Not So Radical After All: Ideological Diversity Among Radical Right Supporters and Its Implications

Abstract

Radical right voters and parties are often characterized as conservative and traditionalist on issues of gender, sexuality, and morality. Common wisdom is that they reject the progressive sociopolitical shifts that began in the 1970s and early 1980s. However, some radical right parties, such as the Dutch Party for Freedom, maintain moderate positions on morality issues. Are radical right supporters still traditionalist? Latent class analysis applied to European Social Survey data from 10 West European countries reveals that radical right supporters belong to three ideologically distinct classes. The fastest growing group is the sexually-modern nativists, who make up about 45% by 2016. Contrary to extant literature, traditionalism no longer appears to be a major motivation for today’s radical right. Instead, immigration and nationalism are now the core common concerns for radical right supporters in Western Europe. This development may be due to the Euro crisis and the migration crisis, which have increased the salience of national borders.

Keywords

radical right latent class analysis postmaterialism European politics immigration

Introduction

Radical right populist parties exist in almost every country in Western Europe today. Their widespread popularity and success highlights the deep grievances in the region regarding issues such as immigration, European integration, and a lack of trust in establishment politicians and parties. The question of who votes radical right and why has long concerned political scientists, but the recent populist wave brings renewed interest and urgency to the issue.

Early scholarship on the radical right argued that these parties rose in response to the new political agenda of the 1970s and early 1980s. Postmaterialist issues—multiculturalism, sexual freedom, women’s liberation, and environmentalism, among others—captured the attention of the left and caused a reaction among the right. Radical right parties formed, seeking to arrest this rapid sociopolitical change, and they were primarily supported by working-class men with conservative attitudes toward gender and sexuality, authoritarian tendencies, and strong nativism (Bornschier, 2018). Yet in the past 10–15 years, a puzzling and increasingly prevalent phenomenon has appeared among the West European radical right—some parties are softening their traditionalist positions on issues of gender, sexuality, and the family (Akkerman, 2005; Akkerman, 2015; Akkerman and Hagelund, 2007; Campbell and Erzeel, 2018; De Lange and Mügge, 2015; Meret and Siim, 2013; Spierings and Zaslove, 2015a). Are radical right supporters also moderating?

A study using data from the European Social Survey (ESS) through 2012 suggests that indeed, a subset of radical right voters is quite progressive on gender and sexuality, combining support for gay and lesbian rights with strong anti-immigrant sentiment (Spierings et al., 2017). The existence of these “sexually-modern nativists” (Spierings et al., 2017) calls into question the “backlash” thesis of Inglehart (1997; see also Bornschier, 2010), reiterated recently by Inglehart and Norris (2016, 2017). This article critically evaluates the “sexually-modern nativist” phenomenon by examining changes in the ideological cohesion of radical right supporters. Pooling two waves (2004 and 2016) of the ESS (NSD—Norwegian Centre for Research Data, 2016), I use latent class analysis (LCA) to discern distinctive attitude patterns among respondents. I identify three broad categories of radical right supporters—sexually-modern nativists, conservative nativists, and an intermediate category, moderate nativists. Sexually-modern nativists have a social profile distinct from that of other radical right supporters: they are younger, more educated, and more likely to be female. This category is growing over time, which may be a direct result of the increasingly broad acceptance of progressive gender and sexuality norms in Western Europe, a phenomenon that is increasingly reflected in the rhetoric of several West European radical right parties. This suggests that traditionalist appeals may no longer be electorally viable for most radical right parties. These parties, instead, focus more heavily on authoritarianism and nationalism rather than traditionalism (Hooghe and Marks, 2018; Kriesi et al., 2006; Marks et al., 2006). Hence, radical right supporters appear to increasingly set themselves apart from mainstream voters in their views on nationalism and immigration while converging to the mainstream on women’s and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) rights. These novel findings provide not only an in-depth analysis of the ideological and issue preferences of radical right supporters, but also speaks of the state of West European party competition and political cleavages more broadly. In this era of increased popularity of populist radical right parties across the Western world, it is integral that we update our understandings of who votes for these parties, and why.

The next section reviews the arguments on the radical right and its supporters, paying particular attention to the potential development of a new, transnationalist, cleavage on which the radical right takes a clear position. I hypothesize that the changing issue agenda among many radical right parties is in sync with changing attitudes among their supporters, and I develop concrete expectations. The following sections test these conjectures against ESS data for 2004 and 2016 across 10 Western countries, draw conclusions, and discuss implications for further research.

