Philip Rathgeb, "How the Radical Right Has Changed Capitalism and Welfare in Europe and the USA" (Oxford UP, 2024)
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Welcome to the new Books Network.

Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of New Books Network. This is your host Morteza Haji Zadeh from Critical Theory Channel. Today I'm speaking with a very special guest about a very timely topic. My guest today is Dr. Philip Rothke. Dr. Philip Rothke is an Associate Professor in Social Policy in the School of Social and Political Science at the University of Edinburgh.

He has recently published a book with Oxford University Press. The book is called How the Radical Right Has Changed Capitalism and Welfare in Europe and the U.S. And the book just came out a few months ago in 2024. Philip, welcome to New Books Network. Thank you.

Thank you very much, Morteza. It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you. As I said in the introduction, it's a very timely topic and I'm sure many people are interested to know more about this. But before talking about the book, I'm interested to know a little about you, your field of expertise, and why you decided to write a book about how the rise of radical right has changed welfare state in Europe. Yeah, thanks, Morteza, for the kind introduction.

So I'm a political scientist by training and my major areas of research are around comparative political economy. So that is the intersection between politics and markets or capitalism and democracy. And I have a special focus on labor relations, labor market policy and the welfare state more generally. Am I right?

My previous research or the research with which I started off as part of my PhD thesis was on labor relations and questions of inequality and precarity. So I want to understand the conditions under which legal actors tackle precarity on the labor market. So that was my first research project in which my PhD thesis was based and the first book I published with Cornell University Press. And within that research,

what I discovered was that there's growing working class support for radical right parties, which historically speaking is rather unusual, at least if you take the 20th century and the late 19th century across the Western countries, in the sense that working class people, blue collar workers with some variation,

predominantly were voting for central left parties and social democratic parties rather than the radical right. And I observed this in my native Austria in particular where I was born and raised, where the radical right freedom party, the FPÖ, reached 50% of the blue-collar votes already in the late 1990s. And that attracted my interest. So I was interested, first of all, how

These parties would react to their changing electorates. How would they respond to the material demands, the economic demands of these voters? I mean, do they deliver for them? That was my kind of first interest that attracted me towards this topic.

And the second one was more of a bit of an anecdote. So I remember back in the mid 2010s, there was this discussion about TTIP. So the transatlantic trade partnership between the United States and the European Union. And the center left party, social democratic parties, they were kind of conflicted. I mean, they had cold feet about a few features of it.

But overall, with some concessions and compromise, they came around to support it. Whereas Donald Trump came to power and he pulled out of free trade deals and was most explicit in his rejection of free trade. And he connected it with a protectionist promise, which was to say that free trade, it's bad for society.

for manufacturing workers in our country. And that's why we're no longer in for this. At that point, I mean, this just felt like something is going terribly wrong in a way, in the sense that if the radical right assumes that protectionist position, when center-left parties assume

were still influenced by the legacy of a kind of market conforming, third way, more neoliberal minded agenda. There I could see that this just I found intriguing.

In the sense that, of course, there was always protests against free trades. We remember the Battle of Seattle against the World Trade Organization, all of that. But these were rather fringe movements on the left, the kind of alter globalization movement. Whereas center-left parties such as the Democrats under Bill Clinton, Tony Blair under Labour,

I mean, they compared globalization with the weather, right? Saying you can't change the weather, you can't change globalization. It's a fact. It's something you have to deal with. And then Trump was the one who more or less put an end to it, now with tariffs increasingly on top. So all of this taken together led me to the assumption that

Immigration is important, but the economy is very central to the agenda of the radical right as well. And this led me eventually to write that book. This was a great, let's say, set up to this interview and the questions that I have. And you have sort of touched upon some of the issues I wanted to raise, which was this shift to more right-wing or even authoritarian governments in Europe today.

not in every country in Europe, but in some countries. But to me, a few months ago when there was this election in Europe, it was surprising that even the Scandinavian countries, which were economically better off than England or America, also saw a shift to the right-wing politicians. Why do you think this has happened?

