ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the relationships between economic egalitarianism, support for the welfare state, and political progressiveness, and focuses on political cultures in which right-authoritarian issues have become highly salient in certain years. The chapter analyses the relationship between economic egalitarianism and supports for the welfare state in Flanders—an instructive case, because its political culture has changed drastically in connection with a number of successive electoral victories by the rightist-populist Vlaams Blok since the 1980s. It focuses on European countries in which rightist-populist parties have also been electorally successful in certain years. The chapter explains whether among the working class economic egalitarianism is less politically progressive than among the middle class. The APS 1996 Survey contains a list of nine items, presumably intended by the data collectors to enable the construction of a "balanced" or "bipolar" one-dimensional measure of economic egalitarianism/conservatism. The prevalence of economic populism among the working class suggests that working-class economic egalitarianism remains strongly particularistic, exclusionary, and self-serving.
