Radical right voters and parties are often characterized as conservative and traditionalist on issues of gender, sexuality, and morality. Common wisdom is that they reject the progressive sociopolitical shifts that began in the 1970s and early 1980s. However, some radical right parties, such as the Dutch Party for Freedom, maintain moderate positions on morality issues. Are radical right supporters still traditionalist? Latent class analysis applied to European Social Survey data from 10 West European countries reveals that radical right supporters belong to three ideologically distinct classes. The fastest growing group is the sexually-modern nativists, who make up about 45% by 2016. Contrary to extant literature, traditionalism no longer appears to be a major motivation for today’s radical right. Instead, immigration and nationalism are now the core common concerns for radical right supporters in Western Europe. This development may be due to the Euro crisis and the migration crisis, which have increased the salience of national borders.

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The sociocultural divide in Western Europe is increasingly focused on issues of national identity, namely immigration. It is commonly assumed that opponents of immigration also exhibit conservatism on other sociocultural issues. Yet recent research suggests that general social conservatism is declining in the region. Do immigration attitudes fit squarely into the sociocultural dimension? Using survey data from eleven West European countries, as well as a Dutch household panel from 2007–2019, this study finds that gender attitudes, a key sociocultural issue, are subject to change through both cohort and life cycle effects, while immigration attitudes are stable over the course of the panel and exhibit little variation across cohorts. Immigration attitudes also appear to be immune to period effects resulting from the 2015 refugee crisis. Further, those born during and after the ‘post-materialist revolution’ have weakened associations between these two attitudes, while older individuals' attitudes are strongly correlated. The combination of gender egalitarianism and anti-immigrant sentiment may become increasingly common as acceptance of the former spreads, while immigration remains a hotly contested issue.

Islamist parties' electoral performance is a hotly debated question. Two arguments dominate the literature in terms of Islamist parties' performance in democratic elections. The conventional argument has been the “one man, one vote, one time” hypothesis. More recently, Kurzman and Naqvi challenge this argument and show that Islamists tend to lose in free elections rather than win them. We argue that existing arguments fall short. Specifically, we theorize that moderateness of Islamist platform plays a key role in increasing the popularity of these parties and leads to higher levels of electoral support. Using data collected by Kurzman and Naqvi, we test our hypothesis, controlling for political platform and political economic factors in a quantitative analysis. We find that there is empirical support for our theory. Islamist parties' support level is positively associated with moderateness; however, this positive effect of moderation is also conditioned by economic openness.