Do welfare concerns drive electoral support for the populist radical right? An exploratory analysis

In this paper, we empirically investigate what kind of welfare concerns drive electoral support for radical right populist parties. The literature on the rise of populism in Western democracies argues that rising inequality is associated with more support for populist radical right parties. This leads to the assumption that populist radical right voters are in favour of more effective redistribution policies. We test this question using logistic regression analysis on the basis of the European Social Survey’s 2016 welfare module. We distinguish various forms of welfare preferences, which allow us to conclude that voters of radical right populist parties mainly tend to display welfare chauvinistic and socially conservative tendencies and are highly selective in the kind of programmes they support. While these parties' rhetoric in a number of cases now includes concern about inequality, we do not find this to be a major voting motive among these voters.