Voting green or right-wing populist: Ideological poles of a new cleavage?

Abstract

With the emergence of the two newest party families, Green and right-wing populist (RWP) parties, the assumption rose that these parties can be considered the two poles of the new transnational cleavage. In this paper, I analyse the impact of voter attitudes toward liberal values, immigration, EU integration and climate change in nine Western and Northern European countries on voting for Green and RWP parties using data from the ESS10 (2020–2022). Using descriptive analyses and logistic regression models, I find some evidence of a transnational cleavage, in the form of an ideological as well as structural divide between Green and RWP parties and their voters. However, this divide does not extend across all four attitudes or all nine countries. I conclude that Green and RWP parties do not seem to be complete opposites in Northern and Western Europe, but only in country- and issue-specific contexts.

Keywords

Cleavage ideological divide Green parties right-wing populism opinion research

Introduction

In recent decades, many European countries have experienced a transformation of their party systems. On the one hand, electoral volatility has increased in most European countries since the early 2000s (Dassonneville and Hooghe, 2017). On the other hand, new parties have emerged, challenging the stability of interparty competition between mainstream parties (Emanuele and Chiaramonte, 2018). Since the Second World War, there are two party families, which have successfully established themselves in the European electoral systems: Green parties and the populist radical right (Mudde, 2007). While the latter have received considerable political, media, social science and public attention, the former are often mentioned in the same breath with traditional mainstream parties. However, some scholars argue that ‘Green and other left-libertarian parties are in a number of important aspects the direct opposite of the radical populist Right’ (Betz, 1994: 181).

Bornschier (2010: 2) argues that Green parties ‘have come to constitute the left-libertarian pole of a new cultural dimension of conflict’, whereas the populist right is seen as the traditionalist-communitarian counterpart. Similarly, Inglehart and Norris (2016: 3) note that the rise of material security in Western societies has led to an intergenerational cultural shift towards post-materialist values, which has triggered the emergence and electoral success of Green and other left-libertarian parties. As a counter-movement, they identify a cultural backlash among certain social groups that emphasises traditional norms and provides the electoral basis for populist parties (Inglehart and Norris, 2016: 3). The notion that especially Green parties can be considered the (cosmopolitan) counterpart to (communitarian) right-wing populist (RWP) parties has been empirically assessed repeatedly in Germany (Franz et al., 2019; Otteni and Weisskircher, 2022; Wirth, 2020), but comparative data from Europe are still lacking. Moreover, while there are numerous studies on the determinants of RWP voting, and also some studies on the motives for Green voting, there are only very few comparing these two party families. It has been shown that ideological positions of Green and socialist parties in Europe are furthest from those of RWP parties (Immerzeel et al., 2016), and in the 2019 European Parliament elections in Germany, structural factors affected the electoral success of the Greens and the RWP ‘Alternative for Germany’ (AfD) in directly opposite ways (Franz et al., 2019). In terms of individual voting behaviour, Marks et al. (2021) find that the ‘parties on the socio-cultural transnational divide—GAL (Green, alternative, libertarian) and TAN (traditionalist, authoritarian, nationalist) have sharply divergent social bases’. Guth and Nelsen (2021) use the 2014 European Parliamentary Election Study (EPES) to examine the ideological and structural bases of right- and left-wing populist parties, and their analyses also show that RWP and Green parties draw from opposing constituencies regarding social status, assessment of the economy, left–right placement, approval of EU and the national government and (post-)materialist values.

However, there is no study systematically comparing the ideological dimension of individual voting behaviour for Green and RWP parties in Europe. Thus, the aim of this paper is to empirically test the cleavage-theoretical argument that Green and RWP voters hold diametrically opposed attitudes towards the central issues defining the new transnational cleavage. Using data from the latest round of the European Social Survey (2020–2022), I compare the electoral bases of six party families with respect to key demographic, structural and cultural characteristics, and then test four hypotheses about the motives for voting for Green and RWP parties in multivariate models. The descriptive results are in line with the expected pattern, as Green voters show the highest support for immigration and EU integration of all six party families and the highest concern about climate change, while RWP voters show the lowest support for both issues and the lowest concern about climate change. The overall regression for all nine countries also confirms this result, which could be interpreted as evidence for the theoretical assumption. However, country-specific regression models show that none of the four hypotheses holds for all nine countries in the sample. Conflict alignment on immigration, EU integration, liberal values and climate change differs considerably between countries. In Germany, the multivariate results come closest to the expected pattern, while in the other countries in the sample only one or two issues are aligned with the new cleavage and older cleavages seem to structure voting behaviour.

Green and RWP parties within the new cleavage

The idea that a new cleavage is changing the political structure in Europe has received much attention from social scientists. The cleavage-theoretical lens is a useful tool for the analysis of societal conflict, because the three-dimensional conceptualisation provides a framework that connects structural, ideological and political conflicts. Therefore, the use of the cleavage concept helps to describe and understand societal conflicts more thoroughly than a consideration of only one of these dimensions. At the same time, a thorough investigation of all three dimensions at once requires an extent of theoretical discussion and empirical descriptions that often goes beyond the scope of a single research paper. Accordingly, in the following I will focus on the ideological and political dimension of the new cleavage in regard to Green and RWP voting, and only briefly discuss and examine the structural aspect of this divide.