The Radical Right and Its Supporters

A burgeoning literature on radical right parties and voters has begun to examine an increasingly prevalent and perplexing phenomenon: parties’ and voters’ abandonment of traditionalism, particularly with regard to gender and sexuality (Akkerman, 2005, 2015; Akkerman and Hagelund, 2007; Campbell and Erzeel, 2018; De Lange and Mügge, 2015; Meret and Siim, 2013; Spierings and Zaslove, 2015a, 2015b; Spierings et al., 2017). This stands in contrast to value-based accounts of the party family’s rise, which posited that the radical right party family was a reaction to postmaterialism (see Inglehart, 1997).

Lipset and Rokkan (1967) predicted a “freezing” of the West European party system, but the 1970s and 1980s saw the development of a postmaterialist value shift that gave rise to Green and New Left parties, which were disproportionately supported by the highly educated (Rydgren, 2007). As Inglehart (1977) writes, this “silent revolution,” involved a “fundamental shift from ‘materialist’ values to ‘post-materialist values . . . prioritiz[ing] the expansion of individual freedom . . . multiculturalism, gender and racial equality, and sexual freedom.” The so-called “universalistic values” that became politicized during this time breathed new life into a sociocultural dimension of conflict. Starting in the 1980s, radical right parties began to cater to voters at the other side of this divide, many of whom were not highly educated (Bornschier, 2010, 2018; Kriesi et al., 2008). In this, the radical right “demand[ed] the protection of (patriarchal) family values and a nationally-oriented immigrant-free way of life” (Meguid, 2005: 384; Kitschelt, 1995). Concerns with law and order, hierarchy, and conformity—in other words, authoritarianism—were also crucial to radical right appeals at this time (Altemeyer, 1981; Arzheimer, 2018; Mudde, 2007). As a result of these societal changes, a new politics dimension referred to as “GAL-TAN” crystallized (Hooghe et al., 2002).¹ Others have labeled this divide “libertarianism-authoritarianism” (Kitschelt, 1995), “cosmopolitanism-parochialism” (Inglehart, 1977; Inglehart and Norris, 2016; De Vries, 2018), or “demarcation-integration” (Kriesi et al., 2006).

The “cultural backlash” against progressive social values was a chief cause of the rise of the radical right (Bornschier, 2018; Inglehart, 1997; Inglehart and Norris, 2016), but the sudden popularity of this family was likely abetted by another phenomenon—an electoral dealignment on the left–right dimension, whereby the working class, particularly men, began to abandon socialist and social democratic parties. Parties on the left began to lose appeal for the working class as they adopted more progressive social stances in pursuit of the white-collar middle class, which was expanding in postindustrial societies (Kriesi and Bornschier, 2012). According to this argument, disaffected working-class voters were drawn to the radical right because of their traditionalist values (Betz and Immerfall, 1998; Kitschelt, 1995; Kitschelt and Rehm, 2014; Kriesi et al., 2006, 2008; Van der Brug et al., 2005). The radical right was not shy to point the finger to various scapegoats for working-class plight, such as immigrants, establishment politicians, and women. The radical right also promised a new electoral avenue through which “the losers of postindustrialization” could be heard.

The rise of the Dutch Lijst Pim Fortuyn (LPF)—a radical right party founded in 2002 by the eponymous Pim Fortuyn, a xenophobic, openly gay sociologist—was perhaps the first major sign that something was not quite in line with the expectations of postmaterialist theory. LPF was decidedly not traditionalist (Akkerman, 2005; De Lange and Mügge, 2015; Spierings et al., 2017). Soon it became clear that this party was not just an anomaly as other parties began to follow suit. LPF’s successor, the Party for Freedom (PVV), has been committed to gender equality and LGBT rights for much of its existence, claiming this to be a bastion of Western society (Vossen, 2011). The Danish People’s Party has also long taken progressive stances on social issues. Former leader of the Danish People’s Party, Pia Kjærsgaard, stated, in 2007, that, “In Denmark we adhere to liberal values. We accept and respect the choices people make. We accept homosexuality. In Iran you will be hanged for your homosexuality” (Akkerman, 2015: 55–56). And Marine LePen, leader of the French Front National, began to support civil partnerships during debates over the legalization of same-sex marriage in 2012 (Akkerman, 2015). This is corroborated by the study of party manifestos and other documents by Meret and Siim (2013), Akkerman (2015), De Lange and Mügge (2015), and Mudde and Kaltwasser (2015), who find that several radical right parties tend to take progressive stances on gender and sexuality. An expert survey of party gender ideologies in 15 countries finds that the two most “liberal” radical right parties in this regard are the Dutch PVV and the Sweden Democrats (SD) (Campbell and Erzeel, 2018). These parties tend to draw a link between their progressive social values on gender and LGBT rights and their nativist nationalism: “gender equality as part of a hegemonic national culture that is under threat from the cultural ‘other’” (Meret and Siim, 2013). One possible implication is that women may be particularly receptive to this moderation (Inglehart and Norris, 2000), and this might over time reduce the gender gap in radical right voting (Harteveld et al., 2015).