You mentioned immigration, you mentioned economy, but what is the underlying reason that more and more people are gravitating towards governments that may not even, they speak a populist language, but they may not even look after their constituent? So from a comparative standpoint, we could address this question by...

by saying, okay, there is variation across countries, and this is what you touched upon, saying that there is differences between the US, England on the one hand, with rather problems of regional decline with left-behind regions on the one hand, and Scandinavia, for example, on the other, where these problems are less pronounced. However, even despite these cross-national differences,

all these countries were on a similar historical trajectory. And what I mean by that is that all countries were more or less embedded from the 80s, but especially 1990s onwards on a neoliberal paradigm. What I mean by that is a market-conforming consensus that after the fall of communism, especially communism,

what you have to do in order to reinvigorate the economy is to ensure a liberalization of markets and thereby increase cost competitiveness, in particular in a situation of competitive pressures. So what that meant was that the economy was depoliticized.

Right? So, and this is something we can observe as you as you brought up this comparison from from Scandinavia to the United States in the sense that social democratic parties center left parties in particular, they bought into that market conforming consensus. And therefore there was less conflict on the economy. I remember an example again from from my native Austria, where in the 1990s there was a mostarity period

And one slogan of the Social Democratic Party was, so I say it in German, sparen aber sozial, which means austerity, but in a social manner, which gives you a sense of how much the whole debate has shifted to the right on the economy.

So, and in that context, I think that context paved the way for the radical right in a sense that they could politicize issues where there is conflict, right? So if you depoliticize the economy, you create opportunities for the radical right to politicize issues on which they strive.

and that is immigration, asylum, gender, the whole culture war. So that's one thing. So the salience of their topics increased, which then improved their competitive position. And this we can observe across countries because

virtually all Western countries now have a significant radical right party with the exception of Ireland, Ireland perhaps, although there things are changing as well quite quickly. And the second outcome of this acceptance of austerity was the question of how do you distribute austerity, right? So that notion of permanent austerity

promoted that question. And the radical right had a coherent answer, which is to say that it's immigrants, it's ethnic minorities, they should take the price of austerity by cutting their benefits, for example, via a policy that is called welfare chauvinism, which means

a policy where parties legislate selective cutbacks in the welfare entitlements of immigrants.

At the same time, so that's the kind of supply side, as we call it in political science, so that's the kind of story of how party competition evolved. At the same time, on the demand side, if we think about how the decades of socio-economic transformation ranging from deindustrialization

globalization, technological change. I mean, all of this came with... And then, of course, the way this was handled in a kind of more neoliberal approach, all of this contributed, of course, to middle-class anxieties. And the radical right doesn't win among those who have fallen, right? So they're not particularly strong among the poor, among the precarious, but rather among those who...

who have a fear of falling, right? So that kind of fear of falling, those people who have something to lose. So they are homeowners, but maybe not homeowners in the most striving areas. They used to have a decent job, but in the wake of the industrialization, especially manufacturing, that's increasingly being called into question. Recently also passed with the green transition. And there is clear evidence

anxieties, but also real hardship that we shouldn't ignore. So I think these are my kinds of the way I make sense of the literature that on the one hand, the supply side has changed, the neoliberal consensus, which was good for the radical right to mobilize on their issues. And at the same time, on the demand side, where it comes to voters, status anxieties and

and partly also hardship, which helps us understand why these parties have been so strong in regions that have experienced decline. I mean, we can mention the Rust Belt, of course, in the United States, the North of England, the so-called Red Wall, or the North of France, or the East of Germany.

And that's why among lower educated voters, which arguably face greater pressures from globalization, they were the ones that have been most likely to vote for these parties. And in your book, you have some terminology and some concept that I'd like you to elaborate on. You argue that

The radical rights policies create a binary of economic winners and losers. And then you're going to talk about radical rights, selective status protection. Can you talk about who are these winners and losers of radical rights policies? And then as a result of that, what is that selective status protection that they put in place in terms of welfare programs?

