Are radical right and radical left voters direct democrats? Explaining differences in referendum support between radical and moderate voters in Europe

ABSTRACT

Several Radical Right (RR) parties have called for referendums challenging European institutions, unpopular elites, and immigration, but do their voters support the use of referendums in general and do Radical Left (RL) voters also share preferences for these instruments? Combining data on twenty-six European countries from the 2012 ESS and the 2017 Polpart survey, we demonstrate that both RR and RL voters score higher on referendum support than moderate voters, with RR voters scoring the highest. However, the differences between voter groups are more characteristic of Western than Eastern European countries and the link between RR voting and referendum support is weaker in countries where these parties are more electorally successful. In a second analysis on five Western European countries from the 2017 Polpart Survey, we investigate individual-level explanations for the association between radical voting and referendum support, demonstrating that anti-elitism is the most important attitude linking RR voters to referendum support whereas income redistribution is the most important attitude linking RL voters to referendum support. Even when controlling for all possible explanations, we find that radical voters are still more favorable towards direct democracy than moderate voters.

KEYWORDS:

• Referendums
• radical right
• radical left
• populism
• direct democracy
• political participation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Age: 18–34: 40%; 35–49: 45%; 50–65: 15%. Sex: 50% Female. College Graduate: 40%; Some College or University: 50%; High School or Less: 10%. Employed: 70%; not in labour force: 30%.

Additional information

Funding

This research was made possible by two projects financed by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme: POLPART (Grant agreement No 339829) and POLITICIZE (Grant agreement No 772695)

Notes on contributors

Sebastien Rojon

Sebastien Rojon is a post-doctoral researcher working on the ERC-funded project “Non-elected politics: Cure or Curse for the Crisis of Representative Democracy” at the Université libre de Bruxelles. During his PhD at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, he investigated public support for citizen participation in political decision-making through referendums and deliberative meetings. More specifically, he looked at which groups of citizens are most favourable to direct decision-making and how this differs across countries.

Arieke J. Rijken

Arieke J. Rijken is a researcher at the Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute. This article was written while she was affiliated with the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Department of Sociology. She received her PhD from Utrecht University, the Netherlands, in 2009 and has published in the fields of family sociology, demography, criminology, and political science.