This shift in rhetoric has been most pronounced among Northern European radical right parties, as the discussion above indicates. There indeed remains considerable variation among West European radical right parties on this front (Online Appendix, A5 Figure 5), as some parties may change at a slower rate. Nonetheless, the question of why some parties have “moderated” while others have not is outside of the scope of this article.

However, relatively little is known about the attitudes of radical right supporters toward women’s and LGBT rights in Western Europe. Inglehart and Norris (2017) argued as recently as that cultural backlash is behind the most recent populist resurgence. This is indeed the same argument made by Inglehart in his 1997 book regarding the initial rise of these parties. The implication is that the same conflicts regarding postmaterialist values are still alive and well today and thus that “traditional misogyny and sexism” still very much motivate the support base of the radical right (Inglehart and Norris, 2016: 7). But if this were the case, one would not observe that some radical right parties, as of late, claim themselves to be the sole guardians of European Enlightenment values.

Spierings and Zaslove (2015b: 138) argue that radical right voting is simply “a more radicalized version of voting for center-right parties.” They find that radical right voters are distinguished from center–right voters only by the extremity of their immigration positions, and to a lesser extent, their opinions regarding European integration. The authors also state that radical right voters “are not outliers with respect to gender and sex” (Spierings and Zaslove, 2015b: 152). Subsequent research suggests that voters who combine progressive LGBT attitudes with strong nativism have a higher likelihood of voting radical right than other voters (Spierings et al., 2017).

Just as some radical right parties (e.g. SVP) are more conservative than others (e.g. PVV), I argue that there are fundamentally different types of radical right supporters. Some, indeed, are extremely conservative, reacting against postmaterialism. Such individuals are likely to conform, demographically and ideologically, to the literature’s usual conceptualization of the “radical right supporter”—a male blue-collar worker with low educational attainment and an affinity for traditional family values, law and order, and the nation-state. I term these individuals “conservative nativists.”

On the other hand, other radical right supporters seem to accept that postmaterialism won—at least with regard to gender and sexuality. Recent work on “femonationalism” and “homonationalism” speaks of this phenomenon (Farris, 2017). As a specific example, many gay men have flocked to the Front National/National Rally.² These are the “sexually-modern nativists” first posited by Spierings et al. (2017). Gender conservatism does not resonate with these individuals, the primary concern of whom is immigration. I expect these radical right supporters to look more like leftists—younger, highly educated, and skewed female. In the following section, I introduce the method through which I distinguish these different groupings of radical right supporters. However, I first conclude this section with my hypotheses.

The existence of “sexually-modern nativists” suggests that the radical right’s backlash against postmaterialism is not as robust as Inglehart and Norris (2016, 2017) suggest. Indeed, among older radical right supporters—those who were around when the party family formed—one may expect more traditionalist and patriarchal values. However, such values should be less prevalent among supporters who came of age during the era of postmaterialist progressivism. This suggests a possible cohort effect at play. Hence the first hypothesis can be formulated as follows:

H1. Radical right supporters from younger cohorts are more likely to be sexually-modern nativists than radical right supporters from older cohorts.

Furthermore, as discussed above, postmaterialist values are more prevalent among the highly educated and among women, and so it makes sense to expect radical right supporters with postmaterialist values to be more highly educated and more likely to be female. This leads to two more hypotheses:

H2. Education tends to predispose radical right supporters to sexually-modern values.

