Radical Right Voters Often Embrace Franco — Detachment Not Required

📌 What This Study Asks

Do radical right parties need to distance themselves from past right-wing authoritarian regimes to win votes? This study probes the reputational cost, if any, of association with anti-democratic regimes, and the paper confronts challenges that make that cost hard to observe.

🔍 Why This Question Is Hard

Observational research struggles to estimate the electoral penalty of authoritarian associations because of two problems:

• social desirability biases that suppress honest responses about support for authoritarian figures, and
• the rhetorical ambiguity of party elites that can mask true voter preferences.

These obstacles require experimental leverage to reveal latent attitudes.

📊 A Preregistered Endorsement Experiment With Spanish Radical Right Voters

A well-powered, preregistered endorsement experiment is used to test support for Franco’s regime and the effect of his historical legacy among voters of a newly established radical right party in Spain. The design measures responses to endorsements tied to Francoism while accounting for other ideological traits such as xenophobia and anti-feminism (i.e., estimates are net of those traits).

💡 Key Findings

• Strong sympathies for the Franco regime are common among radical right voters in the sample.
• Positive attitudes toward Francoism are the principal distinguishing feature between radical right electorates and mainstream right electorates.
• These patterns persist even when controlling for xenophobia and anti-feminism, indicating that Francoist sympathy is not reducible to those other attitudes.

⚖️ What It Means

The results suggest that a clean break from past authoritarian regimes is not a necessary condition for the electoral success of newer radical right parties. In other words, detachment from historical authoritarian legacies is not required for these electorates to coalesce and support a radical right party.