Voting for Radical Right Parties in Europe: the Role of Cultural Change and Party Polarization

Abstract

The article is devoted to the problem of rapid growth in recent decades of electoral support for radical right-wing parties in Western, Central and Eastern Europe. The first part of the article discusses the general theoretical foundation of approaches to this problem in the scientific literature - social changes caused by modernization and globalization, and the main varieties of these approaches. One of them assumes that there is an increase in public "demand" for populist and nationalist ideology, while the other indicates the emergence of favorable political opportunities due to electoral institutions of proportional multi-party systems and strategies of party competition, leading to a change in the polarization of the party system in the economic and socio-cultural dimensions. A brief review of empirical studies is given, and the ambiguity of the results is noted.