H3. Women radical right supporters are more likely to be sexually-modern nativists.

My final hypothesis relates to dynamics over time. As progressive attitudes toward gender and sexuality become widely accepted in Western Europe, and as they are picked up by radical right parties, one would expect cohort effects (H1) and a changing political landscape to produce the following:

H4. Sexually-modern nativists are more prevalent in 2016 than in 2004.

The increasing acceptance of postmaterialist values may mean that voters and partisans are no longer sorting themselves along a postmaterialist cleavage but rather a transnational cleavage. Hooghe and Marks’s (2018) “transnational cleavage” thesis posits that the Euro and migration crises of the early to mid-2010s have accelerated a realignment around issues of nationalism and the autonomy of nation-states against immigration, European integration, and the accompanying loss of agency to “foreigners” both inside and outside Europe. These issues have always been of great concern to radical right parties, but a renewed emphasis on the integrity of the nation-state suggests that immigration, alongside European integration, is perhaps even more salient to the radical right than in the past (Arzheimer, 2018; Cutts et al., 2011; Lubbers et al., 2002; Norris, 2005; Rooduijn, 2018; Van der Brug et al., 2005; Van der Brug and Fennema, 2003). The transnationalist cleavage hypothesis provides a possible explanation for why radical right parties have shifted their appeals in recent years and why their support bases seem to have become much less concerned with patriarchal traditionalism. Thus, radical right supporters’ primary motivation is more likely nationalism, and this has, to some extent, displaced concerns with family values. It appears that traditionalist appeals are no longer a winning formula even among the most rightist parties in the political space.

Methodology

In the previous section, I argued that radical right supporters can be sorted into groups or classes based on different attitudinal and demographic characteristics. Rather than placing respondents into categories in an ad hoc manner based only on their revealed attitudes regarding gender, sexuality, and immigration, I turn to a method known as LCA. This method allows me to confirm my theoretical expectations, as well as to determine whether these groups vary with regard to other key issues (e.g. authoritarianism). LCA (estimated with the poLCA package in R), is a type of latent variable model whereby unobserved patterns of responses in the data are uncovered (Oberski, 2016). Respondents are “probabilistically group[ed through maximum likelihood estimation] . . . into a ‘latent class,’” the members of which all share similar response patterns (Linzer and Lewis, 2011).³ An LCA model is a finite mixture model. It assumes that individuals are sampled from different distributions depending on their latent propensities to provide certain responses (Blaydes and Linzer, 2008).

The latent trait of interest in an LCA model (in this case, attitudes on issues pertaining to traditionalism, authoritarianism, and nationalism (TAN)) is categorical (Linzer and Lewis, 2011). Whereas an item response theory (IRT) model uses observed variables to measure a continuous latent trait (say, the sociocultural dimension of ideology (GAL-TAN)), LCA allows for a more in-depth examination of response patterns. Because I am not interested in merely a respondent’s placement on the GAL-TAN scale, LCA is an ideal method. LCA has been used in public health, sociology, and psychology research for decades but has only recently gained traction in political science (see Alvarez et al., 2017; Blaydes and Linzer, 2008; Feldman and Johnston, 2014).

The number of classes estimated by the model is chosen by the researcher on the basis of theoretical and model fit criteria. In the above section, I theorized that there are both “conservative nativists” and “sexually-modern nativists” within the radical right. However, it is not likely that all radical right supporters fit squarely into one of these two extremes. Therefore, this analysis opts for a model with three classes. I term the third class as the “moderate nativists.” “Nativist” because I hypothesize that they share with the other two classes concern with European integration and immigration, and “moderate” because I expect them to hold only moderately conservative and traditionalist positions on other issues.

Regarding model fit criteria, the three-class model exhibits the lowest Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC) compared with other class number specifications (2–6). Please see the Online Appendix (A3) for the BIC values of these alternative specifications.⁴ Furthermore, the three-class model is substantively the most meaningful and interpretable.⁵

Reliability is always a concern with survey research (Converse, 1964), and this concern is rooted in the fact that some respondents may answer randomly, either on purpose or due to ignorance. LCA is not immune to reliability concerns, but it is reasonable to assume that random answers are randomly distributed and thus unlikely to introduce bias into any one class disproportionately. In fact, this method has been proposed as a way to correct for survey measurement error (see Berzofsky et al., 2014).⁶

