Abstract
The use of classical regression techniques in social science can prevent the discovery of complex, nonlinear mechanisms and often relies too heavily on both the expertise and prior expectations of the data analyst. In this paper, we present a regression methodology that combines the interpretability of traditional, well used, statistical methods with the full predictability and flexibility of Bayesian statistics techniques. Our modelling approach allows us to find and explain the mechanisms behind the rise of Radical Right-wing Populist parties (RRPs) that we would have been unable to find using traditional methods. Using Swedish municipality-level data (2002-2018), we find no evidence that the proportion of foreign-born residents is predictive of increases in RRP support. Instead, education levels and population density are the significant variables that impact the change in support for the RRP, in addition to spatial and temporal control variables. We argue that our methodology, which produces models with considerably better fit of the complexity and nonlinearities often found in social systems, provides a better tool for hypothesis testing and exploration of theories about RRPs and other social movements. This article is part of the theme issue 'Coupling functions: dynamical interaction mechanisms in the physical, biological and social sciences'.
Highlights
Radical right-wing populism is resurgent across European societies, posing an existential threat to established democratic systems
Some examples supporting the social marginality hypothesis are: Radical Right-Wing populist parties (RRPs) have been found to have a negative correlation with the level of education in the populous [4]; workers and middle-class voters are over-represented among new supporters of RRPs [4,17,18]; unemployment is positively correlated with new RRP voters [4]; unemployment together with high share of foreign-born residents in the population have a positive interaction effect on support [19]
In Rydgren (2008) [22], a positive correlation is found between the number of immigrants within a country and RRP support in the Netherlands and Denmark, but not in Austria, Belgium, France and Norway; ethnic heterogeneity has been reported to have a non-significant correlation to RRP support [18]
Summary
Radical right-wing populism is resurgent across European societies, posing an existential threat to established democratic systems. Previous studies in this area use standard regression techniques to analyse drivers of RRP support [23,24,25,26,27,28,29] While they allow hypothesis testing within a standardized framework, traditional regression models are unlikely to provide the best fit of the data because they assume linearity or a particular chosen, often polynomial, form, missing things that do not correspond to this form, and perhaps falsely identify patterns that have a different form. We present several ways in which we can adequately measure the relevance of different variables and explicitly test theories proposed in political science We use this approach to model and investigate the rise of the Swedish RRP, the Sweden Democrats, using aggregated municipality-level data, and re-evaluate the predominant theories of RRP support. A similar approach has been adopted in chemistry[42,43,44], neural science [45] and communications [46]
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