THE RADICAL RIGHT – CHAPTER 7 – NORRIS 1/24/2005 8:38 PM 1Chapter 7 ‘None of the above’: the politics of resentment The demand-side ‘politics of resentment’ thesis regards rising support for the radical right as essentially expressing a negative protest against the status quo, and hence an indicator of rising political disaffection with democratic politics. This perspective is commonly used in the academic literature on new parties, for example to explain support for Ross Perot’s Reform Party in the United States, One Nation in Queensland, Canadian Reform, and New Zealand First1. This argument is not necessarily antithetical to the ‘new cleavage’ thesis, as these explanations can be combined where it can be suggested that political disaffection is concentrated among disadvantaged social sectors. Nevertheless these explanations remain logically distinct. Betz articulates one of the strongest versions of this argument, suggesting that the rise of populist politics in Europe has been fuelled by resentment and alienation from the political institutions of representative government: “A majority of citizens in most Western democracies no longer trust political institutions that they consider to be largely self-centered and self-serving, unresponsive to the ideas and wishes of the average person, and incapable of adopting viable solutions for society’s most pressing problems. …It is within this context of growing public pessimism, anxiety and disaffection that the rise and success of radical right-wing populism in Western Europe finds at least a partial explanation”2 This claim is also commonly heard in popular commentary where the growth of widespread political cynicism, civic malaise, and social alienation, particularly disaffection with mainstream parties (parteienverdrossenheit), is believed to have provided a springboard for radical right anti-establishment appeals3. The language of party leaders from Glistrup and Haider to Le Pen and Bossi is richly flecked with vivid anti-party and anti-establishment sentiments and it is believed that this constitutes an essential part of their appeal4. Despite the popularity of politics of resentment thesis, and its intuitive plausibility, systematic empirical studies that demonstrate the negative motivations of radical right voters remain scarce, and some research throws serious doubt on this thesis5. Evidence favoring the protest vote hypotheses has come from open-ended survey questions, where voters for anti-immigrant parties often mention that they were motivated by discontent with mainstream or governing parties. Nevertheless, as with other direct motivational questions, it remains difficult to know how much weight to put on these responses, whether regarded as reasons or rationalizations for support6. One of the most sophisticated comparative analysis of this question has been conducted by Wouter van der Brug and colleagues, who classified voting motivations into four categories: idealistic, pragmatic, clientalistic, and protest.7 Idealistic voters are seen as those who rationally cast a vote on the basis of ideological proximity. Pragmatic voters (who can also be regarded as ‘strategic’ or ‘tactical’) take account of ideological proximity plus the size of the party, on the grounds that it is perfectly rational to vote for a second-choice party which isTHE RADICAL RIGHT – CHAPTER 7 – NORRIS 1/24/2005 8:38 PM 2close to one’s policy positions if this party stands a better chance of getting into power. Clientalistic voters rationally cast a ballot for concrete material benefits, such as the delivery of individual or public goods (‘pork’). Protest voters are regarded as the default category in the analysis, understood as those whose objectives are to demonstrate a rejection of all other parties. Based on this classification, van der Brug and colleagues use party preferences, measured by probability to vote for a party, (not votes cast) as their dependent variable in the 1994 and 1999 European Election Studies. They concluded that in the 1994 elections, party preferences for seven radical right parties in the EU could be largely explained by the same mix of idealistic and pragmatic motivations that accounted for support for other parties. The propensity to vote for radical right parties in European Parliamentary elections could be accurately predicted by voters’ ideological (left-right) proximity and their anti-immigrant attitudes, coupled with pragmatic considerations of party size. The only exception to this rule was found for one party (the Dutch Centrumdemocraten). Their replicated study in the 1999 European elections again confirmed a similar pattern concerning support for the FPÖ, Alleanza Nazionale, Dansk Folkeparti, and Vlaams Blok. Yet they also concluded that these factors could not satisfactorily explain party preferences for the Danish Fremskridtspartiet, the French Front National, the Lega Nord, the Germany Republikaner, the Wallonian Front National, and the Dutch Centrumdemocraten, who could therefore have attracted support based on protest votes. This provides one of the most thorough cross-national comparisons of radical right party preferences in second-order European elections, but the analysis suffers from the critical weakness that protest voting is regarded as the default category, so that their conclusions rely upon circumstantial evidence. The study fails to consider any direct evidence for or against protest voting, such as indicators of political disaffection, trust, and alienation among radical right supporters. As a result, as the authors acknowledge, the study cannot prove that the default category is actually motivated by a protest rejection of ‘all of the above’ as they have no direct evidence of public attitudes towards the political system8. Their models might be misspecified by failing to consider other plausible explanations for supporting radical right parties, such as the attraction of charismatic leaders, the strength of party identification, the impact of other important demographic factors including gender or race (both commonly and consistently linked to radical right voting), and indeed any of the multiple salient policy issues in the European elections (such as attitudes towards the government’s performance on education, health care, and crime) not included in their study. One of the well-known characteristics of elections to the