Methods

Abstract

The three datasets used in this study are the British Election Study (BES 2017), 2017 French Election Study (FES 2017), and the German Longitudinal Election Study (2017, GLES pre- and post-election cross-section + CSES). This project benefited from the timing of the three major European elections taking place within such close proximity and the collaboration of research scholars through the project called the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES). The core objectives of the CSES aligned perfectly with the paper’s objectives in a number of regards, particularly regarding the measure of populism, nativism, and anti-immigrant sentiment. Models are built firstly to measure how populism, nativism, and economic risk predict anti-immigrant sentiment. We then model support for the extreme right using two separate logistic regressions. In the first case, we model right-wing voting from the populism, nativism, and economic variables, absent the anti-immigrant sentiment, and in the second set of models, anti-immigrant sentiment is included. We adopted this approach to examine the net effect of standard theories of support for right-wing parties while controlling for the dominant out-group sentiment present in all three election contexts.