Right-wing populist parties and their appeal to pro-redistribution voters
| Published date | 01 February 2025 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/02633957221125450 |
| Author | Pascal D König,Georg Wenzelburger |
| Date | 01 February 2025 |
https://doi.org/10.1177/02633957221125450
Politics
2025, Vol. 45(1) 37 –53
© The Author(s) 2022
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DOI: 10.1177/02633957221125450
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Right-wing populist parties
and their appeal to
pro-redistribution voters
Pascal D König
Technische Universität Kaiserslautern, Germany
Georg Wenzelburger
Saarland University, Germany
Abstract
As anti-establishment parties, right-wing populists (RWPs) have been successful in attracting the
politically discontent. This article shows how this appeal of RWPs asymmetrically affects citizens
on the economical left and right. Building on previous work, the analysis examines how anti-
establishment status conditions not only the effect of political disaffection, but also the effect
of redistribution preferences on RWP support. A multilevel analysis using nine waves of the
European Social Survey and a composite anti-establishment measure reveals that where RWPs
are more established, strong pro-redistribution preferences drive voters away from these parties
even more than voters are attracted to them based on political distrust. Political distrust more
than outweighs the countervailing effect of pro-redistribution preferences only where RWPs are
less established. There, pro-redistribution voters are a particularly suitable target as they are also
more politically dissatisfied. These findings help to understand when and why RWPs can attract
different segments of society.
Keywords
European Social Survey, political dissatisfaction, political support, political trust, redistribution,
right-wing populist parties, Western Europe
Received: 25th November 2021; Revised version received: 17th July 2022; Accepted: 17th August 2022
Introduction
Right-wing populist parties (RWPs) have experienced a notable surge throughout Europe
in the 2010s. They combine a populist and anti-establishment stance with authoritarianism
and nativism that translates into traditionalist and strong anti-immigration positions
(Mudde, 2007). In terms of economic policy orientation, they are clearly anti-globalisation
Corresponding author:
Pascal D König, Department of Social Sciences, Technische Universität Kaiserslautern, Erwin-Schrödinger-Straße,
Building 57, Kaiserslautern, 67663, Germany.
Email: pascal.koenig@sowi.uni-kl.de
1125450POL0010.1177/02633957221125450PoliticsKönig and Wenzelburger
research-article2022
Article
38 Politics 45(1)
but largely in favour of fiscal austerity and against economic interventionism, with some
of them even taking strongly market-liberal positions (Kitschelt, 2002; Kriesi et al., 2006;
Otjes et al., 2018; Zaslove, 2008). In view of these parties’ successes, scholarly work has
examined who supports RWPs and why. Given the considerable RWP support in the work-
ing class and among globalisation losers in recent elections – groups of society which have
traditionally supported the left and radical left (Arzheimer, 2013; Oesch and Rennwald,
2018; Rydgren et al., 2012) – recent studies have increasingly focused on policy- and
ideology-related aspects also to study differences between voters of the far left and the far
right (Arzheimer, 2013; Betz, 1993; Kriesi et al., 2006; Oesch and Rennwald, 2018). RWP
voters are less formally educated than voters of the far left (Akkerman et al., 2017;
Rooduijn et al., 2017) and they have a clear anti-immigration and nationalist orientation,
whereas pro-welfare and redistribution positions characterise supporters of left-wing pop-
ulists/the radical left (Akkerman et al., 2017; Burgoon et al., 2019; Rooduijn et al., 2017;
Rydgren et al., 2012; Van Hauwaert and Van Kessel, 2018).
More recent studies have furthermore shown that beyond such policy-related aspects,
political discontent plays an important role in understanding the sources of RWP support.
While this may seem all too obvious and has meant that many studies relegated political
discontent to the status of a control variable (see, for example, Akkerman et al., 2017;
Rooduijn and Burgoon, 2018; Rydgren et al., 2012), some scholars have shown that
focusing on political discontent can actually offer a more differentiated picture: It seems
that political discontent only drives RWP support as long these parties remain in opposi-
tion and remain credible challengers of the establishment (Cohen, 2020; Krause and
Wagner, 2021; Kriesi and Schulte-Cloos, 2020).
This article builds on and extends this research on how anti-establishment status mat-
ters for the electoral appeal of RWPs. Although the electoral appeal of RWPs has been
widely studied in recent years, some important aspects remain underexplored. While
Krause and Wagner (2021) formulate a comparatively elaborate measure of establishment
status, they use a single international survey wave from 2014 – limiting the number of
higher level units and the possibility to estimate the coefficients within a multilevel model
– and they also do not inspect the role of individuals’ policy preferences further. Cohen
(2020) and Kriesi and Schulte-Cloos (2020), in turn, use large datasets consisting of vari-
ous international survey waves and also look at the conditional effects of policy prefer-
ences, but rely on simpler measures of establishment status. Also, they do not examine
more closely the role of redistribution preferences for the support of RWPs.
The analysis below adds to this work in several ways. First, it tests the moderating role
of a composite anti-establishment measure using a large dataset that consists of nine
waves from the European Social Survey (ESS; 2002–2018) and performing multilevel
regression analyses with cross-level interactions to test the hypothesised moderating
effects. For this purpose, we draw on the original index by Krause and Wagner (2021) as
well as a modified version, testing them for a large set of country-years. Second, the
analysis goes beyond previous work by focusing on anti-establishment status as a mod-
erator conditioning not only the effect of political distrust but also the effect of redistribu-
tion preferences on RWP support. While Kriesi and Schulte-Cloos (2020) look at the
conditional influence of redistribution preferences for left-wing populist support, we
think that this factor is at least as important to understand when RWPs are able to mobilise
different citizen segments, especially those on the economic left. By zooming in on this
aspect, the analysis, third, sheds light on what the conditional effects of both political
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