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ABSTRACT
Recent decades have seen the growth of various strands of right-wing populist political orientations, where populism and critique of immigration policies have been central. These ideological developments have caused concern for the legitimacy of social and political institutions. The question explored in this paper, based on Norwegian survey data, is ‘Which types of right political orientations exist among young people, and how do these political attitudes affect trust in social and political institutions?’ The results reveal the existence of both a populist ‘new right’ political orientation similar to the ideology of the Progress Party and a nativist ideology. The new right orientation contains two sets of variables: (i) economic liberalism/state scepticism and (ii) nationalist values. For trust in political institutions, the emerging picture is complex because the nationalist dimension of both the populist orientation and the nativist ideological orientation implies a high level of trust in political institutions. To the extent the new right political orientations causes mistrust, it seems to come from the liberal economic, anti-statist values included in this ideology. Based on these findings, future researchers should distinguish more clearly between the ideological dimensions going into populist political right orientations and the relationship between attitudes and more practical implications of such ideologies.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. The Norwegian researcher and specialist on totalitarian ideologies, Lars Gule, has studied radical right discussions on the Internet for several years and estimates that the perpetrator has 12,000–15,000 ideological followers.
2. An argument in discussions concerning the lowering of the age for political voting is that 16-year-olds are in the middle of a process of establishing political values and opinions; hence, giving them the right to vote would strengthen this process of political socialisation and have a longstanding effect on the habit of voting (see Ødegård Citation2011).
3. A paradoxical situation is described in Borchgrevink (Citation2012, 303) where the high level of trust was actually part of what made the Utøya tragedy possible. The perpetrator lured the young people out of hiding by assuming a police identity and saying that the police had arrived.
4. There is a huge body of literature on whether and how ethnic diversity fosters or harnesses trust. See, for example, Uslaner Citation2012).
5. According to Inglehart (Citation1990), ‘maintain order’ taps into an authoritarian value set (materialists), whereas ‘environmentalism’ is part of a post-material set of values.
6. This comes to the fore when investigating correlations between all the indicators going into the factor analysis and the trust variables. Except for trust in the media, the correlations between the economic liberal dimensions and the trust variables are negative, and for all types of trust, the correlations with nationalist stances are positive.