Do unhappy voters vote for radical right-wing populist parties?
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2022-07-26
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en
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This thesis builds on the last few decades of populist research by adding life satisfaction as a new viewpoint to the demand side of populist research. This is contextualized by the two research schools that are most prevalent in populist literature: the rationalist and the structuralist school. Building on these schools, two theories leading to supplementary hypotheses are formulated of how life satisfaction could play a role in understanding who votes for radical right-wing populist parties. The first theory argues that the wish to change an individual's current situation is fueled by low life satisfaction which in turn leads to individuals rationally voting for the party that they expect will change their situation the most drastically. This leads those individuals to vote for a populist party. The second theory argues that lower life satisfaction, in hand with the deprivation theory, fuels feelings of resentment towards the elite which in turn leads them to vote for a populist party. This thesis found, after applying a multilevel model logistic regression analysis, significant evidence that the first theory was correct. The results of this thesis imply that feelings of discontent, which were initially only researched in the context of the political system, now serve to be an independent explanatory variable.
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Faculteit der Managementwetenschappen