Far-right Support Research Articles

Religion, secularization, and far-right support in the Netherlands, Hungary, and Italy

Academic evaluations of the relationship between religion, secularization, and far-right collective actors have grown increasingly complicated. New religious immigrants, seen as invaders importing contradictory values imposed on the populous by EU elites, may threaten Christian and irreligious Europeans. Europe has been secularizing for decades, concurrent with a resurgence in far-right collective action, but this far-right resurgence has also accompanied an increase in religious discourse in politics. In this study, I investigate the relationship between religion, secularization, and far-right collective action utilizing three case studies. I find, with some caveats, that in Hungary, Fidesz motivates Christian voters with religious nationalist appeals, while assertive secularization motivates irreligious voters in the Netherlands. Italy is more complex, where far-right collective actors are less able to monopolize social issues. These findings speak to the critical role religious values and institutions play in shaping voter preferences and present competing options for secularist politics moving forward.

The Mosque Nearby: Visible Minorities and Far-Right Support in France

How is support for right-wing populist parties affected by exposure to Muslim visibility? Using an original database on French mosques, this article analyzes the relationship between the presence of mosques and support for the Front National at the polling station level in the late 2000s. It finds that the propensity to vote for the Front National increases in polling stations up to intermediate distances from mosques and then decreases, suggesting a spatial mechanism known as the halo effect. The analysis also shows that larger mosques and those with minarets are associated with an accentuated halo effect, suggesting the importance of the salience of minority groups rather than their relative size in influencing political behavior.

Rally ’Round the Barrack: Far-Right Support and the Military

Rally ’Round the Barrack: Far-Right Support and the Military

Acknowledging that Men are Moral and Harmed by Gender Stereotypes Increases Men’s Willingness to Engage in Collective Action on Behalf of Women

The rise of far-right parties with antifeminist sentiments constitutes a new challenge in the path to gender equality. Here, we aim to identify strategies to promote men’s acceptance of social change towards equality. Thus, we first examined key concerns about gender equality held by far-right supporters through a discourse analysis of 120 men. The findings revealed a focus on male victimhood, the negation and only partial recognition of inequality, and the delegitimization of feminism. Given the centrality of victimhood in the discourse of far-right male supporters and its social relevance, we developed several non-confrontational strategies based on men’s suffering and supposed (im)morality, and then compared the effectiveness of these strategies for getting men to commit more to gender equality. Two experimental studies (n = 417 and 428 men) revealed that recognizing that men are generally moral or that they also suffer because of gender stereotypes led participants to increase their willingness to participate in collective action for women’s rights. In contrast, questioning their morality by denouncing men’s violence against women had no impact on their intentions. We conclude that non-confrontational strategies that address men's concerns about feminist advancement can prevent potential defensive reactions and make them more receptive to social change towards gender equality.

Disease and prejudice: risk attribution to ethno-racial groups over the course of a pandemic

ABSTRACT Past research suggests that disease outbreaks drive prejudice towards minorities as they increase economic and disease threats. Based on an open-ended survey question distributed to 7,902 German residents over the course of one year of the Covid-19 pandemic (April 2020 to April 2021), we investigate the link between life-threatening events and ethno-racial prejudice. We find that pandemic-related threats only drive respondents’ tendency to scapegoat ethno-racial groups if they hold left and center leaning ideologies. However, for far-right supporters who are the most likely to attribute the spread of Covid-19 to ethno-racial groups, pandemic-related threats do not affect that attribution. We further find that threat theories are of limited relevance for explaining which ethno-racial groups are targeted: respondents held Chinese accountable at the beginning of the pandemic but quickly shifted their attention to immigrants – a salient figure in pre-Covid-19 rightist rhetoric. We show that ideology, more than pandemic-induced threat, continues to drive prejudice and demonstrate the under-utilized advantages of using open-ended survey questions for understanding the dynamics of intergroup prejudice.