Data

To probe the existence of ideologically coherent clusters of radical right voters in Western Europe, I turn to the ESS, a comprehensive, cross-national attitudinal survey completed every 2 years in Europe since its inception in 2002 (NSD, 2016). I choose 12 questions from the most recent, 8th wave, released in 2016. Because I am interested in temporal trends, I merge these with data from the 2nd ESS wave from 2004 to create a pooled dataset. Data limitations preclude a continuous analysis.⁷

To gauge radical right affinity, I use the party closeness variable rather than the vote choice variable. The ESS asks, “Is there a particular political party you feel closer to than all the other parties?” If the respondent answers in the affirmative, they are then asked which party. I include individuals who indicate that they feel closest to a radical right party. Because time since the last election varies between countries, party closeness may be a more accurate indicator of party affinity (Campbell and Erzeel, 2018). Furthermore, it is well known that voting recall is error-prone, especially in multiparty systems (Dassonneville and Hooghe, 2016). As a function of the survey design, it is not possible for an individual to indicate closeness to more than one party. Therefore, a respondent would be excluded via the first question if they feel equally close to two or more parties. This likely leads to conservative estimates, as those who profess closeness to a radical right party may also be close to another party and, therefore, may not be strong radical right partisans. The sample contains respondents from any West European country in the dataset that has at least one radical right party. A list of these parties may be found in the Online Appendix (A1).⁸

The questions seek to measure the T, A, and N of radical right ideology. First, to measure traditionalism, I include one question each on gender equality (whether women have the same right to jobs as men), gay and lesbian rights, and respect for tradition. Authoritarianism is measured through questions regarding the desire for a strong government and respect for rules. The nationalism questions concern the two chief challenges to the nation-state, per the transnationalist cleavage argument—the European Union (EU) and immigrants (Hooghe and Marks, 2018). The EU question asks whether European integration has gone too far or not far enough. Immigration, in these waves of the ESS, is measured through six questions, including whether one’s country should admit immigrants who are poor, of the same race, and of different races, as well as whether one believes immigration harms her country, economy, and culture. These six questions load onto the same factor, suggesting that they tap into a latent construct pertaining to immigration attitudes (see Spierings and Zaslove, 2015b). My analysis uses an average of these six questions. All variables have been transformed to 1–5 scales and coded so that low values indicate GAL/liberal positions and high values TAN/conservative positions. “Don’t know” and refused are coded as missing. For descriptive statistics and exact wordings, please see the Online Appendix (A1 and A2).

Covariates may be added to an LCA to adjust individuals’ prior probabilities of belonging to each latent class (see Note 6). This is sometimes referred to as one-step latent class regression (Linzer and Lewis, 2011). Birth cohort, income, education, and religiosity are included as covariates.⁹ The birth cohort variable ranges from 1 to 6, where 1 indicates an individual was born prior to 1950, 2 from 1950 to 1959, 3 from 1960 to 1969, 4 from 1970 to 1979, 5 from 1980 to 1989, and 6 from 1990 onward. (The final cohort only exists in the 2016 dataset.) I classify those from the 4th cohort and beyond as being raised in the “postmaterialist era.” Income measures net household income from all sources. Because it is measured from 1 to 12 in 2004 and 1 to 10 in 2016, I use individuals’ decile assignments for this variable rather than the raw values, producing a 1–10 variable, where low values indicate a low income. Education is coded from 1 to 5, where 1 indicates that a respondent did not complete high school and 5 indicates a holder of a bachelor’s degree or higher. Finally, religiosity ranges from 0, or “not at all religious” to 10, “very religious.”

Results

I now present the results of my pooled LCA, first by discussing the ideological characteristics of the classes, followed by an analysis of the demographic and temporal trends. As expected, I find response patterns that correspond to the three groupings I discussed above—the sexually-modern nativists, the conservative nativists, and the moderate nativists. Figure 1 shows the mean response to each question per latent class, where 1 is the most GAL/liberal and 5 is the most TAN/conservative.

Figure 1.

Response Means by Latent Class.

