Past decades have witnessed an unholy alliance between the working class and the petty bourgeoisie, serving the reactionary radical right across Europe. The radical right’s disproportionate appeal to the working class recalls the old thesis of “Working-class authoritarianism,” formulated by Seymour M. Lipset in the late 1950s. It is, nonetheless, a puzzling phenomenon: why does such a large portion of workers support right-wing parties in defiance of their own a priori economic interests? Have these workers, as anticipated by Herbert Kitschelt in the 1990s, assumed an economically right-wing position because they are concerned about the competitiveness of their nation in a globalized capitalist economy?
The political-economic character of the radical right has been much debated. Theorists have variously claimed that these parties’ economic policy has been vague or “blurry,” moving towards the “center” or even shifting leftward. Were this the case, their support among workers would perhaps not be so puzzling. The conception of radical-right parties as economically interventionist and leftist has, however, not gone unrefuted. Several factors suggest that the radical-right economic agenda, though not free of ambiguity, can be classified as decidedly right-wing (in the Western European context, at least).
First, according to aggregated expert judgments, the European radical right remains notably more right-wing in its economic profile than the social-democratic party family—despite the latter’s significant turn to the right since the 1970s. Second, radical-right parties tend to form government coalitions with the bourgeois right. This is even the case for parties like the Finnish True Finns and Dutch Party for Freedom, both parties that are classified as more “left-wing” economically than their counterparts on the right. Third, apart from workers, a crucial support base of the radical right is self-employed, small business owners—a stratum known to be favorable to market liberalism and averse to redistributive politics and political intervention in the economy. If radical-right parties promote the interests of labor, they risk, as Eeco Harteveld sarcastically puts it, winning the “losers” and losing the “winners.” Thus, programmatically, politically, and (at least partially) sociologically, radical-right parties remain wedded to right-wing economic positions.
Programmatically, politically, and (at least partially) sociologically, radical-right parties remain wedded to right-wing economic positions.
So, why do workers show such strong levels of support for these parties? Are they themselves economically right-wing despite having to live off the sale of their (“unskilled”) labor power? Or are they supporting right-wing parties in defiance of their (empirical as well as theoretical) economic interests? If the latter is the case—that the group of workers who support radical-right parties are, in fact, left-wing in the economic-political sense—this would indicate a deprioritization of economic interests in favor of non-economic, i.e., postmaterial, values.
From Class Struggle to the Culture War
Postmaterialization is (modified from the term by Ronald Inglehart) the process by which the material, class-based political struggle between capital and labor becomes overshadowed by conflicts of a non-economic character. This non- or postmaterial dimension of conflict has been conceptualized as the GAL-TAN scale, introduced in 2002: “Green, Alternative, Libertarian” versus “Traditional, Authoritarian, Nationalist.” GAL and TAN are understood as two coherent sets of values, antithetical but similar insofar as they both center non-economic considerations. These are attitudes and conflicts relating to moral values and religion, ethnicity and nationalism, the environment, gender roles and sexuality—or the war over “woke.” Of course, several of these issues and the controversies surrounding them are deeply interrelated to the economic-material divide.
Within the postmaterial paradigm, however, this relation is obscured, and they are treated as separate issues unrelated to economic class conflict.
In distracting from political economy, postmaterialism reinforces existing economic structures to the benefit of the capital-owning class.
Postmaterialism may at the same time be seen as incited by, contributing to, and the outcome of the same external causes as past decades’ and general depoliticization. The decline or weakening of (explicit) economic conflict is in part explained by the early “domestication” of labor movements and parties into the state apparatus by constraints imposed by economic globalization and by the collapse of the Soviet Union. The shift toward political conflict characterized by cultural and identitarian concerns rather than class-based ones is in itself not a politically neutral phenomenon but a fundamentally ideological one. In distracting from political economy, postmaterialism reinforces existing economic structures to the benefit of the capital-owning class.
It may be hypothesized that as political-economic struggles are overshadowed by postmaterialism, the party sympathies of workers will increasingly be built upon interests other than the economic. As economic preferences are ascribed less significance, members of the working class may support the radical right despite remaining economically left-wing.
When the non-economic is given precedence, the radical right does have a certain appeal to workers. As claimed by Lipset, the working class is particularly receptive towards the ideas summed up as “TAN,” such as anti-immigration sentiment. However, the statistical relationship between authoritarian attitudes and labor market position is entirely spurious: it disappears when controlling for the effect of education. Hence, it is the authoritarianism of the poorly educated, not of the working class per se.