Commemorating local victims of past atrocities and far-right support over time

Does public remembrance of past atrocities lead to decreased support for far-right parties today? Initiatives commemorating past atrocities aim to make visible the victims and crimes committed against them. This runs counter to revisionist actors who attempt to downplay or deny atrocities and victims. Memorials for victims might complicate such attempts and reduce support for revisionist actors. Yet, little empirical evidence exists on whether that happens. In this study, we examine whether exposure to local memorials that commemorate victims of atrocities reduces support for a revisionist far-right party. Our empirical case is the Stolpersteine ("stumbling stones") memorial in Berlin, Germany. It commemorates victims and survivors of Nazi persecution in front of their last freely chosen place of residence. We employ time-series cross-sectional analyses and a discontinuity design using a panel dataset that matches the location and date of placement of new Stolpersteine with the election results from seven elections (2013 to 2021) at the level of polling station areas. We find that, on average, the presence of Stolpersteine is associated with a 0.96%-point decrease in the far-right vote share in the following election. Our study suggests that local memorials that make past atrocities visible have implications for political behavior in the present.

National crises and cancer control: challenges for Latin America and beyond

2023 began with the emergence of chaotic and violent scenes from Brazil, as the country weathers a period of high political instability. In January, thousands of far-right supporters of former president Jair Bolsonaro stormed Congress, the Presidential Palace, and the Supreme Court in Brasilia in protest against the inauguration of the country's new President, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who was democratically elected in October, 2022. Bolsonaro's most dedicated supporters refuse to accept the new presidency, claiming electoral fraud, and have led road blockades that have crippled major sectors of the economy, as well as street protests and violent attacks on police and civilians.

The far-right and anti-vaccine attitudes: lessons from Spain's mass COVID-19 vaccine roll-out.

Far-right politicians in several countries have been vocal opponents of COVID-19 vaccination. But can this threaten vaccine roll-out? We take advantage of repeated cross-sectional surveys with samples of around 3800 individuals across Spain conducted monthly from December 2020 to January 2022 (n = 51 294) to examine any association between far-right politics and vaccine hesitancy through the whole vaccine roll-out. Consistent with prior data, we found that far-right supporters were almost twice as likely to be vaccine-hesitant than the overall population in December 2020, before vaccines became available. However, with a successful vaccine roll out, this difference shrank, reaching non-significance by September 2021. From October 2021, however, vaccine hesitancy rebounded among this group at a time when the leadership of the far-right promoted a 'freedom of choice' discourse common among anti-vax supporters. By the latest month analysed (January 2022), far-right voters had returned to being twice as likely to be vaccine-hesitant and 7 percentage points less likely to be vaccinated than the general population. Our results are consistent with evidence that far-right politicians can encourage vaccine hesitancy. Nonetheless, we show that public attitudes towards vaccination are not immutable. Whereas a rapid and effective vaccine rollout can help to overcome the resistance of far-right voters to get vaccinated, they also seem to be susceptible to their party leader's discourse on vaccines.

Uncovering the flash potential of immigration: attitudes, salience, and far-right support in Europe

Abstract Attitudes toward immigrants and immigration are a central explanation for the electoral support of far-right parties. However, while these parties gained strength over the last two decades, European citizens’ views about immigration have not changed much. In this study, we contribute to solving this puzzle by uncovering the flash potential of immigration. With its salience as a politically contested issue increasing, negative yet previously less relevant immigration preferences and evaluations transform more often into politically tangible attitudes and behaviors, such as support for far-right parties. We uncover this flash potential with individual-level ESS data and aggregated measures of issue salience among the public, allowing us to model the conditioning effects of contextual-level immigration salience on the individual-level relationship between immigration attitudes and far-right support. The results from random-effects within-between models analyzing 208,794 individual respondents from 141 country-rounds and 24 countries over the period of 2002–2018 show that the effects of citizens’ attitudes on support for far-right parties are stronger in contexts and periods in which the salience of immigration is higher. Accordingly, while immigration attitudes among European public have not turned more negative over time, they have become more influential for citizens’ party attachments and vote choices.

New parties in a crowded electoral space: the (in)stability of radical right voters in the Netherlands

Previous research demonstrated that voters for the Dutch radical right party PVV were the most stable voters among the highly volatile electorate. However, since 2017 two new radical right parties have successfully entered the Dutch Parliament: Forum for Democracy (FvD) and JA21, conceivably at the expense of the PVV. The success of these new parties is puzzling, because there does not seem to be much room for new parties campaigning on a highly similar platform. In our paper, we use LISS panel data to study the determinants of vote switching patterns between four subsequent elections from 2017 to 2021. We find that the surprise victory of the new far right in 2019 can be explained by its ability to attract both former PVV voters as well as voters new to the far right. Since then, FvD has lost many of its supporters again, but these voters have mostly switched to other far-right parties, meaning the far-right support base has become fragmented, yet enlarged. This suggests that when provided with viable alternatives, radical right voters are as volatile as other voter groups.

