Vote gains by domestic nationalist parties in recent years have been partially attributed to effects associated with the international financial crisis. Less well-understood have been the causal mechanisms responsible for this link. Our research suggests that this can be explained in part by citizens having become more cognizant of the interconnectedness between states and their own country’s potential vulnerability as a result of the financial crisis and its ramifications. The latter have turned the rather abstract concept of integration into something significantly more concrete and thus more salient to the public or to large groups of voters. These now feel increasingly threatened by actors and policies outside their national borders. Having become aware of the ‘problem’, citizens long for a return to the (imagined) security of an (often idealized) earlier and more autonomous state of the nation in which domestic elites were still seemingly capable of pursuing policies based exclusively on national considerations.
This phenomenon––which has been labeled a “nationalist backlash”––should also lead voters to evaluate their national political actors in terms of their positions toward the international level. Whereas domestic policymakers are likely to be perceived as biased in favor of international cooperation and are thus evaluated much more skeptically than before the crisis, the opposition, specifically parties pushing a more nationalist and right-wing agenda, should be rewarded by gaining more and more acceptance and votes.
The paper therefore argues 1) that the financial crisis and its effects have made (larger parts of) the national citizenry more skeptical toward international cooperation (nationalist backlash), and 2) that this increase in skepticism leads those citizens to support predominantly parties with a more nationalist and right-wing agenda. Both parts of the argument will be tested quantitatively by drawing on current data from self-administered surveys taken in Hungary, Slovakia, and Poland.
