Identification with the Radical Right in Times of Increasing Social Inequality - Evidence from Germany

In September 2017, the radical right AfD (Alternative for Germany) party scored 12.6 percent of votes in the federal election entering for the first time Germany's parliament. Germany is only the latest country to experience the political resurgence of radical right movements. Their electoral success depends to some extent on the mobilization of the working classes. Past research suggests three competing explanations for the radical right's success among the working classes according to which the latter vote is the result of rising inequality (the modernization losers), heightened feelings of insecurity (the alienated) and growing labor market competition due to immigration (the protectionist). Most empirical inquiries, however, consider only one of the hypotheses and rarely employ dynamic designs that truly account the role of change in the explaining phenomena. Hence, we simultaneously model all three explanations to evaluate their relative importance and use an empirical design that allows us to identify effects of changing subjective and objective inequality. Employing longitudinal data from the SOEP (2000-2016), a large representative household panel study in Germany, we study respondents' party identification accounting for objective position, subjective worries and local labor market conditions. In the first step, we aim at describing the importance of different characteristics arguably related to right party identification. In multivariate models, we study four different sets of attributes: socio-demographic conditions; their subjective evaluations (e.g., satisfaction, sorrows); their personality as well as local opportunity structure and demographic composition (e.g., unemployment rate, migration rate). In the second step, we investigate to what extent social mobility, changing satisfaction and worries as well as changes in the local conditions motivate identification with extreme right parties. Our results indicate that the three alternative explanations contribute to radical right party identification in Germany but differ to the extent to which they are related to changing identification.