Euro-scepticism and radical right-wing voting in Europe, 2002–2008: Social cleavages, socio-political attitudes and contextual characteristics determining voting for the radical right

Abstract

In this contribution, we focus on the role of euro-scepticism on radical right-wing voting in national elections in 18 European countries between 2002 and 2008. We do so with multilevel modelling taking advantage of high-quality cross-national European data. First, we focus on social cleavages related to voting, e.g. social class and religiosity. Second, we examine the effects of several contextual characteristics, of which some are classical and others new. Third, we take diverse socio-political attitudes into account. We test whether euro-scepticism affects voting for the radical right, over and beyond other determinants that have previously been proposed to determine radical right-wing voting. We find evidence that euro-scepticism indeed contributes to the explanation of voting for the radical right beyond perceived ethnic threat and political distrust. At the same time euro-scepticism is much less relevant than perceived ethnic threat in explaining why particular social categories, i.e. lower educated people, manual workers, unemployed people and non-churchgoers are more likely to vote for the radical right.