Support for Far-Right Anti-Immigration Political Parties in Advanced Industrial States: Insiders, Outsiders and Economic Disaffection

This article examines the connection between economic disaffection and support for far-right anti-immigration political parties in Western European countries. The article adjudicates empirically between two explanations for this connection. On the one hand, the "ethnic competition hypothesis ” contends that economically dissatisfied segments of the population tend to vote for far-right anti-immigration parties because these segments of the population have to compete with recent immigrants for scarce resources. On the other hand, theories of economic voting contend that economically dissatisfied segments of the population gravitate to far-right parties because of their “outsider ” or opposition status, rather than just because of their anti-immigration positions. The analysis exploits the cross-time and cross-national breadth of the European Social Survey. The results of the analysis indicate that the “political outsider ” hypothesis outperforms the ethnic competition hypothesis as an explanation for the empirical connection between economi