The “sexually-modern nativists” comprise 33.35% of the pooled sample. Sexually-modern nativists are distinguished from other respondents by virtue of their notably progressive responses to the T questions—particularly those regarding women and gay and lesbian individuals. On a scale from 1 to 5 (leftist to rightist), the average response by this class on the women’s jobs question is 1.36, and on the gay and lesbian rights question, 1.35. This indicates that almost everyone in this class strongly supports these rights (Online Appendix, A4). Sexually-modern nativists are also the least deferential to tradition, compared with other respondents. Regarding A and N issues, the picture is less clear-cut. As with tradition, sexually-modern nativists are least inclined to believe that rules should always be followed. They provide a mean response of 2.89, indicating that they lean toward believing that rules need not necessarily always be followed. However, sexually-modern nativists quite strongly believe that the government should take a proactive role in defending its citizens (mean = 3.72). Finally, sexually-modern nativists are strongly nationalist, only slightly less so than the conservative nativist class. They provide an average answer of 3.18 on the EU question and 3.37 on the immigration question, suggesting that they believe EU integration is going too far and that immigration should be restricted.¹⁰

Conservative nativists comprise 26.05% of the pooled sample. This class is the most TAN latent class across the board and conforms well to the image of the postmaterialist reactionary. However, the conservative nativist class is the smallest class produced by the model. Most radical right supporters thus appear to not be extremely conservative and traditionalist. Conservative nativists feel strongly that tradition should be respected (mean = 4.00) and are least supportive of the rights of women and gay and lesbian individuals. About a third of them do not believe women have the same right to jobs as men, and about a quarter do not believe that gays and lesbians should be free to live as they wish. The conservative nativists provide fairly extreme responses to the A questions, particularly the one regarding strong government, where the average response is 4.37 out of 5, indicating that a vast majority are very concerned about defense. Furthermore, this class is highly nationalist, but only slightly more so than the other respondents, particularly the sexually-modern nativists. Their average answer on the EU question is 3.58, while their average immigration response is more rightist, at 3.76—most believe that integration and immigration should be restricted.

Finally, the moderate nativist class is the largest class, at 40.59% of the sample. This class lies between the sexually-modern and the conservative nativists with regard to the first four questions—tradition, women, LGBT, and rules—more conservative than the sexually-modern nativists but more liberal than the conservative nativists. Yet, the moderate nativists do not fit squarely in the middle of the two other classes in their responses to the remaining questions. Although they are objectively strongly supportive of strong government, they are the least interested in it relative to the other two classes (mean = 3.35). Moderate nativists are also the least nationalist. They lean, on the whole, slightly toward the pro-EU side—in contrast with the other two classes—providing an average response of 2.83. And they also fall right in the middle of the immigration index, with an average response of 2.98, which is less opposed than both the sexually modern and conservative nativists. These differences in means between classes are statistically significant (Online Appendix, A4).

Demographic variables can be best examined through latent class regression—the inclusion of covariates in an LCA. Table 1 presents the results from a latent class regression, a multinomial logistic regression predicting latent class with demographic covariates, where the reference category is sexually-modern nativists. Sexually-modern nativists are significantly different from the other two classes with regard to these four covariates, particularly cohort and education. Moderate nativists are the most likely to be religious compared with the other two classes (Online Appendix, A5). I discuss this result further below, but first, I present Figures 2 and 3, which illustrate the results for cohort and education.

Table 1.

Multinomial Logistic Regression.

	Conservative versus moderate	Conservative versus sexually modern
Intercept	−0.953*** (0.341)	−2.132*** (0.380)
Education	−0.349*** (0.083)	0.154* (0.081)
Cohort	0.456*** (0.079)	0.684*** (0.081)
Income	−0.185*** (0.036)	0.069* (0.037)
Religiosity	−0.252 (0.034)	−0.082** (0.035)
Observations	1616	1616

Dependent variable is latent class and reference category is sexually-modern nativists.

p < 0.1.

p < 0.05.

***

p < 0.01.

Figure 2.

Predicted Probability of Latent Class by Cohort.

Figure 3.

Predicted Probability of Latent Class by Education.

As Figure 2 shows, the probability of being a conservative nativist declines with each younger cohort. Postmaterialist cohorts (4–6) have a less than 25% chance of falling into this class when income, education, and religiosity are held at their means. As hypothesized in H1, the most likely class for these postmaterialist cohorts is the sexually-modern nativist class. As discussed above, this is likely due to cohort effects related to increasing gender and LGBT progressivism in Western Europe.