Yes. So first of all, that distinction between winners and losers is also a way of putting a critical light on the populist narrative that these parties represent, quote unquote, the people, which would suggest that everyone benefits, right? So that there are no winners and losers, at least the way they define the people, which excludes immigrants, of course.

But as a political economist, as a welfare state researcher, I'm mindful of the distributive implications of economic policies. And if you're in power and it's perfectly legitimate, you make distributive choices that are structured along class, race and gender. And that's why I was interested.

I was focusing on that distinction and I tried to, for the sake of the argument, make that kind of rigid distinction between winners and losers, even though in reality things are more complicated. But when it comes to the winners and the concept of selective status protection I introduce in the book, it basically refers to a selective protectionist promise

legislated especially by a social policy and welfare state reform for a group of workers that used to be the dominant social groups in the 20th century. So I hereby refer to so-called labor market insiders. So that's a term that originated from labor economics, but it's also in political science quite prominent these days.

So it means workers, employees with relatively long and uninterrupted employment biographies. So that the people in the core workforce are also male breadwinners. And what can you do for these groups of voters in particular?

Well, you can introduce policies, social policies and protections that require a long contribution record, a long employment record. For example, take early retirement. So that's something European radical right parties have been advocating for if you work for 40 years

you are considered hardworking and thanks to your hard work in the interest of the country, you should be rewarded with generous and early retirement. At the same time, in terms of family policy, you can reinvigorate more traditional family policy settlement by expanding child benefits,

and maternity leave without expanding public childcare or increasing the role of men in parental leave regulations, which also buttresses and strengthens the position of kind of male breadwinners, something we can observe in Central and Eastern Europe, in particular in Hungary and Poland, something that the Austrian Freedom Party demanded as well, partly the AFD in Germany as well.

So a kind of conservative, pro-natalist family policy that inevitably benefits the one who is the dominant breadwinner more, which in practice means men via tax cuts for the person in the household earning more money and for child benefits on the assumption that families take over care, and that in practice means women.

So that's re-traditionalization of gender, gender relations is part of that selective status protection for predominantly male native co-workers that are kind of an electoral target group of that sort of social policy. The losers by contrast,

are obviously immigrants and ethnic minorities via a policy of welfare chauvinism I was just referring to, especially dominant in Western Europe, where you have generous welfare states and therefore the nativist, the nationalist impulse is very much translated into that kind of social policy welfare chauvinism. At the same time,

their authoritarian instinct, which is to say that you have to behave and if you don't behave, you should be punished. And that affects the unemployed and the poor in particular. So we see cutbacks in social assistance, minimum income schemes, as well as unemployment benefits systems when these parties are in power.

And finally, another loser I would mention that regard are working women. Because since late 20th century, we've seen a trend towards greater work family reconciliation policies, at least they attempt to go in that direction by expanding the public provision of childcare and thereby create more gender equality on the labor market.

And that's something that either stagnates under radical right parties or is outright rejected by a more conservative family policy, which is also not in the interest of working women.

So you see how these parties divide things up and that's why the status protection I was referring to is selective in nature because it targets only a specific group of workers, not working people more generally. And that has the potential to basically unleash wage and social dumping because if you

promote precarious working conditions for the unemployed, for the poor, for ethnic minorities, for immigrants, you put pressure on prevailing wage levels, on prevailing collective bargaining arrangements, because they put wage pressure and social pressure on those in more stable employment relationships. So that's kind of the

the weak link, the contradiction that selective status protection is because if you don't, without intraclass solidarity, it's hard to improve the conditions for anyone within the labor market. So that's why I was emphasizing that selective nature of protectionism.

