Roots of the Radical Right: Nostalgic Deprivation in the United States and Britain

Abstract

Following trends in Europe over the past decade, support for the Radical Right has recently grown more significant in the United States and the United Kingdom. While the United Kingdom has witnessed the rise of Radical Right fringe groups, the United States’ political spectrum has been altered by the Tea Party and the election of Donald Trump. This article asks what predicts White individuals’ support for such groups. In original, representative surveys of White individuals in Great Britain and the United States, we use an innovative technique to measure subjective social, political, and economic status that captures individuals’ perceptions of increasing or decreasing deprivation over time. We then analyze the impact of these deprivation measures on support for the Radical Right among Republicans (Conservatives), Democrats (Labourites), and Independents. We show that nostalgic deprivation among White respondents drives support for the Radical Right in the United Kingdom and the United States.

Keywords

race class working class radical right inequality political behavior elections voting immigration

Introduction

There is a Radical Right renaissance today. In Europe over the past 5 years, Radical Right parties notched victories across national and European Parliamentary elections. The Swiss People’s Party, the Danish People’s Party, and the National Front took more than a quarter of their most recent national votes in Switzerland, Denmark, and France, respectively (European Parliament, 2015). The second largest party in the Netherlands is now Geert Wilders’s Freedom Party. In Britain, the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) collected 27% of the British vote in the 2014 European elections, 12% in the 2015 Parliamentary election (BBC News, 2015) and subsequently led the referendum campaign to leave the European Union. Scholars have explained these developments with institutionalist (e.g., Givens, 2005) and culturalist (e.g., Sniderman, Hagendoorn, & Prior, 2004) theories of voter choice.

Across the Atlantic, after being constrained by a two-party system, Radical Right candidates and organizations have emerged in the United States—few with more bravado than the presidential campaign of Donald J. Trump. His meteoric candidacy emerged after the Tea Party inspired a rebellious faction inside the Republican Party with the election of President Barack Obama in 2008. In each subsequent congressional election, this movement expanded its share of the Republican congressional caucus and deposed a number of establishment candidates, including House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in November 2014, and eventually Speaker John Boehner—who was pressured to resign in October 2015. American approaches to these recent developments point either to small government grassroots activism (Skocpol & Williamson, 2013) or fear of social and demographic change (Parker & Barreto, 2013) as the main motivators of Tea Party support.

Consequently, what appears to be a related, transatlantic phenomenon is understood in quite different ways depending on local context. Indeed, as in Europe, Trump and the Tea Party are electoral manifestations of an often-militant backlash to economic transformation, global integration, and persistent immigration. They are all predominantly supported by nativist White people with Conservative or Republican leanings. And they all back policies that seek to turn back the clock and reestablish eras of more homogeneous demography, rigid hierarchy, and protectionist economics.

In this article, we pursue a transcendent explanation for these coincidental, connected events and the voter choices that produce them. We hypothesize that Radical Right support is the product of a latent psychological phenomenon we call nostalgic deprivation—the discrepancy between individuals’ understandings of their current status and their perceptions about their past. This deprivation may be understood in economic terms (inequality), political terms (disempowerment), or social terms—a perceived shift to the periphery of society. Supporters of the Radical Right are consumed by their perceived drop in status.

Based on an original, nationally representative survey of White people in both the United States and United Kingdom, we test the veracity of this hypothesis. The results exhibit the power of nostalgic deprivation—in multiple expressions—as a determinant for Radical Right support in the transatlantic space. Rather than disprove earlier work on this matter, this theory builds on and incorporates existing theoretical approaches into a more unified understanding. The next section will review previous attempts to understand the drivers of support for the Radical Right. We then derive our nostalgic deprivation hypothesis from interdisciplinary studies of political psychology and social hierarchies. We describe our data and our approach to soliciting respondents’ self-understandings and perceptions of the past. Finally, we present a set of bivariate correlations and the results of our regression analysis.

What Drives Support for the Radical Right?

Existing literature suggests that three classes of “grievances” explain the emergence of the Radical Right: economic, political, and social (Ivarsflaten, 2008). In this section, we review the main arguments behind each category of theories and then, drawing from sociology and critical race theory, formulate an individual-level theory of perceived relative deprivation that draws from and builds on existing approaches.

Scores of studies in the world’s democracies have found a strong link between economic conditions and electoral outcomes. Scholars find that voters are more likely to support parties in power during periods of economic growth. When growth stagnates, voters remove them from power (see Lewis-Beck & Stegmaier, 2000, for a review). According to this perspective, support for Radical Right candidates and parties can be understood as a response to larger macroeconomic trends and the more immediate, global economic collapse since 2008 (Bartels, 2011). In postindustrial regions of the United States and Europe, the collapse was precipitated first by the swift dismantling of manufacturing sectors (see Iversen, 2001) and then the rise of privatization and supply-side economics (Hood, 1998). Each of these trends held a disproportional effect on middle- and low-skilled workers (Swank & Betz, 2003). During this period, Radical Right parties and candidates have crafted narratives that portray the political establishment as—at best—incompetent, or—at worst—culpable for conspiring against the interests of the working classes (Hofstadter, 1967).

