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‘Left behind’ people, or places? The role of local economies in perceived community representation

August 2019
Electoral Studies 60(1):102046

DOI:10.1016/j.electstud.2019.04.010

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Modern economics attributes importance to spatial inequality: yet in studying discontent with politics, existing research has mostly neglected local contexts and attitudes people hold about them. I use British Election Study data to investigate the factors leading people to believe their community is ignored by the political process. Firstly, real economic contexts play a role, since residents of low-income communities tend to take more negative views about how well their community is represented. Secondly, negative perceptions of the local economy are associated with more negative views of community representation, whereas equivalent ‘egotropic’ measures of people's personal economic situation have no such effect. Thirdly, I observe a ‘grievance’ effect wherein people are particularly negative about community representation when they believe that the national economy is more successful than that of one's local community.

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Electoral Studies

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/electstud

‘Left behind’people, or places? The role of local economies in perceived

community representation

Lawrence McKay

Department of Politics, School of Social Sciences, Arthur Lewis Building, University of Manchester, Manchester, M13 9PL, UK

ARTICLE INFO

Keywords:

Local economy

Left behind

Community

Political representation

Political discontent

ABSTRACT

Modern economics attributes importance to spatial inequality: yet in studying discontent with politics, existing

research has mostly neglected local contexts and attitudes people hold about them. I use British Election Study

data to investigate the factors leading people to believe their community is ignored by the political process.

Firstly, real economic contexts play a role, since residents of low-income communities tend to take more negative

views about how well their community is represented. Secondly, negative perceptions of the local economy are

associated with more negative views of community representation, whereas equivalent ‘egotropic’measures of

people's personal economic situation have no such eﬀect. Thirdly, I observe a ‘grievance’eﬀect wherein people

are particularly negative about community representation when they believe that the national economy is more

successful than that of one's local community.

1. Introduction

Since the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom, the notion of political

discontent reﬂecting geographic divisions has found a degree of favour

within the discipline of political science. Coyle and Ford (2017, p. 67),

in their account of Brexit, argue that political ‘alienation’has become

entrenched in ‘left behind’areas since the 1980s, due to the fraying of

the ‘economic and social fabric’and the failure of successive govern-

ments to reverse this decline. Speciﬁcally, they argue for ‘the devolved

nations and England outside of the southeast’as being the locus of

discontent –identifying regional divisions as the wellspring of political

anger. However, while this paper argues that this perspective has real

value, the geographic account as it exists at present requires further

explanation, examination and reﬁnement.

The sole existing test of this thesis has been conducted by Jennings

et al (2016). They looked at two types of area, ‘cosmopolitan’and

‘backwater’, which they deﬁned as having diﬀerent levels of ‘access’to

high-skilled jobs and ‘connectedness’to the global economy. Looking at

ﬁfty Parliamentary constituencies for each, they found that ‘back-

waters’were ‘more inward-looking, illiberal, negative about the EU and

immigration, nostalgic and more English in their identity’(p. 372).

However, such diﬀerences did not extend to ‘expressions of anti-poli-

tical sentiment’: from distrust in MPs and politicians, to dissatisfaction

with UK democracy, ‘both sets of populations look remarkably similar

to the average voter’(p. 376). This leads them to reject the idea that

local economies currently aﬀect political discontent, although they do

not shut the door entirely, emphasising instead that poor areas are

nonetheless fertile for the ‘growth and spread of political disaﬀection’

(p.380).

This paper re-examines the fundamental question posed by Jennings

and Stoker. It does so in three ways. Firstly, there is reason to believe

that a more discriminating analysis, based on much smaller geographic

areas, may be required to properly identify the eﬀects of economic

context. A large geographic unit such as the constituency is not the

‘context’that most people see in their day-to-day lives. Research on

economic inequalities in the United Kingdom (e.g. Dorling and

Pritchard, 2010) has emphasised the spatially concentrated nature of

disadvantage, such that the economic context of one's ‘community’may

be very diﬀerent to that of one's constituency or region. Equally, nor is

it likely to be the ‘context’they consider meaningful to themselves.

Wong et al. (2018) show that the self-deﬁned community tends to de-

note people's neighbourhoods, and the people and places they see most

frequently: consequently, its physical size is often quite small. Secondly,

the kind of attitudes which Jennings and Stoker expect to vary spatially

may in fact be ill-suited to picking up real variations in underlying

sentiment: attitudes that are more speciﬁcally about how the local

community is represented are more likely candidates. Finally, the ex-

isting analysis is subject to the typical problems of ecological inference:

properly analysing the contextual eﬀect of local economies is of real

importance.

Drawing on an innovative method of gathering public perceptions

related to the local community embedded in a large UK-based public

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.electstud.2019.04.010

Received 5 November 2018; Received in revised form 23 April 2019; Accepted 25 April 2019

E-mail address: lawrence.mckay@manchester.ac.uk.

Electoral Studies 60 (2019) 102046

Available online 06 June 2019

(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/BY/4.0/).

opinion survey, and integrating this with oﬃcial small area economic

data, this article provides empirical evidence of the relevance of the

local, and proposes how these relationships should be conceptually

understood. It innovates in using the local community as an analytical

frame to study discontent and its causes: thus, taking up the challenge

put to the discipline by Mutz and Mondak (1997, p. 302) that we should

study how people relate to the ‘countless subnational collectives’be-

tween the individual and national. It does so both with reference to the

attitude put under the microscope, ‘perceived community representa-

tion’, and in terms of the causal theories proposed. This article ﬁnds

evidence for three distinct mechanisms driving perceived community

representation, demonstrating not just that context (real or perceived)

matters but how it matters.

Speciﬁcally, these are as follows. Firstly, real economic contexts

may also hold a degree of importance, since living in a low-income

community is associated with more negative views of ‘community re-

presentation’. Secondly, I ﬁnd evidence for a basic sociotropic dynamic

at community-level: negative perceptions of the local economy are as-

sociated with more negative views of ‘community representation’.

Finally, I ﬁnd negative views of ‘community representation’are asso-

ciated with ‘grievance’that one's community is perceived to be facing

worse economic conditions compared to the country at large.

2. Capturing the local in representation perceptions: introducing

‘community representation’

In order to approximate the theoretical construct at hand, I use a

dependent variable quite diﬀerent from those used in the literature

relating to political discontent. The stalwarts of the discipline (external

eﬃcacy, institutional trust, democratic satisfaction and so on) are

poorly matched to the task. A central question in this area is distin-

guishing how people view diﬀerent political ‘subjects’: government

versus regime; parliament versus parties (Easton, 1975;Klingemann,

1999;Dalton, 2004;Esaiasson et al., 2015). However, scholars have

shown more limited interest in how people assess the ‘relational ele-

ment between the entity that represents and the entity that is re-

presented’(Castiglione, 2006, p.845). In order to make sense of public

attitudes to their representation, research must address how said atti-

tudes depend on what is presented as the ‘objects’:i.e., the represented

group. However, this is a component of question design that has been

given only perfunctory attention.

The issue is not conﬁned to them, but for the sake of illustration, let

us consider the classic ‘external eﬃcacy’items from the American

National Election Study: ‘People like me don't have any say about what

the government does', and ‘I don't think public oﬃcials care much what

people like me think’.

There are two main ambiguities here. Firstly, do

people bring ‘egotropic’considerations –those related to how an in-

dividual perceives their own situation - to the table, as Campbell et al.

(1954) seemed to believe? Or, alternatively, are their responses based

in perceptions of wider societal or ‘sociotropic’conditions, as Ulbig

(2008) suggests? Secondly, if their responses are sociotropic, the am-

biguities in what is meant by ‘people like me’suggests that people can

bring any one of their heterogenous identities to bear, which they in

some way sample from or weigh-up (Zaller and Feldman, 1992)ina

way that is unknowable from the researcher's point of view. The role

that local factors will play is unclear and liable to inconsistency. Fur-

thermore, the survey context may activate some of these identities

while leaving others dormant: asking dozens of questions about party

politics could make someone who, day-to-day, thinks of themselves as a

Mancunian or Londoner ﬁrst-and-foremost, act as a down-the-line

partisan in their responses.

This study is the ﬁrst to position ‘local community’as the ‘objects’of

representation. Speciﬁcally, the survey question used asks ‘How much

do you think the interests and views of people in your local community

are listened to when important decisions aﬀecting them are made by

national government?’. This question, while innovative in some re-

spects, mirrors the concept of ‘perceived responsiveness’in Esaiasson

et al. (2015), developed from theoretical literature on representation. It

incorporates the insights of Hibbing and Theiss-Morse (2001), who

states that the way policies are produced matters as much (if not more)

to people than the policies themselves –giving reason to believe process

questions such as this generate responses with real aﬀective content. It

also speciﬁes that the decisions taken have real stakes for the local area.

Thus, negative responses are more likely to communicate something

about a failure to meet normative expectations.