At the same time, so that's one side, the labor side, if you will, and within capital, that's something I haven't looked at in such great detail. It's something I

I'm curious to do in future research, but what I did find in the Hungarian case and the Polish case as well, and drawing on case study research, we've looked at that in greater detail, is that the domestic capital and the domestic bourgeoisie, as Viktor Orbán called it, was also an important constituency for them relative to foreign capital, right, in the sense that

Orban said he wants to establish a domestic bourgeoisie so that Hungary is no longer that reliant on foreign capital. And you do that by a policy of economic nationalism that discriminates against foreign capital via taxes and regulatory constraints, and thereby building up a loyal base

towards his regime. So that's the capital side and arguably something that in the American context, I mean, we've had the inauguration of Trump this week. In the American context is right now, arguably even more overt that linkages between the radical right and capital factions.

We will get to talk about that in a little while, maybe towards the end of the interview. It was quite interesting to me when you were talking about these selective, let's say, groups of people who might benefit from these policies you had, mainly white working men rather than women, right?

And that's one of the before I have another question to ask on that, but maybe before that, I should ask about maybe I should take a step back, talk about 1980s or before 1980s, before the rise of neoliberalism. There were, of course, radical right parties in 1970s or 80s.

And what was their policy towards, for example, the Keynesian economic policies or the idea of class back then before the rise of neoliberalism? Did they still have those nativist ideas? So at that time in the 1970s, the protagonists were the Framskritspartiet, the progress parties in Norway and Denmark.

And as you say, they emerged in a changing context where the state exerted great levels of state intervention in the economy with high levels of regulation and protection and high levels of influence on macroeconomic management via state-run industries, via collective bargaining arrangement, via corporatist arrangements.

And the radical right was a protagonist against that. So they were the first ardent neoliberals.

in the 70s and 80s. So when it comes to class, I mean, the radical right more generally rejects that because it makes sense for them. They have to neutralize and obscure class divisions as much as possible because that's not their home turf. A class, a conversational class is something the center right and center left are more comfortable with ideologically, whereas

for the radical right, their home turf is nationalism. So they need a nationalist competition in order to, or inside their country is a kind of ethnic competition in order to strive. But at that time, they were kind of neoliberal populists, which may sound like a contradictory term in the sense that

I mean neoliberalism was an elitist idea. It was an elitist project and populism is something that portrays itself to be to mobilize on behalf of the people. But back then neoliberalism had an insurgent quality against that kind of more status, social democratic consensus of the 1970s. So at that time they

The rhetoric was they mobilized on behalf of their people against corrupt elites and corrupt elites exerting too much influence on the economy and they abuse money for their own purposes. And that's why in order to disempower corrupt elites, what we have to do is to retrench tax levels, cut welfare states.

and get rid of collective bargaining and the whole industrial relations arena. And in this way, it's the market that operates, and this way we get rid of public sector waste and public sector corruption. I mean, that's typical among the right, that they see waste and corruption in the public sector, whereas the left more typically sees this in the private sector.

But that was their main narrative at the time. Because Keynesianism did provide the political mainstream with high levels of political influence and power in macroeconomic management. So therefore that ideological turn, that ideological orientation provided them with a power strategic

was with a power strategic advantage to overhaul the Keynesian public policy regime from which they felt excluded, right? Because it sent the left and sent the right parties that were embedded in these institutions and radical right parties were excluded. And that's why that was also a power strategic motive behind that rejection of the Keynesian class compromise. And going back to the previous point that I wanted to ask, which was about

the demographic of the population that gravitates towards radical right. In your book, you focus on that a lot, I guess. You talk about how most of these policies leave out women or most of these policies actually benefit working men, single income earner. I'm interested to know why is it that

working class people, especially male or elderly male, gravitate towards radical rights arguments or policies or rhetoric of nativism and authoritarianism. Yeah, so maybe one point on the gender dynamic. You're right that the policies

which they legislated in power, especially family policies, they benefited male breadwinners more, but we are no longer in that kind of 20th century male breadwinner model. So what they do is, but what they do is they kind of stabilize a kind of one and a half model in the sense that men continue to be in the public sphere in employment and women should combine care work with