The concept of cleavages goes back to Lipset and Rokkan, who explained the emergence of European party systems by identifying lines of societal conflict that shaped the structure of political competition (Lipset and Rokkan, 1967; Rokkan, 1999). The four classical cleavages that are considered to have led to the party systems in Western Europe are the centre-periphery, state-church, rural-urban and worker-employer cleavages, while the latter, also called class cleavage, is the basis for the ideological left–right axis still present in many party systems. In more recent research, a cleavage is generally defined as consisting of a socio-structural basis, a normative or ideological dimension and a political manifestation, usually in the form of political organisations and parties (Bartolini and Mair, 1990; see also Bornschier, 2010: 54). Hooghe and Marks (2018) describe the emergence of a new cleavage in recent decades: According to the authors, processes of transnationalisation have changed voter preferences, while mainstream parties have remained largely inflexible, thus leading to the emergence of new party families that accommodate these voter preferences. At the core of the ideological dimension of the new cleavage are questions of universalist vs. traditionalist worldviews, with one side emphasising cosmopolitan preferences for open borders, political integration and liberal values, and the other side favouring national sovereignty and traditional values (Zürn and Wilde, 2016).¹

Several developments are considered to have contributed to the emergence of the cleavage: Since the 1970s, Western societies have been moving away from traditional values and placing more emphasis on post-materialist values, while at the same time generating a ‘cultural backlash’ from social groups with authoritarian values who rejected this development (Inglehart and Norris, 2016: 3). At the same time, economic and political globalisation accelerated, causing a denationalisation process that placed cultural conflicts over the permeability of borders and multiculturalism in the centre of attention (Wilde et al., 2019). This led to the emergence of the New Right and New Left party families, which changed the – previously mainly economic – meaning of the political terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ by adding a cultural line of conflict between libertarian and authoritarian values (Bornschier, 2010: 19). Green and New Left parties often formed in the context of the New Social Movements in the second half of the last century, voicing environmental concern and campaigning for gender equality. In the aftermath of the euro crisis and the so-called ‘refugee crisis’, the increasing importance of political integration and immigration has been successfully mobilised by parties of the populist radical right (the traditional/authoritarian/nationalist pole) on the one hand, and Green parties (the Green/alternative/libertarian pole) on the other (Hooghe and Marks, 2018: 111). Furthermore, Lockwood (2018) argues that attitudes towards climate change and climate policy, which are also becoming more salient as the climate crisis worsens, are structured by the same ideological basis of liberal versus authoritarian (Lockwood, 2018: 12). Societal conflicts around these topics are seen as drivers of RWP voting both because RWP parties voice positions against transnationalisation and because they portray themselves as the only opposition against the ‘liberal elites’ who are seen as responsible for these developments. Research shows that populist attitudes (encompassing distrust in political elites and the view of ‘the people’ as a homogenous entity with a common ‘will’ that should be directly translated into policy decisions) shape voting behaviour for RWP parties and interact with ideological positions (Hawkins et al., 2020). The relation between populism and Green voting has not been systematically researched yet.

Hooghe and Marks (2018: 113) argue that depending on the party system in place, new cleavages can lead to divisions within existing parties or new parties challenging the old ones without replacing them. Therefore, not only a ‘European public’ stands in the focus of this paper but also country-specific cleavage alignments. To assess whether Green and RWP parties are indeed the two poles of the new cleavage in the electoral systems, instead of single-issue parties mobilising with anti-immigration attitudes on the one hand, and environmental attitudes on the other, one important aspect to consider is the public opinion. The divide should be visible in the attitudes of Green and RWP electorates, also in comparison to other party families, especially the more established parties of the ‘old left’ (social-democrats and socialists) and ‘old right’ (conservatives and liberals). Bornschier (2010: 30) states that ‘the electoral coalition that traditionally has supported these parties is often divided over the new cultural issues’. In this section, I will outline a cleavage-theoretical argument, why people vote for Green and RWP parties depending on their attitudes towards liberal values, political integration, immigration and climate change.

Liberal values

Inglehart and Norris' cultural backlash thesis describes the rise of RWP parties as a counter-reaction to the ‘Silent Revolution’. This cultural shift began in the 1970s and has transformed the culture of Western societies through generational replacement, with younger cohorts showing greater tolerance of sexual and gender diversity, more openness to migrants and refugees and greater support for international cooperation and humanitarian aid (Inglehart and Norris, 2016: 13). The authors note that this ‘cultural shift has been linked with the rise of Green parties’ (Inglehart and Norris, 2016: 14), while the rejection of these liberal and cosmopolitan values, particularly among older cohorts, has led to increased support for RWP parties (Inglehart and Norris, 2016: 15). As attitudes towards political integration and immigration will be discussed below, I will first focus on gender equality and tolerance toward sexual and gender diversity. Kováts (2018) describes how movements in several European countries are mobilising against what they call ‘gender ideology’, rejecting women's rights, LGBTQ issues and gender studies. According to the author, this has also become part of the agenda of RWP parties, which challenge these ideas as part of their contestation of liberal democracy and instead promote traditional family models or propose to cut funding for gender studies (see also Donà, 2020). In contrast, Green parties and their voters are theorised to promote ‘gender equality, criticism against established authorities, and the freedom to choose one's way of life’ (Dolezal, 2010: 541). Therefore, one could assume that on one side of the divide lie traditional understandings of gender and family, as well as the rejection of new norms challenging this traditional view. On the other side lies a pluralistic view of gender and family, promoting diversity and rejecting traditional norms and values.

To my knowledge, there are so far no empirical studies that systematically compare Green and RWP party voters’ attitudes towards gender equality and tolerance of sexual and gender diversity in Europe. However, there is some evidence to support the argument: Green and Shorrocks (2023) examine the impact of a ‘gender backlash’ on the Brexit vote and find that men who perceived gender-based discrimination against men were more likely to vote for Brexit. As the Brexit is a good example for the political expression of preferences for closed borders in an economic and cultural sense, this result could be taken as a first hint that the political divide is connected to attitudes toward gender equality. Whitley et al. (2023) present an analysis of the European Election Study 2019, showing that support for Green parties increases with support for gay rights. Based on these considerations, the first hypothesis is formulated:

H1: A higher support for liberal values increases the likelihood for Green voting and decreases the likelihood for RWP voting.

