Data, methodology and results

To test the hypotheses outlined above we rely on all available rounds (1-8) of the ESS. The ESS is a comprehensive European-wide survey that includes a detailed classification of the labour market position of the respondent, vote choice in the previous national elections, and a wide range of ideological and socio-demographic variables on a biyearly basis from 2002 to 2016. This allows us to create detailed measures of our variables of interests and control for other explanatory factors in a cross-national comparative perspective. Unlike in the previous chapter, since now our sole point of interest is PRR vote, we restrict our analysis to these Western European countries were PRR parties are significant enough (i.e. have parliamentary representation): Austria, Belgium, Switzerland, Denmark, Finland, France, United Kingdom, Netherlands, Norway and Sweden.

Our dependent variable measures the vote choice by party family in the last national elections right before the survey took place. We coded each individual party for each of the ESS rounds following the standard CHES party family classification. We employ a simplified version that renders seven categories²:

• Mainstream Left - Social-Democratic parties.

• Mainstream Right - Liberal, Christian-Democrats and Conservative parties.

• Radical Left - Communist and other Radical Left parties.

• Greens

• Populist Radical Right - See Table B.2 in the Appendix for a list of the selected parties by country and the sample size in our dataset. The selection of PRR parties is based on the studies of van Kessel (2015) and Mudde (2007)³.

• Others - Agrarian, Confessional, Regional/Ethnic or without family.

• Abstention - Those who abstained in last national elections.

3.2.1 Dualisation and PRR vote

Our core independent variable (IV) is labour market status (or dualisation). Here, it is operationalised in three categories following Rueda (2005; 2007), namely outsiders, insiders and upscale. Outsiders consist of those individuals who are unemployed or are in part-time or fixed-term employed, including housekeepers. The upscale group is composed of self-employed and large employers, the upper

2

See Table B.2 in the Appendix for the frequencies and percentages of the party families by country.

3

See also Guiso et al. (2017: 62-63).

middle-class, managers and small business owners with employees⁴. Insiders are the remaining individuals whom are neither outsiders nor upscale⁵ (see Figure A.1 in the Appendix to see the percentages of each category by country in the sample).

To test our hypotheses, we run a series of logistic and multinomial logistic models using country-fixed effects and clustering standard errors at the country-level. A series of socio-structural (age, gender, education except for the skill level test) and ideological (anti-immigration, anti-redistribution, political trust) variables are included in the model as controls, running one model with only the structural set of controls and another model with all control variables.

To recapitulate, our first hypothesis suggested that voters of the PRR would tend to be insiders (H1).

The underlying assumption is that the nature of the exclusionary populist discourse will appeal to different socioeconomic groups depending on their labour market position. Since PRR parties highlight outside threats to the nationals’ life style and job security, we expect their discourse to appeal to insiders because they fear competition. Figure 3.1 shows the average marginal effects of labour market status on vote choice for the different party families.

The results show that voters of PRR parties tend to be, on average, overrepresented by insiders as opposed to outsiders. While this effect is significant and in the expected direction, it is also significantly smaller than for voters of SD parties. Consistent with previous work (Rovny and Rovny 2017), our results also suggest that outsiders are overrepresented amongst those who did not vote (abstained in the past elections) -especially in South European countries (Hausermann and Schwander 2012: 45).

Although to a lesser degree, outsiders are also overrepresented in the voters of the green or new left parties in our findings, which again is consistent with existing literature that looks at the effect of temporary contracts on voting behaviour (Marx 2015: 74, 2014: 147).

Figure 3.1. Marginal effects of insiders vs outsiders by party family

Results on Table B.4, based on models from Table B.3.

4

Respondent's occupational code 11, 12, 13 in in ISCO88-2d (ISCO88) plus self-employed professionals and large employers.

5

See Figure B.1 in the Appendix to see the n of each category by country in the

sample.

