Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Extremist Support Across Generational Lines Based On Post-Communist Developments: A Critique Of Post-Materialism, Reese Zavala

Governance: The Political Science Journal at UNLV

The rise of extremism in Europe is a growing concern, as far-right parties are entering parliament with unprecedented seat-shares, and some are even taking government. It has been established that the older generation is more likely to vote for either extreme and that Eastern Europeans are generally more likely to vote for the extreme, however this is an interesting phenomenon. Why are older people, with experience in a communist regime, so much more likely to support both the far-right and the far-left? The dominating theory explaining this is Inglehart's theory of post-materialism, and even though it has been updated in …