This sense of conspiracy reflects a more pervasive sense of powerlessness among supporters of Radical Right parties and candidates. The Radical Right has profited from frustrations about European Union (EU) integration, political corruption scandals (Della Porta & Meny, 1997), and politicians perceived to be out of touch with the needs of average people (Abedi, 2002; Bergh, 2004). In Europe, parties who appeal to these sentiments have been particularly successful in electoral systems that feature proportional representation (Givens, 2005), which grants fringe parties parliamentary representation and thus power in the formation of coalitions. In both the United States and Europe, the greater sense of powerlessness relates to shifts in partisan alignment. Many Radical Right supporters were once fervent members of the mainstream Left, which was variably anchored by unionism, protectionism, and a base of working-class White voters (Bell, 1988). In America, the transition of the Roosevelt-Johnson Democratic Party to its modern coalition of urban liberals, minority groups, and what remains of labor organizations has been understood as a matter of rights and identity politics (Edsall, 1989), the rise of Wall Street’s influence (Greider, 1992), and the rapid decline in union power (Hacker & Pierson, 2010). In Britain, since Tony Blair and New Labour turned away from the party’s socialist roots, it has been decimated by the loss of White working-class support and internal debates over immigration, identity politics, and foreign interventionism.

Other researchers have contended that support for the Radical Right is mobilized by a sense of social or cultural threat that overrides economic and political grievances. In the American context, Hofstadter (1967) explained the paranoia of the American far right as a reaction to perceived drops in (or threats to) social status following broad social change. Social change is interpreted as an attempt to subvert dominant racial groups’ status in society. The political reaction to such change is often an “all out crusade” to stop the forces of progress (Hofstadter, 1967). Following this line of reasoning, Parker and Barreto (2013) argue that the post-2008 groundswell of support for the Tea Party is similar to support for the Radical Right in other periods of American history including the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s and the John Birch society in the 1960s. This more recent anxiety is triggered not by a burgeoning civil rights movement but by the accumulation of immigrant flows and the election of the first African American president to the White House. It fueled the presidential campaign of Donald Trump, who has correspondingly been likened to George Wallace in 1968 (Carter, 2016). Trump’s support is strongest among those with concerns about social and demographic change, expressed in the form of attitudes toward racial and ethnic minorities (Tesler, 2016), ethnocentrism and xenophobia (Kalkan, 2016), and authoritarianism (Taub, 2016).

A similar focus on social and cultural threat has characterized research in European countries, where the Radical right rejects multiculturalism and European integration, appealing to xenophobia and racism (Betz, 1993). This has resonated as the immigration of people from non-White or non-Christian origins increases. Sniderman et al. (2004) found that considerations of national identity dominate those of economic advantage in evoking exclusionary reactions to immigrant minorities. Accordingly, Ivarsflaten (2008) found that it is anti-immigration appeals—not political or economic appeals—that unite support behind successful populist parties in Europe. In a broad review of transatlantic scholarship on the immigration-related attitudes that have been shown to connect with support for the Radical Right, Hainmueller and Hopkins (2014) find that the bulk of scientific evidence suggests that such attitudes are mostly driven by symbolic concerns about the nation and identity.

Social Hierarchies and Nostalgic Deprivation

For many individuals, immigration and demographic change pose a visible and direct threat to established concepts of nation, identity, and their constitutive social hierarchies. Over the course of American history, Cheryl Harris (1993, p. 1713) argues “the set of assumptions, privileges, and benefits that accompany the status of being white have become a valuable asset that whites sought to protect.” Harris refers to these assumptions, privileges, and benefits as the “settled expectations of whiteness.” Olson (2008) approaches this Whiteness as a matter of standing. In his formulation, Whiteness provided a “glass floor below which the white citizen could see but never fall” (p. 708). While such standing did not guarantee White working-class people prosperity, it rendered advantage relative to Blacks—a sort of consolation prize (Harris, 1993; Roediger, 1991), what DuBois (1935) called the “psychological wages of whiteness.”

These settled expectations are passed down through generations such that individuals expect to meet or exceed the living standards of their parents’ generation (Hyman, 1942). White people working and raising families throughout the latter half of the 20th century enjoyed a measure of economic mobility (Crafts & Toniolo, 1996; Marglin & Schor, 1992), an era of unprecedented political cohesion (Poole & Rosenthal, 1997), and social dominance (Sidanius & Pratto, 1999). Children raised during this era are socialized to believe that they will enjoy or exceed the level of political, economic, and social centrality of their parents’ generation. Indeed, a central tenet of the “American Dream” is that each generation will do better than the previous generation. It is thought that these settled expectations have become so embedded, they are understood by Whites as “a natural order of things that cannot legitimately be disturbed” ( Harris, 1993, p. 1778).

