Parliamentary Status and Drivers of Sympathy for the Radical Right

Abstract

Demand-side research on the Radical right-wing populist parties (RRPPs) has highlighted anti-immigration attitudes, political dissatisfaction and their interaction as drivers of sympathy for them. Supply-side research studies the isolation that RRPPs often face in their respective parliaments. Linking these perspectives, we theorize and test whether cross-country differences in parliamentary isolation of an RRPP can predict differences in attitudinal associations. Conducting OLS regression analyses on 15 country samples, we find that that, beyond direct association with sympathy for RRPPs, the moderating term of anti-immigration attitudes and political dissatisfaction varies considerably across our samples. This variation is consistent with the parliamentary status of the RRPP in each country at the time of data collection. In predicting sympathy for RRPPs, these factors reinforce each other when the RRPPs is isolated in parliament; attenuate each other when the RRPP is in government; and are independent from one another when the RRPP has a history of government.