Political integration

Back in 2002, Hooghe, Marks and Wilson found that ‘a new politics dimension that we conceive as ranging from Green/alternative/libertarian (GAL) to traditional/authoritarian/nationalist (TAN) […] is the most general and powerful predictor of party positioning on the issues that arise from European integration.’ (Hooghe et al., 2002: 966). The authors explain this finding with the conflict over national sovereignty, which is at the heart of the new cleavage. In a more recent publication, Hooghe and Marks argue that the Euro crisis served as a critical juncture in the emergence of the new cleavage, as the issues of EU integration and national sovereignty become much more salient and politicised (Hooghe and Marks, 2018: 116 f.). On the one hand, RWP parties tend to oppose EU integration, because of their preference for national sovereignty and cultural homogeneity (Hooghe et al., 2002: 976). This notion is also in line with Eger and Valdez (2015: 117) argument that radical-right parties and their voters in Europe have developed a coherent ideology based on anti-EU, anti-immigration and welfare chauvinist attitudes, which they label as ‘neo-nationalist’.² On the other hand, Green parties tend to ‘support the cultural opening of European societies, as they do not see much importance in the conservation of their countries’ national identities and traditional ways of life’ (Dolezal, 2010: 542). However, the economic side of EU integration is more controversial within Europe's Green parties and their electorates, as there are both opposing attitudes to open markets (as a result of the anti-globalisation movement) and preferences for open markets within the highly-educated and mobile social groups (Dolezal, 2010: 541; see also Hooghe et al., 2002: 983).

Studies find that RWP parties tend to adopt euroskeptic positions (Vasilopoulou, 2018), while their voters have been shown to be somewhat less aligned with this position than they are with RWP positions on immigration (McDonnell and Werner, 2019). Eger and Valdez (2015) analyse both party manifestos and voter attitudes, and find that neo-nationalist anti-EU positions are at the core of RWP party positions and RWP voting. The results for Green parties and voters are mixed. Hooghe and Marks (2018: 127) find that Green parties take diametrically opposite positions to RWP parties on European issues, Whitley et al. (2023:421) show that Green parties attract voter who are in favour of the European Union, but Dolezal (2010: 547) find that Green voters are not explicitly pro-European in all observed countries. If RWP and Green parties do indeed represent opposite poles of the new cleavage, I would expect their voters to have opposite attitudes towards political integration. This leads to the next hypothesis:

H2: A higher support for political integration increases the likelihood for Green voting and decreases the likelihood for RWP voting.

Immigration

The idea that immigration is a core conflict of the new cleavage is widely accepted in the literature. Teney et al. (2014: 580) describe the ideological divide between cosmopolitans, whose universal values lead to tolerance of immigrants and refugees, and communitarians, who oppose immigration, because they believe it ‘dilute[s] the community's potential to realise, collectively, its particular understanding of justice’ (Teney et al., 2014: 580). This divide is also evident in the manifestos of RWP and Green parties: Johnston and Sprong (2023: 348) argue that the nativism at the ideological core of RWP parties sees immigration as a threat to the ‘native’ members of the group, whereas the post-material values of Green parties lead to a socially liberal position on multiculturalism.

Based on an expert judgement survey of European political parties, Immerzeel et al. (2016: 828) find that respondents rate Green parties as the second-least anti-immigrant (beaten only by socialist parties) and least nationalist, while they score RWP parties highest on the anti-immigrant and nationalist dimensions (see also Marks et al., 2021). As for the electorates, Dolezal (2010: 547) shows that Green voters in Europe are distinguished from voters of other parties by their pro-immigration attitudes, Whitley et al. (2023: 421) find Green voters to favour more immigration, and in Ivarsflaten's (2008: 17) analysis of the ESS, restrictive immigration policy preferences are the most consistent predictor of RWP voting (see also Eger and Valdez, 2015). Therefore, I expect Green and RWP voters to have opposing attitudes toward immigration, leading to the following hypothesis:

H3: A higher support for immigration increases the likelihood for Green voting and decreases the likelihood for RWP voting.

Climate change

Because a societal cleavage transcends a single-issue conflict, new conflicts and debates can be ‘absorbed’ into the cleavage in such a way that positions on the new conflict follow the ideological lines of the cleavage. Weko (2022: 1076) argues that climate change is closely linked to the ideological divide between cosmopolitans and communitarians: Climate impacts disproportionately harm people and societies in the Global South, and the necessary political action to slow down global warming requires a coordinated international effort. Accordingly, cosmopolitans tend to see the need for action to protect people outside of their own nation-states, and support the transfer of national competences to the supranational level, while communitarians emphasise the primacy of the in-group and national sovereignty over supranational organisations (Weko, 2022: 1077). These positions are also taken up by political parties. Lockwood explains the climate-scepticism of RWP parties and supporters by saying that it ‘is an expression of hostility to liberal, cosmopolitan elites, rather than an engagement with the issue of climate change itself’, because ‘climate change is the cosmopolitan issue par excellence’ (Lockwood, 2018: 12). Green parties, on the other hand, have emerged as a result of growing environmental concern (Burchell, 2014: 12) and have been increasingly successful in elections over the past five years, as climate change has become more prominent in public debates. This opposition should be especially pronounced regarding attitudes toward climate policy, which influences everyday-life (for example in the form of fossil fuel taxes or the ban of short-distance flights), but also regarding basic attitudes toward climate change like the belief into the anthropogenic causes and concerns about the consequences.

Turning to the empirical evidence, there have been several studies showing how attitudes towards climate change are polarised by partisanship in the US (Dunlap et al., 2016; Huber et al., 2020) and the left/right dimension in Europe (Hess and Renner, 2019; Kvaløy et al., 2012; McCright et al., 2016). A number of studies have also shown that RWP parties and their voters tend to hold climate-sceptic views (Kulin et al., 2021; Yan et al., 2022), while Green parties emphasise climate protection and their voters are more concerned about climate change than voters of other parties (Fisher et al., 2022). Gregersen et al. (2020) find that a more right-wing political self-positioning is associated with a lower concern about climate change. However, there are only few cross-national studies linking these findings to the division along the new cleavage. In Weko's (2022) analysis of the ESS, an index representing the ideological cosmopolitan-communitarian scale is the strongest predictor of attitudes towards climate change, with a more cosmopolitan ideology correlating with more positive attitudes towards climate action (Weko, 2022: 1084). Using data from a large 36-country survey by the Pew Research Center, Lewis et al. (2019) find that the commitment to democratic values, such as gender equality and freedom of the speech, religion and the press, is the strongest predictor of concern about climate change, and in Western Europe the membership in a left/liberal party is also associated with higher climate concern. In the context of this paper, I would therefore expect that a higher climate concern positively impacts Green voting and negatively impacts RWP voting, resulting in the last hypothesis:

H4: A higher concern about climate change increases the likelihood for Green voting and decreases the likelihood for RWP voting.