While it is self-evident that working-class supporters of the radical right hold some ethno-nationalist predilections, the question remains: what about the group’s political-economic preferences? In the era of postmaterialism and raging culture war, what has become of the traditional class interests that ended up in their shadow?
Apart from “left” and “right” there is another category of political-economic views that is relevant in this context. These are attitudes that, although they concern economic distribution, (might) pertain to the postmaterial rather than class-based dimension of conflict. One example is attitudes toward childcare arrangements, intending to either diminish or preserve the gendered division of labor. Another is that of welfare chauvinism—the notion that welfare should be reserved for the (ethnically defined) “native” population. This is a sub-category of the broader phenomenon of conditionality, according to which access to social security should be restricted to those who, according to certain criteria, deserve it. To a large extent, conditionality overlaps with welfare chauvinism, as the group most widely regarded as undeserving is immigrants.
Apart from immigrants, it is the unemployed that is commonly pointed to as undeserving. This view, reflecting portrayals of unemployed people as lazy free-riders whose situation is self-inflicted (and who therefore do not deserve social insurance), may also stem from the TAN array of political ideas. Building on Adorno et al.’s influential work on the “authoritarian personality,” intolerance toward “outgroups”—those displaying unconventional behaviors seen as adverse to traditional norms or morality—is widely associated with authoritarianism. Empirically, negative beliefs about the unemployed have indeed been found to correlate with other authoritarian attitudes. For the socially conservative, there may also be concerns about the moral impact of unconditional social benefits. In addition, it would seem reasonable to suspect that for ethnonationalists, “unemployed” is readily used as a proxy for “immigrants.”
Since these welfare attitudes can all be derived from the non-economic TAN orientation, they need not necessarily be coupled with a certain political-economic position. A welfare chauvinist may well endorse economic redistribution within an ethnically delineated population. Yet again, these “non-material” political ideas—the framework of conditionality, in particular—are far from unrelated to the economic dimension of conflict.
On the one hand, the “producerist” objection against the fruits of labor being reaped by those who do not participate in productive work themselves—a charge that is now being put forward by right-wing populists against “bureaucrats” and “welfare abusers”—is embedded in socialist critiques of class society (and of the capitalist class). When, on the other hand, this notion is turned against workers in the setting of a capitalist labor market, it becomes something quite different. As it is used to justify and launch attacks on unemployment insurance and social security, it undermines the position of all sellers of labor (what we might call colloquially “workers”), amounting to a “re-commodification” of the worker.
It should be kept in mind, then, that while conditionality might stem from the set of non-economic ideas conceptualized as TAN, it does have important economic-material implications. The particular set of welfare attitudes referred to here have been found to be prevalent among the general support base of the radical right—but its connection to welfare and labor market policy makes its appeal to radical-right workers dubious.
Values and Voting Patterns
To solve the puzzle that the relatively strong support for the radical right among workers entails, I have explored political-economic preferences among working-class radical-right sympathizers using survey data collected by the European Social Survey in 2016. The dataset comprises data from 22 European countries, among which 15 had a sufficiently large radical-right party at the time of the survey (for the group of interest to be represented in the sample).
The political-economic attitudes of workers sympathizing with the radical right were compared to those of social-democratic and left-wing workers on the one hand, and those of non-working-class supporters—that is, employers, the self-employed, managers, and others—of bourgeois, economically right-wing, parties on the other. These other groups were included as points of reference, their positions serving as empirical estimates of an economic “left” and “right.” Using linear regression, the attitudinal differences between the groups were measured while controlling for the effect of interacting variables (such as gender and age). This research and the detailed results can be found in my Master’s thesis from 2024.
My analysis shows that in attitudes toward class cleavages, (re-)distribution, and political action pursuing economic equality, workers who support the radical right align with social-democratic workers—not with right-wing, bourgeois, non-workers such as employers, managers, etc.
My analysis shows that in attitudes toward class cleavages, (re-)distribution, and political action pursuing economic equality, workers who support the radical right align with social-democratic workers—not with right-wing, bourgeois, non-workers such as employers, managers, etc. As revealed by responses to the survey questions on whether the state should take measures to reduce differences in income, whether differences in standards of living may be acceptable to reward “talents and efforts” (or not) and whether differences in income must be small for society to be fair, attitudinal differences between radical-right and social-democratic workers are negligible.