This natural order has since been disturbed by transformations of the global economy, Western demography, and subsequent political decisions by governing elites (see Hacker & Pierson, 2010). Industrialized countries’ reorientation toward more service-oriented, high technology, globalized economies since the Second World War required the outsourcing of light manufacturing and basic services to developing nations with minimal labor standards. This economic transformation undermined the social and political strength of White working-class communities by diminishing their ranks, loosening associational life, and jettisoning welfare state support systems (Lipset, 1981). Concurrently, societies that were once racially homogeneous diversified. Whereas earlier social divisions were grounded in differences of religious sect or White ethnicity (native nationals, along with people of Irish, Jewish, Levantine, Southern and Eastern European origin), decolonization and civil rights laws opened the way for immigrants from Africa, Asia, and Latin America. With the steady influx of immigrants, attenuating native fertility rates, and an increasingly global economy, the fault lines of social relations shifted (Gest, 2016).

In this manner, White people in the United States and Western Europe experienced a change from a system in which they “direct most governing institutions, and also economic, legal, educational, residential, and social institutions” to one based on “legal guarantees of equal rights” (D. S. King & Smith, 2005). Olson (2008) frames this transformation in even starker terms. During slavery and segregation, he writes,

white identity functioned as a form of racialized standing that granted all whites a superior status to all those who were not white. . . . The loss of individualized standing due to the victories of the civil rights movement, however, led to anger, anxiety, and resentment among whites, and a desire to restore that standing. (p. 704)

While this understanding of racial politics very much emerged from the American experience, we contend that it may be extended to the European context in light of the aforementioned economic and demographic changes that both continents have undergone and the rigid racial hierarchy that has long defined both Europe and the United States.

Accordingly, we hypothesize that those who support the Radical Right are primarily driven by a perceived threat to or loss of status—a sense of social, political, or economic deprivation. This nostalgic deprivation is a matter of perception (H. J. Smith & Ortiz, 2002) and may not be objectively real, for any given individual or even for an entire social group (Runciman, 1966). The variability of these perceptions reflects the contingent, subjective nature of identity and membership, particularly in times of contestation and change. Over the course of the 20th century, such periods of contestation altered established understandings of Whiteness and national heritage. Prior groups of immigrants (the Irish, Italians, and Jews, among others) were once considered to be outside these definitions, and today, some individuals may be acting to police racial and national supremacy from even more recent applicants (Ignatiev, 2009).

Accordingly, the effect of nostalgic deprivation will not be constant across individuals. While social identities related to gender, religion, race, ethnicity, and class all affect how we experience and understand our position in society, we nevertheless expect partisan identity¹ to moderate the relationship between perceived deprivation and support for the Radical Right. In the political sphere, partisan identity acts as a perceptual screen through which political information is filtered and accepted and shapes how individuals understand politics (Campbell, Converse, Miller, & Stokes, 1960; Converse, 2006; Green, Palmquist, & Schickler, 2002; Kinder & Sears, 1981; Zaller, 1992). So while we do test the impact of perceived deprivation on the entire U.S. and British samples, the focus of our analysis will be on (American) Republicans, (British) Conservatives, and Independents. We have less reason to believe that nostalgic deprivation will compel Democratic and Labourite partisans to jettison a powerful and durable social identity in support of candidate and parties even further from their own ideal points than the existing Republican (Conservative) Party, particularly given the steady increase in disdain for out-partisans over the past 30 years (Iyengar, Sood, & Lelkes, 2012; Mason, 2015). More likely, nostalgic deprivation will either demobilize Democrats or be interpreted, or even celebrated, as the natural progression of change in a dynamic demographic, political, social, and economic landscape. That change may also be more broadly accepted by those Whites who remain in the Democratic or Labour parties; deprivation may have gradually emptied these two parties of those most sensitive to the loss of status. In sum, we expect that nostalgic deprivation will be a powerful moderator of support for the Radical Right among Republicans, Conservatives and Independents.

Data and Methods

An analysis of United States and the United Kingdom is a useful comparison for a number of reasons. The United States and the United Kingdom are two of only three developed Western countries that use a first-past-the-post electoral system that institutionalizes a historic two-party structure. First-past-the-post systems constrain third-party development because votes in their favor are more likely to be “wasted” in their local constituencies. In proportional representation systems, minority parties flourish because every vote counts toward a local or national share of representation. For this reason, the individual-level calculus among voters in the United States and the United Kingdom is comparable.

White working-class communities in the United States and the United Kingdom also share a similar sense of social and economic decline. Socially, the two countries have experienced great demographic change since the middle of the 20th century, owing to the admission of immigrants from Latin America and East Asia in the United States, and immigrants from South Asia, the West Indies, and Eastern Europe in the United Kingdom. Thanks to the newcomers’ initially higher fertility rates, their growing number and demand for equal rights has undermined the number, power, and status once afforded to White people. Economically, the two countries have shed much of their manufacturing sectors in favor of a more global, service- and high technology-driven economy. There has been little refuge for those trained in manufacturing trades, in which wages have stagnated and work has become scarce. The resulting poverty and instability reflects greater trends of inequality and immobility, affecting all individuals without university degrees. However, many White working-class people in the United States and the United Kingdom associate this loss in economic status with coinciding losses in social and political status.

