Climate Change, Renewable Energy, and the Populist Radical Right

• In Event: Political Ideologies and Polarization

Abstract

Right-wing populism is on the rise across advanced industrialized democracies. Past research has primarily focused on national- and individual-level factors driving this phenomenon. However, the local conditions that fuel reactionary attitudes and resentment remain underexplored, despite the fact that local contexts have been shown to play a significant role in shaping citizens’ lives and political behavior. Specifically, although the populist radical right (PRR) primarily capitalizes on opposition against immigration and globalization, it is increasingly stronger in localities seemingly untouched by these issues. What explains these puzzling subnational patterns? Our study investigates how citizens’ ability to respond to local grievances - and mainstream parties’ failure to address them - affect PRR support. In particular, it addresses the puzzling lack of connection between the core issues the PRR advocates at the national level and the salience of these issues at the local level by focusing on an understudied dimension of reactionary anti-establishment support: local opposition against renewable energy and the construction of wind mills. We draw on original, longitudinal subnational-level data of election returns and geolocated wind turbine data from several European countries to demonstrate how the PRR benefits from capitalizing on strong local opposition against wind energy and framing it in populist right-wing terms. Our study breaks new ground by illuminating how local grievances unrelated to immigration and international political and economic cooperation can benefit the PRR, especially when mainstream parties converge on or ignore these issues.

Authors

• Pauliina Patana, Harvard University

• Alexander Held, Trinity College Dublin