The radical right views the welfare state as the economic terrain of its xenophobic and authoritarian “culture war”. As a result, these parties push for policies that amplify social inequalities along lines of citizenship, ethnicity, gender, and employment biography. A new book explores the economic and social policy consequences of radical right participation in governments across Europe and the United States.
Since the French Revolution, the spectrum of economic and social policy positions has been ordered in a left-right schema. While the left is typically in favour of higher taxes and redistribution, the right stands for the opposite. But today’s radical right defies a straightforward classification within this socioeconomically driven framework. Their core ideology primarily revolves around contentious socio-cultural positions, leading to their association with anti-immigration stances and the restoration of national-conservative values. Against this backdrop, their economic and social policies have been labelled as “blurred” or “subordinate”. However, my study of the government participation of radical right parties reveals how their socio-cultural policy positions translate into socio-economic policy choices. Therefore, the strict division between “culture” versus “the economy” obscures the interaction between these two spheres of political conflict. For the radical right, economic and social policies are a means to an end in their “culture war”.
What does radical right mean?
According to Cas Mudde, this definition includes parties (populist radical right) that combine an ideology of (1) nativism, (2) authoritarianism and (3) populism. Nativism, the demand for an ethnically and culturally homogeneous nation-state, forms the ideological centrepiece of the radical right. In its pure form, this position would lead to replacing democracy with “ethnocracy” as a form of governance in which citizens’ political and social rights are contingent on their ethnic background. A further core ideological element of the radical right is authoritarianism, which envisages a strictly organised and hierarchical social order with the help of rigorous “law and order” policies. This goes hand in hand with the idea that the state must uphold “traditional” values and hierarchies by state force if necessary. In this view, social problems such as drug addiction are not attributed to economic disadvantages as such, but are instead seen as an outcome of insufficient discipline. Related to that, education policy should promote traditional family structures, such as marriage between a man and a woman as the “normal” way of life, while rejecting LGBTQ+ rights. Although populism is a third ideological characteristic of this party family, it is less important in the contemporary radical right than nativism and authoritarianism (Art 2022). These ideological elements can be found in far-right parties in Western Europe and increasingly in centre-right parties in Eastern Europe (e.g. PiS and Fidesz-KDNP) and the USA (Republican Party under Trump).
Nativism and authoritarianism in economic and social policy
The ideological core of today’s radical right – nativism and authoritarianism – not only has profound implications for socio-cultural policies and issues such as migration and diversity, but also for socio-economic policies of the welfare state. The radical right’s nativist stance not only leads to a more restrictive migration and asylum policy; these parties need socio-economic instruments to implement nativist divisions in society. This includes, for example, disadvantaging foreigners in social policy (welfare chauvinism) or the selective provision of family benefits to favour exclusively native families with many children (pro-natalism). In economic policy, this can mean tax and regulatory disadvantages for foreign companies (economic nationalism) and tariffs on imported goods (trade protectionism) to favour domestic capital. Nativism therefore means a xenophobic approach in social policy and a nationalistic reaction to globalisation in economic policy.
The emphasis on “traditional” values and social norms within an authoritarian framework implies a narrow conception of solidarity: only those who “work hard” and conform to conservative family norms should be entitled to social support (deservingness). Radical right parties therefore advocate for generous entitlements for pensioners with long contribution records while the unemployed tend to be suspected of “not trying hard enough” to get a job. Moreover, such a distinction between social groups that are considered more or less deserving of support can be found not only at the programmatic level of political parties, but also at the level of individual voter attitudes. For example, Busemeyer et al. show that voters of radical right parties favour relatively generous benefits for pensioners, but not for the unemployed.
A workfare policy – that is, strict requirements and obligations for receiving social benefits in the event of unemployment – also receives the strongest support among voters of radical right parties compared to voters of other party families to the left and right of centre. At the same time, these voters show the least support for social investments in higher education or public childcare. This position is consistent with an authoritarian ideology because social investment policies are associated with progressive values such as social mobility and gender equality.
How radical right parties implement their ideologies nationally
Although radical right parties are similar in their ideology, they do not necessarily implement similar policies when in government. After all, they govern in very different national contexts. In Western Europe, nativism translates primarily into welfare chauvinism because these countries have relatively generous welfare states and high migration rates. Consequently, the radical right has increasingly “culturalised” and “racialised” conflicts over the beneficiaries of social policy in these countries.