Although the depen-

dent variable is perhaps more speciﬁc, for the purposes of this article I

will refer to this as ‘perceived community representation’.

Specifying ‘national’government is useful because it is should be

easily understood that people's views of their local government –which,

in the British context, are usually more positive than those of the central

government (Hansard Society, 2019)–are not sought here. I none-

theless acknowledge certain ambiguities in the chosen dependent

variable. It may be that the concept of perceived ‘community re-

presentation’, as expressed through this variable, captures attitudes to

both elected government oﬃcials and unelected oﬃcials such as civil

servants. Scholars have noted that senior civil servants are increasingly

part of the ‘public face’of government in the UK and are sometimes

drawn into eﬀective advocacy for it (e.g. Grube, 2015). It is not un-

desirable if attitudes to non-elected oﬃcials are captured, however, as

some (e.g. Jones and Stewart, 2012) have argued that Britain's central

civil servants are to some extent responsible for the degree of respon-

siveness to local need (and why it is often lacking, as they are accused

of operating a system of ‘command and control’over local government).

A more genuine challenge in using this variable is that it is not entirely

clear whether it refers to ‘speciﬁc’or ‘diﬀuse’evaluations: a negative

response about representation by ‘national government’could con-

ceivably capture attitudes both towards the incumbent, and a general

sense of a remote, uncaring state ‘regime’. Because I am more interested

in understanding the roots of the latter than the former, I control for

government approval, which implies that the remaining variance to be

explained refers to a more ‘diﬀuse’attitude.

In short, perceived ‘community representation’builds on existing

literature while incorporating an original focus on community. It refers

to perceived responsiveness in the policy process to local people by

central government actors, potentially non-elected as well as elected.

Where there are undesirable ambiguities in the question wording, these

are addressed where possible by decisions around modelling and con-

trols.

3. Bringing geography in

The United Kingdom is an appropriate test-case for the eﬀects of

spatial inequalities. The UK is among the top ten OECD countries for

inter-region gaps in disposable income (McCann, 2016). Long-term

processes, related to the legacy of deindustrialisation and the increased

importance of property wealth, are compounded by shorter-term eﬀects

brought on by the Great Recession of the late 2000s and early 2010s.

For instance, Forth ﬁnds that in the period between 2007 and 2011, the

decline experienced by the economy of South Yorkshire (as measured

by GDP per capita) was almost as large as that of Greece; and it has

since experienced very little of the return to growth found in areas such

In the British Election Studies, these questions are adapted by changing the

subject, but not the object: for instance, successive iterations have asked re-

spondents to indicate their agreement with the statement that ‘politicians don't

care about people like me’.

Although we do not know precisely where people's expectations lie, this is

also an issue that aﬀects most research on external eﬃcacy, perceived re-

sponsiveness and so on.

L. McKay Electoral Studies 60 (2019) 102046

as London (Forth, 2017). Wealth inequalities between areas are even

more stark: as of 2013, in Kensington and Chelsea, the unitary authority

in the UK with the highest property prices, these were nearly twenty

times those seen in Blaenau and Gwent (Savage, 2015). It is recognised

that these divergent economic outcomes have broader social impacts:

Buchan et al. (2017) ﬁnd compelling evidence of the North-South di-

vide in a large and widening gap in early mortality since 1995. Surveys

suggest public awareness of the regional dimension of UK inequalities:

in a 2014 survey, nearly half of respondents agreed that ‘Britain's

economy is more regionally divided than it was 30 years ago’(Johnson,

2015).

Yet the focus on inequality as a regional phenomenon may obscure

how spatially concentrated disadvantage is in the United Kingdom.

While it is generally the case that the North is home to most of the UK's

poorest areas, the most deprived place in England is the Essex seaside

village of Jaywick (Gill, 2016): parts of Thanet in Kent and Great

Yarmouth in Norfolk join it in the top twenty. It is not merely that a

large or well-populated area can have its outliers, but also that, in many

such areas, there is no ‘normal’:asDorling and Pritchard (2010) put it,

‘poverty and wealth are fractal in their geographies’(p. 90). At the level

of Lower Super Output Areas (LSOAs), a small statistical area com-

prising around 1–3000 residents, areas in Glasgow, Liverpool and

Manchester at the 5th decile of deprivation are on average bordered by

at least one LSOA where 35% of people are income deprived and one

LSOA where just 10% of people are income deprived. In the city of

Glasgow, even areas with the least deprivation are on average bordered

by at least one area where 30% of people are income deprived

(Livingston et al., 2013). The extent of concentration means that, to

explore the eﬀects of people's lived reality, economic context should be

considered in a more localised fashion than has so far been utilised in

research into discontent.

However, it remains to be demonstrated what the relevance of local

conditions really is. Why is it that people should care about community

conditions, rather than merely their personal situation? Do community

conditions matter only in an absolute sense, or is the perception that

one's area is being ‘left behind’(by the country at large) also important?

In the following sections, these questions shall be addressed by re-

thinking the existing literature on discontent that addresses economic

factors. Since I have no strong theoretical priors about which ‘dis-

content’attitudes perceived community representation is most related

to, I draw from the literature liberally: while I recognise that there are

important diﬀerences between (for instance) the literatures on trust,

democratic satisfaction and external eﬃcacy, these may all give useful

guidance as to how local factors may function.

4. Three theories of the economy and community representation

4.1. Resource eﬀects and their application to communities

In the trust literature, scholars frequently invoke ‘rational choice’

explanations (Cook and Santana, 2018), wherein trust is based on self-

interest. Such a view is echoed by Newton et al. (2018, p. 48) who state

simply that the aﬄuent –as society's ‘winners’–should be less likely to

be dissatisﬁed with ‘social arrangements that have served them well’,

and thus more likely to trust the system. For the most part, existing

studies suggest that this assumption holds.

In the United States, some

studies have detected income eﬀects (Soss, 1999;Jackson, 1995),

which connected higher levels of household income to higher levels of

‘external political eﬃcacy’(i.e. more positive views of whether politics

is responsive to people like oneself). Similarly, studies with large cross-

national data sources have demonstrated some association of higher

income with increased trust (Van Der Meer and Dekker, 2011) and

higher satisfaction with democracy (Castillo, 2006).

It is notable that income appears to have the same eﬀects across

these diﬀerent forms of political satisfaction/discontent. This is not the

case for another key ‘resource’, education, where higher education

tends to increase ‘external eﬃcacy’, but has been found to decrease

satisfaction with democracy, in the sense of falling short of citizen ex-

pectations (Norris, 2011). As such, there may be something particular

about the experience of living on a low income that catalyses a some-

what generalised discontent with politics.

This may be derived from various sources. In part, it may stem from

inequalities of representation. Though not as comprehensively tested in

the United Kingdom, Gilens and Page (2014) have demonstrated for the

United States that ‘economic elites’and business interests have sub-

stantial impacts on government policy, while ‘average citizens’and

mass interest groups do not. Peters and Ensink (2014) show for Europe

that government welfare state eﬀort is more responsive to the pre-

ferences of better-oﬀgroups than to the poor, especially where their

preferences diverge most. Secondly, economic change, whereby those

on low incomes have experienced stagnating wages (Lansley, 2011),

may cause people to perceive that politicians fail to deliver for them,

regardless of policy congruence. There may be an element of social

distance from professional politicians: MPs —and cabinet ministers

even more so —are high earners by deﬁnition and so may be seen by

people on low incomes as less capable of understanding their needs.

Allen and Sarmiento-Mirwaldt (2015) ﬁnd that those with incomes

below £40,000 were signiﬁcantly more likely to feel a ‘discommunion

of interests’between themselves and MPs: that is, to feel that MPs were

less aﬀected than them by economic conditions and less reliant on

public services. Finally, a phenomenon like political trust is partly

‘anticipatory’:trust is highest when one can expect the best in the future

(Scheidegger and Staerklé, 2011). Yet many people on low incomes are

never far from circumstances of real poverty and tend to face greater

challenges of employment insecurity: they may therefore have less

conﬁdence that any success they experience will be sustained.

Although we lack evidence on the eﬀects of low income as a con-

textual factor, it is possible that it matters at a contextual level for much

the same reasons: under-representation of the poor in policy, an ap-

parent failure of politics to deliver for the community, a social distance

from its people, and an inability to expect a good future for the com-

munity. Indeed, it may be easier for the public to diagnose systemic

failings from observing patterns of experience in their community (re-

peated job losses, business closures, homelessness, evictions and so on)

than it is for them to connect their own, limited experience to political

failure, as personal experience is often ‘compartmentalized’(Sears,

1993, p. 144) and ‘depoliticised’(Mutz, 1992).

While people will inarguably have imperfect knowledge of their

community's ‘resources’, the spatial proximity of poorer and richer

areas in the UK provides people with some means of gauging condi-

tions: most people are likely to have some yardstick for what a com-

munity that is doing well or doing badly would look like. As such, it is

likely that people have at least a broad understanding of economic

conditions in their area. The above leads to my ﬁrst hypothesis.