Still, two important differences between American and British societies reveal different contexts for these trends. First, the popular conceptualization of the United States envisions a country of immigrants that features an enduring set of civic values and laws but an otherwise unorthodox, evolving identity. Accordingly, American politics has always contained the competing political traditions of liberalism, republicanism, and ascriptive inegalitarianism (R. M. Smith, 1993). Alternatively, the British identity is grounded in a sense of heritage, blood, and territory—one that is less malleable, despite a changing citizenry. Second, while class in the United States is characterized by a perceived mobility in which people change status with gains and losses in income, class in Britain is an inherited social attribute often discernible from regional accents. British class distinctions are therefore “sticky” and reflect a far more ossified social structure independent of income or educational achievement. In this manner, American respondents are likely to contextualize similar life circumstances in the fluidity of the American social hierarchy and in the subjectivity of the American identity.

Our study utilizes data from two original data sets collected by the authors in 2015. The first is a nationally representative survey of White British adults.² The sample was recruited via the Internet market research company, YouGov, in the United Kingdom. YouGov now has an active panel of over 360,000 adults. The survey was in the field from April 17, 2015, to May 6, 2015, for a combined sample of 2,332 respondents. The survey is statistically weighted to the national profile of White British adults on age, gender, social class, region, party identification, and newspaper readership.³

The United States sample, which is also nationally representative of White American adults, was recruited via the Internet market research company, Survey Sampling International (SSI). Similar to YouGov, SSI has an active panel of nearly one million adults in the United States. The U.S. survey was in the field from December 16, 2015, to January 2, 2016, for a combined sample of 1,005 respondents. The survey is statistically weighted to the national profile of White American adults by age, gender, state, and party identification.⁴

Measures

Respondents first answered a number of questions to measure latent perceptions of social, political, and economic forms of deprivation. These instruments were followed by a nearly identical battery of questions in both surveys measuring attitudes about discrimination, participation, support for Radical Right candidates, movements, parties and demographics.

For the deprivation measures, we begin by presenting respondents with a diagram of four concentric circles that was developed during 6 months of full-immersion fieldwork in White working-class communities in the United States and Britain.⁵ The center circle was labeled with a 1 and the outer circle with a 4, and we told respondents that the diagram is a model of

how important you (and other people) are to your society. “1” represents those that are considered most central and important to society, whereas “4” represents those that are considered the least central and important to society. Thinking about this, which group do you believe you belong to?

We then showed respondents the same diagram, but told them it represents “how central and important you (and other people like you) were to society 30 years ago . . . Thinking about this, which group do you think people like you belonged to 30 years ago?” By subtracting perceptions of current centrality from perceptions of past centrality, we can construct a scale of nostalgic deprivation—or perceived status decline—for each respondent. We combined two questions on social centrality into a single scale of perceived social deprivation. Respondents then answered two questions on political centrality. The first asked about how much they think politicians care about people like them now and 30 years ago. The second asked how much power people like them have compared with similar people 30 years ago. These were also combined into a scale of perceived political deprivation. Finally, respondents were asked how financially well off people like them are now compared with 30 years ago. These questions formed the perceived economic deprivation scale. Together, these perceived deprivation scales, which have all been scaled to −1 (least nostalgic deprivation) to 1 (most nostalgic deprivation), form the backbone of our theory and analysis.⁶

In the United States, we find that political and social deprivation are correlated at 0.32, political and economic deprivation at 0.38, and social and economic deprivation at 0.21. In Britain our results are similar. We find that political and social deprivation are correlated at 0.23, political and economic deprivation at 0.37, and social and economic deprivation at 0.18. The only difference is that there appears to be a slightly stronger correlation between political and social deprivation in the United States than in Britain. We are confident that our measures are theoretically and empirically related but distinct.⁷

In Figure 1, we display the percentage of the sample who feel more deprived (feel less central today than 30 years ago), feel no different, and those who feel less deprived (feel like they are more central today than 30 years ago).⁸ We show that between a third and half of White adults in both the United States and the United Kingdom perceives themselves becoming less central in one domain. Looking at social centrality, we find that 35% of our White adults in the United States feel less socially central today than 30 years ago. The same goes for a larger 46% of the sample in Britain. An even larger percentage feel less politically central today than 30 years ago. Nearly six in 10 White adults in both the United States and Britain feel that they have lost political power. Finally, a larger proportion of White adults in the United States, nearly 50%, feel that they are less financially well off than people like them 30 years ago. Only 36% of White adults feel the same way in Britain. These findings highlight the general sense of backsliding that many across the West perceive in an era of globalization, migration, political gridlock, and increasing economic inequality.

Figure 1.

Perceived social, political, and economic deprivation.