The effect of education, per Figure 3, is powerful. Most notably, the probability of a supporter finding herself in the sexually-modern nativist category increases considerably as education level increases; the probability of falling into this class for someone with a bachelor’s degree or higher is 50%. On the other hand, supporters who did not graduate from high school have only a 20% chance of being a sexually-modern nativist. These findings are consistent with H2.

One final important demographic characteristic is gender. In support of H3, Figure 4 shows that women are more likely to be sexually-modern nativists than men: 40.9% versus 28.2%. More men than women make up the other two classes, with 27.2% of them falling into the conservative nativist class (21.6% for women) and 44.6% into the moderate nativist class (37.5% for women). Again, these differences are statistically significant (Online Appendix, A4).

Figure 4.

Latent Class Proportions by Gender.

Finally, Figure 5 shows a drastic increase in the proportion of sexually-modern nativists overtime—from 12.7% to 44.5%—providing emphatic support for H4. Interestingly, this gain is mostly at the expense of the moderate nativists’ category, while the proportion of conservative nativists stayed more or less the same (though I show later that this group too has moderated its views on gender and LGBT rights). Recall from above that the moderate nativists were the most religious class, so the steep decline of the moderates may be due to general declines in religiosity in Western Europe. Generally, however, it seems reasonable to assume that the class most likely to exhibit attitudinal change is not the one at the far end of the conservatism spectrum but rather the middling one. Indeed, the core of true believers seems fairly stable, although this may not be true into the future since the conservative nativist class draws heavily from older cohorts. Nonetheless, it seems that only about a quarter of radical right supporters are reacting against postmaterialism; the majority are not out of step with the mainstream regarding gender and sexuality.

Figure 5.

Latent Class Proportions by Year.

To note, it is not so that the increased prevalence of sexually-modern nativists in 2016 is simply the result of the less traditionalist parties winning more votes. As shown in the Online Appendix (A5), the prevalence of sexually-modern nativists has increased in all countries by 2016 (Figure 4) compared with 2004 (Figure 3). That said, the cross-national patterns are generally as expected. The more traditionalist countries, such as Austria and Switzerland, have smaller proportions of sexually-modern nativists, and they experienced less drastic increases over the time period. Furthermore, the less traditionalist countries, such as the Nordic countries and the Netherlands, have high proportions of sexually-modern nativists. The Netherlands experienced a striking increase from 2004 to 2016. One possible anomaly is France, which has the most sexually-modern nativists in the pooled data (Figure 2) as well as in 2016 alone (Figure 4). Per the discussion above, the Front National has adopted sexually-modern rhetoric fairly weakly, but nonetheless, seems to draw from these types of voters, particularly gay men.

How can the declining relevance of traditionalism to the radical right be explained? It is certainly possible that the trends I observe are the result of general declines in traditionalism across Western Europe. Nonetheless, the results in Table 2 suggest otherwise. Table 2 shows the mean answers given to the LGBT and immigration questions for both radical right and non-radical right supporters in 2004 and 2016, where 1 is strongly liberal/GAL and 5 is strongly conservative/TAN.¹¹ Indeed, non-supporters of the radical right provide more GAL answers to the gay and lesbian rights question in 2016 compared with 2004, but supporters have converged: the gap narrows from 0.321 (2.350 − 2.029 = 0.321) in 2004 to 0.21 in 2016, which is about a 34% decline in the gap. The trend goes the other way regarding immigration: while non-radical right supporters are less nativist in 2016 than in 2004 (−0.16), radical right supporters have become more nativist (+0.11). The gap between them is 0.43 in 2004 and 0.48 in 2016 (10% increase).

Table 2.

Difference in Means by Party Closeness and Year.

	LGBT		Immigration
	Non-radical right	Radical right	Non-radical right	Radical right
Constant (2004)	2.029*** (0.009)	2.350*** (0.050)	2.794*** (0.006)	3.226*** (0.036)
2016	−0.362*** (0.012)	−0.473*** (0.059)	−0.160*** (0.008)	0.110** (0.045)
Observations	33,125	1616	33,406	1616

LGBT: lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender.

Dependent variable is party to which the respondent feels closest. Add the coefficient for 2016 to the constant to find the mean answer in 2016.

p < 0.05.

***

p < 0.01.

