Programme

Right-wing populist parties and their appeal to pro-redistribution voters - Georg Wenzelburger, Saarland University

As anti-establishment parties, right-wing populists (RWPs) have been successful in attracting the politically discontent. This article shows how this appeal of RWPs asymmetrically affects citizens on the economical left and right. Building on previous work, the analysis examines how anti-establishment status conditions not only the effect of political disaffection, but also the effect of redistribution preferences on RWP support. A multilevel analysis using nine waves of the European Social Survey and a composite anti-establishment measure reveals that where RWPs are more established, strong pro-redistribution preferences drive voters away from these parties even more than voters are attracted to them based on political distrust. Political distrust more than outweighs the countervailing effect of pro-redistribution preferences only where RWPs are less established. There, pro-redistribution voters are a particularly suitable target as they are also more politically dissatisfied. These findings help to understand when and why RWPs can attract different segments of society. Paper co-authored with Pascal D König.

Georg Wenzelburger is a political scientist and holds the Chair of Comparative European Politics at Saarland University. His research is centred on the comparative study of public policies with a focus on Western Europe. Recent work has focussed on the politics of law and order, welfare state reforms, digital politics and insecurity and has been published in academic journals such as the British Journal of Political Science, the European Journal of Political Research, the Journal of European Public Policy or West European Politics. Wenzelburger is coordinating the Horizon Europe project PROTEMO which studies the role of emotions related to protective policies.

Back to the future? Authoritarian nostalgia and support for the (populist radical) right - Luca Manucci, Institute of Social Sciences, Lisbon

Classic party politics literature shows that, in third-wave democracies, populist radical right (PRR) parties need to distance themselves from the authoritarian past to be electorally relevant. The growing electoral success of PRR parties seems to suggest that this might no longer be true. In fact, it is possible that mobilizing authoritarian nostalgia constitutes a winning strategy among broad population sectors. With that in mind, this study examines to what extent PRR supporters hold attitudes reflective of the country’s authoritarian past, on the one hand, and look back on this authoritarian past as favorable or desirable, on the other hand. Using original survey data and a novel battery of survey items that measure authoritarian nostalgia, we discover that in Spain and Portugal, the supporters of PRR parties such as VOX and Chega display high nostalgia for their authoritarian past. Our findings suggest that feelings of nostalgia for the right-wing authoritarian past are not necessarily an obstacle to the electoral performance of PRR parties but, on the contrary, can help mobilize the electorate.

Luca Manucci is a researcher interested in populism, the far-right, parties, media, and collective memory. He currently leads a project studying the effects of authoritarian legacies on the normalization of the far-right in Portugal and Spain. The project is called "Back to the future? Populism and the Legacies of Authoritarian Regimes" (POLAR).