Politicized ethno-racial shock as group threat: “Refugee crisis” immigration and anti-immigrant voting in Sweden

ABSTRACT Far-right politics has gained significant support across Europe in recent decades. Previous literature has investigated the conditions that lead to immigrants being perceived as “threats”, leading to increased support for anti-immigrant parties. However, how certain “shock events” – times of dramatic change – mobilize far-right support around anti-immigrant sentiment has been understudied. Drawing on social movement literature, I examine how support for anti-immigrant politics was driven by demographic change during the “refugee crisis” in Sweden. I use a unique dataset on Swedish municipalities (N = 290) between 2014 and 2018 to examine the relationship between immigration and far-right outcomes. I show that increases in Syrian immigrants during the “refugee crisis” led to significant gains in support for anti-immigrant politics at the municipal level. I suggest that the “refugee crisis” constituted a politicized ethno-racial shock that lead to increases in far-right support, as political actors seized on increased immigration to mobilize around threat perceptions.

Exploring the populist ‘mind’: Anxiety, fantasy, and everyday populism

This article is focused on the appeal of far-right populist politics in the everyday and how this appeal is related to continuity and change in the global order. Contemporary societies have witnessed an upsurge of populist movements and groups set on filling a political space by appealing to a population in search of solutions to an ever-changing political and economic landscape. Here, we specifically highlight the role of ontological insecurity, fantasy narratives, and emotional governance as critical for understanding far-right populist politics. The analysis consequently attends to the centrality of gendered and racialised narratives and to how these are fuelled by feelings of pride, shame, vulnerability, and insecurity. The aim is to show how structures and emotions work in tandem to create far-right support and how these developments are similar across Western and non-Western contexts. Particular attention is paid to far-right narratives that pertain to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Immigration and Voting Patterns in the European Union

Tempers flared in Europe in response to the 2015 European Refugee Crisis, prompting some countries to totally close their borders to asylum seekers. This was seen to have fueled anti-immigrant sentiment, which grew in Europe along with the support for far-right political parties that had previously languished. This sparked a flurry of research into the relationship between immigration and far-right voting, which has found mixed and nuanced evidence of immigration increasing far-right support in some cases, while decreasing support in others. To provide more evidence to this unsettled debate in the empirical literature, we use data from over 400 European parties to systematically select cases of individual countries. We augment this with a cross-country quantitative study. Our analysis finds little evidence that immigrant populations are related to changes in voting for the right. Our finding gives evidence that factors other than immigration are the true cause of rises in right-wing voting.

“Those on the Right Take Chloroquine”: The Illiberal Instrumentalisation of Scientific Debates during the COVID-19 Pandemic in Brasil

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Brasilian government has undergone a significant political dispute over the use of hydroxychloroquine as a measure to confront the disease and contested scientific and healthcare organisations findings related to the drug's effectiveness. In this article, we seek to understand the manner in which an illiberal populist government and the supporters thereof refer to scientific discourse during the pandemic, with a focus on the debates on Brasilian far-right networks on Twitter. Using a mixed methodology with statistical methods, social media analysis, natural language processing and qualitative content analysis, this study seeks to investigate which sources and stakeholders were referenced and the narratives that structured the arguments of far-right supporters who defended the use of hydroxychloroquine. The results highlight the use of sources that are ideologically aligned to the right and a reconfiguration of scientific authority that was supported by illiberal values. Among the main discourses, we observed an epistemic challenge with a partisan bias, which led to the scientific authority legitimising some arguments and discrediting others. We also identified the spread of conspiracy theories that reflected the epistemic challenge, in addition to conservative, revivalist and individualistic postures.

White and minority demographic shifts, intergroup threat, and right-wing extremism

We present four studies (one correlational and three experimental) of American Whites that examine relationships between White and minority demographic shifts, intergroup threat, and support for extreme-right groups and actions. We focus in particular on the role of collective existential threat (i.e., a perception that the ingroup will cease to exist), along with three alternative/competing intergroup threats: status threat, symbolic threat, and prototypicality threat. Though no zero-order relationship was found between perceived White population decline and far-right variables, we find evidence that (1) perceived White population decline leads to collective existential threat net of other perceived demographic shifts, (2) collective existential threat is related to far-right support net of other threats, and (3) perceived White decline has a robust indirect relationship with measures of far-right support via collective existential threat.

