Ethnic nationalism, social structure, and political agency: explaining electoral support for the radical right in Bulgaria

Abstract

Why do people vote for radical-right parties? Is radical-right voting determined by social structure and extremist political values, or is it induced by political entrepreneurship? This research tests for competing explanations of electoral support for the radical right on the example of the 2005 Bulgarian parliamentary elections. Methodologically, it performs demand-centred modelling of individual-level data with extensions to contextual variables and political agency. This approach yields two principal findings: first, that party-specific variables are the strongest predictors of the radical-right vote when tested against sociodemographic variables, general political attitudes, and economic interests. Second, the results suggest that political agency affects the distribution of electoral preferences whereby voters pertaining to certain sociological and attitudinal categories – blue-collar workers, older voters, and medium-education cohorts in the large cities, and voters sharing centrist ideology and lower levels of political trust – are more likely than other groups to vote for the radical right despite the lack of proximity with extreme-right ideologies.