Who Votes for the Populist Radical Right in Central and Eastern Europe?

While there are plenty of studies regarding the electoral sociology of populist radical right parties in Western Europe, the comparative scholarship on this topic is rather scarce in the case of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). This paper aims to fill this gap by examining who votes for populist parties, vis à vis non-populist ones in post-communist Europe. Does the vote for populist parties in CEE owe to the same motivations as in the West? Shedding light on who decides to cast a ballot for a populist party (or at least admits doing just that) is essential for understanding why they do so. We consider cultural, economic, and political factors related to theories of silent-counterrevolution, losers of globalization and relative deprivation, crisis of representative democracy and political disaffection, as well as euroscepticism. The usage of the 2014 European Elections Study allows us to extend our analyses to 10 CEE countries with right wing populist parties. Our results show that some of the factors accounting for right wing populist support in the West do not fare well in CEE. We find strong support for economic and political motivations, whereas cultural ones do not seem to explain the behavior of CEE populist voters.