Regional differences

The theoretical concept of the new transnational cleavage has been developed with a focus on Western Europe, but there have been several studies on its applicability to other European regions. As this is a country-comparative study encompassing Western and Northern European countries, I will briefly discuss the role of regional differences. In most Northern European countries, Green parties have been represented in the national parliaments since the late 1980s. As Jungar and Jupskås (2014) show, parties from the RWP family have also established themselves in Sweden, Finland and Denmark, while the case of Norway seems to be less clear-cut: the authors show in their paper that the Fremskrittspartiet (Progress Party) in Norway can be seen as a ‘hybrid’ between RWP and conservative party characteristics and should therefore be treated more carefully when compared to other RWP parties (Jungar and Jupskås, 2014). Another important regional difference between Northern and Western European countries is the extent to which liberal values are rejected by RWP parties. In his 2017 article, Moffit shows that the understanding of populism as the antithesis of liberal values does not apply to Northern European countries (the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark and Norway), because RWP parties in Northern Europe use liberal tropes and discourse to become more acceptable as an electoral option for generally liberal-minded voters and to ‘rationalise’ their Islamophobia (Moffitt, 2017: 117).

In Southern Europe, Green parties have faced more challenges and obstacles than those in other regions and have remained relatively minor in the political sphere (Biorcio, 2016: 178), which is also reflected in the ESS data on voting behaviour. Unfortunately, without Green voters in this region, it is not possible to explore their motives in this paper. Moreover, it would have been interesting to extend the analysis to other European regions, especially to Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries. Several authors find a comparable divide between cosmopolitans and communitarians, and it's influence on RWP voting in CEE countries (Azmanova, 2009: 1032; Gunnarsson and Zoega, 2017; Teney et al., 2014: 587). According to Whitley et al. (2023), Green voters in Eastern Europe ‘are breaking with materialist and traditionalist social norms’ (Whitley et al. 2023: 423) and are more similar to West Europeans than most people in that region. However, when looking at attitudes toward climate change and Green parties, there is also evidence of some general differences between European regions. Fisher et al. (2022) analyse the ESS 2016, and find that climate change attitudes in Western Europe are related to left/right attitudes and party affiliation, while in CEE there is no consistent pattern in climate change attitudes and party affiliation. Moreover, Green parties perform worse in Eastern European countries (Grant and Tilley, 2019: 505), and many CEE countries currently do not have Green parties represented in national parliaments. This last fact is the reason why CEE is not included in the analysis, as it would be necessary to analyse a sufficiently large number of countries in Eastern Europe, as well as sufficiently large voter groups for each party family, in order to draw conclusions for this region. As I will describe in the next chapter, this is not the case for the data used in the analysis.

Data and methods

To test the proposed hypotheses, I will use data from nine Northern and Western European countries from the European Social Survey 10. The data were collected between 2020 and 2022 using different survey methods, due to the pandemic. In Switzerland, Belgium, Finland, France, the Netherlands and Norway, face-to-face interviews were used, similar to the previous rounds of the ESS. In Austria, Germany and Sweden, respondents were contacted online and by letter and asked to complete the survey themselves. This ‘self-completion‘ design required some changes to the survey, which are documented on the ESS website.³ Because of these differences, comparisons between the face-to-face and self-completion design countries should be made with caution.

The ESS 10 covers around 30 countries from all regions of Europe (and beyond). However, in order to test hypotheses about the motives for voting, I can only use countries where: (a) at least one Green and one RWP parties stood for election in the last national election; and (b) enough people in the sample indicated in the survey that they voted for each of these parties. Unfortunately, there are only nine countries in the sample, where at least one Green and one RWP parties were selected by enough respondents. Therefore, I will only be able to examine voting motives in these nine countries in Northern and Western Europe.

Classification of political parties is a controversial topic among researchers, but there are several resources that provide insight and guidelines for classifying parties into families. In this case, I have used the PopuList 2020 to identify RWP parties (Rooduijn et al., 2019) and the data from ParlGov 2022 to identify Green parties (see Döring et al., 2022). To compare Green and RWP voting behaviour with other party families, all parties were coded according to the party family classification in the Manifesto Project dataset 2022 (Lehmann et al., 2022). The dependent variable in the following analysis is the self-reported vote in the last national election for one of these six party families: RWP, Green, left/socialist, social democratic, liberal, Christian/conservative or other.⁴ Annex Tables A.1 and A.2 list all parties and their party family classification.

The total sample size for the nine countries is 22,314. The analysis sample was then restricted to people who said they had voted in the last election and had no missing values for any of the variables I use in the analysis (item non-response). The analysis sample consists of 12,638 respondents, with country sample sizes ranging from 581 in Switzerland to 4760 in Germany. The large differences are due to the different population sizes, different survey methods and the percentage of people who abstained in the last election. In Germany, the country with the largest population in the ESS, more than 8000 people completed the self-administered questionnaire. In France, on the other hand, only half of the 1977 respondents said they had voted in the last election, so the analysis sample consists of only 760 cases. Voter shares for all party families for each country are shown in Annex Table 4.

The independent variables are whether respondents are pro-immigration, pro-EU integration, pro-gay rights and concerned about climate change. Pro-immigration attitudes are measured by items asking respondents whether they think that immigration is good or bad for the economy and the cultural life of their country, and whether they think that immigration makes their country a worse or better place to live. The three items are highly correlated (r between 0.62 and 0.75) and load on a single factor (factor loading between 0.85 and 0.91), so they were combined into an unweighted summated index on a scale of 0–10, with 0 representing the lowest level of support for immigration and 10 the highest. Positive attitudes towards EU integration were operationalised by the respondents rating on a scale from 0 to 10 whether EU integration has already gone too far (0) or should go further (10). Respondents’ attitudes towards liberal values were measured by three items, asking whether gay men and lesbians should be free to live their lives as they wish, whether they should be allowed to adopt children and whether the respondent would feel ashamed if a close family member were gay or lesbian.⁵ The responses were given on a 5-point agreement scale and the three items correlate (r between 0.49 and 0.62) and load on the same factor (factor loading between 0.81 and 0.87). Therefore, an unweighted summated index was created and rescaled to the 0–10 scale (0 = lowest agreement, 10 = highest agreement) to facilitate comparisons with the other two items. Finally, concern about climate change was operationalised by asking respondents how worried they are about climate change. Responses could be given on a 5-point scale, which was recoded into a categorical variable with the categories 1 = not (very) worried, 2 = somewhat worried and 3 = very/extremely worried. The exact wording of the question and the recoding rules are given in Table 3 in the Appendix.

