Making Sense of the Radical Left Voter: Attitudes Towards Globalization, Integration, and Immigration in a Time of Economic Crisis

While European radical right-wing parties have recently drawn much attention, radical-left wing parties have been largely ignored. This is surprising given that, on average, radical left-wing parties have actually been more electorally successful than the radical right. This paper aims to remedy this gap by comparing political preferences of radical left- and radical right-wing voters. While the literature predicts an obvious dichotomy between the policy preferences of the two voting blocs, we contend that they might be more alike on some issues than expected. Most radical right wing parties are highly Eurosceptic and xenophobic and these political positions are reflected in the sentiment of their constituencies. Radical left parties, on the other hand, are typically portrayed as the champions of cosmopolitanism and internationalism. At the same time, both party families are opposed to globalization, and presumably integration, albeit for different reasons; radical right voters because globalization brings in immigrants and radical left wing voters because it pushes the capitalist agenda.

However, while some radical left parties are more cosmopolitan, the recent economic crisis has pushed these parties into a more Eurosceptic, populist camp. Hence, we argue that radical left supporters are equally, if not more, Eurosceptic than radical right voters. To test these conjectures, we use public opinion data collected by the 2008 European Values Survey, as well as the 2006 and 2010 Chapel Hill Expert Survey on party positioning. A multilevel modeling approach is implemented to account for both individual-level and country-level differences.