Authoritarianism and the Evolution of Voting Behaviour

Abstract

This chapter analyses the evolution of the relationship between authoritarianism and party support from 1990 to 2017. The chapter presents the analyses of eight different countries, and two conclusions emerge. First, high authoritarians have shifted towards radical right parties over the past three decades though there was no prior cross-national relationship between authoritarianism and party support in each country. As a result, different mainstream parties in each country have lost support as high authoritarians increasingly vote for PRR parties. This finding challenges the popular narrative that PRR parties have gained at the expense of social democratic parties, which only holds true in certain countries. The analysis also shows that low authoritarians have shifted towards left-liberal parties such as the greens, further contributing to the worldview evolution. As high authoritarians move towards radical right parties and low authoritarians towards left-liberal parties, traditional centre-left and centre-right parties that were based on twentieth-century class and religious conflicts struggle for support, particularly as generational replacement results in the depletion of their traditional voters.