TY - JOUR

T1 - Once they are seated

T2 - the impact of radical right parties’ political representation on attitudes of trust and solidarity

AU - Larsen, Mikkel Haderup

PY - 2023

Y1 - 2023

N2 - A close reading of the literature on radical right parties (RRPs) suggests that these parties erode trust and solidarity in European democracies when they pit ‘the pure people’ against political and legal institutions, elites, and immigrants. I propose the conjecture that RRPs with seats in the national parliament have better conditions for spreading nativist and populist messages that may erode trust and solidarity between a society’s residents, between ethnic groups, and towards its political and legal institutions. To test this research question, I combine nine waves of European Social Survey data from 17 countries and data on national elections spanning the years 1999 to 2020. Two-way fixed effects models estimate that RRPs representation in the national parliament is associated with a reduction in public support for redistribution of ca. 18% of astandard deviation. Additionally, I demonstrate that this inverse relationship runs parallel to growing welfare chauvinistic beliefs and that it is stronger in countries with weak integration policies. Contra theoretical expectations, the radical rights’ political representation has not produced any change in societal levels ofanti-immigration attitudes, institutional trust, or social trust. While the findings persist across a wide range of robustness checks and other model specifications, threats to identification in the form of non-parallel pre-trends and unobserved sources of confounding, means that one should be cautious in interpreting thefindings in a causal manner.

AB - A close reading of the literature on radical right parties (RRPs) suggests that these parties erode trust and solidarity in European democracies when they pit ‘the pure people’ against political and legal institutions, elites, and immigrants. I propose the conjecture that RRPs with seats in the national parliament have better conditions for spreading nativist and populist messages that may erode trust and solidarity between a society’s residents, between ethnic groups, and towards its political and legal institutions. To test this research question, I combine nine waves of European Social Survey data from 17 countries and data on national elections spanning the years 1999 to 2020. Two-way fixed effects models estimate that RRPs representation in the national parliament is associated with a reduction in public support for redistribution of ca. 18% of astandard deviation. Additionally, I demonstrate that this inverse relationship runs parallel to growing welfare chauvinistic beliefs and that it is stronger in countries with weak integration policies. Contra theoretical expectations, the radical rights’ political representation has not produced any change in societal levels ofanti-immigration attitudes, institutional trust, or social trust. While the findings persist across a wide range of robustness checks and other model specifications, threats to identification in the form of non-parallel pre-trends and unobserved sources of confounding, means that one should be cautious in interpreting thefindings in a causal manner.

KW - radical right parties

KW - elections

KW - attitudes

KW - fixed effects

KW - trust

KW - regression discontinuity design

U2 - 10.1017/S1755773922000467

DO - 10.1017/S1755773922000467

M3 - Journal article

VL - 15

SP - 57

EP - 74

JO - European Political Science Review

JF - European Political Science Review

SN - 1755-7739

ER -