Immigration and Voting Patterns in the European Union: Evidence from Five Case Studies and Cross-Country Analysis

Tempers flared in Europe in response to the 2015 European Refugee Crisis prompting some countries to totally close their borders to asylum seekers. This was seen to have fueled anti-immigrant sentiment, which grew in Europe along with the support for far-right political parties that had previously languished. This sparked a flurry of research into the relationship between immigration and far-right voting, which has found mixed and nuanced evidence of immigration increasing far-right support in some cases, while decreasing support in others. Studies by Mendez and Cutillas (2014); Mayda, Peri, and Steingress (2016); Vertier and Viskanic (2018); and Georgiadou, Lamprini, and Costas (2018) found that the presence of immigrants decreased votes for right parties, while others by Otto and Steinhardt (2014); Dustmann, Vasiljeva, and Damm (2016); Halla, Wagner, and Zweimuller (2017); Brunner and Kuhn (2018); and Edo et. al. (2019) found that immigration increased votes for right parties. To provide more evidence to this unsettled debate in the empirical literature, we use data from over 400 European parties to systematically select cases of individual countries. We augment this with a cross-country quantitative study. Our analysis finds little evidence that immigrant populations are related to changes in voting for the right. Our finding gives evidence that factors other than immigration are the true cause of rises in right voting.

Palestinian Paranoia and the Colonial Situation

Palestinian Paranoia and the Colonial Situation Zahi Zalloua (bio) Evoking Palestinian paranoia comes with a risk. It could easily resonate with right-wing Zionists, confirming their racist depictions of Palestinians as pathological bodies, psychically and morally deficient, and thus unfit to join the community of civilized human beings. But paranoia does seem to mark the Palestinian condition. Uprooting and paranoia go hand in hand for Palestinians. The experience of collective displacement plunges the exilic Palestinian into a zone of precarity and hypervigilance, "where everyone not a blood-brother or sister is an enemy, where every sympathizer is an agent of some unfriendly power, and where the slightest deviation from the accepted group line is an act of the rankest treachery and disloyalty," writes Edward Said (2000, 178). For Palestinians, non-Palestinians are a priori an object of suspicion. As "paranoid subjects," Palestinians anticipate betrayal from others, that is, complicity with Israel. But not unlike "Black paranoia," Palestinian paranoia resists easy pathologization and rash dismissal. In fact, Palestinian obsession about a looming betrayal sounds more like reasoned extrapolation than irrational speculation. If you are a Palestinian, you've witnessed first-hand the ideological sham of the "peace process." While promised "land for peace," as per the 1993 Oslo Accords, Palestinians in the Occupied Territories saw a massive expansion of illegal settlements, the uninterrupted ethnic cleansing of their neighborhoods, the strategic fragmentation of their people, a numbing increase in humiliating and dangerous checkpoints, devastating attacks on a besieged Gaza, Israel's flagrant defiance of international law, an uptick in serious talks of annexation of Palestinian land in Israeli political discourse, the passing of the Nation-State Law and the continuing disenfranchisement of Palestinian citizens of Israel, and the symbolic relocation of the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.1 To the betrayal from without, a betrayal from within also [End Page 281] plagued Palestinians: the "Abraham Accords" (Goodman 2020), the premature normalization of diplomatic ties between a number of Arab countries and Israel, who self-interestedly suspended their demand for Palestinian self-determination as a precondition for such normalization. And yet, there is something hermeneutically apt about drawing on the concept of paranoia as long as we locate paranoia's roots in politics rather than biology, in the violent and visceral world of what Fanon calls the "colonial situation" (2004, 233) instead of some abstract or ahistorical notion of a pathologized "Palestinian mind." The contemptuous accusation of "Palestinian paranoia," prevalent among political Zionists and far-right supporters of Israel, displays the latter's (mis)understanding of this psycho-pathology. In its Palestinophobic form, the accusation naturalizes the mental [End Page 282] disorder, obscuring its socio-political origins, making the paranoia of the Indigenous population an ontological or essential problem, a permanent feature of their biological or cultural DNA, discounting and disregarding, in turn, their daily humiliation and land-based grievances. If, according to Israeli propaganda, Palestinians are so delusional, intolerant of Jewish difference, and prone to irrational bursts of violence, how, then, can you make permanent and meaningful peace with them?2 In this ideological light, occupation is recast as an Israeli self-protecting policy (it is an existential question of survival) rather than an expression of the Jewish state's expansionist and imperialist desire. The charge of "Palestinian paranoia" thus implicitly obfuscates another paranoia, a Zionist paranoia, whose origins lie in Western Orientalism. Said draws our attention to Orientalism's paranoid tendencies: "Psychologically, Orientalism is a form of paranoia, knowledge of another kind, say, from ordinary historical knowledge" (2003, 72). As a style of thinking, Orientalism is about the West's paranoid construction of the Orient as an object of knowledge and mastery, and in this respect, its racial stereotyping—exemplified in the figure of the bloodthirsty, irrational Palestinian—always tells us more about the anxious psyche of the Zionist/Western knower than its putative object of study. Israel traffics in paranoid knowledge, emblematized in its narrative about the imminent danger of coming undone, repeatedly framing the Palestinian people as an existential threat to its identity and its people. Wanting to end Israel as a Jewish state (a state only for Jews) means wanting to end of the Jewish...

