Income Change, Gender, and Attitudes Towards Right-Wing Populist Parties in the Netherlands

Abstract

The rise of right-wing populist [RWP] parties around the world is one of the major current political issues. RWP parties’ voters tend to be citizens whose situation has been directly threatened by recent economic changes, with income change being a possible way of measuring these changes. However, previous contributions that had examined the effect of income change on support of RWP parties find little evidence. This paper challenges previous findings by taking into account gender. Women and men diverge in their political behaviour, even in case they share the same economic properties, particularly regarding support of RWP parties. Our research questions are (1) whether income change leads to changing attitudes towards RWP parties, and (2) whether this effect is different between men and women? We hypothesize a negative relationship between personal and household income change and sympathies towards RWP parties and expect income change for men to be more influential for their attitudes towards RWP parties. We implement fixed-effects multilevel linear regression models on individual-level panel data (the Dutch Longitudinal Internet Studies for the Social Sciences) collected between 2007 and 2021 (N = 7,801, n = 44,076). This design allows establishing temporal order and accounting for competing explanations. We find that only for men, personal income change, both absolute and relative, is negatively and causally linked with sympathies towards RWP parties. For both men and women, we find that absolute, but not relative, household income change is negatively and causally linked with sympathies towards RWP parties. Implications are discussed.