with either part-time employment or full-time employment plus longer spells of non-employment in order to assume care work. Just maybe that's useful for context and background. And in terms of your question, why the male demographic? I mean, to begin with, it's quite interesting that that gender gap

in most recent elections has been closing in some cases, or at least is no longer that pronounced as it used to be. But you're right that, especially in 2000s, also till mid 2010s, they were very much male dominated parties in terms of their electorates. And one reason, of course, one reason

context we have to bear in mind is that they had their upsurge among these, among that demographic after decades of working class demobilization. So with local clubs, associations, trade unions, but also churches no longer

playing a socializing function. So there's no longer a left-wing socialization in working class circles. So all of that retreated, leading, for example, a famous political scientist who spoke about a growing void, a growing disconnect that emerged between political elites and voters, and especially working class voters.

So there is still distrust and anger at big business at times, but this is no longer turned into a coherent, progressive ideology. So what this suggests is that the strength of the radical right today, it's not a short-term electoral problem. So with a few kind of electoral moves or strategic moves,

you won't turn back the time, won't win back these voters. So that requires a more long-term hegemonic ambition. Hegemonic ambition in the sense of

trying to change what is considered common sense. So we're really speaking of decades of change and big structural changes that turned that group of voters in that direction.

To be fair also, it's not particularly the elderly as such. I mean, male demographic, yes. The elderly, I mean, there's always cross-national variation, of course. But what is remarkable in recent elections, for example, in the US just now, but also in other European elections, is that they also won among the young in particular. So,

So all these, the kind of conventional wisdoms we had about the kind of typical voter of the radical right voting in kind of rural suburb places with lower levels of education, but kind of a comfortable middle class life.

being male and all these sorts of characteristics, they should be taken with a pinch of salt, especially now that they've grown in size and therefore having attracted a broader electorate that goes beyond that. So, and I guess when coming back to your question about working class people, I think the transformation of the center left is crucial as well. And the decline in turnout

among working class people. In a sense, I mean, so if we go back to the 1990s and 2000s, where social democrats bought into the so-called third way and the more market conforming approach to the economy, their calculations at the time were, first of all, electoral in nature. So they sense that the blue collar working class is in decline. So it's a shrinking electorate.

And there's a growing electorate of middle class voters, of professionals. So in order to attract that growing electorate, we should go towards the center, whatever the center is, right? It's also a kind of...

ambiguous term, but anyway, become more centrist, if you will. And at the same time, alongside this electoral incentive, there was also an economic incentive. So the recognition that globalization creates competitive pressures, so that's the new game in town. And in order to strive in these new global economic contexts,

we have to care about competitiveness as well. And that, I think, opened a void. And when social democratic parties legislated policies that were not in the interest of many of these voters, again, early retirement, pension cuts were arguably the most alienating policies when we think about the kind of welfare state arena.

And in that context, in the 1990s, we see that to some extent in 1990s at least, blue-collar workers increasingly flocked to far-right parties. And that, of course, became stronger over time, but then they gained more voters from the center-left as opposed to the center-right. So today,

there is, at least in proportional representation systems, there's very little movement between center-left and radical-right parties. So that's why there's all this debate about the extent to which the center-right is going to co-opt the radical-right and what that means for liberal democracy, the whole competition around the culture war. But in the 1990s,

The far right indeed, especially in Austria, for example, did gain voters from social democratic party. We have talked about radical right and the kind of demographics that they appeal to. And I guess you kind of corrected that.

me as well, because I was aware, but maybe I didn't put it right in the question, that even the democracy is changing these days. You can't just say white working class men as opposed to non-white working class men and women, but it's quite changing these days. But one question that I have, which I guess is also at the heart of your book, which is about the impact that radical right has on welfare state,

The question that I have is how does radical right manipulate that welfare state in the context to promote their ideas and the impacts also of globalization on welfare services in Europe? It would be great if we could talk about these topics. Yeah, so the key argument of the book here is that although these parties have similar ideologies,

of nativism and authoritarianism, they pursue very different economic and social policies. And the reason why this is, is that, again, although they have similar key constituencies in mind, they operate in vastly different welfare state contexts, and therefore they face different economic challenges, and they have different policy instruments at their disposal to

and pursue their agenda. So you mentioned globalization. So globalization means the cross-border movement of people, of goods, of services, capital. And the welfare state context I've been looking at, they've been challenged by that globalization in different ways. And as a result, we also see different reactions to globalizations economically.

