Populist Radical Right Parties in Government: Representational Correctives or Vehicles of Discontent?

In the past decades, populist radical right parties in Europe have seen a rise in popularity and have recently started entering European parliaments and governments. This thesis seeks to dive deeper into the consequences of government representation, specifically by looking at how it affects political trust for different groups of individuals. As it has proved theoretically and empirically important, I differentiate between supporters and non-supporters of populist radical right parties. The main contribution of this thesis, however, is the included interaction effect of voters displaying «authoritarian predispositions», a set of human values prioritising conformity over autonomy. The theoretical background for this is very limited, even though authoritarianism constitutes one of three core components of populist radical right parties. The analysis is done by employing a two-way fixed effects OLS approach using a combination of the nine available rounds from the European Social Survey and the ParlGov database. The results unsurprisingly indicate a strong positive effect of populist radical right in government for supporters. For non-supporters, the results also indicated a positive effect, although statistically insignificant. Most importantly, the analysis indicates no observed interaction effect of displaying authoritarian predispositions on political trust, which is interesting