The role of authoritarian nostalgia on radical right voting

Are populist radical right parties a real threat to democracy? This question is partly behind the overwhelming interest that radical right parties have generated in scholarly work, at least in comparison to other party families. Surprisingly, however, the answer remains ambiguous. The literature on radical right parties distinguishes between extreme and populist radical right. Supporters of the former are assumed to have inherently anti-democratic values and preferences for authoritarian forms of government. By contrast, the latter are expected to agree with democracy as a system but dispute the legitimacy of elites and liberal institutions in favour of people-centric forms of government. In practice, however, the role of anti-democratic values and preferences for authoritarian forms of government has been difficult to isolate in previous studies. Some of the methodological challenges include social desirability in classical survey questions on democratic attitudes, and the confounding between anti-democratic preferences with other ideological traits like xenophobia and sexism. In this contribution we run a variation of an endorsement experiment in Spain, allowing us to quantify the weight of socially sensitive preferences among voters of the radical right party VOX. Our experiment consists of measuring support for public subsidies for social and cultural associations, while randomly varying the organization receiving those benefits across treatments. More specifically, we will vary the recipients of public funds like the Francisco Franco foundation (an institution representing nostalgia for a non-democratic past), and several other social organizations representing ideological values that are known to trigger VOX support and that will act here as benchmarks to contrast effect magnitudes (Catalan secessionism, immigrant rights, feminist values, and trade unionism). We will further apply an item count experiment to further test the support for the Franco Foundation among different voters. If the treatment activating authoritarian nostalgia (vs the control group) generates stronger support levels among VOX voters than among other kinds of voters, we will be able to conclude that the distinction between extreme and populist radical right is more muddled than often assumed. This will have important implications for serious democratic backsliding in the event of such parties reaching governmental offices.