We turn now to our dependent variables. Measuring support for the Radical Right can be challenging. First, depending on the public perceptions of support for Radical Right parties or political figures, social desirability norms are likely to bias downward support among respondents (Breen, 2000). In lieu of more stigmatized entities, in the U.S. survey we measure support for one salient political figure, Donald Trump, one less salient political movement, the Tea Party, and one hypothetical right-wing party. In a battery of questions on support for public political figures, we simply ask whether respondents have a “favorable or unfavorable opinion of Donald Trump.” The response option consisted of a 5-point standard Likert scale of support.⁹ Rather than ask whether the respondent was affiliated with the Tea Party movement or not, following Parker and Barreto (2013), we simply asked “Based on what you have heard about it, do you approve or disapprove of the Tea Party Movement?” Finally, we asked how likely respondents were to support a hypothetical third party were it to exist in the United States. We devised a hypothetical party with a platform that precisely mirrored the political platform of the British National Party (BNP) in the United Kingdom.¹⁰ While this permits a comparison with our British sample, our hypothetical party does not suffer the social stigma of many of Europe’s Radical Right parties, and therefore social desirability will be far less of a factor in the American context.

Limited by the number of Radical Right groups in the United Kingdom, the British survey simply asks respondents whether they had participated in a range of political activities—two of which are “voted or campaigned for the British National Party” and “taken part in an English Defence League or English National Alliance protest/demonstration.” Because of the social stigma surrounding affiliation with these Radical Right groups in the United Kingdom, we combined respondents who said that they “ha[d] done in the last 12 months” and those who said that they “hadn’t done but would in the future.” We combined this with a question asking respondents how “likely or unlikely” they would be to “consider voting for the UKIP.” We were conscious of social desirability bias because, in related fieldwork in the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham, we found that respondents were initially timid to reveal their past and present support for Radical Right groups. Many respondents were concerned they would be labeled a racist and that their views would subsequently be dismissed (Gest, 2016).

Looking just at the raw distribution of support for Radical Right outcomes, we find that support appears to be higher in the United States than in Britain for most of our measured outcomes. We find that 39% of White adults have very or somewhat favorable opinions of Donald Trump, 36% strongly or somewhat approve of the Tea Party, and a surprising 65% of U.S. respondents indicate that they would be very likely or somewhat likely to support a hypothetical Radical Right third party. In the British sample, 42% of respondents indicated that they would somewhat or very likely consider voting for UKIP, while 9% indicated that they have or would consider taking part in an English Defence League (EDL) or English Nationalist Alliance (ENA) protest/demonstration or vote or campaign for the BNP.¹¹

This study has two important limitations. First, because of limited space on surveys, we were unable to include batteries on racial attitudes, authoritarianism, social dominance orientation, and ethnocentrism. We are unable, therefore, to explore the relationship between these predispositions, nostalgic deprivation, and support for the Radical Right. We expect that those who are more racially resentful, more authoritarian, and more ethnocentric will be more threatened by social change and therefore express higher levels of nostalgic deprivation. Second, endogeneity is a potential concern with our measures of support for the Radical Right and nostalgic deprivation. It is not uncommon for Radical Right politicians and parties to campaign on messages of deprivation. There is always the possibility that survey respondents will simply adopt and internalize these messages and indicate high levels of perceived deprivation when asked (Lenz, 2009; Zaller, 1992). Given the volume of news coverage in the United States surrounding Trump’s candidacy, this might be partially true. However, it is noteworthy that the U.S. survey was conducted before Trump captured the Republican nomination and monopolized the party’s messaging. It was fielded at a moment when there were 13 other Republican Party candidates still in contention. Nevertheless, to account for possible endogeneity, we model a number of less salient outcomes that are less prone to endogeneity, like support for the Tea Party and for a hypothetical Radical Right third party. In the United Kingdom, where Radical Right parties have a smaller platform from which to project their message, we suspect that endogeneity is less of an issue.

Initial Correlations

Who is the typical supporter of the Radical Right? In the U.S. survey, we group respondents as supporters of the Radical Right if they show any support or approval for Trump, the Tea Party, or the hypothetical third party. In the U.K. survey, we categorize respondents as supporters of the Radical Right if they show any support for the BNP, the English Defence League, or are considering voting for UKIP. Using this grouping, we find the Radical Right supporters in the United States tend to be older, more likely to be male, less educated, less wealthy, more likely to be married, and more likely to own a home. In the United Kingdom, supporters of the Radical Right are older, more likely to be male, far less likely to have a college education, more likely to be married, and slightly more likely to own a home.¹² In sum, less educated (working-class), older, White male homeowners are the Radical Rights’ core constituency in both the United States and Britain. While this demographic group may not have the most to lose materially (economically), they have long been the “prototypical” social group that constituted the backbone of the middle class and defined what it meant to be American or British.¹³ For them, social change represents a symbolic challenge (Danbold & Huo, 2014).

Deprivation and Support for the Radical Right

As previously noted, external social, political, and economic factors have all been linked to the rise of the Radical Right at the national level in the United States and Western Europe. It is less clear how each drives individual-level variation in support for the Radical Right. How individuals interpret the impact of these larger trends moderates their individual political behaviors. We hypothesize that the extent to which each respondent feels that her own social, political, and economic conditions have worsened over time will be a strong predictor of support for the Radical Right in both the United States and Britain.

