Environmental Issue Prioritization and Radical Right Support: Evidence from the Dutch Nitrogen Crisis

Can radical right parties expand their appeal by mobilizing new issues beyond their traditional ownership concerns? This paper argues that the politicization of environmental policy offers new opportunities for radical right mobilization. We examine the Netherlands’ 2019 nitrogen crisis, when a court ruling mandating strict reductions in agricultural emissions disproportionately affected farming communities. Using municipality-level data and a difference-in-differences design, we show that affected areas experienced significant increases in support for radical right parties and opposition to the governing coalition. Individual-level survey data indicate that these shifts are not driven by changes in environmental attitudes between affected and unaffected individuals but by the heightened political salience of anti-environmental positions that explain stronger radical right support among those affected. These findings demonstrate that issue prioritization, rather than attitudinal change, can generate electoral gains, suggesting that radical right parties are well positioned to capitalize on the distributive conflicts of the green transition.