H1. A higher average local income is associated with positive views of

community representation.

It is essential to acknowledge at this point that the take-home pay of

locals may not be the speciﬁc cause of an income eﬀect. For the pur-

poses of this paper, any eﬀect of income should properly be considered

as a proxy for the eﬀect of occupying a broadly higher or lower position

in a hierarchy of local economies: that is to say, being advantaged in the

distribution of economic resources. For this reason, I refer to this ex-

planation as the community resource model of perceived community

representation.

See e. g. Davis and Hitt (2017) for a counter-example in the context of the

United States.

L. McKay Electoral Studies 60 (2019) 102046

4.2. The role of ‘sociotropic’perceptions and why the local should matter

While the processes I investigate here should not be devoid of a

material foundation, how individuals perceive their world is crucial.

Perhaps surprisingly, the evidence for the importance of economic

perceptions to relevant evaluations is somewhat more circumspect than

that for concrete individual ‘resources’. At the macro-level, Alesina and

Wacziarg (2000) provide a compelling explanation for the long-term

decline of trust across most nations in the developed world, arguing

that the end of the post-war years of growth and stability has led to

long-term loss of conﬁdence in the government's ability to provide good

economic conditions, although Dalton (2016) disputes this. In cross-

sectional, individual-level studies, ﬁndings are inconsistent as to whe-

ther poor national economic perceptions are responsible for a lack of

trust (Hetherington and Rudolph, 2015): for instance, Citrin and Green

(1986) found that their inﬂuence in the USA varied dramatically across

a four-year period in the early 1980s.

While it remains an open question as to how far economic percep-

tions aﬀect political discontent, there is a near-consensus that, if they

do, rather than ‘egotropic’evaluations –those related to how an in-

dividual perceives their own situation, it is ‘sociotropic’evaluations –

those that pertain to national economic conditions –that matter. The

public, in the view of Anderson and Mendes (2005, p. 9), ‘blame the

government less for their personal economic diﬃculties than for failing

to produce good economic outcomes for the country as a whole’–only

the former, they ﬁnd, inﬂuences trust in government.

What is left mostly unaddressed by the literature is whether per-

ceptions of the local economy also hold any importance. However,

there is a ﬁrm theoretical foundation for this expectation. The basis for

the importance of national-level evaluations to political attitudes is

believed to be two-fold: ﬁrst, it may be based on ‘pro-social’concern for

others; second, it may be based on an expectation that national con-

ditions indicate the economic risks and beneﬁts that one can personally

expect in future (Kinder and Kiewiet, 1981, p. 132). Both, however,

indicate that perceptions of local circumstances should be of real im-

portance. The pro-social factor should be present: if anything, in-group

sentiment is likely to be stronger in the real community (populated by

people we know and care about) than in the ‘imagined community’of

the nation-state. Secondly, since people usually work close to their

home, people are likely to give some weight to local economic condi-

tions when they consider their personal prospects.

Beyond the theoretical, this argument is supported to some degree

by existing empirical research. Firstly, in the context of the United

States, Rogers (2014) demonstrated that ‘communotropic’economic

perceptions aﬀected Congressional approval, controlling for both per-

sonal and national equivalents. Since Congress is a key representative

body, it is plausible that this reﬂects local circumstances shaping per-

ceptions of the underlying quality of representation. Secondly, scholars

in the ﬁeld of electoral geography have shown that localised con-

siderations –such as views of whether one's local area has been getting

more or less prosperous than other parts of Britain –inﬂuence people's

political judgements in a UK context, namely their voters at General

Elections (Pattie and Johnston 1995,Tunstall et al., 2000,Pattie and

Johnston, 2006). Thus, localised conditions have a proven importance

in UK politics, and have been shown (albeit in a diﬀerent national

context) to inﬂuence considerations connected to representation.

From this follows a basic proposition: evaluations of the re-

presentation of one's community should be inﬂuenced by so-called

‘communotropic’perceptions of the local economy (Rogers, 2014). This

general expectation takes the form of two speciﬁc hypotheses.

H2a. Negative views of recent change in the local economy are associated

with negative views of community representation.

H2b. The perception of a higher rate of unemployment in one's community is

associated with negative views of community representation.

This explanation shall henceforth be referred to as the commu-

notropic model of perceived community representation.

4.3. Distributive justice and a theory of ‘grievance’

While the communotropic dimension is likely to be a relevant one in

and of itself, it may be that its importance also derives from how the

community is seen in relation to the norm. This expectation is derived

from core principles of the ‘distributive justice’literature, particularly

the class of distributive justice theories focused on ‘fraternal’or group-

based ‘relative deprivation’,orRD(Runciman, 1966). Under principles

of distributive justice, when a group is not conferred the beneﬁts that

accrue to ‘salient others’(Tyler and Lind, 1992, p. 122), members of

that group tend to experience a sense of grievance,which informs their

conﬁdence in the system that is perceived as responsible for distributing

resources (in this instance, government or the political system as a

whole). As Hooghe et al. (2017) have lamented, the distributive justice

perspective is rarely applied in research on trust and, similarly, the

literature linking distributive justice to other discontent outcomes is

rather barren. However, there is a substantial body of work connecting

relative deprivation to engagement in protest (Van Zomeren et al.,

2008) and non-co-operation with authority (Verboon and Goslinga,

2009), from which feelings of discontent with authority can most likely

be inferred. Indeed, recent work by Zhang and Zhou (2018) has made

the direct connection: they show using experiments that trust in gov-

ernment mediates the eﬀect of group-based distributive justice on non-

cooperation with authorities. It should be acknowledged that RD, as

operationalised in these studies, does not speciﬁcally refer to inter-

group comparisons, such as the ‘local-national’dynamic investigated

here. Focusing speciﬁcally on intergroup comparisons, Smith et al.

(2012, p. 216) ﬁnd that across nine studies, RD was ‘solidly associated

with negative attitudes towards the larger system’, such as support for

political authorities.

Applying this basic principle to the local/national dynamic, it fol-

lows that people may be especially likely to experience discontent with

the representation of their community when they perceive the eco-

nomic situation in their local area as worse than that which exists na-

tionally. This does make an assumption that ‘national conditions’are

indeed a relevant ‘reference group’for social comparison. However, this

is also a common issue in the RD literature in general: as Budria and

Ferrer-I-Carbonell (2018, p. 10) have noted, ‘large-scale surveys do not

contain direct questions about the composition of the reference groups’.

Instead, the relevant reference group is often inferred from results

(Delhey and Kohler, 2006).

One of the necessary pre-conditions for a ‘grievance’eﬀect is that

people actually attribute the responsibility for economic conditions to

‘politics’, in some respect. It is generally acknowledged that attributions

are ‘important determinants of judgements, decisions and behaviour’

(Ige, 2014, p. 2180). It might be argued that the attribution of re-

sponsibility for the local economy is not as clear as for the national

economy, and so they are less likely to blame the authorities. It might

also be argued that, even if both the quality of the local and national

economy were attributed to politics, people might not hold government

responsible for unequal prosperity. However, Johnston and Pattie

(2002),using the 1997 BES, show that most people (56%) do indeed

hold ‘government policies’responsible for how economic development

at the local level had compared to ‘other parts of Britain’over the

previous ﬁve years. The existence of attribution for local, national and

relative conditions suggests that the ‘grievance eﬀect’is a plausible

result of relative deprivation perceptions.

Attribution is also relevant, in that it points towards a speciﬁc for-

mulation of this general idea. Theoretically, this is based in ‘group

62% of people in England and Wales work at home or under 10 km from

their home (ONS, 2014).

L. McKay Electoral Studies 60 (2019) 102046

justiﬁcation’theory, wherein people experience a psychological need to

‘develop and maintain favourable images of one's own group’, in this

instance members of one's geographic community (Jost and Banaji,

1994). People who believe they live in a poorly-performing area, and

believe that the national situation is signiﬁcantly better, might seek

external causes for the relative deprivation of their in-group, which do

not reﬂect on the qualities of local inhabitants. They may, therefore, be

more likely to understand the area's underperformance as an unjust

result of political failure. However, those who believe they live in a

high-performing area, but that the national economy is performing

poorly, may be less keen to attribute their relative ‘gratiﬁcation’to

political choices that have beneﬁted their area and its inhabitants. In

other words, people tend to blame political processes rather than credit

them, in line with the general perspective of ‘grievance asymmetry

theory’in the economic voting literature.

Indeed, Johnston and Pattie

(2002) found that those who perceived the local economy to have got

worse (compared to others) were substantially more likely to blame the

government for what had happened in their area: as such, it seems that

the asymmetries are likely to translate to ‘communotropic’perceptions.

Thus, the following expectation presents itself: the more negative

the view of local economic performance, the stronger the association

between positive views of the national economy and negative views of

community representation.This I shall term the grievance model of

perceived community representation. Speciﬁcally, it is represented by

the following hypotheses.

