The talk examines which voter grievances electorally successful populist radical right parties in Western Europe most effectively mobilized using data collected in the first immigration module of the European Social Survey in 2002/3. Several hypotheses are discussed under the headlines, "grievances over the economy", "grievances over the political system", and "grievances over immigration". The analysis showed that voters' grievances over immigration was both (a) the only concern that all successful populist radical right parties consistently mobilized in all the detailed country-by-country analyses; and (b) the variable with the most explanatory power when pooling the data across countries in a model of the populist radical right vote. The present talk uses data from the new immigration module in the ESS collected in 2015/16 to examine whether the conclusions of the earlier study still hold. On the one hand, there are reasons to believe that this would be the case, but, on the other hand, fundamental changes have taken place in European politics between 2003 and 2015.
