What we are reading: Nostalgia in the Netherlands and radical right voting 1

What we are reading: Nostalgia in the Netherlands and radical right voting

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Populist radical right parties feed on emotion. The most prominent feelings connected to radical right voting are anger and fear. However, nostalgia, i.e. the longing for an idealised past, may also play an important role.

The nostalgia/right-wing link has been frequently discussed in the context of the campaign that led to Britain’s exit from the European Union, but so far, there was relatively little quantitative evidence to back up the (largely plausible) journalistic claims. This is now changing, so I selected this very recent article that looks into the connection between nostalgia and support for the radical right in the Netherlands for my readings course.

Versteegen, P. L. (2024). Those were the What? Contents of Nostalgia, Relative Deprivation and Radical Right Support. European Journal of Political Research, 63, 259–280. http://dx.doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1111/1475-6765.12593

What we liked

Students were enthusiastic about an article that tackles the political consequences of emotions, and were particularly intrigued by the role of nostalgia. They thought that the first set of hypotheses was largely plausible and liked the framing and literature review as well as the large battery of measures for nostalgia. As far as the findings are concerned, they (and I) were somewhat surprised (in a good way) that nostalgia is so stable at the micro level.

What we did not like so much

The study was pre-registered, but the mediation analysis was not part of the original design. Was it foisted upon the author by an evil reviewer? Students did not think that figure 2 was particularly helpful, were unimpressed by inconsistencies within the tables (standard errors vs confidence intervals) and worried about the temporal sequence of measurements and the potential for reversed causality. They also noticed that many cases seem to be dropped from the analyses once socio-demographic controls are included, which is somewhat surprising and rarely a good sign.

Conceptually, students argued that “temporal deprivation” and its operationalisation do not really fit into the narrative, because the operationalisation of nostalgia already has a temporal component. This made us wonder whether “deprivation” was also a later addition that had to be integrated during the review process.

Finally, the students noticed that the whole framing is a bit over-confident: the strengths of the panel design were not really utilised in the analyses, and the statistical model is not a fixed-effects panel regression.

Take home messages & further questions

Nostalgia and its role in politics are important and intriguing topics, but a lot of questions are still unanswered. One potential issue for further research is the role that other parties and their communication play for the interaction(s) between nostalgia, subjective deprivation, and political backlash.

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