Authoritarian values and the welfare state: the social policy preferences of radical right voters

Abstract

What kind of welfare state do voters of populist radical right parties (PRRPs) want and how do their preferences differ from voters of mainstream left- and right-wing parties? In this paper, we draw on an original, representative survey of public opinion on education and related social policies in eight Western European countries to measure (1) support for social transfers, (2) support for workfare and (3) support for social investment. Challenging the view that PRRPs turned into pro-welfare parties, our results indicate that their voters want a particularistic-authoritarian welfare state, displaying moderate support only for ‘deserving’ benefit recipients (e.g. the elderly), while revealing strong support for a workfare approach and little support for social investment. These findings have important implications for contemporary debates about the future of capitalism and the welfare state.

Keywords:

• Radical right parties
• populism
• authoritarianism
• welfare states
• social investment

Acknowledgements

We thank Silja Häusermann, Tim Vlandas, Catherine De Vries, Philip Manow, Alexandre Afonso, Niccolo Durrazzi, Lucio Baccaro and the participants of the Panel ‘Reducing Dualization through Social Investment?’ at the 2019 SASE Conference (New York, June 27–29) as well as two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.

Notes

1 The Front National was renamed Rassemblement National (RN) in June 2018, whereas the previously regionalist Lega Nord was renamed Lega in the 2018 elections as it ran a nation-wide campaign for the first time in its history. We use the previous names in this paper, because our data stem from the time before the rebranding had taken place.

2 In a recent study, Elff et al. (2021) show that correct inference from multi-level models is possible even with few level-2 entities when certain procedures are applied, namely Restricted Maximum Likelihood Estimation and adjusted t-tests. We present the results of this procedure in Table A8 in the Online appendix and find our main results supported.

3 In an additional analysis we added a variable that measures respondents’ self-assessment of the rurality of their domicile in order to control whether our results might be partly due to a more rural background of PRRP-voters compared to other party families. Inclusion of this variable did not change our results.

Additional information

Funding

Gefördert durch die Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) im Rahmen der Exzellenzstrategie des Bundes und der Länder – EXC-2035/1 – 390681379. This work was also supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG) under grant number 392405337.

Notes on contributors

Marius R. Busemeyer

Marius R. Busemeyer is Professor of Political Science and Speaker of the Excellence Cluster ‘The Politics of Inequality’ at the University of Konstanz. His work focuses on comparative welfare state research, political economy, welfare state attitudes and inequality. [[email protected]]

Philip Rathgeb

Philip Rathgeb is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Social Policy in the School of Social and Political Science at the University of Edinburgh and an Associated Fellow in the Zukunftskolleg at the University of Konstanz. His work falls in the area of comparative political economy, with a particular focus on welfare states, labour relations, party politics and social inequality. His book Strong Governments, Precarious Workers was published with Cornell University Press and he has written articles for the Socio-Economic Review, West European Politics and Comparative European Politics, amongst others. [[email protected]]

Alexander H. J. Sahm

Alexander Sahm is a student of psychology and research assistant in political science at the University of Konstanz. [[email protected]]