This study explores how interactions between sociodemographic factors— rural/urban residence, gender, native/non-native background, class, education, age, and income—shape radical right support, using 56,311 observations from the Swedish SOM Survey (2015-2021). It contributes to political sociology by demonstrating that radical right support is not only influenced by individual traits but also by their interactions. Age emerges as a key moderating factor, with educational and rural-urban political divides being much exacerbated among younger generations. A replication with the European Social Survey shows that these patterns extend to other West European countries. The findings imply a generational political realignment in that younger groups exhibit stronger links between their social position and radical right support, likely because they underwent political socialization in an era of digitalization, heightened inequalities, and segregation, amplifying cultural distances between social groups. The study further explores heterogeneity with mediation models to examine different pathways to radical right support across sociodemographic groups. The findings reveal some divergent pathways: cultural threat strongly mediates support among particularly low-educated individuals, while crime concerns explain support among older individuals. Conversely, welfare concerns drive support evenly across the electorate, challenging prevailing notions that economic concerns disproportionally drive the economically disadvantaged toward the radical right.

This study uses three different surveys to investigate the links between various educational fields, radical right support, and political opinions. Logit regressions and KHB mediation analysis of 41,770 observations from the Swedish SOM survey (2011–2019) reveal that graduates from technical and agricultural fields are approximately twice as likely to support the radical right as graduates from sociocultural fields. Fields such as natural sciences, business, and health demonstrate medium to medium-high support. These differences are partially mediated by horizontal, but not vertical, labor market allocation. Replication using the European Social Survey (ESS) indicates that these patterns are generalizable to Western, but not Eastern, Europe. Additional analyses show that radical right support and refugee intake skepticism decrease with years spent in sociocultural, but not technical, fields in upper-secondary school. Moreover, panel data from the Swedish Level of Living Survey (LNU) show that progressive attitude shifts occur predominantly following education in sociocultural fields.

The Oesch class schema is widely regarded as the leading framework for studying class politics, yet there is a lack of critical evaluations of its theoretical foundations. While studies continuously confirm that sociocultural professionals tend to align with culturally libertarian ideologies, production workers with culturally authoritarian ideologies, and managers and administrative professionals with economic right-leaning ideologies, the mechanisms behind these empirical patterns remain a black box. This study addresses this research gap using individual-level data from the Swedish Level of Living Survey (LNU) from 2010 and 2021 to evaluate the schema’s theoretical assumptions empirically. Specifically, it investigates how vertical (hierarchical) positions and horizontally distinguished work tasks—interpersonal, technical object-oriented, and organizational/managerial—are linked to cultural and economic political attitudes. The study finds consistent support for the link between object-oriented tasks and culturally authoritarian values, and the authoritarian leaning among production workers is partially mediated by their object-oriented work. However, several theoretical foundations of the Oesch class schema warrant reconsideration; interpersonal tasks show no link to culturally libertarian values, and panel data analysis reveals that increased managerial tasks are associated with becoming more favorable toward redistribution. Given the lack of support for several key elements of the Oesch schema, this study suggests revising the schema based on educational level and field requirements. The most crucial revision is the separation of health professionals from sociocultural professionals, which proves valuable as health professionals are much more right-leaning and less culturally libertarian than sociocultural professionals, they also differ in other life outcomes such as health and income.