Electoral support for FPÖ in regional and national arenas: Different levels of government, same causality?

Abstract

Which factors contribute to the electoral success of Populist Radical Right Parties (PRRPs)? We empirically investigate the relationship between the Austrian Freedom Party/FP (Freiheitliche Partei Österreich/FPÖ)'s electoral shares and the degree of population's socioeconomic polarization based on data for six regional and national elections and 118 municipalities in the state of Salzburg. Regional elections offer an excellent setting for conducting a thorough test of the argument that relative deprivation provides fertile ground for PRRPs. Our longitudinal study provides clear evidence that the more polarized the socio-economic structure in Salzburg's municipalities, the higher the share of FP supporters. This relationship holds over time and across types of elections: regional elections ('Landtagswahlen') and national elections ('Nationalratswahlen').

Horizontal and vertical spill-over in multilevel electoral systems

“…8 Importantly, they disaggregate regional (Land) election results to 118 municipalities and they find that the FPÖ wins higher vote shares in municipalities where 'modernization losers and winners' are more polarized, that is the extent to which these groups of voters are of similar size within a municipality. In polarized municipalities, modernization-losers are constantly reminded of their poor situation compared to modernization-winners and this constitutes an 'ideal breeding ground' for popular-radical-right-parties such as the FPÖ (Jansesberger, Lefkofridi, and Mühlböck 2021). Thijssen et al (2021) provide an interesting example where voters who have regular contact with voters from another jurisdiction voted differently in the 2019 federal elections in Belgium compared to voters who do not have these interactions.…”

“…8. The 2013 and 2018 elections in Salzburg are excluded from the analysis because scandals render them not comparable (Jansesberger, Lefkofridi, and Mühlböck 2021). 9.…”