As control variables, I include socio-structural variables that are usually associated with voting behaviour, such as gender, age (in years), net household income (in deciles), residence (urban/rural) and education level (ISCED). Religion also been shown to influence Green voting (Whitley et al., 2023) as well as RWP voting (Montgomery and Winter, 2015; Guth and Nelsen, 2021), so both religious denomination (no religion/Roman Catholic/Protestant/other Christian/Islam/other non-Christian)⁶ and religiosity (0 = not religious at all to 10 = very religious) were added as control variables. I also control for the political self-assessment (0 = right to 10 = left) and trust in political parties (0 = no trust at all to 10 = complete trust) as a broad measurement for populist attitudes, as both can be expected to correlate with both attitudinal variables and voting behaviour.

While I don’t propose any specific hypotheses about an opposite effect of the control variables on Green vs. right-wing voting, it will be interesting to see if the socio-structural basis of Green and RWP electorates coincides with the opposing pattern I expect for the attitude variables. Also, controlling for structural characteristics can show whether a possible opposite effect of the attitude variables is a robust effect, or just an artefact due to an effect of, for example, education on attitudes and voting behaviour.

In the first step of the analysis, I look at the bivariate associations between the attitudinal variables and voting behaviour. The violin plots in Figure 1 depict kernel density estimates of the probability distribution (outside) combined with box plots (inside). All descriptive analyses are weighted to correct for differential selection probabilities within each country as specified by sample design, non-response, noncoverage, sampling error due four post-stratification variables (age group, gender, education and region), as well as differences in population size across countries. To see if the associations remain robust under control of the socio-structural variables, I then compute multinomial logistic regression (MLR) models for the seven outcomes of the voting variable (the category ‘other party’ is omitted from the figures). The results are compared using coefficient plots showing average marginal effects (AMEs). Due to the hierarchical structure of the data, the regression standard errors are clustered by country. As a robustness check, I also ran the models as a multilevel regression with country fixed-effects, which led to similar results. To account for regional differences, the analysis is then carried out again separately for each country in the sample (see Table 7 in the Appendix).

Figure 1.

Attitudes and worry about climate change by party family.

Results

Figure 1 shows the distribution of the support for immigration, EU integration and gay rights, as well as concern about climate change for voters of each party family. The RWP electorate is considerably more opposed to immigration and EU integration than voters of other party families. When it comes to gay rights, they differ less from the other groups and even agree slightly more than Christian/conservative voters. In terms of concern about climate change, RWP voters have by far the highest proportion of people who are not concerned (∼35%) and the lowest proportion of people who are very or extremely concerned (∼20%). In comparison, around 80% of Green voters are very or extremely worried about climate change, and only a very small fraction of less than 5% are not (very) worried. Voters of other parties fall somewhere in between, with around 10 to 15% not (very) worried and around 40 to 60% very or extremely worried about climate change. Green voters show the strongest support for EU integration, while all other parties fall somewhere between Green and RWP voters. When it comes to attitudes to immigration and gay rights, Green voters are the most supportive, together with voters of left/socialist parties. Voters of all other parties are considerably less supportive of immigration, while the differences in support for gay rights are less pronounced.

The descriptive results suggest that on the issues of EU immigration and climate change there may be a divide between the Green and RWP parties, where they represent the opposite poles of a continuum, with voters of other party families positioned somewhere in between. The picture changes slightly when we look at attitudes to immigration: While Green voters are among the voter groups with the highest average support for immigration, there is no difference between Green and left/socialist party voters regarding their support for immigration. This could mean that this conflict is still more in line with the left/right political divide. However, RWP voters are considerably less supportive of immigration than Christian/conservative voters. Regarding attitudes towards gay rights, the differences between party families are much less pronounced and the pattern follows the left/right political divide, but Green and RWP voter are still among the voter groups with the highest resp. lowest support for gay rights.

Table 5 in the Appendix presents the exact results of the descriptive analysis, including the percentages and means of the different socio-structural groups within each voter group and the sample. The results show that the structural bases of Green and RWP voters differ notably. In the RWP voter group there is an overrepresentation of men, people living in rural areas and people with a lower level of education compared to all other voter groups. In addition, RWP voters tend to be older than Green voters, have the lowest average income, place themselves further to the right of the political spectrum and show the lowest trust into political parties. For Green voters, the differences with the other voter groups point in the opposite direction for all variables, but are less pronounced: they tend to be younger, have the second highest average income, lean to the left of the political spectrum and have the highest average trust in political parties. They are also more likely to be female, to have the highest level of education and to live in urban areas. This is consistent with the theoretical expectation of a divide not only at the political and attitudinal level but also in the structural basis of the electorate. This does however not apply to religious denomination and religiosity: Here, left/socialist and Christian/conservative voters are on opposite ends of the spectrum with the former being most often without any denomination and having the lowest average score on religiosity, and the latter having the highest share of Roman Catholics and Protestants and the highest average score on religiosity. RWP and Green voters are relatively similar regarding these two variables, with RWP voters having a higher share of Roman Catholics and Green voters having a higher share of Protestants, and RWP voter being somewhat more religious than Green voters.

In order to re-evaluate the descriptive results in a multivariate model, I used MLR models, as shown in Figure 2. The coefficient plot shows the AMEs of each predictor variable on each outcome, as estimated by the MLR. The figure only shows the results for the attitudinal variables and worry about climate change. The full regression results, including the socio-structural variables, are presented in Table 6 in the Appendix. The AMEs of the socio-structural variables indicate that there are significant opposing effects of gender and education on voting for Green and RWP parties. This is also true for the self-placement on the left–right scale, but this predictor has a stronger effect on voting social democratic and conservative. Having any of the religious denominations has a negative effect on voting for RWP parties in reference to people without a denomination, whereas religiosity has a very small positive effect of RWP voting. For Green voting, only belonging to Islam or other Non-Christian religions lowers the probability significantly, and religiosity has no effect. Trust in political parties shows no significant effects on voting for any of the party families. There are also no contrary effects of age, income and place of residence, meaning that the group differences in voting behaviour I found in the descriptive analysis could be due to different attitudes within these groups, which are now controlled for.