So, for example, in coming back to Sweden and the Scandinavian countries, so these are countries where you have high levels of immigration and high levels of welfare generosity. So here the contentious feature of globalization is immigration and welfare chauvinism, right? So because foreign newcomers, they are entitled to generous benefits and services.

And here the radical right impulse is to be against that, right? To restrict the boundaries of the welfare state or the borders of solidarity, if you will. In the US, by contrast, you also have high levels of immigration, but you don't have a Scandinavian style welfare state. And social policy more generally is somewhat, you know, it's racialized and there's a consensus around low taxes.

So social policy is not really at the disposal of a person like Trump. And welfare chauvinism is not really salient, because foreign newcomers, they are not entitled to as much as they are in Scandinavian countries, for example. But in the US, the contentious feature of globalization is the cross-border movement of goods. In other words, current account deficits. So the US

going back to the 1980s, imports more goods than it exports goods. And that's been an issue that's been haunting US administrations for a long time. And for Trump, this doesn't have anything to do with the huge financial sector and the huge

capital account surpluses the US has, in the sense that the US attracts a lot of capital thanks to Wall Street, thanks to its role in global capital markets. And this also affords high levels of imports, right? So that's the connection. It has to do with the financialized nature of the American political economy. But of course, for Trump, from a kind of nationalist standpoint,

you turn this into an agenda of trade protectionism. So here, the US doesn't discriminate against foreign welfare claimants, at least not as saliently as they do in Scandinavia, but against foreign goods, especially Chinese goods, but also European goods, Mexican goods now. So here, the nationalist response to globalization is trade protectionism.

which we don't see in Scandinavia, Western Europe, where you have current account surpluses, at least when it comes to goods. And in Central and Eastern Europe, by contrast, these countries, they have been highly reliant on foreign capital. There is a book that came out in the early 2000s that was called "Making Capitalism Without Capitalists." And that referred to the post-communist challenge

of Central and Eastern European countries, which was to introduce, well, to make capitalism without having a lot of domestic capital left after the fall of communism. So therefore, in that context, the Washington Consensus, which these countries have adopted, was a way of attracting foreign direct investment. So attracting foreign, that is Western capital,

in order to grow their economies and make the transition to capitalism work. So here the contentious feature is not the cross-border movement of people so much, because you have low levels of immigration to begin with. It's not the cross-border movement of goods as in the US, because you no longer have those trade deficits so much.

But it's the cross-border movement of capital that came with a strong reliance on foreign companies in areas such as banking, pharmaceuticals, energy, retail.

So here the anti-globalist response, anti-globalization response was economic nationalism. Again, by discriminating against foreign capital in the interest of domestic capital. So you see how these parties, first of all, they are all against globalization, but as their countries are affected by globalization in different ways,

they also legislate different policies that are anti-globalization in nature. And this is one way of how I make sense of the variation we can observe, ranging from economic nationalism, welfare chauvinism, and trade protectionism from the radical right. And let's be fair, I mean, these are significant changes. So they do

clash with a lot of the consensus and market conforming consensus we had in these countries. So it's a kind of a nationalist counter movement, um, and a counter movement from the right and not from the left. And of course, this also is still compatible with some neoliberal policies. So, as I said before, in their ideology, they have to obscure and neutralize class divisions. Um,