As hypothesized, the decisive difference between the two groups of workers is not that those drawn to the radical right are notably more right-wing in the economic sense. It is not a rejection but a deprioritization of left-wing preferences that compels workers to support radical-right parties. These findings hint at a dormant, widespread desire for political-economic change—and show that the real adversary of the radical right and its allies is not “woke ideology” but a radical re-politicization of the economy.
It is not a rejection but a deprioritization of left-wing preferences that compels workers to support radical-right parties.
However, the political-economic preferences of the radical right’s working-class adherents appear more ambiguous when assessing those welfare attitudes discussed above, which are linked to a non-material TAN position. In line with a TAN-oriented conception of welfare, these workers are strongly in favor of benefits granted to the group most widely recognized as deserving, the elderly. Conversely, their level of support for unemployment insurance is notably lower, falling somewhere in between that of the bourgeois non-workers and the social-democratic workers. The same applies when it comes to opinion on public child care, presumably reflecting a conservative endorsement of traditional gender roles, found in the ideological programs of radical-right parties.
Regarding perceptions of welfare recipients, the TAN tendencies are even more pronounced. Workers who sympathize with the radical right agree to the same extent as the right-wing bourgeois group (the difference between the two is non-significant) that social benefits make people lazy. Further, the right-wing workers are even more inclined than the bourgeois group to hold that many receive benefits to which they are not actually entitled—and that most unemployed people merely do not try to find a job. The implications of this last conception are clear: unemployment is self-inflicted and therefore, the unemployed do not deserve public support.
These perceptions also trigger a general concern about the cost of social expenditure. In judgments on whether social benefits and services place too great a strain on the economy, the radical-right workers clearly align with the bourgeois view, and not that of the social-democratic working-class respondents.
Certain components of these workers’ political-economic vision, those relating to welfare arrangements, are actually “postmaterialized.”
Hence, the difference in political-economic attitudes between radical-right and social-democratic workers is not solely one of prioritization but also, in some respects, of content. It is not only that workers who support the radical right prioritize non-economic considerations over class interests. It is also that certain components of these workers’ political-economic vision, those relating to welfare arrangements, are actually “postmaterialized.” By this, I mean that although they are issues of an explicitly political-economic character, the radical-right workers’ opinion on them is influenced by their position on the non-material GAL-TAN dimension of conflict—by ethnonationalism, social conservatism or authoritarianism in general—not by their political-economic preferences (which, as the data shows, are no less left-wing than those of their social-democratic counterparts).
As already noted, the conditional, TAN-influenced conceptions of welfare have been found prevalent among the general support base of radical-right parties—and, at least according to data from Belgium and the Netherlands assembled in the 1990s, also among workers in general. Houtman, Achterberg and Derks conclude in their study on the subject that “there is nothing ideologically inconsistent about [the working class’s] endorsement of a desire for equality and simultaneous aversion to the welfare state” since, as they rightly note, the former depends on economic-material positioning and the latter on non-economic, socio-cultural values.
But these are not so easily separated. Rather than resolving the puzzle of the right-wing workers’ class interests and their party sympathies, the findings unveil yet another, internal tension: that between these workers’ desire for economic equality, on the one hand, and their aversion towards labor-strengthening policies on the other.
In sanctioning restrictive welfare policy marked by conditionality and intensified strains on the unemployed, radical right-wing workers will not only strike the “free-riding immigrants” but might, as a Swedish saying goes, end up “biting their own tails.”
In sanctioning restrictive welfare policy marked by conditionality and intensified strains on the unemployed, radical right-wing workers will not only strike the “free-riding immigrants” but might, as a Swedish saying goes, end up “biting their own tails.” The discrepancy in wanting economic equality while at the same time rejecting certain of its means—the decommodifying mechanisms of the welfare state—is not merely a theoretical but a practical one. Across Europe, radical-right parties are engaging in bourgeois government coalitions to dismantle social protection, particularly for groups deemed undeserving—including workers who lost their jobs. Through its attack on the unemployed, the radical right undermines the material security of the working class, directly adding to its precarity.
Miranda Thulin holds a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Political Science from Södertörn University in Stockholm. She has worked as an associate researcher at the University of Gothenburg and will begin PhD studies at the Department of Political Science at Södertörn University in April 2025. She has a broad interest in political theory and philosophy and has focused particularly on the phenomenon of postmaterialism and its political implications.
Image: “Workers working,” by Kimmo Räisänen licensed under CC Attribution 2.0 Generic.
