Sub-national context and radical right support in Europe: Policy Brief

The SCoRE project focuses onexplaining regional differences in support for populist radical right parties. More specifically, it examines how developments in citizens’ immediate environment - what one would commonly call the ‘neighbourhood’ or ‘community’ level - affect their attitudes towards immigrants and political elites and thereby their support for populist radical right parties. The project focuses on the impact of developments that manifest themselves very differently in urban and rural areas, such as the settlement of immigrants in cities and the exodus of young citizens and the decline in public services in rural areas. The project is comparative in nature and looks at the impact of these developments in four countries:United Kingdom(excluding Northern Ireland and Scotland), France, Germany, and the Netherlands. These countries are characterized by different historical trajectories with respect to, for example, urban-rural relations, immigration patterns, and support for populist radical right parties.In the countries under study, large-scale representative surveys have been conducted, with proper representation of citizens with different background characteristics (e.g. also including the less educated and politically alienated) and from different kinds of municipalities and neighbourhoods. The survey data, consisting of the same core set of questions in each country, have been connectedto statistical data on developments at the community level, embedding the surveyed respondents in the characteristics of their neighbourhood.On the basis of these data we have investigated how citizens’ attitudes – especially nativist attitudes (the feeling that countries should be populated primarily by natives, and that non-natives are a vital threat to the nation-state) and political discontent (the feeling that political elites are not taking the people and their interests seriously) – are influenced by their daily environment (the environment in which they live), as well as by their broader environment (the environment that they might visit on a regular basis, or read about in the local media). Hence, the impact of developments in the surrounding neighbourhoods on citizens’ opinions and political behaviour has also been examined.