When Populism meets Government: The Social Policy Impact of the Radical Right in Europe

• Applicant: Dr. Philip Rathgeb
• Subject Area: Political Science
• Term: from 2017 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 392405337

• Final Report Year: 2024

Final Report Abstract

This project started out of a personal curiosity: How does the radical right affect people’s livelihoods when it gets to power? When starting this research project, I relied on my priors as a political economist by viewing the radical right’s policy choices through the analytical lens of the economic left–right divide. In theory, I expected that the radical right would shift to the economic left and pursue redistributive policies in order to consolidate its electoral support among lower middle-class and working-class voters. In reality, however, this is not what I found when studying the radical right’s policy choices in office. It thus became clear to me that the conceptual apparatus of the existing debate – distinguishing between ‘left’ versus ‘right’ and ‘pro-welfare’ versus ‘anti-welfare’ – was too coarse to capture the radical right’s distributive impact. To understand the radical right’s policy impact, I first had to recognize how its sociocultural ideology informed its socio-economic policy preferences. This has led to the first major contribution of this project: the radical right’s core ideology of nativism and authoritarianism has clear distributive implications that favour threatened core workers (‘labour market insiders’) and male breadwinners, typically at the expense of the unemployed, the poor, immigrants, ethnic minorities, and new social risk groups such as working women and precarious non-standard workers (‘labour market outsiders’). In other words, selective protections for the native (male) core workforce go hand in hand with the promotion of a racialized and gendered precariat when the radical right gets to decide who gets what, when, and how in contemporary capitalism. The commonalities of the radical right’s distributive impact might appear hidden by the varieties of policies the radical right has implemented in government. In some contexts, these parties have opted for trade protectionism or economic nationalism, whereas in other contexts, they have prioritized familialism or welfare chauvinism. To make sense of this variation, I built on the literature of comparative political economy and welfare state research that highlights the enduring capitalist diversity in which domestic political actors find themselves. As countries have different economic vulnerabilities and institutional legacies, they have to rely on diverse policy instruments to achieve similar distributive outcomes. The political-economic profile of welfare state contexts provides the radical right with diverse opportunities and constraints when pursuing their nativistauthoritarian agenda. This insight is important not only to make sense of the remarkable variations through which radical right parties have changed national models of capitalism and welfare; it also holds implications for the viability of liberal democracy as such. One of the broader political implications of this research project is that the radical right uses the welfare state to manufacture consent for authoritarianism.

Publications

• Authoritarian values and the welfare state: the social policy preferences of radical right voters. West European Politics, 45(1), 77-101.
  Busemeyer, Marius R.; Rathgeb, Philip & Sahm, Alexander H. J.
  
• Deserving Austrians First: The Impact of the Radical Right on the Austrian Welfare State, Comparative Labor Law and Policy Journal 42 (1), 43-60.
  Rathgeb, Philip & Gruber-Risak, Martin
  
• How to study the populist radical right and the welfare state?. West European Politics, 45(1), 1-23.
  Rathgeb, Philip & Busemeyer, Marius R.
  
• Makers against takers: the socio-economic ideology and policy of the Austrian Freedom Party. West European Politics 44 (3): 635-660.
  Rathgeb, Philip
  
• Protagonists or consenters: radical right parties and attacks on trade unions. Journal of European Public Policy, 29(7), 1049-1071.
  Rathgeb, Philip & Klitgaard, Michael B.
  
• The radical right is not a pro-welfare party. Social Europe, April 7.
  Rathgeb, Philip & Busemeyer, Marius
  
• When do social democratic parties unite over tough immigration policy?. West European Politics, 45(5), 979-1002.
  Rathgeb, Philip & Wolkenstein, Fabio
  
• The Radical Right and Welfare Politics: Causes and Consequences. West European Politics 45 (1).
  Rathgeb, Philip & Busemeyer, Marius
  
• How the Eurozone shapes populism: a comparative political economy approach. Journal of European Public Policy, 32(5), 1173-1196.
  Rathgeb, Philip & Hopkin, Jonathan
  
• How the Radical Right Has Changed Capitalism and Welfare in Europe and the USA. Oxford University PressOxford.
  Rathgeb, Philip