Once they are seated: the impact of radical right parties’ political representation on attitudes of trust and solidarity

Abstract

Abstract A close reading of the literature on radical right parties (RRPs) suggests that these parties erode trust and solidarity in European democracies when they pit ‘the pure people’ against political and legal institutions, elites, and immigrants. I propose the conjecture that RRPs with seats in the national parliament have better conditions for spreading nativist and populist messages that may erode trust and solidarity between a society’s residents, between ethnic groups, and towards its political and legal institutions. To test this research question, I combine nine waves of European Social Survey data from 17 countries and data on national elections spanning the years 1999 to 2020. Two-way fixed effects models estimate that RRPs representation in the national parliament is associated with a reduction in public support for redistribution of ca. 18% of a standard deviation. Additionally, I demonstrate that this inverse relationship runs parallel to growing welfare chauvinistic beliefs and that it is stronger in countries with weak integration policies. Contra theoretical expectations, the radical rights’ political representation has not produced any change in societal levels of anti-immigration attitudes, institutional trust, or social trust. While the findings persist across a wide range of robustness checks and other model specifications, threats to identification in the form of non-parallel pre-trends and unobserved sources of confounding, means that one should be cautious in interpreting the findings in a causal manner.