Take the streets or take the parliament? Political participation choices of radical left individuals

Voters across Europe have become increasingly polarized on both ends of the political spectrum in the last decade. While radical right parties were able to mobilize voters on their salient topics, radical left parties were only sporadically successful. In this paper, we analyse why radical left parties fail to benefit from increasing polarization by examining their potential voter base. Radical left individuals should have a lower incentive to participate in elections in order to change the status quo because of their suspicion towards authorities in general and the government more specifically. Instead, they should engage in status-quo-busting grassroots activities to enforce revolutionary, rather than evolutionary, change. Our hypotheses are put to an empirical test by relying on data from the European Social Survey. We include respondents from seventeen Western European countries from five rounds of the European Social Survey. The results have important implications for our understanding of the demand side of the political extremism wave.