Yesterday, all our troubles seemed so far away—(Re)conceptualizing nostalgic deprivation as a predictor for radical‐right support
2025-07-11
The return to “old glories” is one of the main promises of radical‐right parties, picking up on widespread longings for the collective past. Many people argue that radical‐right support is motivated by Relative Deprivation, that is, the perception of being worse off than others. We suggest that radical‐right support is more likely to reflect Nostalgic Deprivation —the perception of an unfair decline in the ingroup's status compared to the past. However, psychological theorizing is rare, and previous studies differ in their conceptualization and measurement. We seek to fill this gap by introducing and validating a standardized measure of nostalgic deprivation. Based on a literature review, we start with a concise definition and conceptualization of nostalgic deprivation. We developed a reliable nine‐item self‐report scale that captures nostalgic deprivation indicated by (a) a temporal disadvantage comparison, (b) injustice appraisal, and (c) collective anger and nostalgia ( N = 398). We estimated the reliability and validity using empirical indicators of demographics, right‐wing populist attitudes, voting and personality measures in German ( N = 1206) and US‐quota samples ( N = 490). Our data shed light on the great predictive power of nostalgic deprivation for radical‐right support surpassing established measures of relative deprivation and nostalgia.