Returning to our case of interest, Tables B.3 and B.4 in the Appendix show the marginal effects of voting for the PRR of different multinomial logistic models. In all models the coefficients for insider with outsider as a reference category range from .004 to .007, where the effect is statistically significant at p<.015 in all models. This means that, on average, insiders are about 0.47pp and 0.6pp more likely than outsiders to vote for the PRR (in the case for SD parties, for instance, it is about 2.5pp). Even if we find the expected direction of the coefficient, the results are not of an impressive magnitude, suggesting that labour market position and the appeal to national protectionism is only one of the many reasons why voters might opt for these parties.

If we pay attention to the other variables in the models, we find that the labour market dimension does not seem the most relevant variable for explaining the vote. For instance, a one-point increase in the anti-immigration attitudes scale leads to an increase of between 12 and 17.4 percentage points of likelihood to vote for the PRR. This is by far the variable included in the model with the most substantial effect. It should be noted that the higher the anti-immigrant attitudes, the more insiders (as opposed to outsiders) are likely to vote for radical right, especially for men (results not shown).

Commenting on other control variables, looking at the predicted probabilities of social class on the PRR vote (see Table B.5 in the Appendix) we find that the coefficients of service workers, small business owners, and to a lesser degree clerks, are higher than average (though the latter two are not statistically significant at p>0.05). Moreover, we also find that females are strongly underrepresented in PRR parties (ranging between 1 and 2 percentage points lower), as already discussed in the literature (Spierings and Zaslove 2017). Our results in terms of education indicate that it is not the least educated that tend to vote for the PRR, but those with middle levels of education (other studies have found similar results, see Arzheimer and Carter 2006). Our variable to measure economic anxiety does not render clear results: we only find a significant and negative effect on voting for the PRR amongst those who claim to have severe difficulties with income.

In terms of political variables, it is worth highlighting that PRR are, on average, less likely to trust political institutions, more dissatisfied with the way democracy works, and show higher levels of political interest. Regarding ideology, besides the aforementioned effect we find for anti-immigration attitudes, we also find that authoritarian attitudes are also important in predicting the vote. In fact, together with anti-immigration, authoritarian attitudes are one of the best predictors of PRR vote.

3.2.2 Pinning down the mechanism

While our preliminary tests come to ratify recent findings from the literature (Rovny and Rovny 2017), our second set of hypotheses aims to deepen the analysis. In a quest to pin down a mechanism that explains the aforementioned relationship, we point to two competing explanations. It might be that insiders feel a threat to their earned material status and therefore opt for an exclusionary platform. Or, it might be that the threat is rather non-material, and that 'insider' is serving as a proxy of other dimensions of societal status.

We put both to test. For the material status hypothesis, which is the one we choose to defend in H2a, we have calculated the average rates of non-natives and unemployment levels for each pair of class group (following Oesch's schema) and country, then multiplied them to get a measure of the joint presence of immigrant workers and unemployment in the individual’s work environment. For the societal status hypothesis, the ESS provides a question on how important it is for the individual to maintain respect from her peers. Both are included in two separate models as interactions with our core dependent variable (insider vs outsider), while maintaining them as simple controls when testing for the other. Last but not least, we also include an additional model to see if different levels of employment protection (EPL) affect insiders' proneness to vote for PRR parties, in order to distinguish the purely institutional effect. All tests include as well socio-demographic controls and those indicating a certain degree of anti-immigration sentiment, either for economic or cultural reasons.

Results in Tables B.5 to B.10 of the Appendix come to confirm H2a while discarding the 'non-material status' hypothesis and being relatively inconclusive on the effect of actual EPL levels. Figure 3.2 below shows that while there is no difference on the marginal probability of voting for PRR between insiders and outsiders at the lowest level of the combined migration-unemployment variable, at the highest level the gap doubles. At the same time, Table B.10 indicates virtually no difference in the probability distribution when using the 'respect' variable.

Figure 3.2. Marginal effects of insiders vs outsiders of PRR voters by immigration*unemployment rate/position interaction

Results on Table B.6, based on models from Table B.5.

