Do religious voters support populist radical right parties? Opposite effects in Western and East-Central Europe

Abstract

The rise of populist radical right parties fuels a discussion about the roots of their success. Existing research has demonstrated the relevance of gender, education and income for explaining the far-right vote. The present study contributes to the aforementioned debate by focusing on the role of religiosity. The data collected in the eighth round of the European Social Survey (2016) allow examining in more detail the political relevance of attendance at religious services and other measures of religious devotion. This study focuses in particular on 15 countries, 11 from Western Europe and 4 from East-Central Europe. In none of the Western European countries is there evidence of a positive relationship between religiosity and vote for a populist radical right party. In fact, in many countries of this region more religious voters are substantively less inclined to support far-right movements. The situation is different in parts of East-Central Europe. In Poland, and to a weaker extent also in Hungary, the probability of a vote for right-wing populists increases with religiosity.

May the lord protect our country: ethnic relations as a moderator between religiosity and radical right vote

“…4 However, to be certain the validity of our findings, a more nuanced examination is required. A recent paper by Marcinkiewicz and Dassonneville (2021), provides a partial answer to this question. They argue that the effects of religiosity are conditioned on the East-West division, primarily as a function of the strength of Christian Democratic parties.…”

“…Thirdly, Marcinkiewicz and Dassonneville (2021) make the somewhat tautological argument that the success of radical right parties among the religious electorate depends on the extent to which other right-wing parties are successful among such individuals. We believe this reasoning requires much more of an explanation, and that these dynamics can also be explained by the salience of ethnic relations.…”

“…The most recent research findings in the field show us that context matters. Marcinkiewicz and Dassonneville (2021), revisited Arzheimer and Carter (2009), and found that religion plays a role as a predictor of RRWP vote in some European countries, while in others it does not. We try to build on their paper and to provide an explanation for this difference across countries.…”

“…In the seminal work on the topic, Arzheimer and Carter found some evidence to support a positive relationship between the two elements in a sample of Western European countries and argued that religious voters would become increasingly available to radical right appeals as time passes (Arzheimer 2009). A decade later, Marcinkiewicz and Dassonneville (2021) took another look at this question and found that in some countries there is clear evidence, of a positive relationship between religiosity and voting for RRWPs, while in other countries there is none.…”

“…Since the most recent work on the topic has shown that both negative and positive associations are empirically observed (Marcinkiewicz and Dassonneville 2021), we aim to extend our knowledge of this relationship and try to answer the question -What role do ethnic relations play as a moderator between religiosity and radical right vote? Are ethnic relations the factor that foster the activation of religiosity and result in support by religious voters for RRWP?…”