"Man-y" ways to be right: Generational and Life-Cycle Differences in Male Far-Right Voting
P8-S213-3
Presented by: Reto Mitteregger
Since their early days, far-right parties are not only institutionally dominated by men and largely represented by men in parliaments and governments, but also - as research has repeatedly shown - more strongly voted for by male voters. In that regard, recent exit polls have shown that the far-right scores increasingly strong electoral results among young men. While most studies on the gender gap in (far-right) voting look at differences between men and women, they less frequently focus on differences within genders, and particularly rarely on divergences between different generational groups of men. In that regard, relatively little is known about new generations of male far-right voters' divergence from earlier generations of male voters. However, I expect to find differences between cohorts and age groups: First, I assume that newer generations of male voters are generally more likely to see the far-right as an electable option due to normalization processes and parental socialization. Second, I expect that newer cohorts of male voters are more likely to vote for the far-right than earlier cohorts because of gender-related attitudes and that they assess these questions to be more salient. To test these assumptions, I rely on data from the ESS and the EES (to disentangle age, period, and cohort) and original survey data from Germany and Switzerland conducted in 2024. These findings have broad implications for our understanding of the seemingly increasing gender gap in Western democracies and help us contextualize the temporal dimension of these shifts.
Keywords: Far-Right, Generations, Male Voters, Western Europe, APC