15:30 - 17:45
Friday-Panel
Chair/s:
Diane Bolet
Discussant/s:
Pauliina Patana
Meeting Room K

Diane Bolet, Florian Foos
Going Mainstream: Does Mainstream Media Platforming Legitimize Radical Right Views?

Denis Cohen, Daniel Bischof
The normalization of radical politics: Polling, electoral performance, and reported vote switching

Marius Saeltzer, Jochen Müller, Stecker Christian, Blätte Andreas, Christoph Leonhardt
The Populist Zeitgeist and Parliamentary Discourse

Pauliina Patana, Alexander Held
Housing, Assets and the Populist Radical Right

 
Housing, Assets and the Populist Radical Right
Pauliina Patana 1, Alexander Held 2
1 Postdoctoral Fellow, Harvard Kennedy School
2 Assistant Professor, Trinity College Dublin

Support for populist radical right (PRR) parties and politicians has considerably increased across advanced industrialized democracies in recent years. However, the causes of their rising popularity continue to be widely debated. One stream of scholarship attributes the PRR’s rise to economic factors, arguing that these parties primarily cater to the economically insecure, low-skilled losers of modernization and globalization. Yet, previous research has failed to establish a strong connection between modest or deteriorating economic conditions and PRR support at the individual- level. Given this lack of strong evidence, many prominent narratives have downplayed the role of economic factors and instead argued that rising PRR support is primarily a cultural backlash against rising immigration or long-term social change. We build on, and move beyond, these debates by bringing to light novel, thus far overlooked dimensions of political behaviour related to housing and assets. To causally identify how changes in housing prices and assets influence PRR support, we draw on individual-level panel data from multiple advanced democracies. In so doing, our study sheds light on the conditions under which economic factors play a role in influencing PRR support and uncovers the importance of relative economic conditions rather than absolute economic deprivation as central for understanding it.