ABSTRACT
This chapter explains the differences in extreme right-wing voting between all Western-European countries from a multi-disciplinary and multi-level perspective. The hypotheses are tested using data from 16 Western-European countries in the 1990s. The hypothesis would be that people with stronger anti-immigrant attitudes and people who are more dissatisfied with democracy are more likely to vote for extreme right-wing parties in countries where extreme right-wing have more favourable party characteristics. The Austrian FPO, the Flemish Vlaams Blok, the French Front National, the Italian Lega Nord and the Norwegian Progress Party do possess such favourable characteristics, which increase the likelihood of voting for these parties. To test the hypotheses multi-level analysis is used. This technique allows to test individual characteristics and contextual characteristics simultaneously, and gives information on the variance in extreme right-wing voting at the contextual level. Between countries, individual level effects of education and socio-political attitudes turned out to vary.