Figure 2.

Multinomial logistic regression of attitudes and worry about climate change on voting behaviour (AMEs).

Figure 2 shows that attitudes towards immigration and EU integration continue to have an opposite effect on Green vs. RWP voting in the multivariate models. The higher a respondent's approval of immigration and EU integration, the higher the probability of voting for Green parties and the lower the probability of voting for RWP parties. This is in line with H1 and H2. Interestingly, higher support for immigration has a small but significant positive effect on voting left/socialist, while higher support for EU integration has a negative effect on voting left/socialist and a positive effect on voting Christian/conservative. Support for gay rights does not follow the theoretically expected pattern: There are significant effects only for Christian/conservative and Social Democratic voters (negative effect) and left/socialist voters (positive effect). Thus, there is no evidence to support H3. In contrast, the effect of concern about climate change is consistent with H4: People who are somewhat or very/extremely concerned about climate change are significantly more likely to vote for Green parties and less likely to vote for RWP parties. The only other significant effect on voting behaviour is a negative effect of being very worried about climate change on voting left/socialist.

The country-specific analyses presented in Figure 3 show a more complex pattern (see Table 7 in the Appendix for exact regression results for all countries and party families): None of the four hypotheses is equally supported by the regression results in all countries. Higher support for immigration has a negative effect on RWP voting in all countries, while it has a significant positive effect on Green voting only in Austria, Germany, Belgium and Finland. People who are more in favour of EU integration are significantly less likely to vote RWP in all countries except Belgium and Norway, and significantly more likely to vote Green in Germany, Norway, Sweden and the Netherlands. In the Nordic countries, support for EU integration has a stronger positive effect on voting for social democratic parties than on voting for the Greens Higher support for gay rights is associated with a significantly lower probability of voting for Christian/conservative parties in some countries, but has no systematic effect on voting for RWP parties and the Greens. Only in Germany the results show the expected pattern, in some countries there is no effect, and in Norway effects are even reversed.

Figure 3.

Country-specific multinomial logistic regression models (AMEs).

The effect of concern about climate change is more consistent, but H4 has to be rejected for some countries as well. In Austria, Germany, Norway and the Netherlands, the regression results follow the expected pattern with opposite effects for RWP and Green voting, at least for the group with the highest concern about climate change. In other countries, such as Finland, Sweden and France, the degree of concern about climate change only has a significant effect on the likelihood of voting Green, but not RWP. In Belgium, being somewhat concerned about climate change even increases the likelihood of voting for a RWP party. In Switzerland, there are no significant effects of concern about climate change on voting behaviour, also due to the smaller number of cases and therefore larger confidence intervals. In some countries, concern about climate change also has a significant effect on voting for other party families, such as the Social Democrats in Austria, Germany and France, or the Liberals in Germany, Norway and the Netherlands. Interestingly, these effects point in different directions and do not follow a systematic pattern.

To sum up, in the overall analyses I find some evidence of the expected opposite effect on Green vs. RWP voting for three out of four issues, with only attitudes towards gay rights not following the expected pattern at all. However, this does not hold for all countries in the sample, as the country-specific analyses show. Only for Germany all hypotheses can be maintained, as significant opposite effects for all variables are confirmed. Possible reasons for these findings and further implications of the results are discussed in the next chapter.

Discussion

Using a cleavage approach, I have argued that RWP and Green parties could be seen as two ideological poles of the new transnational cleavage if their voters hold diametrically opposed attitudes towards the four issues at its centre. Descriptive analyses generally support this assumption, but it does not fully hold when comparing respondents’ attitudes towards immigration, EU integration, gay rights and climate change between different voter groups. Green voters are indeed the most supportive of immigration, EU integration and gay rights and the most concerned about climate change, while RWP voters are the least supportive of immigration and EU integration and the least concerned about climate change. However, when it comes to attitudes towards gay rights, Conservative voters are slightly less supportive than RWP voters, while Left/Socialist voters are as supportive as Green voters. This means that the RWP and the Greens cannot be seen as the poles of a new cultural divide, but are more in line with the ‘old’ left/right divide when it comes to attitudes towards gay rights. Similarly, left/socialist voters are as pro-immigration as Green voters, suggesting that attitudes towards immigration are also at least partly aligned with the left/right divide.

This interpretation is also supported by the results of the multivariate models. In the overall regression, including all nine countries in the sample, I find directly opposite effects on RWP and Green voting regarding gender, right–left ideology, education, immigration attitudes, support for EU integration and concern about climate change. The effects of pro-immigration attitudes on voting behaviour generally follow a left–right direction, but with the strongest effects for RWP and Green parties. Similarly, the effect of attitudes towards EU integration is in line with theoretical expectations in the overall regression. Moreover, the effects for other party families do not follow the right–left divide, but people with pro-EU integration attitudes are more likely to vote Green and conservative and less likely to vote RWP and left/socialist. This may indicate that populist parties on the left and right mobilise voters with EU-critical attitudes, while the more established parties tend to attract voters who are pro-EU integration. Positive attitudes towards gay rights have a significant effect only on conservative and left/socialist voting, and no effect on Green or RWP voting. The effects of concern about climate change on voting behaviour also follow the expected pattern of strong positive effects on Green voting and negative effects on RWP voting. These results could lead to the conclusion that RWP and Green parties are indeed the two poles of the new cultural divide regarding conflicts over immigration, integration and climate change, while the conflict over liberal values is more aligned with the ‘old’ left/right political axis. The results of the overall regression are in line with other research of Green voters and/or RWP voters (Dolezal, 2010; Marks et al., 2021; Whitley et al., 2023) that analysed a pooled sample of several European countries. However, the country-specific regression models show that the conflict structure in Western and Northern Europe is more complex than the overall models in this study as well as previous research imply.

