The Populist Right-Wing Partisan

The chapter deals with the support base of the Populist Radical Right (PRR) party family. It is sometimes assumed that PRR parties rely on protest voters with weak or no partisan attachment. Not much has been known, however, about the extent to which PRR party voters and supporters identify with their party. Based on recoded data from the European Election Studies (EES), it is shown that a majority of the studied PRR parties display growing proportions of identifiers over time. In addition, the data suggest that the proportions of identifiers in PRR parties do not deviate strongly from those of other party families. The overall conclusion is thus that PRR parties have not exacerbated the broader trend towards partisan dealignment. Nothing suggests that they are about to take over the position of the traditional mass parties, but nor are they mere temporary stopovers for floating protest voters.