The education gap over immigration and socioeconomic security.

Worries about polarization are on the rise. In today's Europe, one of the most manifest gaps is the education divide over immigration. Where lower educated citizens tend to be negative about immigration, higher educated individuals are generally positive. Yet the magnitude of this education divide strongly differs between countries. What explains these differences? I theorize that when the levels of socioeconomic security are high, in particular less well educated citizens will be more likely to focus on issues with a strong cultural component, like immigration, and therefore hold more radical opinions. As a result, existing divides will be more pronounced. Analyzing 23 countries between 2002 and 2018, I show that social welfare spending fuels the education divide over immigration. I demonstrate that, indeed, it does so by affecting the immigration attitudes of the less well educated-not those of the better educated.

Radical distinction: Support for radical left and radical right parties in Europe.

Support for radical parties on both the left and right is on the rise, fueling intuition that both radicalisms have similar underpinnings. Indeed, existing studies show that radical left and right voters have overlapping positions and preferences. In this article, however, we focus on the differences in the voting bases of such parties. We show that radical left and right voters have sharply diverging ideological profiles. When it comes to the historical traditions of the 'left' and 'right', these voters differ radically from each other. Both groups express the traditions associated with their mainstream counterparts-particularly with respect to (non-)egalitarian, (non-)altruistic, and (anti-)cosmopolitan values. Such differences also explain why radical left voters tend to be more, not less, educated than mainstream or radical right voters.