Does Income Inequality Bother Us, the People? Far-Right Voter Attitudes in ISSP

• In Event: The Role of Ideology in Public Opinion

Abstract

How do supporters of the far right think about income inequality and redistribution? This question is as much unresolved as it is essential, considering how far-right parties have in recent decades entered by force the electoral competition in various democracies. While authoritarianism, nationalism and in-group favoritism are the core concerns of far-right ideology, their positions on socio-economic inequality are often rather blurred. Research on the welfare preferences of the far right has so far predominantly focused on party positions, describing radical right-wing parties either as ambivalent on social policy issues (Rovny and Polk, 2019), or gradually more supportive of redistribution as a response to their working-class electoral base (Afonso and Rennwald, 2018). As for the demand side, recent research shows that the European radical right electorate desires a ‘particularistic-authoritarian’ welfare state grounded in workfare policies and a limited support for social transfers only to clearly defined “deserving” beneficiaries (Busemeyer et al., 2022). Voters of far-right parties seem to be supportive of a different welfare state model than supporters of center-right or center-left parties.
As insightful as these studies are in revealing the social policy and welfare preferences of far-right voters, they do not shed enough light on the underlying attitudes and perceptions on income inequality and redistribution that drive the far right’s social policy preferences. Attitudes on inequality and redistribution draw strongly on normative expectations and conceptions of justice (Svallfors, 2012). Hence, it is likely that their drivers are partly distinct from those of concrete policy proposals concerning the distribution of goods and burdens in society.
The aim of this paper is to extend on the emerging scholarship on radical right welfare preferences by combining approaches from electoral sociology and welfare state literature with theory on social justice norms, and investigate how far-right voters think about income inequality and redistribution on three particular points:
1. How much inequality do far-right voters tolerate in today’s society?
2. How do they conceive the role of ordinary people in combatting inequality?
3. How supportive are they in principle of fiscal redistribution?
Our empirical analyses use data from the 2019 Social Inequality module of the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP). The 2019 ISSP is a cross-national survey in public opinion on inequality and welfare, containing at present data from 22 countries worldwide. Our study has a major advantage in using comparative data that allow us to investigate into some of the contextual moderators of the inequality and redistribution attitudes of far-right voters. Despite of their inherent subjective orientation, inequality and redistribution attitudes develop in environments that differ, for instance in terms of the public’s support for meritocracy (Roex et al., 2019) or the average levels of subjective economic insecurity (Melcher, 2021).
Our analyses suggest that far-right voters are more tolerant of income inequality than center-right (“mainstream party”) voters. Firstly, they are more likely to believe that income inequality is necessary for a country’s prosperity. This tendency is stronger in countries where public support for meritocracy is high. Secondly, far-right voters are more skeptical about ordinary people’s ability to join forces to combat inequality. Yet, this fatalistic view on inequality is weaker among far-right voters in countries where popular belief in meritocracy is high and economic insecurity is widespread. Finally, far-right voters are less supportive than mainstream party supporters of tax increases to the wealthy. Paradoxically, this relationship is more pronounced in countries where income insecurity among the people is high on average.
The results of our research help us to draw a profile of far-right citizens in terms of their inequality and redistribution attitudes and principles, as well as examine how the contextual environment interacts in the relationship between political ideology and attitude-formation. Considering how successful far-right parties have been recently in many countries and elections around the globe, the opinions and demands of its electorate are expected to become increasingly influential in future democratic policy-making. Finding that this electorate has distinct expectations and opinions about inequality and redistribution has implications on the future trajectories of the welfare state.

Author

• Annika Lindholm, University of Lausanne