Abstract
ABSTRACT Since their transition to democracy in the 1970s, Spain and Portugal have been ‘immune’ to the success of populist radical right (PRR) parties. This exceptional situation, however, came to an end: Chega’s leader, André Ventura, was elected in the Portuguese parliament, while VOX has become the third most voted political party of Spain. Using new online survey data from the Spanish and Portuguese national elections in 2019, we find that the Iberian PRR electorate is mostly in line with the characteristics of the PRR electorate in Western Europe when it comes to socio-demographics, political dissatisfaction, media diet, and the rejection of immigration and feminism. Interestingly, however, the support for Chega and VOX does not come from economic losers of globalization. Finally, both parties capitalize on country-specific issues —national unity in Spain and welfare in Portugal— but PRR parties might struggle to establish themselves within the party system of the two Iberian countries.
Highlights
Between 2018 and 2019, Iberian exceptionalism came to an end: VOX gained 12 seats in the regional parliament of Andalusia and subsequently became the third most voted party at the national level, while Chega was the first radical right party to obtain a seat in the Portuguese parliament and its leader came third at the 2021 presidential elections
Using new online survey data from the Spanish and Portuguese national elections in 2019, we find that the Iberian populist radical right (PRR) electorate is mostly in line with the characteristics of the PRR electorate in Western Europe when it comes to sociodemographics, political dissatisfaction, media diet, and the rejection of immigration and feminism
With the end of Iberian exceptionalism, it is time to analyze the demand-side factors driving the vote for VOX and Chega to understand whether their electorate presents the characteristics described in the relevant literature and to what extent the electoral breakthrough of PRR parties in formerly negative cases is linked to peculiar factors
Summary
Between 2018 and 2019, Iberian exceptionalism came to an end: VOX gained 12 seats in the regional parliament of Andalusia and subsequently became the third most voted party at the national level, while Chega was the first radical right party to obtain a seat in the Portuguese parliament and its leader came third at the 2021 presidential elections. Political information is a key aspect of voting behaviour and mobilization (Brady, Verba and Schlozman 1995), and knowing that political misinformation relates positively to support for right-wing populist parties (van Kessel, Sajuria and van Hauwaert 2020), we consider this aspect as very relevant to understand the electorate of PRR parties in a comparative perspective Combining these strands of literature and relying on existing empirical studies testing these theories, we derive our hypotheses on the socio-demographic characteristics of citizens supporting PRR parties and their levels of political dissatisfaction, investigating to what extent they can be characterized as economic and cultural ‘losers of globalization’, as well as their media diet.
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