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We investigate the support for neofascist and populist parties across societies in Europe. Apart from the standard variables, such as immigration and unemployment as well as various supply-side variables, we also consider societal openness (defined on the basis of European Social Survey, 2004), welfare state and democracy. The main contribution of this paper is to establish the meta link between the three institutions (1) societal openness, (2) welfare state, and (3) democracy, and find out their impact on the support for extreme right in Europe. We first establish that, in more open societies the direct effect of openness on neofascist votes is negative; however, openness increases the neofascist support indirectly through immigration and unemployment. Moreover, we find that openness has no direct effect on the support for populist parties, but has indirect positive effects through unemployment. We also find that the effect of openness go hand in hand with that of welfare indicator within countries; however, the link between openness and democracy is less unambiguous. Our results are robust with respect to different classifications of extreme right parties and when endogeneity of immigration is controlled for. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As pointed out by Quinn and Woolley (2001), survey data suggest that, in democracies, economic instability is one of the major fears of citizens. The authors showed that democracies differ from autocracies in that democracies produce stable growth. Their main explanation is that “the mechanisms of democratic competition and the preferences of voters lead democracies to select away from very low and very high growth and away from high volatility”. The aim of this paper is to test that explanation through cultural dimensions of Hofstede (1980). Since, after all, that is the cultural characteristics that shape the degree of democracy. Hofstede conceptualized culture in terms of meanings; he therefore studied it by assessing the values of people. Cultural-level, rather than individual-level, factor analyses (using country mean scores) produced four factors; “individualism,” “power distance,” “masculinity,” and “uncertainty avoidance”. According to Hofstede, “individualism stands for a society in which the ties between individuals are loose; everyone is expected to look after himself or herself and his or her immediate family only,” and “collectivism stands for a society in which people from birth onwards are integrated into strong, cohesive in-groups, which throughout people’s lifetime continue to protect them in exchange for unquestioning loyalty”. In Hofstede’s view, “Power Distance indicates the extent to which a society accepts the fact that power in institutions and organisations is distributed unequally” while Masculinity expresses the extent to which the dominant values in society are “masculine”-that is, assertiveness, the acquisition of money and things, and not caring for others, the quality of life, or people. Finally, Uncertainty Avoidance indicates the extent to which a society feels threatened by uncertain and ambiguous situations and tries to avoid these situations by greater career stability, establishing more formal rules, not tolerating deviant ideas and behaviors, believing in absolute truths and the attainment of expertise. Using regression analysis for testing a specification adopted by Quinn and Woolley to which the above mentioned four cultural dimensions were added, we found that the only variables that affect statistically significantly the volatility of economic growth are (i) individualism dimension, (ii) volatility of government expenditures and (iii) investment expenditures. Our sample covers 43 countries (containing both industrialized and developing countries) for which Hofstede’s cultural dimensions data are available. The interesting point is that due to the multicollinearity between democracy and individualism variables, the former is not statistically significant. Putting it differently, individualism as a cultural dimension that shapes the degree of democracy is much more important in explaining variations in the economic growth stability. Direction of the relationship confirms our a priori expectations, i.e. as individualism scores of countries increase economic growth becomes less volatile. Our explanation for this is that the self-regulating markets go hand in hand with self-interest individuals and harmony between the two is realized through political competition, i.e. democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we show not only that variations in unemployment and income distribution affect the rise of anti-immigrant parties but also that countries with higher individualism/collectivism scores have stronger anti-immigrant parties. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]