Radical Right Voters and Liberal Democracy: democrats, authoritarians, or somewhere in between?

Do populist radical right parties pose a threat to democracy? To date this question has been addressed via supply-side studies that examine whether the presence of a populist party affects core dimensions of a liberal democracy (Huber and Schimpf 2016). Other demand-side studies focus on populist attitudes and support for core dimensions of democracy (Kaltwasser and Van Hauwaert 2020; Zaslove et al. 2021). In this paper, we employ a different strategy. We are interested in whether individuals who support populist radical right parties are more or less supportive of liberal democracy. Focusing on vote choice allows us to assess the democratic values of individuals who actually support populist radical right parties and moves us away from a focus on attitudes which may or may not be essential in determining vote choice. The paper is interested in three questions: first, do supporters of populist radical right parties demonstrate less support for liberal democracy? Second, do these voters demonstrate support for non-democratic regimes? And, third, do populist radical right supporters demonstrate consistent values vis-a-vis support for liberal democracy and other regime types? Our data set contains a unique bundle of questions: items that measure support for liberal democracy; democratic backsliding; and support for authoritarian regimes respectively. These questions are fielded in: Germany, the United Kingdom, Spain and Poland. All four countries contain a populist radical right party, albeit with different histories. Moreover, these four countries constitute a collection of established and newer democracies, while they also include countries with different democratic and authoritarian histories. This unique collection of countries allows us to control for, but also to test for the influence of historical legacies on populist radical right support for liberal democracy.