H3a. The more positive the view of the national economy, the stronger the

association between negative views of the local economy and negative views

of community representation.

H3b. The lower the estimate of national unemployment, the stronger the

association between higher estimates of local unemployment and negative

views of community representation.

5. Data and methods

5.1. Data and dependent variable

I use a merged dataset, combining survey data on respondents in

England and Wales from Wave Three of the British Election Study

Internet Panel (Fieldhouse et al., 2016:ﬁeldwork September to October

2014) with oﬃcial statistics at the Middle Super Output Area level.

Wave Three applied an innovative survey method to elicit speciﬁc re-

spondent considerations about their ‘community’. Respondents are

asked to draw on a digital map the area which they consider deﬁnes

their ‘community’, with the map initially centred on their household.

Respondents were subsequently asked ‘How much do you think the

interests and views of people in your local community are listened to

when important decisions aﬀecting them are made by national gov-

ernment?’, rating this on a scale of 1–4 from ‘not at all’to ‘a great deal’,

along with a wider battery of questions.

Although the measure is ordinal, ordinal models violated the pro-

portional odds assumption, according to common tests (e.g. Brant,

1990), potentially creating ‘a misleading impression of how the out-

come and explanatory variables are related’(Williams, 2016). Although

certain statistical workarounds exist (such as generalised ordered lo-

gistic regression), these are cumbersome to present and often poorly

understood (Williams). As such, I chose to dichotomise the DV. How-

ever, due to the distribution of responses, standard ‘median split’

practice for dichotomisation did not oﬀer a single logical cut-point. The

DV could be cut between ‘none at all’and ‘not very much’, or between

‘not very much’and ‘somewhat’. I chose the former. Feeling ‘not at all’

listened to is a clearer signal that a democratic expectation is being

violated than ‘not very much’and should be more clearly associated

with discontent. This is supported by the fact that ‘not very much’re-

spondents look more diﬀerent to ‘not at all’respondents than they do to

‘somewhat’and ‘a great deal’respondents, in terms of their higher le-

vels of more general ‘discontent’as measured through eﬃcacy, trust

and democratic satisfaction.

From the standpoint of model ﬁt, di-

chotomising between ‘not at all’and ‘not very much’also performed

better than the alternative.

The choice of dependent variable is primarily justiﬁed on theore-

tical grounds. However, in Appendix 1, I undertake an empirical vali-

dation of the dependent variable, using EFA to test the principle that it

measures a distinctive attitude to those yielded by the existing re-

pertoire of questions (satisfaction with democracy, external eﬃcacy,

government satisfaction, perceptions of politicians and so on). The

analysis did not yield a satisfying factor solution, but the analysis of

Squared Multiple Correlations between the items displayed very high

speciﬁc variance (Child, 2006) for the dependent variable. As Samuels

states, this is often indicative of an additional factor that requires fur-

ther items to detect in EFA. Considering this, it is unlikely that the

variable taps a more generalised discontent, and more likely that it

measures something genuinely new and distinctive.

5.2. Independent variables

The independent variables are as follows. Firstly, I model the eﬀects

of retrospective economic perceptions, for both national and commu-

nity-related perceptions. The former is measured by asking ‘How do you

think the general economic situation in this country has changed over

the last 12 months?’. For the latter, respondents are asked ‘Thinking

about your local community, how do you think the general economic

situation has changed over the last 12 months?’. These scales are re-

versed such that higher numbers denote increasing negativity about

each kind of economic perception. For simplicity of interpretation,

these are treated as continuous in the models. Perceived unemployment

rates in one's community/the country as a whole are measured by a

question asking respondents to place a marker for each on the same

slider from zero to 100 per cent, encouraging respondents to gauge one

against the other.

In addition, objective context is measured at the Middle Super

Output Area level for England and Wales: small census areas of between

5,000 and 15,000 people. The BES oﬀers a wide variety of potential

contextual ‘containers’, linking respondents to large Government Oﬃce

Regions, local authorities, Parliamentary constituencies, and, at the

smallest level, MSOAs. My decision to use MSOAs is informed by two

factors. Firstly, it most accurately captures the scale of objective spatial

inequalities in the United Kingdom, which are most evident the less

aggregation is undertaken. Secondly, small areas are necessary because

they most closely approximate the kinds of areas which people consider

to be their ’community’, according to prior research. Wong et al. (2018)

ﬁnd that, using the mapping method replicated in the BES, Canadians'

community maps had a median area of twelve square kilometres;

MSOAs in England and Wales have a mean of twenty-one squared

kilometres in area. By comparison, the mean constituency in England

and Wales encompasses 263 square kilometres, which indicates the

utility of far more granular data.

The speciﬁc variable at MSOA-level is the median net household

income, based on model-based estimates for 2014 (Oﬃce for National

Statistics/ONS, 2016), which include all major income sources net of

various outgoings such as taxes, rates and housing costs.

See Mueller (1970) for the original statement of the theory.

For example, the mean of satisfaction with UK democracy (1–4 scale) by

levels of perceived community representation is 2.05 for ‘not at all’re-

spondents, 2.48 for ‘not very much’respondents and 2.68 for ‘somewhat’re-

spondents.

L. McKay Electoral Studies 60 (2019) 102046

5.3. Control variables

In all models, individual-level socio-economic controls are included,

in order to assess the presence and magnitude of their eﬀects relative to

those deriving from local factors. The principle decision taken in this

regard was to control for household income: based on the ordinal

variable of self-reported gross annual income by income category in the

British Election Study. However, as Pickett and Pearl (2001, pp. 119-

20) have noted, ‘in studies with only a single individual-level SES

[socio-economic status] variable, the neighbourhood-level SES vari-

ables may be capturing unmeasured individual-level variation’. As such,

I also include a four-category variable for respondent qualiﬁcations,

another important component of SES, and a three-category measure of

working status (in work or study; working-age out of work; retired).

Gender, age, and marital status are included as further demographic

controls. Additionally, all models control for government approval (on

a1–4 scale), and for party identiﬁcation, since the ‘winner-loser gap’in

levels of discontent is a ‘consistent and persistent’feature of public

opinion in democratic systems (Anderson et al., 2005, p. 60).

At the contextual level, I include controls measuring urban-rural

status of the community, which has been a particular concern in more

recent research. Research suggests that places outside of major cities

often perceive ‘relative social, political and economic deprivation’

(Jennings, 2017). Speciﬁcally, I use a measure of the population density

of the MSOA. While oﬃcial measures of urban-rural status exist, the

number of categories is too small –failing to capture, in particular, the

diﬀerences between cities and small towns. Although a continuous

measure of population density has its weaknesses –such as failing to

identify a potential non-linear relationship whereby towns are highest

in discontent (Jennings, 2017)–it ought to suﬃce as a control. Indeed,

it is correlated –albeit weakly –to the measure of local incomes, such

that the denser a place is, the worse-oﬀit is. Thus, the inclusion of this

control should aid in the measurement of the contextual eﬀect of local

economy.

5.4. Testing against ‘cultural’factors

Drawing on the literature on radical right voting (e.g. Norris and

Inglehart, 2016), I take a particular focus on testing against ‘cultural’

factors, which constitute a plausible alternative set of inﬂuences on

perceived community representation. In practice, the cultural factors

identiﬁed by these studies usually relate to ethnic diversity, foreign-

born populations and immigration (Amengay and Stockemer, 2018). It

is possible that, as in the radical right literature, the eﬀect of the (real or

perceived) economic context is overestimated if measurements of ‘cul-

tural’context are omitted.

The set-up of testing economic factors against cultural ones is not

intended to imply a total dichotomy between them: I acknowledge that

perceived economic and ‘cultural’context may be related, potentially

reciprocally (Lamerís et al., 2018a and 2018b). Nonetheless, it is un-

clear how strong their relationship is and how applicable the under-

lying theory is to the UK, while empirical tests suggest that in my data

there are only modest correlations between the two. These issues are

explored and tested in Appendix 2. As such, I maintain that the ap-

proach to use ‘cultural’controls is preferable, regardless of the persis-

tence of mild endogeneity concerns, given the alternate risk of omitted

variable bias.

For the models which deal with the eﬀects of perceptions of the

local economy (i. e., the communotropic and grievance models), I use

perceived cultural contexts as the relevant controls. Speciﬁcally, these

are the respondent's estimate of the proportion of the local population

which is White, the estimated proportion of those born outside the UK,

and the respondent's perception of whether their community has be-

come more diverse (on a 1–5 scale). The last of these is of particular

utility, because the nub of the cultural explanation does not hinge on

numbers per se, but on a ‘cultural backlash’against the perceived

decline in the ‘social centrality’of white natives (Gest et al., 2017,p.

1698). Should economic perceptions still have explanatory power, we

would be in possession of genuine evidence that culture does not trump

economics in explaining why people feel their communities are poorly

represented.

