Thesis Title:
PRIDE AND PREJUDICE? The Fluctuating Boundaries of Inclusion across the European Right – A Mixed Methods Analysis
Abstract:
Electoral success of populist radical right (PRR) parties across Europe has ushered in a new era of not just political volatility, but ideological blurring – with the traditional boundaries of party ideology and voting behaviour being re-written. My thesis takes a quantitative-led mixed-methods approach in analysing the interplay of homosexuality and nativism across both political parties and public opinion across Europe. Separating many PRR parties from traditional far-right groups is their strategy of adopting certain progressive positions into their largely nativist platforms. My thesis aims to analyse this phenomenon through the PRR’s adoption of seemingly progressive positions on homosexuality through including homosexual natives into what they deem the ‘acceptable’ population.
Conceptualising the phenomenon as homonativism, I theorise this adoption due to both presenting an opportunity to exploit sexual-liberal societal values to defend against the alleged threat of non-native peoples, as well as providing a strategy to appeal to the wider electorate by distancing themselves from traditional far-right extremists. The analysis extends to the centre-moderate right-wing to explore how party competition and ideological shift may lead to relatively centrist parties adopting similar positions. A party’s ideological platform at least partially depends on their success in appealing to the electorate. Therefore, the second phase of this thesis analyses the extent to which nativist and sexual-liberal attitudes manifest themselves across populations, how large this proportion may be, and identify the characteristics of ‘the potentially homonativist voter’. A range of quantitative methods will identify homonativism at both the party and public levels, map their development across time and place, and predict who (or where) is more likely to develop homonativist positions. The findings are then supplemented qualitatively with comparative case study analyses.
Primary Supervisor:
Dr. Isabelle Hertner
Social Media:
LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/jesse-grainger-745846180/
Publications:
Grainger, J. (2024) Why Israeli-palestinian tensions in the UK matter for ReformUK, Europinion. Available at: https://www.europinion.uk/post/why-israeli-palestinian-tensions-in-the-uk-matter-for-reformuk
Grainger, J. (2024) An emerging homo-nativist electorate?, British Politics and Policy at LSE. Available at: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/an-emerging-homo-nativist-electorate/
Grainger, J. (2024) ‘Coming In: Sexual Politics and EU Accession in Serbia – Koen Slootmaeckers’, Europe-Asia Studies, 76(5), pp. 813–814. doi:10.1080/09668136.2024.2339737