We investigate the support for neofascist and populist parties across societies in Europe. Apart from considering the standard socioeconomic variables, such as immigration and unemployment - as well as various supply-side variables -, we also consider ‘societal openness’ (defined on the basis of European Social Survey, 2004), ‘welfare state’ and ‘democracy’.
As such, the main contribution of this paper is to establish the “meta” link between the three institutions (1) societal openness, (2) welfare state, and (3) democracy, and find out their impact on the support for extreme right in Europe.
We first establish that, in more open societies the direct effect of openness on neofascist votes is negative; however, openness increases the neofascist support indirectly through immigration and unemployment. Moreover, we find that openness has no direct effect on the support for populist parties, but has indirect positive effects through unemployment. We also find that the effect of openness go hand in hand with that of welfare indicator within countries; however, the link between openness and democracy is less unambiguous. Our results are robust with respect to different classifications of extreme right parties and when endogeneity of immigration is controlled for.
The working paper is available here
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