For the models that test the eﬀects of real economic contexts, I in-

clude alternative ‘real’cultural contexts. These are selected in order to

parallel the perceived cultural contexts mentioned above. I use the

percentage of the population of the MSOA in 2011 (the most recent

census year) which is non-White and non-UK born. To estimate changes

in diversity, I calculate the percentage point growth in the proportion of

non-Whites between 2001 and 2011 in the MSOA. Due to the very large

correlations between all three of these variables, separate models are

speciﬁed.

5.5. Modelling contextual eﬀects

The models speciﬁed below are at a single-level, including those

attempting to assess contextual eﬀects. This choice is, ﬁrst and fore-

most, a consequence of the sparse data structure encountered, which

identiﬁes 6,023 respondents in 3,526 MSOAs (for an average of 1.7

respondents per MSOA). The literature suggests that the utility of multi-

level (ML) models may be compromised at such degrees of sparseness:

for instance, Clarke and Wheaton (2007) recommends a minimum of

ﬁve observations per group for ML modelling. Furthermore, it can be

assumed that no local-level clustering (which would necessitate ML)

occurs through the data collection method, as might occur with a multi-

stage sampling method: for instance, where individuals are selected

within neighbourhoods.

Utilising single-level models does result in one important limitation,

in that it is not possible to estimate and compare the between-places

and between-individuals variance, nor is it possible to assess the degree

to which between-places variance is explained by economic context. As

such, this article makes no claims as to the extent of the importance of

context, nor whether economic context is the dominant factor in local

context.

6. Results

6.1. The eﬀect of real conditions

In the ﬁrst instance, it is crucial to understand how far attitudes vary

predictably according to real economic resources in the community –

which should serve as the most direct test of whether spatial inequality

is a genuinely important phenomenon determining how people feel

about representation. In order to test the validity of the ‘community

resource’model, I specify Models 1a-c. (Table 1).

Models 1a-c deliberately omit the local economic perceptions (of

change and unemployment), which are expected to be partly derived

from the ‘real’local conditions as captured through the variable for

local average incomes. It should be apparent that the results support the

community resource model. Models 1a-c show that we can reject the

null in the case of H1, which proposed that a higher average local income

is associated with positive views of community representation. Average

weekly income after housing costs had a highly signiﬁcant eﬀect, and in

the expected direction: higher local incomes are associated with a lower

probability of believing one's community is ‘not at all’listened to (see

Fig. 1). Notably, this eﬀect of income is not found at an individual-level:

people who estimate their household income in the higher brackets do

not tend to believe their communities are better represented.

6.2. Communotropic versus conventional

The second line of enquiry pursued here concerns the basic re-

levance of ‘communotropic’perceptions. These shall be contrasted with

the ‘conventional’model, which expresses the contribution of the range

L. McKay Electoral Studies 60 (2019) 102046

of predictors discussed in the established literature. Speciﬁcally, it en-

capsulates the eﬀects of individual-level resources (household income,

level of education, working status), personal experience (retrospective

household ﬁnances), and national-level economic perceptions (retro-

spective general economy, and perceived national unemployment rate).

It was argued that negative views of the local economy should be

associated with higher discontent with the representation of one's

community by central government. This general theory was expressed

by two speciﬁc hypotheses. Firstly, H2a stated that negative views of

recent change in the local economy are associated with negative views of

community representation. Model 3 (Table 2) indicates that it is indeed

possible to reject the null hypothesis. The eﬀect of more negative opi-

nions about the local economy's performance in the past year is posi-

tively-signed, and highly signiﬁcant: thus, negative views of the local

economy are associated with negative views of community re-

presentation. Furthermore, Model 3 indicates that this relationship is

not item-speciﬁc. H2b stated that the perception of a higher rate of un-

employment in one's community is associated with negative views of com-

munity representation, and in this instance we can also reject the null

hypothesis. From Model 3, we can observe a positive relationship be-

tween the respondent's estimated level of unemployment in one's

community and negative views of community representation. Hence,

Model 3 provides considerable support for the communotropic model.

To illuminate the contribution of communotropic factors, three

further ﬁndings can be highlighted. Firstly, the eﬀect size of local ret-

rospective perceptions is substantial. Moving from the most positive to

the most negative perception increases the predicted probability of

expressing high discontent from 0.10 to 0.39. Secondly, the commu-

notropic model appears to have substantially better ﬁt with the data

compared to the ‘conventional’model, according to all three ﬁt statis-

tics tested (AIC, BIC, and R

). Thirdly, whereas in the conventional

model (2) perceptions of the change in the national economy had a

signiﬁcant eﬀect, this does not occur when the variables measuring

communotropic factors are included in Model 3. It follows from the

above, as well as from the support found for H2a and H2b, that the

communotropic model is of signiﬁcant value.

6.3. The role of grievance

The third theoretical proposition was the ‘grievance model’, which

posited that people would make more negative judgements of com-

munity representation if they saw their community as being ‘left be-

hind’compared to the nation as a whole. In Models 4 and 5, I test the

grievance model over two distinct variants of economic perceptions.

Firstly, I include a variable for level of economic negativity: one re-

lating to negativity about one's local community, and one relating to the

national situation. H3a states that the more positive the view of the na-

tional economy, the stronger the association between negative views of the

local economy and negative views of community representation. Support for

the grievance model, in this case, would arise if the interaction term

between these variables were negative, meaning the lower the level of

negativity about the national economy, the larger is the eﬀect of ne-

gativity about the local economy in increasing the propensity for ne-

gative views (and vice versa). From Model 4, we observe that the ex-

pected relationship is not found in the case of local and national

economic evaluations. As such, we fail to reject the null hypothesis for

H3a.

Secondly, in Model 5, I model the interaction of national and local

unemployment. Similar to the above, H3b states that the lower the

estimate of national unemployment, the stronger the association be-

tween higher estimates of local unemployment and negative views of

community representation. Again, support for the grievance model

would arise if the interaction term were negative, indicating that the

lower the estimate of national unemployment, the larger is the eﬀect of

Table 1

The eﬀects of economic context on the probability of high discontent with community representation.

Variables Model 1a Model 1b Model 1c

Age (years) 006* (.003) .006* (.003) .006 (.003)

Gender: female -.298*** (.064) -.296*** (.064) -.299*** (.064)

Education (ref. cat.: no quals)

GCSE -.098 (.122) -.098 (.122) -.103 (.121)

A-level -.032 (.131) -.033 (.131) -.035 (.131)

University -.012 (.123) -.014 (.123) -.012 (.123).

Household income -.001 (.011) -.001 (.011) -.001 (.011)

Working status (ref: in work)

Out of work .096 (.100) .095 (.100) .098 (.100)

Retired -.324** (.093) -.324** (.093) -.325** (.093)

Marital status: married -.073 (.072) -.070 (.072) -.078 (.072)

Government approval -.560*** (.037) -.560*** (.037) -.559*** (.037)

P.P. increase non-white in MSOA (01–11) .004 (.007)

% non-white in MSOA (2011) .002 (.003)

% foreign born in MSOA (2011) -.001 (.004)

Population density in MSOA (2014) -.004*** (.001) -.005*** (.001) -.004** (.001)

Average weekly earnings in MSOA (£10s) -.017*** (.003) -.017*** (.003) -.017*** (.003)

R square .078 .078 .078

N 6,023 6,023 6,023

Notes: Models include controls for party identiﬁcation (not shown here due to number of categories and available space).

*p < 0.05; **p < 0.01; ***p < 0.001.

Fig. 1. The eﬀect of average weekly earnings in one's Middle Super Output Area

on the probability of high discontent with community representation. Notes:

error bars represent 95% conﬁdence intervals of the estimates from Models 1a-c

(Table 1).

L. McKay Electoral Studies 60 (2019) 102046

a high estimate of local unemployment in increasing the propensity for

negative views (and vice versa). In this instance, the expected re-

lationship does emerge. As such, we may reject the null for H3b,

thereby oﬀering support for the grievance model. These eﬀects are most

easily understood from a comparison of the slopes in Fig. 2. It has been

argued by Ai and Norton (2003) that interaction eﬀects in logit and

probit models can be misspeciﬁed by conventional techniques. To rule

out the possibility of a false positive, I calculate the ‘cross-derivative’

using inteﬀin STATA (Norton et al., 2004). This conﬁrmed that the

interaction was highly signiﬁcant, in the correct direction, and

equivalent in size.

As proposed above, the most likely explanation for the interaction

derives from the psychology of group attachment. People who see a

much worse situation in their local economy than nationally will tend

to want to displace the responsibility from the community itself and are

likely to indict the government (or the political system) instead.

However, those who perceive their communities to be succeeding

ahead of the nation are likely to use this in a process of psychological

bolstering that gives credit to the in-group of local people, rather than

to assess this as an example of extraordinary success by political au-

thorities.

