Anti-system politics, welfare states, and the new age divide

Our Professor of Comparative Politics Jonathan Hopkin has co-authored a new paper with Andrew McNeil for the Europe in Question Discussion Paper Series at the European Institute, which proposes an explanation of variations in anti-system voting in European democracies.

Abstract

"This paper tests the hypothesis that younger voters are the main constituent of anti-system parties, conditional on the type of welfare regime of the society they live in. We show that when economic resources and welfare policy are skewed toward insiders and older generations, the young are more likely than the old to vote for antisystem parties. Hopkin (2020) argues that younger voters on average have more postmaterialist values and therefore tend to support anti-system left parties over the right. However, in some countries large numbers of younger voters vote for the anti-system right. In Southern Europe, we find that younger voters, across all levels of education, are the most likely to support anti-system left parties. In social democratic and continental welfare regimes, younger people with low educational attainment are most likely to vote for the anti-system right.|