An analysis of the link between individual identity traits and radical party choice

ABSTRACT

While recent trends in the study of radical party voting have tended to focus on egalitarian attitudes and individual personality traits in their endeavour to explain radical party choice, the present study pits individual identity traits in the spotlight of ballot box behaviour, using data from the World Values Survey and European Values Survey. We analyse the link between exclusive and inclusive identity (identifying with a more restricted ‘in-group’ versus identifying with a larger community) and the propensity to vote for radical right and radical left parties, using differences in individual identification with respondents’ home nation and as European citizens. The results show that exclusive individual identity is a good predictor of radical right party choice, even in the presence of redistributive and egalitarian values usually associated with left-wing voting. The results also speak to the literature on welfare chauvinism. While the presence of strong egalitarian and redistributive attitudes does indeed normally predict radical left party preference in line with previous findings, this relationship is complicated by the presence of exclusive individual identity, which moderates the former’s effect and can induce egalitarian voters to prefer radical right parties. In conclusion, the paper explores the interaction of identity and social class.

KEYWORDS:

• Radical political parties
• individual identity
• elections and voting
• values
• welfare chauvinism
• economic preferences

Notes

1 Since both values range from 1 to 4 (strongly agree to strongly disagree), the combined Identity variable ranges from −3 to +3.

2 Cases for Netherlands only become available when not controlling for attitudes towards immigration (see Table 4 in the Appendix). While the main analysis does control for attitudes to immigration, the Appendix presents the results when that is omitted, The results of the analysis remain the same.

3 In some few instances, the world values survey contains ballot choice responses of parties too small or insignificant for the Chapel Hill Survey: for example parties like the NPD or DVU. For such small parties, the decision on whether to designate them radical right or radical left was taken on the basis of the ParlGov database (Döring & Manow, 2018).

4 A table describing the operationalization of all variables included in our models can be found in the appendix.

Additional information

Funding

The research and writing for this paper was conducted as part of the Research Project 'Opinion Dynamics and Collective Decisions: Procedures, Behavior and Systems Dynamics' 2014 - 2018 funded by the DFG (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft), Grant Number 265108307.