The effect of anti-immigration attitudes on RWP voting is confirmed for all countries, but not for Green voting. This could indicate that in some countries, Green parties have constituted themselves as the pro-immigration counterpart to the anti-immigration stance of RWP parties, while in other countries attitudes towards immigration are not relevant for Green voting. This result provides a more differentiated perspective on previous studies that found pro-immigration attitudes distinguish Green voters from other voter groups (see for example Dolezal, 2010). The finding that anti-immigration attitudes increase the likelihood of voting for a RWP party is not surprising, as nativist ideology is a core feature of right-wing populism and this effect has been consistently found in many studies (see for example Ivarsflaten, 2008 or Eger and Valdez, 2015). The effect of pro-immigration attitudes on the Green vote in Germany, Austria and Finland suggests that the conflict over immigration has indeed created a new divide in these countries, which is in line with cleavage expectations about RWP and Green parties as party-political opponents.

Furthermore, the country-specific results show that higher support for EU integration is associated with a lower likelihood of voting RWP in most countries, and in some countries also with a lower likelihood of voting left/socialist. People with higher support for EU integration are more likely to vote Green in some countries, but in others I find effects for social democratic and liberal voting, confirming previous results showing that EU integration is not a core issue of Green voters (Dolezal, 2010). Green parties do not seem to be a single pole of this divide, but other parties also mobilise successfully on this issue. The effect on RWP voting is also less consistent than the effect of immigration attitudes, which is in line with previous results, which show that ‘RRP supporters were substantially and significantly closer to their parties on immigration than on European integration’ (McDonnell and Werner, 2019: 1773). Opposite effects are only significant for Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands, where voting for RWP and Green parties seems to be a result of attitudes towards EU integration, among other party families. The fact that the positive effects of immigration and European integration in some countries produced significant positive effects in the overall regression should be considered when interpreting other studies that show positive overall effects of support for immigration (as well as European integration) on Green voting. This suggests that country-specific analyses of these effects are a necessary tool to avoid attesting divisions or cleavages to whole regions, as the cleavage structure might be more country- and context-specific.

There is no strong divide in attitudes towards gay rights. In the countries where these attitudes do affect voting behaviour, higher support for gay rights is mostly associated with a lower likelihood of voting conservative and a higher likelihood of voting Green, liberal or left/socialist. The lack of a consistent effect on Green voting contradicts the results of Whitley et al. (2023: 420) who find an overall positive significant effect of support for gay rights on Green party affinity. There is an inconsistent effect on RWP voting, and in Norway even a negative effect on Green voting. Thus, gay rights do not seem to be an issue that is aligned with the new divide, but rather embedded in conservative voting. Results by Guth and Nelsen (2021: 9) give further insight into this, as they differentiate between Christian and conservative parties, and show that it's especially the former who's electorates oppose gay marriage. The lack of an effect on RWP voting is not surprising, given the earlier remarks about RWP parties using the ‘defence of liberal values’ as a mobilisation tool within their nativist ideology (see Moffitt, 2017). A study of the European Values Survey 2017–2018 by Spierings and Glas (2021) provides more insight, as they find a cluster of people that cross-cut the GAL-TAN spectrum regarding their nativist and gender attitudes. These ‘Gender-modern nativists’ make up 15% of their sample and combine nativism with support for gender equality (including support for gay rights) (Spierings and Glas, 2021: 461). Moreover, the descriptive analysis shows that gay rights are not very controversial, as voters of all party families generally tend to have positive attitudes towards the issue. To measure the conflict over liberal values, a more controversial issue such as trans rights might have been more appropriate for this analysis.

Finally, concern about climate change plays a role in voting behaviour in most countries, confirming results from Fisher et al. (2022) and Kulin et al. (2021). People who are very or extremely concerned about climate change are significantly more likely to vote for Green parties in all countries except Switzerland. Concern about climate change has a negative effect on voting for RWP parties in all countries, but the effect is not statistically significant in some of them. Moreover, in some countries, the likelihood of voting for other party families decreases even more when concern about climate change is high: For example, there are negative effects on conservative voting in Austria and Sweden, on left/socialist and liberal voting in Germany and Finland, and on social democratic voting in France, Norway and the Netherlands. This suggests that Green parties are indeed the most likely choice for people who are very concerned about the climate, but people who are less concerned don’t automatically vote more often for RWP parties. One interpretation could be that in some countries, there is no new divide between RWP and Green parties in terms of attitudes to climate change. Another possibility is that the conflict is not caused by concern about climate change, but by attitudes towards climate action and policy. People who are not very concerned about climate change may vote for different party families, but it is possible that people who are explicitly opposed to climate action and policies are more likely to be mobilised by RWP parties that take a different stance from more established conservative or liberal parties.

Before drawing final conclusions, some issues and limitations of the data and analysis need to be addressed. Firstly, the results refer only to Northern and Western Europe and cannot be generalised to other European regions. Within the theoretical framework, the fact that there are no countries in Eastern and Southern Europe with both a relevant Green and RWP party suggests that the party alignment does not correspond to the transnational cleavage in these countries. However, the reasons for this fact could also lie in the specific country context or in the party family classification. As mentioned above, the classification and comparison of parties in different countries is a controversial issue. I rely on three different sources, and the classification into Green and RWP parties is consistent across these categorisations. Nevertheless, national contexts are important to take into account and this is reflected in the results. In some cases, parties of the same family have very different determinants in the countries analysed, possibly because of the conflict alignment, but also because of differences in the public discourse, mobilisation strategies, electoral systems, party history or personnel. In a comparative survey study such as the ESS, these factors cannot be clearly identified. Nevertheless, it should be mentioned here that depending on the structure of party competition, other party families or even wings within parties could take the role of the ‘opponent’ of RWP parties, especially parties of the New Left. Hooghe and Marks (2018: 113) argue that in ‘party systems that load the dice against new parties, a new cleavage can be expected to produce intense frictions within parties’. To identify these other parties or wings of parties, their voters’ structural and ideological characteristics and the conditions under which different parties become the pole of an ideological divide should be subject to further research in this field.

