Comparative research on the radical right has focused mainly on national-level indicators and individual motivators to explain variation in support for these parties. Some case-study approaches use sub-national models to look at within-country variation, but to date there is an absence of comparative research formalising the role of the meso-level across countries in radical right support.
This comparative study proposes an interdisciplinary political science, sociology and geography team to construct a multi-level analysis of four key countries (France, Germany, the Netherlands and the UK) which provide varying institutional, infrastructural, socio-economic and attitudinal contexts in which to study the phenomenon. The three-year project will first collate all available secondary political and socio-economic data from official sources to establish an across-time database at multiple levels of territorial aggregation. Second, it will build upon these macro-/meso-level foundations with a standardised large-n survey across the four countries, to collect an up-to-date set of individual demographic, attitudinal and behavioural indicators. Finally, these will be combined in a full mixed model of radical right support, identifying the comparative role of context and individual attributes.
The results will provide an unparalleled level of detailed understanding of such determinants, of importance both to academic understanding and to stakeholders’ policy planning and implementation.