In spite of the support for H3b, there is a real problem of inter-

pretation here, insofar as H3a was not conﬁrmed. There are two viable

explanations. First is that the sense that one's area is falling behind on a

‘getting better’/’getting worse’question is not as damaging as falling

behind on the unemployment question. In theory, people could see their

area as failing to ﬂourish in the short-term, but still possessing struc-

tural advantages over the rest of the country and thus retain the sense of

being overall ‘winners’. Indeed, I ﬁnd that the ordering of ‘better/worse’

and ‘higher/lower’unemployment rates were often at odds. Of those

who rated the local economy as better than the national economy on

the ‘general’question, thirty percent deviated, and indicated that local

unemployment was higher than national unemployment. Similarly, of

those rating the local economy worse, some ﬁfty percent thought there

was lower unemployment locally.

It is unclear how much of this is due

to respondents making a short-term/structural distinction, but it may

be enough to blunt the impact of being ‘left behind’on ‘general’per-

ceptions.

The alternative explanation is survey methodology. This is in two

senses. First, the far more ﬁne-grained 0–100 scale for unemployment

perceptions may be more suited to the detection of interactions than the

ﬁve-point scale. For instance, respondents who think the national

economy is poor, but the local much worse, are left with little room to

indicate the real gulf in their perceptions on the ‘general’question but a

lot more on the unemployment question. Again, the data supports this.

Table 2

The eﬀects of economic perceptions on the probability of high discontent with community representation.

Variables Conventional Communotropic Grievance

Model 2 Model 3 Model 4 Model 5

Age (years) .004 (.003) .005 (.003) .003 (.003) .005 (.003)

Gender: female -.179* (.072) -.179 (.073) -.240*** (.071) -.197** (.005)

Education (ref: no quals)

GCSE -.272* (.134) -.252 (.136) -.238 (.136) -.254 (.135)

A-level -.176 (.144) -.142 (.155) -.100 (.144) -.167 (.145)

University -.257 (.136) -.029 (.145) -.175 (.136) -.230 (.148)

Household income -.002 (.012) .021 (.013) .011 (.012) .002 (.012)

Work status (ref: in work/study)

Out of work .068 (.110) -.032 (.119) .042 (.037) .054 (.110)

Retired -.261* (.101) -.241* (.109) -.244* (.102) -.276*** (.101)

Marital status: married -.040 (.078) -.109 (.085) -.087 (.079) -.038 (.078)

Government approval (low-high) -.492*** (.044) -.450*** (.045) -.446*** (.044) -.541*** (.041)

Perceived diversity increase .153*** (.046) .098* (.047) .106* (.047) .143** (.046)

Estimated percentage white .006* (.002) .006** (.002) .006* (.002) .006* (.002)

Estimated percentage non-UK -.001 (.001) -.002 (.001) -.002 (.001) -.002 (.001)

Negativity –household ﬁnances .072 (.043) -.015 (.043) -.013 (.043) .112* (.039)

Negativity –national economy .134** (.042) .035 (.043) .042 (.097)

Negativity –local economy .462*** (.051) .511*** (.119)

Estimate national unemployment (low-high) -.008** (.002) -.013*** (.003) -.007 (.004)

Estimate local unemployment (low-high) 007* (.003) .017*** (.004)

National * local economic negativity .012 (.037)

Estimate of local * estimate of national unemployment -.0002* (.000)

R square .080 .098 .094 .082

N 5,152 5,152 5,152 5,152

Notes: Models include controls for party identiﬁcation (not shown here due to number of categories).

*p < 0.05; **p < 0.01; ***p < 0.001.

Fig. 2. The eﬀect of estimates of local unemployment on the probability of high

discontent with community representation given perceived national un-

employment. Note: Error bars represent 95% conﬁdence intervals of the esti-

mated probability of high discontent obtained from the results displayed in

Model 5 (Table 2).

There is a slight tendency on the unemployment questions to think that

things are better locally; on the economy ‘in general’, however, the reverse is

true. Though unclear why, one speculative suggestion is that it may reﬂect

media prominence given to the idea of a widespread use of unemployment and

other beneﬁts by the ‘work-shy’, which is perhaps sometimes disconﬁrmed at a

local level while being maintained as a belief about the nation as a whole.

L. McKay Electoral Studies 60 (2019) 102046

Nearly forty percent of respondents evaluated the local and national

economies equally on the ‘general’questions, but just eleven percent

did so on the unemployment question. Of the forty percent, nearly nine

in ten gave either higher or lower estimates for local unemployment

than for national.

The unemployment question may also shake re-

spondents out of survey-answering strategies which could suppress in-

teraction eﬀects –for instance, ‘straight-liners’and ‘midpoint stickers’

may have to give more consideration to how they answer the un-

employment questions than the general ones.

The second possible method eﬀect is that the unemployment ques-

tions directly invited a comparison between local and national cir-

cumstances in a way that the ‘general’questions did not. The local/

national unemployment questions were asked together, while the local/

national general economic perceptions were asked in diﬀerent parts of

the survey. Some respondents could therefore use the unemployment

scales in a more expressive way than they could the ‘general’scales (and

as suggested, they could draw particularly dramatic comparisons).

6.4. Cultural factors, demographics and other controls

In the results discussed above, I ﬁnd no evidence to suggest that

‘culture trumps economics’in its inﬂuence on perceived community

representation. Nonetheless, cultural factors are not irrelevant: al-

though none of the variables measuring cultural context had eﬀects,

there was a signiﬁcant eﬀect (in all models) of perceiving one's com-

munity as being more White on feeling the community was not re-

presented, and of perceiving a growth in community diversity had the

same eﬀect. How, precisely, a community's real or perceived cultural

context aﬀects discontent is an important question for future work. At

the contextual level, I also observe an eﬀect of population density.

Speciﬁcally, this highlighted that people in less dense areas were more

likely to be high in discontent, despite the relative aﬄuence of rural

areas.

In terms of the individual's demographics, two further points of

interest emerge. The retired also appear distinct in their relative con-

tentment with community representation –although age is insignif-

icant. This may be linked to greater involvement in community activ-

ities among retired than working people in the United Kingdom

(Matthews et al., 2014) and the corresponding sense of inﬂuence that

can come with local civic engagement (Johnson, 2014). Finally, gender

stands out, with men more likely to perceive their communities as

poorly represented. This has a potentially interesting implication. Gest

(2016) suggests that political discontent is more acute among some men

because they have struggled to adjust to both long and short-term

changes in their local economy, often accompanied by the erosion of

institutions (the union, the working men's club and so on) which they

perceived aﬀorded them status above their social class. This implies

that gender and local economy may be interlinked in contemporary

political discontent in the advanced economies. Given the role for local

economies and for gender that emerges here, this is a plausible theory in

the British context which, although out of scope of this paper, research

might fruitfully explore.

7. Conclusion

I began by noting the way the narratives used to understand poli-

tical discontent had begun to incorporate a spatial element in the po-

litical moment post-Brexit, but expressed concerns that this had not

been accompanied by real scholarly understanding of this dimension. In

this article, I have sought to identify the precise impact of community

economies –both from the standpoint of their real economic conditions

and the perceptions people hold about them –and the mechanism that

links them to perceived community representation. Below, I summarise

the major ﬁndings, exploring their potential implications, for how the

discipline could explore this further, and in highlighting the general

value of paying attention to geographic inequalities.

Firstly, people appear to be inﬂuenced by community ‘resources’—

with low average incomes in one's area being associated with an ele-

vated likelihood of discontent with community representation. Insofar

as incomes are a good proxy for economic performance, this ﬁnding

oﬀers a counter-point to the ﬁnding of Jennings and Stoker that the

‘two Englands’were no diﬀerent in their degree of political discontent.

While they posited that this might be an ‘emerging trend’that they

could not yet discern, the evidence presented here suggests instead that

it had already manifested in some form –albeit, not necessarily in more

generalised judgements about politics and politicians, but instead in

more particular perceptions of community representation.

Secondly, replicating a common ﬁnding in the political trust lit-

erature (see e.g. Anderson and Mendes, 2005), personal circumstances

and ‘egotropic’economic perceptions are of minimal importance in

perceived community representation. This can be seen in terms of the

non-signiﬁcant ﬁndings over two variables that capture diﬀerent ego-

tropic dimensions (household income, and personal economic percep-

tions). However, this study diverges from some previous literature,

including Rogers, in that one's view of the national economy is not a

signiﬁcant factor. Despite its apparent utility in explaining political

trust, the conventional ‘sociotropic’perspective, which focuses on na-

tional perceptions, is not wholly satisfying in understanding why people

perceive a poor quality of representation in their community.

Thirdly, this research has found that there is a substantial role for an

explanation based on the ‘grievance’associated with perceived relative

deprivation between one's community and the country-at-large. This

ﬁnding indicates that the common perception held by the public-at-

large, that diﬀerent parts of the country are on diﬀerent economic

trajectories, has tangible eﬀects on the sentiment that one's community

is ignored.