To reinforce the picture of economic status being the actual factor behind the relationship between insiders and exclusionary populism, H2b considered that working class insiders would have a higher probability to vote for PRR parties. Insiders who belong to socioeconomic groups which are more likely to be in vulnerable positions are more attracted to the protectionist and exclusionary discourse of PRR parties given that they would benefit most from being sheltered from further competition. Social class categories are defined by Oesch (2006) class schema, whose connection with voting patterns has already been proven (e.g. Oesch 2013). In order to test the combined effect of being an insider and in a position of labour market vulnerability on the effect to vote for the PRR, we run models testing the interaction effect between the two variables. Figure 3.3 shows the average marginal effects.

Figure 3.3. Marginal effects of insiders vs outsiders of PRR voters by social class

Results on Table B.12, based on models from Table B.11.

The interaction effects show that working class (service and production workers) insiders are more likely to vote for PRR parties. Differences are statistically significant (at p<0.05). These results suggest that the effect of being an insider on voting for the PRR is mediated by the degree of risk of status loss faced by the individual in the labour market, attributing the PRR insider vote to working class insiders.

It follows that, in line with our expectations in H2c, results show that low-skilled manual and service insiders, as well as technicians and clerks, are much more likely than their skilled counterparts to vote for PRR parties (see Tables B.7 and B.8 in the Appendix). The combination of skill level and job status stems from crossing our main IV with the Oesch simplified schema, in which mid- and low-skilled segments are defined as small business, production workers, clerks and service workers. High-skilled segments would be large employers, professionals, technicians, and socio-cultural professionals.

As a matter of fact, this reinforces our quest for a mechanism to better explain our first hypothesis, since it looks like it is the insiders in the working classes, both production workers and service workers, who display a larger tendency to vote more for the radical right.

3.2.3 Country-level effects

Moving now into country-level effects, we advanced that insiders would be overrepresented amongst PRR voters especially in Bismarckian welfare states (H3a). If, as widely argued, these models of capitalism produce a larger risk differential between insiders and outsiders (Hausermann et al. 2013), then the search for security hypothesised in H1a should play a larger role in mobilising insiders towards the PRR. Figure 3.4 illustrates that classic Western Bismarckian countries with strong PRR parties (Austria, Belgium, France, Netherlands, Switzerland) tend to display the expected effect, albeit with variations. In Germany, the paramount example of a Bismarckian state, the insider/outsider division seems to play a smaller role than in all its category partners, being at the level of the UK or Finland. This can be explained by the fact that the sample includes a relatively small amount of PRR votes in the country. Since the rise of the AfD in Germany in the last general election of September 2017, trends should be clearer. Finland, on the other hand, offers a counter-example: generally seen as a member of the Nordic (and thus, egalitarian) family, insiders feel particularly strong about PRR parties. However, it should be noted that results for Finland and Sweden are non-significant, while its Scandinavian neighbours (Denmark and Norway) feature an overrepresentation of outsiders amongst the voters of PRR parties.

Figure 3.4. Marginal effects of insiders vs outsiders of PRR voters by country

Results on Table B.13, based on models from Table B.12.

To finish our tests, we check whether there is a country-level link correlation between the strength of unions and how deep the connection between insiders and PRR vote goes. Strength of unions in any given country is measured by the unionisation rate, since it is a relatively parsimonious and universal proxy widely used in the specialised literature. Figure 3.5 shows that there seems to be a correlation between the level of union density in a country and the strength of the coefficient that indicates the proportion of insiders vs outsiders that vote for the radical right. Although not a lot can be confirmed by this, it does seem to indicate that in countries where workers are more organised, the insiders tend to vote less for the radical right.

Figure 3.5. Correlation between the level of union density in a country and the strength of the coefficient that indicates the proportion of insiders vs outsiders that vote for the radical right

This is just a preliminary approach, although a promising one, to a question that begs further tests:

whether workers’ self-organisation can prevent PRR parties’ appeal among the working class to grow beyond a certain threshold.