Introduction
Following recent elections in Western Europe, one question has dominated many headlines: why have young people turned to the far right? This trend surprised many observers because narratives around younger generations often emphasize their progressiveness on many issues (see, for example, Henley and Sauer, 2023). Indeed, research shows that younger generations have become more progressive on such issues as gender equality and lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans (LGBT) rights (O’Grady, 2023).
Gender features prominently among the reasons for an increase in support for the far right among young voters, which is often interpreted as a backlash among especially young men (see, for example, Chazan, 2024). Progressive changes around gender equality, gender identity and the #MeToo movement have challenged patriarchal structures, gender roles and the status of men in many aspects of society. Far-right parties try to strategically exploit this and directly appeal to young men with a focus on questions of masculinity (Mudde, 2019). I contribute to this debate by addressing two questions empirically: (1) ‘Have we indeed seen increased support for the radical right among young people?’; and (2), ‘If yes, has the increase been stronger among young men?’.
There are several new studies that investigate changing generational patterns of voting behaviour (Haffert and Mitteregger, 2023; Rekker, 2024). Similarly, the gender gap in radical-right voting has received significant scholarly attention (Harteveld et al, 2015; Weeks et al, 2023). This gender update does not aim to make a substantial contribution to explaining differences in voting behaviour; rather, the goal is to establish an empirical pattern that can serve as a puzzle and point of departure for future research and the broader public debate.
To do so, I use novel data from the last wave of the European Election Study (EES), collected in late spring 2024 in all countries participating in the European Parliament elections (Popa et al, 2024). I use the vote recall question for the last national election that exists in every EES (since 1989) to show how age is related to having voted for the radical right in the last national election.
In addition, I analyse how age is related to having the far right in the ‘consideration set’. The logic of consideration sets sees the act of voting as a two-stage process in which voters first select parties that they would potentially vote for into a consideration set and then in a second step pick a party to actually vote for (Oscarsson and Oskarson, 2019). The intuition here is that we can track changes in support for the radical right that may not yet have translated into actual electoral behaviour. If latent support for the far right has increased but young voters nonetheless voted for a different party (or did not vote at all), we would underestimate the increase in support for the far right when only looking at vote choice.
Empirical analysis
Data and operationalization
To diagnose a rightward shift among young voters, we want to know if younger voters today are more likely to vote for the far right than younger voters five or ten years ago. The following results focus on the 2024, 2019 and 2004 waves of the EES. The analysis includes 13 countries and over 80 elections.1
The analysis uses two dependent variables. The first is the vote choice in the last national parliament election. I use a binary variable, with voting for the far right as 1 and all other vote choices as 0. Far-right parties are coded based on the scheme by the PopuList (Rooduijn et al, 2024). As a second dependent variable, I use the inclusion of a far-right party in the consideration set. This variable relies on the propensity to vote (PTV) question in the survey: ‘How likely is it that you would ever vote for party X?’. A respondent is coded as having the radical right in the consideration set if they give the far-right party a 6 or higher on the 0 to 10 scale. If there is more than one far-right party, I use the average of all far-right parties.
The main independent variables are age and gender. Age is coded into four age brackets: 30 and younger, 31–50, 51–65, and 66 and older. Gender is a binary indicator for men and women.
I run logit models with vote choice and consideration sets as the dependent variables. These models include country and wave fixed effects. The result section shows the predicted probabilities based on a triple interaction of age, gender and wave with heteroscedasticity-robust standard errors. As the goal of these regressions is purely descriptive, they do not include any control variables.
Results
Figures 1 and 2 show the predicted probability of voting for the far right and having the far right in the consideration set conditional on age in the 2004, 2019 and 2024 EES waves. Compared to 2004, we see a strong increase in support for the radical right. This increase is consistent across all age groups. Between 2019 and 2024, there is again a significant increase in support for the far right. In 2024, the predicted probability of having voted for the far right in the previous national election is consistently above 0.2 in all age groups. The increase in support is even more remarkable if we look at ‘considering voting’ for the far right.