We begin by examining the bivariate relationship between each deprivation measure and support for the Radical Right in both the British and U.S. samples. We hypothesize that nostalgic deprivation will primarily moderate support for the Radical Right among Independents and Republicans/Conservatives, not among Democrats or Labourites. If we find support for our theory in the aggregate data, it is likely that partisan subgroup analysis will reveal even stronger relationships.

In Table 1, we calculate the correlation between the perceived deprivation measures and each outcome. In the first three rows, we report the correlations for the full data set. We then break it out and look at correlations among partisans only. Looking first at the full samples, we see that perceived deprivation is weakly but positively correlated with Radical Right outcomes, regardless of partisan identity. The correlations strengthen significantly among Republicans/Conservatives. For self-identified Independents, the associations weaken, but are still correlated with support for the hypothetical third party. Finally, among Democrats/Labourites, deprivation measures are weakly or negatively correlated with support for the Radical Right.

Table 1.

Correlations Perceived Deprivation and Radical Right Outcomes.

	Deprivation measure	Tea Party	Trump	Third party	BNP/EDL	UKIP
Full sample	Social deprivation	0.03	0	0.08	0.01	0.05
	Political deprivation	0.02	0.07	0.17	0.07	0.14
	Economic deprivation	−0.02	0.06	0.08	0.05	0.05
Republicans (Conservatives)	Social deprivation	0.12	−0.05	0.12	0.02	0.10
	Political deprivation	0.14	0.15	0.33	0.09	0.29
	Economic deprivation	0.09	0.18	0.26	0.08	0.15
Independents	Social deprivation	0	−0.06	0.18
	Political deprivation	0.04	0.07	0.17
	Economic deprivation	−0.03	0.09	0.13
Democrats (Labourites)	Social deprivation	−0.06	0.05	0.02	0	0.03
	Political Deprivation	−0.18	−0.09	0.01	0.05	0.09
	Economic Deprivation	−0.09	−0.05	−0.03	0.02	0.07

Figures represent the correlations between each measure of deprivation and each Radical Right outcome in the full samples as well as within White adult self-identified Republicans/Conservatives, Independents, and Democrats/Labourites. BNP = British National Party; UKIP = United Kingdom Independent Party.

In sum, we provide initial evidence that all three types of nostalgic deprivation are correlated with some measures of support for the Radical Right in both the United States and United Kingdom in the representative samples. We note that support for the Radical Right is relatively strong in the United States among deprived respondents but mixed in the United Kingdom. Support for UKIP among the deprived looks similar to the U.S. outcomes, but the relationship between the British extreme Radical Right and deprivation is weaker. As we describe earlier, we rely on measures of support for the BNP and the English Defence League that is aggregated into a single measure of support or potential support for the British Radical Right. There is little doubt that these organizations’ openly xenophobic and often racist rhetoric is more extreme than the Tea Party or Donald Trump and also more extreme than UKIP. We posit that, despite the steps we took to reduce it, social desirability suppresses public support for these organizations in the United Kingdom to a far greater extent than in the U.S. Support for UKIP, however, is more similar to support for the Tea Party or Donald Trump in the United States.

Predicting Support for the Radical Right

We turn to a regression framework to assess the relative impact of each type of nostalgic deprivation on support for the Radical Right while controlling for demographic variables. Our models control for relevant demographic characteristics: partisanship, age, education, gender, home ownership, and marital status. We rescaled every dependent variable to a continuous 0 to 1 scale and use ordinary least squares regressions. For ease of interpretation, we plot predicted probabilities for various counterfactual scenarios of interest (G. King, Tomz, & Wittenberg, 2000). Full regression results are included in Table A2 in the Online Appendix.

At this point, we have found initial evidence of the association between nostalgic deprivation and support for the Radical Right, but it is less clear these associations will hold in a regression framework once we control for the demographic characteristics that impact vote choice. For our core models, we interact deprivation with partisanship to assess the relative impact of deprivation on support for the Radical Right among Democrats (Labourites), Republicans (Conservatives), and Independents. Given the stability and durability of partisan identification, we hypothesized that self-identified Republicans (Conservatives) and Independents who think their social, political, or economic situations have deteriorated will be more likely to support the Radical Right than those who perceive no deprivation. Democrats (Labourites), we posit, will be less likely to channel deprivation into support for the Radical Right.

In Figure 2, we plot the predicted probability of support for each U.S. Radical Right outcome given a change of deprivation from minimum to maximum levels for self-identified Republicans (triangles), Democrats (circles), and Independents (lines) with all other variables held at their means. Lines indicate 95% confidence intervals.

Figure 2.

Perceived nostalgic deprivation and support for the radical right among partisans in the United States and Britain.