Individual- and party-level determinants of far-right support among women in Western Europe

AbstractSupport for Western Europe’s far-right is majority-male. However, given the sweeping success of the party family, literature on this ‘gender gap’ belies support given to the radical right by millions of women. We examine differences between men and women’s support for far-right parties, focusing on workplace experience, positions on economic and cultural issues, and features of far-right parties themselves. We find that the received scholarship on blue-collar support for far-right populists is a largely male phenomenon, and women in routine nonmanual (i.e. service, sales, and clerical) work are more likely than those in blue-collar work to support the far-right. Moreover, while men who support the far-right tend to be conservative on other moral issues, certain liberal positions predict far-right support among women, at both the voter and party level. Our analysis suggests that gender differences may obscure the socio-structural and attitudinal bases of support for far-right parties and have broader implications for comparative political behavior and gender and politics.

A Spatial Exploration of the Halo Effect in the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election

The outcome of the 2016 presidential election in the United States was partly influenced by factors such as social marginalization and anti-immigrant sentiment, both of which have been associated with the global rise in far-right voting (FRV) outcomes. Sociological hypotheses such as group threat and group contact have been suggested as potential contextual factors in the relationship between immigrant share and far-right support; more recently, the halo effect has been used as a spatial mechanism to explore these relationships. Briefly, the halo effect describes increased FRV in ethnically homogeneous areas that are near ethnically diverse areas. This portentous trend has significant international implications, but differences in the spatial distribution and composition of immigrant share and the spatial scale of analysis have produced inconsistent empirical results. This study addressed the spatial distribution of the halo effect in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and used geographically weighted regression to explore spatial nonstationarity in the relationships between socioeconomic factors and Republican (GOP) support. Spatial nonstationarity is observed when a relationship is not globally consistent such as in large or complex areas where local processes might interact with or overwhelm global processes. We found evidence of spatial nonstationarity in the relationships between GOP support and many socioeconomic factors, including the halo effect. In addition to providing a better understanding of the spatial context of electoral dynamics and their interactions at a local scale, these results indicate that spatial nonstationarity in these relationships might be partially responsible for inconsistent results in previous studies.

The Electoral Success of the Extreme Right: Is the Presence of a Minority Important?

Anti-minority rhetoric as an almost universal feature of extremeright parties is often analytically and empirically linked to their electoral success. This article tests the link between the presence of an outgroup and the vote for the extreme right in an attempt to explain the electoral success of the first openly anti-system extreme-right party to enter the Slovak parliament in 2016. A multilevel approach is used to analyse the connection between Roma presence in a municipality and extreme-right support while controlling for the individual characteristics of voters. Analysis using exit-poll data covering 161 municipalities and 20 128 voters reveals no relationship between the presence of Roma in a municipality and support for the extreme right. A partial exception seems to be observed for older voters and the university-educated, who are generally the least inclined to far-right support. Interaction effects suggest that, for these groups, Roma presence might be connected to a higher probability to cast a vote for the extreme right. However, a notably higher chance of voting for the extreme right was associated with young, male, manual labourers and people without university education.