In contrast, migration in Central and Eastern Europe is relatively low while social policy provides less generous benefits. However, these countries became heavily dependent on foreign direct investment following the collapse of the Soviet Union. In this context, the radical right is not so much targeting foreign welfare recipients as in Western Europe, but foreign capital in the form of (selective) economic nationalism, intended to make these countries less dependent on foreign (Western) capital. This approach has led to taxes on foreign banks and insurance companies while domestic capital was favoured through (re-)nationalisation and clientelistic subsidies, especially in Hungary and Poland.
In the USA, on the other hand, there are high migration rates, but not a generous welfare state along West European lines. Trump’s trade protectionism was also not directed against foreign capital as in Eastern Europe, but against foreign goods, especially from China. The credo of low taxes was not new under Trump, but the introduction of high import tariffs in response to chronic trade deficits marked a clear departure from previous US administrations. In a nutshell, nativism is primarily directed against foreign welfare recipients in Western Europe, against foreign capital in Eastern Europe and against foreign goods in the US. The policies may be very different, but ideologically they share a similar nativist core.
Authoritarianism also results in different policy consequences. The emphasis on “hard work” leads to defending (and selectively expanding) generous early retirement and pension benefits in the West European social security systems, coupled with worsening conditions for the unemployed. At the same time, there are differences in family policy. Unlike in Continental Europe (Austria, Italy), the radical right in Northern Europe (Denmark, Norway) rarely promotes any familialistic measures. This can be attributed to their different welfare state legacies. While the dual earner/dual carer model was already established in Northern Europe in the 1960s and 1970s, the male breadwinner model was institutionally upheld for longer in parts of Continental Europe. Consequently, conservative family policy enjoys less public support in Northern Europe than in Continental and especially Eastern Europe, as data from the ISSP show. This is one of the reasons why conservative and pro-natalist family policy benefits (bonuses, cash benefits, loans) – coupled with anti-LGBTQ+ measures – have been at the heart of social policy expansion under the Fidesz-KDNP governments in Hungary and the PiS government in Poland. In the USA, trade policy serves as a functional equivalent of social policy, since social security is closely tied to employment, which trade protectionism aims to defend.
Radical right parties undermine a progressive welfare state recalibration
Despite all these differences, we do find broad similarities in the distributive impacts of radical right parties. While the radical right aims to shore up protections for threatened labour market insiders and male breadwinners, it also imposes cuts for the unemployed, the poor, non-citizens and ethnic minorities. At the same time, these parties undermine a progressive transformation of the welfare state. This is particularly to the detriment of working women seeking to reconcile work and family life, and to labour market outsiders in insecure and low-paid employment. These are social groups that would benefit from precisely those inclusive welfare state arrangements the radical right opposes, including public childcare and more paternal participation in parental leave, training-based active labour market policies and job guarantees for the (long-term) unemployed, as well as protective measures in labour and social law for atypical employment relationships.
In short, when the radical right participates in government, selective protections for the native (male) core workforce and contestations of globalisation go hand in hand with the promotion of a gendered and racialised precariat. As a result, the radical right has become the political representative of the “losers of globalisation”, even though it rejects a redistributive agenda and exacerbates social divisions. This paradox can only be understood by looking at the ideology of these parties. Nativist and authoritarian positions are incompatible with an inclusive redistributive agenda that does not distinguish by ethnicity, citizenship, gender and employment biography.
More of the same after Trump's victory?
This correlation can be observed again in the USA. Even though the two dominant parties can naturally unite a broader electoral coalition in the US majority electoral system, men without a college degree have again helped Donald Trump to his election victory. Formerly heavily industrialized states in the so-called Rust Belt affected by globalization have once turned to the Republicans. Trump is likely to have scored points with the radicalization of his economic program: permanently reduce taxes and secure insurance benefits for "hard-working" Americans (Social Security and Medicare), drastically increase import tariffs on foreign goods (nativism) and cut spending on social services or transfers for those affected by poverty (authoritarianism). In order to permanently reduce the trade deficits, however, Trump would have to reduce the enormous capital imports and with them the interests of the American financial sector. This will almost certainly not happen. From Trump's point of view, trade conflicts are not class conflicts. For the radical right in Europe as well as in the USA, the effects of globalization as well as internal distribution issues must continue to be dealt with in a nativist-authoritarian way.
This article is also available in German at sozialpolitikblog: "Wie die Radikale Rechte den Wolfahrtstaat verändert".
Header photo by Yeshi Kangrang - Unsplash