Going forward, there may be opportunities to improve on the

methodology utilised here to access ‘grievance’. In particular, it will be

important to interrogate the claim that being ‘left behind’is typically

processed as an injustice: work by Jost and Banaji (1994) on ‘system

justiﬁcation’suggests that this will not always be the case and that often

people will justify their disadvantage rather than let it drive them to

anger. More broadly, it will be important to discover the aﬀective

content in ‘grievance’.AsVan Zomeren et al. (2008) argued, the ‘cog-

nitive component’in ‘relative deprivation’–the weighing up of one's

own group's situation against another - is a far less powerful political

motivator than the emotions of anger and resentment that may ac-

company such calculus.

Furthermore, there is a risk that working from people's national-

local comparisons captures ‘grievance’only in a limited sense. This

study identiﬁes those who feel their area is suﬀering compared to the

country at large. However, an alternative source of grievance might be

the sense that select areas of the country monopolise the fruits of eco-

nomic growth. This way of seeing distributive politics may be potent

politically, because it identiﬁes speciﬁc beneﬁciaries in a way that

might be associated with a degree of ‘resentment’.Cramer (2016) shows

how the resentment of big cities found in Wisconsin residents is pro-

foundly connected to their views of representation: the relative eco-

nomic failure of their own area is frequently explained by her interview

subjects through a sense that successful places are subject to political

favouritism.

It is not hard to see plausible parallels internationally, particularly

in the United Kingdom. It may be that the high importance and ongoing

ascendancy of London is especially important to the development and

politicisation of grievance. Mandler (2016) has written that, along with

struggling former industrial areas and coastal towns, ostensibly pros-

perous parts of the country perceive themselves as un-represented and

deprived of power because of its monopolisation in London, ‘the home

The variance in their estimates was also just as high as in the rest of the

sample.

L. McKay Electoral Studies 60 (2019) 102046

of all of Britain's elites' –ﬁnancial, political, journalistic, professional.

To acquire an improved picture of the nature and extent of grievance, as

well as its ramiﬁcations for political discontent, future survey research

might incorporate the perspective that people may see their area as

struggling less in relation to the country and more in relation to speciﬁc

centres of economic power.

The above analysis is, of course, merely a ﬁrst step in understanding

the eﬀects of economic context on discontent. One principle limitation

is that the average local income is only a static measure of the local

economy. While this may capture something important, it is none-

theless somewhat abstracted from how people actively experience the

economy: that is, as a dynamic system in which trajectories in pros-

perity and hardship may be as important as their levels, and may

powerfully inﬂuence community psychologies. Given recent studies

suggesting that localised decline is linked to cultural ‘threat’(Colantone

and Stanig, 2018;Carreras et al., 2019), which may be in turn linked to

discontent, advances in this area may be especially important both in

uncovering new facts and in connecting literatures that at present are

generally presented as conﬂicting explanations.

Modelling the eﬀects of change poses challenges of its own, of

course: especially at small-area levels, where rates of growth are not

estimated by oﬃcial statistics. However, political science has recently

begun to confront these obstacles. For instance, in order to study the

economic drivers of Brexit, Jennings (2017) constructs an index of

‘relative decline’at constituency level using a variety of indicators,

including employment changes, business growth, population inﬂows

and outﬂows, and changes in the proportions of degree-holders. Such a

methodology may provide a useful precedent for how the relationship

between economic trajectory and perceived representation might be

approached.

It will also be valuable to explore how perceptions of ‘community

representation’can be better captured. This study used a single item,

whereas for several reasons multi-item measures are generally pre-

ferred. Further, it would be useful to know to what extent people re-

sponsibilise and evaluate diﬀerent political actors within central gov-

ernment for ‘community representation’, and in particular how they

judge non-elected oﬃcials relative to government. In addition, the item

used placed an emphasis on ‘listening’- yet, as Esaiasson et al. (2015)

argues, attitudes to representation also relate to how far governments

‘adapt’policy decisions in line with public opinion, and to how well

they ‘explain’those decisions.

While the ﬁndings related to economic resources, economic per-

ceptions, and the grievances of the ‘left behind’are all of individual

signiﬁcance –and in their own way may contribute to academic and

political conversations –the wider perspective oﬀered by this paper is

that these ﬁndings reﬂect another dimension of the politics of in-

equality: the fact of real geographic divides with genuine consequences

for residents' life experiences. While political science has not entirely

eschewed this perspective, its application to research concerning poli-

tical trust, democratic satisfaction, and similar political attitudes has

thus far been limited. I contend that attentiveness to the geographic

divides, and how they come to be understood by the general public,

constitutes a perspective of real value to the study of questions of

alienation, distrust and discontent that are central to our research, and

that profoundly leave their mark on contemporary politics.

Declaration of interest

This research has been supported by the Economic and Social

Research Council and the Hansard Society [grant number 1775110].

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to Professor Jane Green (Nuﬃeld College,

Oxford), Professor Edward Fieldhouse (University of Manchester) and

Professor Maria Sobolewska (University of Manchester) for the many

improvements that they suggested during the gestation of the manu-

script. I would also like to thank those who oﬀered advice and sug-

gestions at my panels at the Political Studies Association Annual

Meeting 2018 and at the Elections, Public Opinion and Parties Annual

Conference 2018, as well as the many members of faculty who oﬀered

support and encouragement through the writing process.

Appendix A. Supplementary data

Supplementary data to this article can be found online at https://

doi.org/10.1016/j.electstud.2019.04.010.

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Dec 2024

Algooth Putranto

The rapid changes of the times affect various aspects of human life globally. This condition is considered part of the conditions that occur in the Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity (VUCA era). The VUCA era has also impacted people in Indonesia, especially in the economic sector, causing prices of basic necessities to keep rising. To manage the economic situation, the Indonesian government must adopt an effective public communication strategy to stabilize society. This research uses Stuart Hall's representation theory, which examines how language produces meaning in public communication. The aim is to analyze the government's communication strategy in responding to global economic and political uncertainty in the VUCA era. The study adopts a qualitative approach, utilizing critical discourse analysis by Norman Fairclough. The primary data comes from the Indonesian government's communications, specifically through the Presidential Secretariat's YouTube account, analyzing three selected videos. The findings indicate that President Joko Widodo's administration aims to shape public perception, reassuring citizens that the nation's economic uncertainty is manageable. This research highlights the importance of understanding the VUCA era and provides insights for the government to adopt appropriate communication strategies to guide public attitudes and behavior.

Not Everything is Black and Red: The Geographies of Canadian Economic Change

Article

Full-text available

Dec 2024
Can J Reg Sci

Canada experienced the strongest economic growth of all G7 countries in 2022. However, economic development is not evenly distributed across the nation. Unlike global cities, economically declining municipalities are often overlooked, contributing to social, cultural, and political repercussions. What are the geographies of regional economic change in Canada? And what demographic and spatial characteristics are associated with economic decline? This study examines the spatial distribution of economic change across Canadian cities and regions from 1981 to 2021, while accounting for municipal boundary adjustments between census periods. The findings of our spatial analyses reveal distinct, complex patterns of socio-economic change, influenced by peripherality at various spatial scales. For instance, cities further from the American border were often found to have experienced undesirable trends in educational attainment and average income, while also experiencing an improvement in unemployment rates. These observations were confirmed through statistical analyses, with stagnation in educational attainment and income trends occurring in rural, peripheral, and demographically shrinking municipalities. Conversely, there is a positive relationship between trends in unemployment rates and population size. The diversity of geographies of economic change demonstrates the need for targeted interventions to mitigate the unique manifestations of decline within communities.

Urban–rural links in relaunching left-behind places: the case of Portuguese municipalities

Article

Nov 2024

During the last few decades, the gap between the most prosperous metropolitan areas and the rural areas has widened, especially since the 2008 crisis. This gap has been particularly relevant in relation to population and employment. However, the bi-directional links in terms of population and employment between rural places and the most urbanized areas have been partly overlooked by the literature. At the same time, recent studies have brought the plight of “left-behind” areas to the forefront, highlighting rural as well as other types of “left-behind” places as focal points of discontent. In the context of the debate on left-behind areas, and in an attempt to address the decline in population and employment that they are experiencing, this article proposes a strategy based on the spatial interactions among the different types of territories. Specifically, we develop a spatial econometric model capable of testing all interactions among different territorial typologies based on their degree of urbanization. We apply the model to 278 continental municipalities in Portugal during the period 2010–8. The model estimates have implications for understanding the dynamics of territorial interactions in Portugal, highlighting the crucial role of semi-urban municipalities. The results reveal the positive and significant connections between change in employment in semi-urban municipalities and population change in both neighboring rural and urban municipalities. The findings suggest that semi-urban/rural diffusion should be promoted as a policy approach to left-behind rural places in Portugal.

