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No Longer Empowered by the Numbers: Why Working-Class Voters Get Ignored in Today's Politics and How This Explains the Rise of Radical Right Populist Parties

I provide a novel theory of the rise of radical right populist parties (RRPPs) in Western Europe. Support from the working class has been both necessary and sufficient for the electoral success of RRPPs. I argue that working class support ultimately derives from the fact that European public policy over the past three decades has been at odds with the preferences of working class voters on virtually all issues that are of importance to them (e.g., immigration, climate policy, EU enlargement). Working class preferences have been ignored because the stark rise in general education has reduced the working class to a minority of the electorate. This has incentivized the large governing parties to focus on middle- and high class voters, which are now in the majority, and which tend to have preferences that directly contradict those of working class voters on the issues that are of most importance to them. Proportional representation in continental Europe allows RRPPs to take advantage of this, even through their platform is unlikely to ever receive majority support. The populist ideology itself is a natural derivative of these material conditions—i.e., because it has been working class preferences that have consistently lost out to higher class preferences it is an effective political strategy to frame the nature of the political game as a fight between two homogenous and antagonistic constituencies ("the people" and "the elite"). Time-series cross-section data, survey experiments, and voter interviews provide evidence for this theory.