The Shadow Side of Rootedness: How Geographic Stability Across Generations Increases Radical-Right Attitudes

Abstract: 

Why do some people hold radical-right attitudes while others don’t? Extending the existing literature, we argue that geographic immobility across generations (“rootedness”) generates social milieus that foster radical-right attitudes such as authoritarianism, chauvinism, ethnic nationalism, and populism. This argument builds on insights from social psychology and the ethnography of nationalism suggesting that individuals take their own milieu as typical for the nation as a whole. Rooted individuals are exposed to the life-long authority of their parents or even grandparents, cultivating authoritarian views. They develop a shared pride in their local community, leading to chauvinism when projected to the national level. Their networks contain many family members and lifelong friends, making ethnic nationalism plausible. These networks are territorially confined and densely clustered, lending themselves to populist views of a unified “people.” We test these theoretical claims using original survey data from 22 countries around the world. In line with predictions, we find that rooted individuals are much more likely to hold all four radical-right attitudes. This positive relationship between rootedness and radical-right attitudes holds across social classes as well as rural and urban communities, and rootedness is fairly evenly distributed across these divides. Our paper contributes to the existing literature by offering a multi-generational perspective on the genesis of radical-right attitudes, as well a new focus on the role of geographic (im)mobility and the social milieus it generates.