A ‘left behind’ habitus? understanding local political disengagement using Bourdieu

Article

Sep 2024

Suzanne Wilson

GROUNDSWELL: THE CORNERSTONE OF INTERACTIVE COMMUNICATION ON SOCIAL MEDIA Title: GROUNDSWELL: THE CORNERSTONE OF INTERACTIVE COMMUNICATION ON SOCIAL MEDIA

Book

Full-text available

Nov 2022

Social media create a space for the emergence of a sociological and psychological phenomenon of our time, which the authors of the monograph refer to as the "groundswell" The monograph focuses on this phenomenon in the context of digital marketing communication and offers its definition and a unique typology. The groundswell is primarily observed in groups on social media, where users gather to discuss specific topics or express their opinions. This trend establishes a foundation for interactive communication between businesses and their audiences. The monograph is intended for businesses that are monitoring the impact of the groundswell on their activities, as well as for those unfamiliar with the phenomenon but seeking to better understand online community audiences. It is also valuable for researchers and students who study communication between unofficial and official institutions in the online environment.

Rural but not radical right: The rural‐urban cleavage in Norway

Article

Sep 2024

Conventional wisdom claims that rural voters are politically mobilized by right‐wing and culturally conservative forces, while urban voters are left‐leaning and have progressive cultural views. Leveraging original survey data from Norway, our work challenges this dichotomy. We build on cleavage theory and recent research on place identitiesto develop a latent measure of rural attachment. Using regression analysis, we investigate how well this measure maps onto five different cultural attitudes, left‐ right ideology, and partisan voting. The findings show that people with rural identities are not more right‐wing, reluctant towards immigration, or anti‐environmental than their urban counterparts. Instead, the geographic cleavage relates to dissatisfaction with the way the central government treats rural areas, resistance to the EU, and voting for the agrarian Center Party. The findings from Norway therefore show that it is possible to mobilize rural identifiers without disparaging immigrants or adopting other radical‐right stances. Our work suggests that the supply of political parties plays a decisive role in how rural identities are activated and contributes to a more nuanced understanding of the urban‐rural divide in advanced, multi‐party democracies.

Social Justice and Public Cooperation Intention: Mediating Role of Political Trust and Moderating Effect of Outcome Dependence

Article

Full-text available

Aug 2018

Cooperation is vital to human evolution and the development of society. In addition, social justice is one of humanity’s long pursuits. Based on social exchange theory and system justification theory, we built and tested a comprehensive mediated moderation model of the relationship between social justice and public cooperation intention via the mediation of political trust and with the moderation of outcome dependence. This research consisted of two studies using laboratory experiment (N = 320) and field survey (N = 1240) methods. Data were collected from participants located in China. The results showed that (1) both competence-based trust and motive-based trust mediated the relationship between social justice (i.e., distributive justice and procedural justice) and public cooperation intention; (2) outcome dependence moderated the relationship between social justice and public cooperation intention; and (3) the moderation of outcome dependence functioned through the mediating effect of competence-based and motive-based trust. The theoretical and practical significance of these findings is discussed.

The Radical Right in Western Europe: A Meta-Analysis of Structural Factors

Article

Full-text available

May 2018
Polit Stud Rev

In this meta-analysis, we summarize the results of 48 peer-reviewed articles on the radical right-wing vote in Western Europe. These results come from 48 peer-reviewed articles published from January 1990 until October 2017. We use the following inclusion criteria, the selected articles must focus on Western Europe, they must have the vote share of one or several radical right-wing parties as the dependent variable, and at least one structural variable as the independent variable. We find that more than 20 different structural variables have been tested. Most of them, like unemployment, reflect mitigate results in explaining the electoral support for radical right-wing parties. For others, like immigration, the statistical significance and direction of the relationship seem to be highly dependent on the type of proxies used. In fact, only a few variables, such as crime rates and the district magnitude seem to have a consistent effect on the vote share for radical right-wing parties.

Political trust in North America

Chapter

Jan 2017

Russell Dalton

Symbolic Politics: A Socio-Psychological Theory

Chapter

Jan 1993

David O. Sears

Process Preferences and American Politics: What the People Want Government to Be

Article

Mar 2001

John R. Hibbing

We present evidence of the kind of governmental processes Americans would like to see in Washington. People believe they have been excluded from current processes, but they do not want direct democracy. The extent to which individuals believe actual processes are inconsistent with their own process preferences is an important variable in understanding the current public mood. Moreover, individual-level differences in level of dissatisfaction with democratic processes help explain variations in public approval of government and in willingness to comply with the outputs of government. Of course, many political attitudes and behaviors are influenced by fondness for the policies that government produces, but it is also the case that sentiments and actions are affected by the way government produces those policies. Far from being merely a means to a policy end, governmental process is important in its own right.

The UK Regional–National Economic Problem: Geography, globalisation and governance

Book

Mar 2016

Philip McCann

In recent years, the United Kingdom has become a more and more divided society with inequality between the regions as marked as it has ever been. In a landmark analysis of the current state of Britain's regional development, Philip McCann utilises current statistics, examines historical trends and makes pertinent international comparisons to assess the state of the nation. The UK Regional–National Economic Problem brings attention to the highly centralised, top down governance structure that the UK deploys, and demonstrates that it is less than ideally placed to rectify these inequalities. The ‘North-South’ divide in the UK has never been greater and the rising inequalities are evident in almost all aspects of the economy including productivity, incomes, employment status and wealth. Whilst the traditional economic dominance of London and its hinterland has continued along with relative resilience in the South West of England and Scotland, in contrast the Midlands, the North of England, Northern Ireland and Wales lag behind by most measures of prosperity. This inequality is greatly limiting national economic performance and the fact that Britain has a below average standard of living by European and OECD terms has been ignored. The UK's economic and governance inequality is unlikely to be fundamentally rebalanced by the current governance and connectivity trends, although this definitive study suggests that some areas of improvement are possible if they are well implemented. This pivotal analysis is essential reading for postgraduate students in economics and urban studies as well as researchers and policy makers in local and central government.

Long-Term Economic Distress, Cultural Backlash, and Support for Brexit

Article

Mar 2019
COMP POLIT STUD

Economic and cultural factors are often presented as alternative explanations of Brexit. Most studies have failed to recognize the interplay between contextual economic factors and individual attitudes such as nativism and Euroscepticism. We argue that both economic and cultural factors matter to explain the outcome of the referendum. Economic factors are critical because they shape cultural attitudes. British citizens who live in economically depressed and declining districts are more likely to develop anti-immigrant and Eurosceptic views. These cultural grievances, in turn, explain support for Brexit. Using both aggregate economic and electoral data at the local level (380 districts) and data from the 7th wave of the British Election Study 2014-2017 panel, we find strong support for our argument that cultural grievances mediate the effect of long-term economic decline on support for Brexit. Our results have important policy implications, and suggest targeted economic policies are necessary to protect the “losers of globalization”.

Trust and rational choice

Chapter

Jan 2017

This chapter provides an overview of the rational choice orientation to the study of trust, rooted primarily in economics, political science, and sociology. Conceptualizations of trust that build on a rational choice framework focus on the cognitions that form the basis of judgments of trustworthiness and decisions to place trust in another, as well as the embeddedness of trust relations in networks, groups, and institutions. The strengths of rational choice approaches to trust and their limitations are discussed, and brief comparisons are made with other approaches that have gained popularity in the social sciences (many of which are represented in this volume). Much of the trust we see in society is based on reasoned assessments of the evidence at hand that lead one to evaluate others as trustworthy given past performance, reputational information, and the incentives at play, including those derived from network embeddedness or the institutional context.

Maps in People’s Heads: Assessing a New Measure of Context

Article

Nov 2018

To understand the relationship between place and politics, we must measure both political attitudes and the ways in which place is represented in the minds of individuals. In this paper, we assess a new measure of mental representation of geography, in which survey respondents draw their own local communities on maps and describe them. We use a panel study in Canada to present evidence that these maps are both valid and reliable measures of a personally relevant geographic area, laying the measurement groundwork for the growing number of studies using this technology. We hope to set efforts to measure “place” for the study of context and politics on firmer footing. Our validity assessments show that individuals are thinking about people and places with which they have regular contact when asked to draw their communities. Our reliability assessments show that people can draw more or less the same map twice, even when the exercise is repeated months later. Finally, we provide evidence that the concept of community is a tangible consideration in the minds of ordinary citizens and is not simply a normative aspiration or motivation.

Global Competition and Brexit

Article

Mar 2018

We show that support for the Leave option in the Brexit referendum was systematically higher in regions hit harder by economic globalization. We focus on the shock of surging imports from China over the past three decades as a structural driver of divergence in economic performance across U.K. regions. An IV approach supports a causal interpretation of our finding. We claim that the effect is driven by the displacement determined by globalization in the absence of effective compensation of its losers. Neither overall stocks nor inflows of immigrants in a region are associated with higher support for the Leave option. A positive association only emerges when focusing on immigrants from EU accession countries. The analysis of individual data suggests that voters respond to the import shock in a sociotropic way, as individuals tend to react to the general economic situation of their region, regardless of their specific condition.

‘Left behind’ people, or places? The role of local economies in perceived community representation

Abstract

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