First, we see that the effect of nostalgic deprivation, as we found in the table of correlations above, does vary significantly for different partisans. For self-identified Republicans, nostalgic deprivation is a strong determinant of support for the Radical Right. Looking first at the Tea Party, moving economic deprivation from its minimum to maximum levels increases support for the Tea Party by 0.15 points, for the third party by 0.26 points, and for Trump by 0.41 points. Moving perceived political deprivation from its minimum to maximum increases support for the Tea Party by 0.2, for the third party by 0.39, and for Trump by 0.23. Finally, moving perceived social deprivation from its minimum to maximum increases support for the Tea Party by 0.26 and for the third party by 0.15. Social deprivation does not appear to be associated with support for Trump. Given that each outcome has been scaled between 0 and 1, these effects are notable in substantive magnitude.

Consistent with Parker and Barreto (2013), our data suggest that it is not necessarily economic concerns among Republicans that drive support for the Tea Party, but rather social and political concerns, a feeling that the country and political system is being taken over by out-groups at the expense of the in-group. Interestingly, support for Trump among Republicans appears to be driven by perceived economic and political deprivation. This is consistent with the media narrative that support for Trump is strongest particularly among working-class Whites who have been hurt economically by deindustrialization and automation and feel like they have no voice in the political system. Given the impact of racial resentment on support for Trump, however, we expected that perceived social deprivation would also be positively associated with support for Trump. Finally, the relationship between perceived deprivation and support for the hypothetical third party largely mirrors that of support for Trump among Republicans. Given that Trump’s campaign appeals closely mirrored the BNP-like platform we created for the hypothetical third party, this is no surprise.

For Democrats, the effect of nostalgic deprivation is largely null or negative. Democrats who perceive themselves to be most deprived are consistently less likely to support the Radical Right, though the results are rarely significant. Finally, the results for Independents are mixed. In most cases, nostalgic deprivation has no effect on Independent support for the Radical Right, with two exceptions. Perceived political deprivation is positively associated with support for the third party and perceived economic deprivation is positively associated with support for Trump. This is consistent with support for Trump in economically depressed bastions like the Rust Belt and Appalachia, where many Democrats who left their party and registered as independents were mobilized by Trump’s economic populist message.

Overall, two important findings emerged in the U.S. survey data. First, perceived political deprivation appears to be a consistent and strong determinant of support for the Radical Right among Republicans in the United States. When Republican respondents believe that the political system no longer cares about people like them, they tend to look to more radical alternatives for political outlets, whether it be a grassroots small government movement like the Tea Party, an anti-immigrant and hyper-nationalist party, or an economic nationalist strong-man like Trump. Second, the differential impacts of perceived social and economic deprivation on support for the Tea Party and Trump highlight the different strains of Radical Right support in the United States. Consistent with existing research, we find that the Tea Party movement is driven more by perceived social and political change than perceived economic hardship.

In Figure 2, we show the results for our modeling as it relates to Conservatives and Labourites in the United Kingdom. Here, we find that nostalgic deprivation has a positive impact on support for the BNP or EDL, the most radical of outcomes, among Conservatives but the findings are not significant at conventional levels of statistical significance (p < .10) and the effect substantively small.¹⁴ The findings on support for UKIP were far more consistent with the data from the United States. In particular, moving perceived economic deprivation from its minimum to maximum levels increased support for UKIP by 0.30 points, social deprivation by 0.20 points, and political deprivation by a substantively large 0.82 points. As with the U.S. sample, perceived political deprivation again appears to have the largest impact on support for the Radical Right in Britain, followed by economic and social deprivation. Also similar to the United States, there appear to be null or negative associations between nostalgic deprivation among Labourites and support for the Radical Right. The one exception is that Labour members who are politically deprived are marginally more likely to support UKIP than those who are not politically deprived. In many ways, UKIP harvested enormous political capital among alienated unionists and leftists who felt like the Labour Party abandoned their interests after aligning with London’s cosmopolitan financial class and ethnic minorities.

We find strong and consistent support for our hypotheses across types of deprivation, for different dependent variables, and across countries. In sum, in a cross-national context, we find that Republican/Conservative nostalgic deprivation is a powerful motivator of support for various Radical Right outcomes. In particular, perceived political deprivation, the idea that one has less power and say in the political process than in the past, is consistently associated with support for the Radical Right. We find that there are different strains of the Radical Right, as well, that are motivated by different types of nostalgic deprivation. In particular, support for a Radical Right movement like the Tea Party emerges among those who perceive themselves to be worse off socially and politically, but not economically. Perceived economic deprivation, on the contrary, has a larger effect on support for Trump among Republicans, than perceived political or social deprivation.

Finally, we ran two additional sets of models to ensure that our measures of nostalgic deprivation were distinct from other manifestations of deprivation: present perceived deprivation and persistent perceived deprivation. Present perceived deprivation is simply a measure of whether the respondent felt socially peripheral, politically powerless, or economically marginal at present, regardless of their perceptions of the past. Persistent deprivation is a measure of whether the respondents felt socially peripheral, politically powerless, or economically marginal, both at present and in the past.¹⁵ While the patterns are similar to our nostalgic deprivation analysis, we find much weaker associations between present deprivation and support for the Radical Right and even weaker associations between persistent perceived deprivation and support for the Radical Right. The full regression tables and predicted probability plots can be found in tables and Figures A3 and A4 in the Online Appendix. In all, these findings increase our confidence that nostalgic deprivation, specifically the movement from perceived centrality in the past to marginality at present, drives support for the Radical Right in the United States and United Kingdom.