And therefore, these are also parties of tax cuts, especially in the American case, the Trump, the 2017 tax cut, which predominantly went into the pockets of the top 1%. And that's not a contradiction for them, because their lens, their ideological starting point is more nationalist and nativist in orientation. So they don't think about

vertical inequality between the rich and the poor. It's about competitions between nation states and how you should respond to globalization in order to embrace America first in the American context. Or in Hungary, Viktor Orbán legislated a flat tax as well. And I think that's the kind of intellectual challenge

in a sense that if we want to grasp, if we want to understand what's going on, I think it is perfectly compatible to see that there is a nationalist contestation with protectionist elements against globalization, but at the same time, a radicalization of neoliberalism. You have discussed

demographics, globalization, and economic policies. I'm interested to know how this trend affects gender in terms of right-wing policies there. Can you talk about that aspect, please? Also on that question, I think it's useful to adopt a comparative optic. In the sense that in Scandinavia, for example, in Northern Europe,

you have high levels of gender equality that goes back to 1960s and 70s really. In these countries where you had labor shortages in the kind of booming years of the so-called golden age of the welfare state, like with high growth 60s, 70s, Western European countries more generally needed

to mobilize labor. They needed more working people in order to fill those labor shortages. And in Scandinavia, what they did was to mobilize female labor. So that's why they expanded

public childcare at a relatively early point in time. They introduced individual taxation. They later on enhanced incentives for men to assume a greater role in parental leave regulations. So therefore the dual earner, dual carer model in Scandinavia is relatively well entrenched. It has high levels of support in public opinion.

And this helps us understand why the far right in Northern Europe

is not as heavily invested in gender and family policy as it is in Central and Eastern Europe, for example. So family policy is not so much an issue among far-right parties in Northern Europe when they were in power. And this contrasts with Central and Eastern Europe, where I show in the book survey data on attitudes towards family relations,

where Central and Eastern European respondents have more conservative views on what gender divisions should look like, what the role of women should be in society in terms of employment. And in that context, it is much easier and much more pertinent and expedient for radical right parties

to mobilize on that conservative family policy, which we can see in Poland with very generous child benefit scheme being introduced by PiS in 2015, or in Hungary via the introduction of generous tax credits for households with children, for families, which always have a kind of a conservative undertone in the sense that they steer

families in a more familialist direction when it comes to questions of care. And we see that also in continental Western Europe, to some extent, where these parties are still more aligned with the legacy of the male breadwinner model, which is much more pronounced in continental Europe than in northern Europe.

And the reason is, first of all, you have a Catholic legacy as opposed to the Protestant legacy in Northern Europe. So in the 60s and 70s, whereas Northern European countries mobilized female labor, countries like the German-speaking countries in particular, they mobilized immigrant labor from Turkey, ex-Yugoslavia.

in order to sustain and maintain conservative gender relations. That helps us understand historically why the male breadwinner model has been conserved for a long time, and this creates a different political context for the radical right. And in the United States, you also have relatively conservative attitudes in the populace, judging from nationwide attitudes. There is huge variation across the US, across regions, across states, of course.

But here, of course, Trump was thinking about tax credits and so on. But social policy, again, is not as popular as it is in Western Europe. So that's why, given the kind of restraints you face in the American social policy, family policy expansion was less popular.

prominent and salient compared to Central and Eastern Europe, for example, where family policy expansion was the main social policy expansion we could observe under Viktor Orban and the Kaczynskys in Poland. Dr. Philip Ratke, thank you very much for speaking with us. I must say that

There's a lot in the book that I strongly encourage our listeners to pick up and read. You have a lot of cases, studies, and that provides a beautiful perspective to even compare and contrast not only among different European countries, but also between Europe and America. I do like to thank you again for taking the time to speak with us on New Books Network, the book we just discussed.

was How Radical Right Has Changed Capitalism and Welfare in Europe and the U.S., published by Oxford University Press. Thank you very much for your time. Thanks for having me, Morteza. It's been a pleasure.