Another issue with the latest ESS data is a change in survey mode in some countries between rounds 9 and 10, due to the pandemic. The implications of the mode change for this analysis are unclear, as it is not possible to determine to what extent country differences are due to the different contexts or the different survey modes. None of the earlier ESS waves contain all variables used for the models in this paper, so a comparison with earlier ESS waves is not possible. Additional analyses using the ESS waves 8 (2016) and 9 (2018) reveal some differences between the mode-change countries and the rest of the sample regarding the attitude trends.⁷ This should be kept in mind when interpreting the results of these analyses. Finally, some of the indicators I have used are not the ideal operationalisation of the constructs they are supposed to represent. It would have been preferable to use items on several aspects of liberal values, as well as a good measure of attitudes towards climate action and policy. In the next and final chapter, I will discuss possible implications of this analysis.

Conclusion

In this paper, I made the cleavage-theoretical argument that Green parties could be seen as the direct opposite of RWP parties in Europe because their voters take opposing positions on the central issues that define the new transnational cleavage. To examine this assumption, I derived four hypotheses about Green and RWP voters’ attitudes towards immigration, EU integration, gay rights and climate change. Using the latest ESS data from nine Western and Northern European countries, I show that the average attitudes of voters, as well as multivariate regression of the whole sample at once, are consistent with this assumption and could be interpreted as evidence for the new cleavage. However, the picture changes in the country-specific analyses. Only in Germany are the effects of the attitude variables consistent with the theoretically expected conflict alignment. In the other seven countries, some issues are divided along Green/RWP party lines, while others follow a left/right alignment or no systematic pattern at all. The results suggest that in most countries in the sample, the electoral basis of Green and RWP parties is not only structured by the new transnational cleavage but also, or even more importantly, by older cleavages structures and other divisions. Green parties are a more likely party choice for left-leaning people with higher education and strong concern about climate change in most countries, while attitudes toward immigration, EU integration and gay rights only impact Green voting in some countries. This could mean that post-materialism seems to play a more important role in Green voting than questions about the openness of borders. On the other hand, the RWP parties in the analysed countries are only united by their appeal to voters who oppose immigration, while all other effects differ between countries. Therefore, the mobilisation of anti-immigration attitudes can still be considered the core of RWP voting, whereas other issues are only important in some country-specific contexts. In the rest of the countries in the ESS 10, the lack of Green or RWP parties and their voters could be due to the lack of a new cleavage or different conflict constellations within the party systems.

These findings have several implications for cleavage theory research and the contextualisation of political conflict in Europe. First, there is some evidence of a transnational cleavage in terms of an ideological as well as structural divide between Green and RWP parties and their voters in Northern and Western Europe. In Germany, in particular, attitudes and voting behaviour are aligned with cosmopolitan and communitarian worldviews. Similar to other studies, I also find evidence for the persistence of older cleavages that structure voting behaviour such as social class, left/right ideology and religion, which largely explain voting for Social Democratic, Christian/Conservative and also Liberal parties (see Guth and Nelsen, 2021). In contrast, attitudes toward the issues defining the transnational cleavage showed to be more relevant in explaining support for RWP, Green and left/socialist parties. Here, further research needs to specify the specific roles of Green, New Left and Populist Left parties within the new cleavage, as Guth and Nelsen (2021) have found Left- and Right-Wing Populists to be united ‘in their opposition to the ruling elites at home and in Brussels, and the deep cultural changes tearing at their sense of security, identity, and community’ (Guth and Nelsen, 2021: 10). This could also explain the finding of this paper that Left/Socialist voting like RWP voting becomes more likely when EU integration is rejected, calling for a clearer distinction of different types of left-wing parties.

Second, in all analysed countries (except Germany), this divide does not extend across all four attitudes, but rather seems to be issue-based. In these countries, one or two issues are significant and opposite predictors of RWP and Green voting, while the other issues follow a left/right alignment or are not relevant for predicting voting behaviour. The results underline that parties of the same family can use very different mobilisation strategies and that issue salience differs notably between countries. The differing conclusions from the overall regression and the country-specific analyses are a reminder for future studies using pooled country-samples to not only look at the overall effects but to compare those to the more complex pattern of country-specific analyses.

Third, the importance of single issues for Green vs. RWP voting also differs within countries, presumably due to issue ownership and emphasis by the parties. As might be expected, attitudes towards immigration are more relevant to RWP voting, while concern about climate change is a stronger determinant of Green voting. This shows that Green and RWP party mobilisation goes beyond the rejection of the opposite position, and that people who have attitudes opposing one party don’t automatically vote for the other. Shedding more light on this aspect, Abou-Chadi (2016) shows how issue ownership differs between Green and RWP parties in the way their party success influences mainstream party strategies: While electoral success of RWP parties leads to mainstream parties emphasising immigration issues and cultural protectionism, Green party success leads to other parties de-emphasising environmental issues (Abou-Chadi, 2016: 433).

Fourth and finally, attitudes towards gay rights are not relevant in explaining Green and RWP voting. Whether this means that these groups of voters are not opposed to each other in terms of liberal values, or that gay rights are not a suitable indicator of liberal values (anymore), has to be determined by future research. In conclusion, Green and RWP parties do not seem to be complete opposites in Northern and Western Europe, but only in country- and issue-specific contexts.

Supplemental Material

sj-docx-1-asj-10.1177_00016993241311518 - Supplemental material for Voting green or right-wing populist: Ideological poles of a new cleavage?

Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-asj-10.1177_00016993241311518 for Voting green or right-wing populist: Ideological poles of a new cleavage? by Clara Dilger in Acta Sociologica

Footnotes

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Data availability

The raw data required to reproduce the above findings are available to download from . The syntax for Stata is available to download from https://osf.io/c7pjk/.

ORCID iD

Clara Dilger

Supplemental material

Supplemental material for this article is available online.

Notes

Author biography

Clara Dilger holds a degree in Sociology from the University of Leipzig, where she currently serves as a researcher and PhD candidate at the Research Institute Social Cohesion. Her academic work focuses on exploring the dynamics of right-wing populism, cleavage theory and public opinion on climate change.

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