Conclusion

The link between nostalgic deprivation and support for the Radical Right is made clear by recent electoral sloganeering. Donald Trump has popularized his promise to “Make American Great Again.” Tea Party–backed politicians pledged to “Take America Back.” Meanwhile, the UKIP slogan demanded, “We Want Our Country Back” and the Vote Leave campaign urged voters to “Take Back Control” through Britain’s departure from the European Union. In their reverence for the way things once were, each of these broad platforms makes clear use of nostalgia and disappointment—the very premise of nostalgic deprivation.

Diverging from purely institutional explanations of the rise of Radical Right populist movements, we situate our theory of nostalgic deprivation within a psychological framework. Economic, political, and social change may set the stage for the emergence of Radical Right parties and politicians, but it is ultimately the discrepancy between individuals’ self-reported social, political, or economic status and their perceptions of the past that moderates support. Nostalgic deprivation is a measure of how much status has been gained or lost over time, and we find that there is a clear and often strong relationship between nostalgic deprivation and support for Radical Right entities.

Using innovative survey questions fielded with nationally representative samples of White British and American adults, we find strong evidence that nostalgic deprivation is associated with support for the Radical Right. A few important patterns emerge from our analysis. In both the United States and the United Kingdom, perceived political deprivation is the most consistent correlate of support for multiple Radical Right outcomes among Republicans and Conservatives. This finding suggests that a perceived drop in the ability to influence the allocation of material and psychological resources primes respondents to be receptive to the extreme solutions proposed by Radical Right politicians. Perceived economic and social deprivation are less consistently associated with Radical Right outcomes, though the patterns highlight multiple strains of Radical Right support that are consistent with media and scholarly reporting on the Tea Party and Donald Trump. Perceived social deprivation among Republicans and Independents is most strongly associated with support for the Tea Party in the United States, and with UKIP in Britain. Perceived economic deprivation among Republicans and Independents, however, is most strongly associated with support for Donald Trump, consistent with Trump’s durable support among White working-class voters. Our findings hold in both bivariate and multiple regression with full statistical controls; they are distinct from outcomes using alternate measures of deprivation; they are robust to multiple outcomes; and they are similar across both countries.

There are several ways to further explore nostalgic deprivation in future work. First, researchers might better understand how certain personality traits and predispositions, such as pessimism, racial resentment, social dominance orientation, authoritarianism, and ethnocentrism, are associated with nostalgic deprivation. Is nostalgic deprivation itself manifested primarily among authoritarians or those highest in racial resentment or social dominance orientation? Second, researchers might test its relevance in countries subject to proportional representation that have also experienced rises in Radical Right support. In such systems, support for small parties or fringe candidates is far more rational and incentivized because they are more likely to result in some degree of representation in legislatures. Does this change in calculus result in a different set of constituents motivated by other factors? Finally, can nostalgic deprivation be ameliorated or effectively addressed? Are there inclusionary strategies or policies that could reduce nostalgic deprivation among White working-class voters? Are symbolic appeals sufficient? Are there others that exacerbate such sentiments? If so, this would suggest it is to a degree plastic and malleable. If however, deprivation is resilient and relatively immune to counter-messaging, it is likely to be part of the landscape of Anglo-American politics for some time to come.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Matt Barreto, Anna Boucher, Nick Carnes, Nancy DiTomaso, Alexandra Filindra, Noam Gidron, Jack Goldstone, Sean Gray, Zoli Hajnal, Peter Hall, Jennifer Hochschild, Eric Kaufmann, Michele Lamont, Monica McDermott, Kimberly Morgan, John Russo, Dan Rasmussen, Danny Schlozman, Kay Schlozman, David Sears, Paul Sniderman, Jessica Streib, Kris-Stella Trump, Jennifer Victor, and Ariel White. Thank you to participants of the UCLA Political Psychology lab, and to the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. Very special thanks to Rob Ford and the Horowitz Foundation for Social Policy for making this research possible.

Authors’ Note

Earlier versions of this article were presented at the Western Political Science Association and the American Political Science Association annual meetings, and also a conference hosted at the University of Illinois, Chicago by Alexandra Filindra.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Supplemental Material

Supplementary material for this article is available online at the CPS website .

Notes

Author Biographies

Justin Gest is assistant professor of Public Policy at George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government. He is the author of The New Minority: White Working Class Politics in an Age of Immigration and Inequality (2016) and Apart: Alienated and Engaged Muslims in the West (2010).

Tyler Reny is a PhD student in political science at the University of California, Los Angeles. He studies the impact of demographic change on American politics.

Jeremy Mayer is associate professor of Public Policy at George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government. He is the author of Running on Race: Racial Politics in Presidential Campaigns 1960-2000 (2002) and Closed Minds? Politics and Ideology in American Universities (2008).

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