Nationalistic attitudes and voting for the radical right in Europe

Abstract

Voting for radical right-wing parties has been associated most strongly with national identity threats. In Europe, this has been framed by the radical right in terms of mass-migration and European integration, or other politicians bargaining away national interests. Perhaps surprisingly given the radical right’s nationalist ideology, nationalistic attitudes are hardly included in empirical research on the voting behaviour. In this contribution, we test to what extent various dimensions of nationalistic attitudes affect radical right voting, next to the earlier and new assessed effects of perceived ethnic threat, social distance to Muslims, Euroscepticism and political distrust. The findings show that national identification, national pride and an ethnic conception of nationhood are additional explanations of radical right voting. National identification’s effect on radical right voting is found to be stronger when populations on average perceive stronger ethnic threat.