Studying the far-right vote in Europe, again
This winter, I’m teaching a new iteration of my MA reading class on far-right voting in Europe. I have been doing this for a long time, and every now and then I feel the urge to summarise decades of research by stating the obvious: some people are simply racist arseholes. But there we are.
My initial plan was to post a short summary of the respective class each week, but other things intervened. However, four weeks in, it’s not too late yet to go back to my notes.
Class-voting? Tri-polar spaces?
Oesch, Daniel and Line Rennwald. “Electoral Competition in Europe’s New Tripolar Political Space: Class Voting for the Left, Centre-right and Radical Right.” European Journal of Political Research 57 (2018): 783–807. doi:10.1111/1475-6765.12259
What we liked
What we did not like so much
The somewhat dense writing style makes the article challenging to read and digest. The delineation of the “poles” in their analysis appears somewhat arbitrary, which may raise questions about the robustness of their classification.
Making the theoretical assumptions (rooted in macro-sociology) more explicit would really have helped us. The study also overlooks the supply side of politics, neglecting to consider how parties and their offerings evolve over time, and fails to incorporate the concept of issue salience. But then again, it is quite busy as it is.
The reliance on a single item to measure the economic dimension might be seen as an oversimplification. And finally, the study is limited to just nine countries.
As you point out, the study you discussed “reveals surprisingly high levels of support for right-wing parties across various social groups.” I have a theory why this is so, and why in fact far-right political parties are a persisting phenomenon. My theory explains how the human social brain emerged and how the evolutionary heritage influences today’s society and politics. An important point is that the genetic code varies, and, of course, upbringing and environment produce additional variation. Thus, behavioral traits vary in strength across the population. Each has its statistical distribution with mean and standard deviation, and “fringes” of extreme over- and under-expression. Most people have good moral intuition, some are passionate about social justice, others less so. Most people are patriotic, but some are chauvinist, xenophobic, or racist. Although the inherited part is only a component, even if it is small, it is recreated whenever a baby is born, whereas education and influence of civilization always start from scratch. This might sound highly theoretical, but considering the inheritable component has very practical conclusions.
See “Thirty Thousand Years of Loneliness. The Evolutionary Aspect of Being Human” by Joachim R. von der Heydt