From left to Right: Explaining the working-class vote for populist radical right parties in Western Europe, 2006-2018

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2020-06-28

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en

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Since their (re-)introduction to Western European party systems in the 1990s, populist radical right parties have attracted support from working-class voters, who, according to classic cleavage theory are expected to vote for left-wing parties. This thesis tests three mechanisms that could explain this turn to the right: economic grievances, cultural protectionism, and protest voting. Furthermore, it tests whether some of these mechanisms are more important than the others, and whether their strength depends on issue salience. By performing a multi-level logistic regression on data gathered in twelve Western- European countries, this thesis concludes that all tested mechanisms play an important role in explaining why working-class citizens vote for populist right-wing parties, and that these mechanisms do not only apply to the working-class, but to other classes in society as well. It also finds that the mechanisms regarding cultural protectionism exhibits the largest effect of the three tested mechanisms, and that the explanatory power of these mechanisms is heavily influenced by issue salience because of major events, even to the point where some mechanisms only display an significant effect when made salient by a major event.

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Faculteit der Managementwetenschappen

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