Research on European politics suggests that far-right parties and their partisan constituencies are disliked much more intensely than other political parties and partisan bases. However, our understanding of the micro-foundations underlying this phenomenon is incomplete. Drawing on empirical research on electoral support for radical right parties as owners of immigration issues and on studies concerning these parties’ stigmatization, this paper centers on two explanations at voter level, namely issue preferences and democratic attitudes, that are likely to underpin voters’ affective evaluations of this party family. It argues that the two factors have an asymmetric impact: while voters’ immigration preferences are expected to shape both (a) affinity toward far-right parties among supporters and (b) antipathy toward such parties among non-supporters, (liberal) democratic beliefs should be more strongly related to the latter. The empirical strategy employed to test these expectations is two-fold. Analyses of cross-sectional data for twelve elections in ten Western European countries from module 5 of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES), complemented by individual-level panel data from the British Election Study Internet Panel (covering six waves fielded between November 2016 and November 2019), provide support for the hypotheses. Radical right parties appear therefore to be rejected for both their policy positions and perceived illiberal behaviour, whereas sympathy toward these parties is mostly rooted in policy proximity. These findings highlight the issue-specific and democratic norm underpinnings of public support for this party family, and of affective polarization more broadly, in Western European democracies.
