Broadening the individual differences lens on party support and voting behavior: Cynicism and prejudice as relevant attitudes referring to modern‐day political alignments

Abstract

AbstractSocial‐cultural and economic‐hierarchical ideological attitudes have long been used to explain variation in political partisanship. We propose two additional, stable attitudes (political cynicism and ethnic prejudice) that may help in explaining contemporary political alignments. In a Belgian (N = 509) and Dutch sample (N = 628), we showed that party support can be segmented into four broad families: left, libertarian, traditionalist, and far‐right parties. Both studies revealed that social‐cultural and economic‐hierarchical right‐wing attitudes were negatively related to left party support and positively to libertarian, traditionalist and far‐right support. Importantly, additional variance was consistently explained by political cynicism (lower libertarian and traditionalist support), ethnic prejudice (lower left support), or both (higher far‐right support). Study 2 additionally demonstrated these patterns for self‐reported voting.