This suggests two things. First, if radical right supporters were reacting against increasing gender progressivism, they would not provide more GAL answers to the LGBT question in 2016. Furthermore, they would not have decreased their traditionalism at a higher rate than did the general population. Second, that radical right supporters are more nativist in 2016 while others are less nativist suggests that voters may in fact be sorting themselves along a transnational cleavage rather than a postmaterialist one.

Conclusion

This article critically examines the “sexually-modern nativist” phenomenon first noted by Spierings et al. (2017). I first discussed the literature’s conceptualization of the radical right’s rise, focusing particularly on the “cultural backlash” argument wherein radical right parties are believed to have formed in reaction to new left parties. This origin story suggests that the radical right is heavily populated by working-class men with traditionalist, authoritarian, and nativist attitudes. However, a nascent literature on the gender ideologies of radical right parties shows that some have moderated traditionalist stances on gender and sexuality. But have radical right supporters as a group also moderated their stances? The findings here suggest that indeed, the radical right support bloc as a whole is becoming less traditionalist. Using LCA, three distinct types of radical right supporters are identified. This analysis confirms the existence of sexually-modern nativists, and also reveals that this category is fast growing: from 12.7% of the radical right support base in 2004 to 44.5% by 2016. Sexually-modern nativists hold progressive stances on the T questions on tradition, gender and LGBT rights, support strong government, and are strongly opposed to immigration and European integration. They are younger, more highly educated, and more likely to be female compared with other radical right supporters. Conservative nativists are the most traditionalist, highly authoritarian, and nationalist, and arguably the only category that can be construed as motivated by anti-postmaterialism. The final class largely falls in the middle on T, A, N, somewhat traditionalist, somewhat authoritarian, and not as strongly nationalist as the other two types.

As a whole, these results call into question the cultural backlash thesis and are suggestive of increased salience of nationalist issues, but questions still remain. Future work should further examine this moderation phenomenon. Are these trends among the radical right due to new supporters switching from other parties, or are long-time supporters changing their views? Is this phenomenon unique to the radical right, or is it also happening among the mainstream right? And regarding parties themselves, why have only some taken up this new immigration frame while others have remained conservative?

Supplemental Material

PSX870468_Supplemental_material – Supplemental material for Not So Radical After All: Ideological Diversity Among Radical Right Supporters and Its Implications

Supplemental material, PSX870468_Supplemental_material for Not So Radical After All: Ideological Diversity Among Radical Right Supporters and Its Implications by Caroline Marie Lancaster in Political Studies

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I thank Kaitlin Alper, Dave Attewell, Austin Bussing, Andreas Jozwiak, Herbert Kitschelt, Jelle Koedam, Gary Marks, Rahsaan Maxwell, Santiago Olivella, Graeme Robertson, Milada Vachudova, and the participants of UNC Comparative Working Group and the Radical Party Challenges workshop at Duke University, as well as my discussant at the 2018 meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, for their insightful comments and criticism. I also thank my anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions. Finally, I would like to especially thank Liesbet Hooghe for her support and advice and for reading a multitude of drafts.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This manuscript is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship (NSF-GRFP) under Grant No. DGE-1650116. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the National Science Foundation.

ORCID iD

Caroline Marie Lancaster

Supplementary Information

Additional supplementary information may be found with the online version of this article.

A1: Descriptive Statistics.

Table 1. Parties.

Table 2. Descriptive Statistics.

Table 3. Counts by Country and Year.

A2: ESS Questions.

A3: Latent Class Model Results.

Table 1. BIC for Alternative Class Number Specifications.

Table 2. Main LCA Model, 2004 and 2016.

Table 3. Alternative LCA Model, 2004, 2008, and 2016.

Figure 1. Latent Class Proportions by Year, Alternative LCA Model.

Table 4. Alternative LCA Model, 2008 Only.

A4: Difference in Means Tests.

A5: Supplemental Figures.

Figure 1. Predicted Probability of Latent Class by Religiosity.

Figure 2. Latent Class Proportion by Country, 2004 and 2016.

Figure 3. Latent Class Proportion by Country in 2004.

Figure 4. Latent Class Proportion by Country in 2016.

Figure 5. Radical Right “Social Lifestyle” Positions from the Chapel Hill Expert Survey.

Notes

Author Biography

Caroline Marie Lancaster is a PhD student in political science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she received her MA in 2018. Her research interests center around party and voter behavior and political extremism, particularly in advanced democracies. She has recently published in Democratization and Politics and Religion.

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