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Predicted probability of radical-right vote conditional on age
Citation: European Journal of Politics and Gender 2025; 10.1332/25151088Y2024D000000065
Predicted probability of the radical right being in the consideration set conditional on age
Citation: European Journal of Politics and Gender 2025; 10.1332/25151088Y2024D000000065
While we see an increase in far-right support in all age groups, the change between 2019 and 2024 is, indeed, strongest among younger voters. Voters below the age of 30 have seen the largest uptick in the predicted probability of voting for the far right and having such parties in the consideration set. While younger voters in 2019 still supported the far right less than voters between 31 and 65, they are now equally or even more likely to do so.
Is this increase in support for the far right among young voters driven by young men? When we look at voting in Figure 3, we see an increase in support for the far right among both men and women. The increase in voting for the far right among men under 30 is very similar in magnitude to the increase among women under 30: between 2019 and 2024, both young women and young men increased their probability of voting for the far right by about 11 percentage points. However, young women still remain less likely than men overall to vote for the far right in 2024 (22 per cent likely compared to 30 per cent likely, respectively). Further, young men had already become more likely to support the far right than young women in the period between 2004 and 2019.
Predicted probability of radical-right vote conditional on age and gender
Citation: European Journal of Politics and Gender 2025; 10.1332/25151088Y2024D000000065
Comparing older cohorts shows that among the 30+ cohorts, women saw a larger increase relative to men between 2019 and 2024: men between 31 and 50 jumped about seven percentage points in their probability of voting for the far right, whereas women jumped about eleven percentage points; and for those between 51 and 65, men jumped about four percentage points, whereas women jumped about eight percentage points. This means that differences between men and women have become smaller in all age cohorts but the youngest. While men still have a higher predicted probability of voting for the far right in all age groups, the differences between men and women have become statistically indistinguishable from zero for men and women between 31 and 65.
This pattern changes when we look at consideration sets rather than voting in Figure 4. For young men, we see a sharp increase in the predicted probability of having the far right in the consideration set. The predicted probability of the propensity to vote for the far right among men under 30 is now close to 0.6. For men, there now is a nearly linear relationship in which the predicted probability of considering voting for the far right decreases over age groups. While we also see an increase in the propensity to vote for the far right among women, we do not observe the same over-proportional increase among young women. Women under 30 are still less likely to consider voting for the far right than those between 31 and 50.
Predicted probability of having the radical right in the consideration set conditional on age and gender
Citation: European Journal of Politics and Gender 2025; 10.1332/25151088Y2024D000000065
Conclusion
Support for the far right has strongly increased among younger voters. While the increase in voting for the far right between 2019 and 2024 is similar for men and women, young men have seen a much stronger increase in considering voting for the far right. This pattern is striking and indicates that young men have indeed developed a higher affinity for the far right that has not yet translated into vote choice.
One potential explanation is that the gendered backlash is extremely recent and is thus better captured by a prospective PTV question in 2024 than by a retrospective one that refers to elections that could have been several years in the past. However, the broader societal transformations that are usually regarded as the root cause of a backlash among young men did not, of course, only start in the previous year.
Generally, political science research should dedicate more attention to this phenomenon. The gender gap in radical-right voting is well studied, and an increasing number of studies analyse generational patterns in voting behaviour. How these two factors interact should be a fruitful avenue for further research.
For political actors, the massive increase in support for the far right among young people documented in this study should be a wake-up call. As mainstream parties have increasingly adopted positions closer to the far right and have contributed to the normalization of their ideas, it should maybe not surprise us that people socialized in this political environment show higher propensities to vote for the far right. The fact that particularly young men increasingly consider voting for the far right should also encourage more research into the gendered patterns of backlash and the conditions that allow the far right to especially appeal to young men.
Note
The countries are the old EU-15 minus Luxembourg, Ireland and Greece. Due to their different party systems, Flanders and Wallonia are treated as two different ‘countries’.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Conflict of interest
The author declares that there is no conflict of interest.
References
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