Those were the what? Contents of nostalgia, relative deprivation and radical right support

Abstract

Recent research suggests that emotions are a central motivation for radical right voting. One emotion that has gained particular interest is nostalgia: Radical right politicians use nostalgic rhetoric, and feeling nostalgic is associated with radical right support. However, while nostalgia is widely and frequently experienced, previous work differentiates personal contents of nostalgia (e.g., childhood) from group-based contents (e.g., traditions) and suggests that only the latter is related to the radical right. But why does nostalgia, and specifically its group-based content, matter? In the present paper, I argue that nostalgia evokes implicit comparisons between the past and the present. Using relative deprivation theory, I posit that group-based nostalgia makes people subjectively evaluate society's present as worse than its past. In turn, this temporal group-based relative deprivation is associated with attempts to restore the past through radical right voting. Personal nostalgia, instead, does not evoke equivalent experiences of personal relative deprivation and is, therefore, unrelated to radical right support. In preregistered analyses of representative panel data from the Netherlands, I show that group-based nostalgia is more consistently related to radical right support than personal nostalgia. In subsequent exploratory analyses, I test the relative deprivation argument and find that group-based relative deprivation does indeed mediate the relationship between group-based nostalgia and radical right voting: People who long for the group-based past are more likely to feel dissatisfied with the government and, in turn, consider voting for the radical right. In studying this mechanism, I connect recent work on emotional and relative deprivation explanations to radical right voting.