Extreme-Right Voting in Western Europe: The Role of Social-Cultural and Antiegalitarian Attitudes

The joint impact of antiegalitarian attitudes and social-cultural attitudes on citizens' tendency to vote for extreme right-wing political parties was investigated. In the first study, we explored these attitudes in representative samples of seven Western European countries. In a follow-up study, we predicted respondents' likelihood of voting for a Dutch right-wing party on the basis of the measures of social-dominance orientation (as an indicator of antiegalitarian attitudes) and right-wing authoritarianism (as an indicator of social-cultural attitudes). Our findings demonstrated that voting for extreme right-wing parties was associated more consistently with antiegalitarian attitudes than with social-cultural attitudes. Moreover, the effect of antiegalitarian attitudes was partly mediated by migration attitudes (Study 1) and ethnic prejudice (Study 2). We discuss the finding that antiegalitarian attitudes are more strongly related to extreme right-wing voting than social-cultural attitudes.