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Sheltering Populists? House Prices and the Support for Populist Parties
... An increasingly common assumption in the comparative politics literature is that voters generally welcome rising house prices as a sign of economic health, while falling house prices would signal an economy or community in decline. Voters' positive views of rising house prices would then result in less support for populist parties or greater support for incumbents (Larsen et al. 2019;Adler & Ansell, 2020;Ansell et al., 2022). However, there is little direct evidence that voters, in fact, do consider rising house prices as a positive development for the economy. ...
... In another study on the Nordic countries, Ansell et al. (2022) suggest that voters' local house-price perceptions are linked to national populist voting (also see Adler & Ansell, 2020). ...
... While rising house prices increase the cost of buying property in both countries, the majority of British renters are aspirational (UK Government 2023), unlike their German counterparts. As a result, British renters might tolerate rising house prices more than German renters, as rising property values make housing an attractive investment class with anticipated future investment returns from asset-price appreciation after becoming homeowners (Ansell et al., 2022(Ansell et al., , p. 1423). We will test the following hypothesis: ...
Little is known about voters' demands in response to dramatically rising house prices. We argue that voters' house-price perceptions and housing policy preferences depend on countries' differing economic institutions. In the UK's liberal welfare and credit regimes, we expect voters to view house-price growth as a comparatively positive sign for the economy and show little demand for policies restraining prices. In Germany's generous welfare and restrictive credit regimes, we expect voters to view house-price appreciation with more skepticism and demand policies restraining prices. First, through a custom survey, we experimentally demonstrate that British homeowners regard house-price growth as a sign of economic health, while German homeowners and renters from both countries do not. Second, we find that German voters, both homeowners and renters, support policies restraining house prices more so than their British equivalents. Our findings suggest that similar types of voters have different housing attitudes in differing institutional contexts.
... The predominant thrust of such investigations has been to elucidate the relationship between home ownership, housing market valuations, and collective sentiment. This is predicated on the supposition that individual conduct is principally molded by cognizance of personal asset valuations or juxtaposition of one's assets with those of peers [7]. Nevertheless, a salient oversight in this body of work pertains to the profound influence exerted by digital news media on perceptions of housing wealth, given its pervasive reach and sway. ...
... Prior studies predominantly tethered the nexus between home ownership dynamics, housing market evaluations, and welfare inclinations or public fiscal commitments (e.g., Refs. [1,4]) and the correlation between housing wealth and electoral predilections (e.g., Ref. [7]). Augmenting the foundational corpus on mass sentiment, this study illuminates potential conduits through which online media avenues might recalibrate individuals' subjective worldviews and political engagements. ...
... The scholarly landscape addressing the interplay between home ownership, housing market valuations, and public sentiment has largely centered on individual predilections for welfare strategies and political factions. These inclinations are typically rooted in their cognizance of personal asset magnitudes and juxtapositions with distinct demographic groups or geographical sectors [1,7]. Nonetheless, a conspicuous gap in this body of work pertains to the paramount influence of online news. ...
The present study delves into the underexplored nexus between online real estate news and societal welfare news. A novel methodological approach is adopted herein: web scraping techniques amass online newspaper articles, the sentiment of which is subsequently evaluated through a neural network-informed natural language processing framework. The sentiment-oriented data is transitioned into a panel data configuration for deeper analysis. Results indicate a prevailing negative link between real estate news sentiments and those of welfare news. Intriguingly, the ascension of the conservative party amplifies this negative correspondence. This paper augments the political economy and political communication discourse by underscoring the conceivable potential influence of digital media framing on shaping public perceptions and political inclinations. It offers pertinent insights regarding the interrelation between housing wealth and political outcomes in a distinct national milieu.
... Moreover, among the contextual factors considered, housing market dynamics stood out as a particularly crucial predictor of transnationalism-related attitudes and political preferences. This is consistent with a budding strand of studies that stresses the relevance of housing for individuals' cultural and political behaviour (Adler and Ansell, 2020;Ansell et al., 2022;Patana, 2022;Waldron, 2021). ...
... Outer/Inner The borough is in Outer (0) or in Inner (1) as a sign of suburbanism or peripherality (Johnston and Pattie, 2006;Vendemmia et al., 2021;Walks, 2005). The first group of contextual predictors aimed at capturing 'social centrality' relates to housing (Adler and Ansell, 2020;Ansell et al., 2022;Bertuzzi et al., 2019;Essletzbichler and Forcher, 2022;Patana, 2022;Rossi, 2018;Waldron, 2021). Adler and Ansell (2020) were the first to empirically analyse the relationship between the housing market and voting patterns for populist radical right candidates, such as Marine Le Pen, or causes such as Brexit. ...
... Adler and Ansell (2020) were the first to empirically analyse the relationship between the housing market and voting patterns for populist radical right candidates, such as Marine Le Pen, or causes such as Brexit. Their study found that areas affected by house price deflation were more likely to support the populist radical right compared to contexts that experienced an increase in property values, such as the centres of large and booming cities. Adler and Ansell's findings were then corroborated by similar research on Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland (Ansell et al., 2022), and France (Patana, 2022). This suggests that 'housing discontent', understood as 'the political expression of latent anxiety regarding housing' (Waldron, 2021(Waldron, : 1221, could foster the populist radical right vote. ...
European democracies are moulded by a ‘transnational cleavage’ between green-alternative-libertarian and traditionalist-authoritarian-nationalist parties and attitudes. The territorial reverberations of this new cleavage are still scarcely analysed. Therefore, this article aims to explore how the transnational cleavage relates to political opinions and choices at the local level, by uncovering connections between such cleavage and the characteristics of metropolitan places. What are the implications of living in different metropolitan contexts on citizens’ positions on the transnational cleavage? I answer this question by investigating how metropolitan contextual factors shape transnationalism attitudes and support for green-alternative-libertarian and traditionalist-authoritarian-nationalist parties within London. Findings highlight that transnationalism attitudes and support for green-alternative-libertarian/traditionalist-authoritarian-nationalist parties are statistically significantly related to contextual factors; among the latter, the boroughs’ housing conditions and ethnic structures are the best predictors of transnationalism attitudes and party choices; residents of disadvantaged metropolitan contexts exhibit lower support for transnationalism and green-alternative-libertarian parties.
... The expectation that asset prices will remain stable or bring a greater profit can cause attitudes toward government taxation and social policy to change regardless of income (Ansell, 2019). Home ownership is therefore critical for economic security, but house prices also affect individual policy preferences and political behavior (Ansell, 2014;Ansell et al., 2022;Hall and Yoder, 2022;Steele, 2021). ...
... Housing is the asset most widely held and most sentimentally important to people. As Ansell et al. (2022) have pointed out, wealth embodied in housing is distinct from labor market incomes in its connection to geographic place. Housing belongs to a specific location and the investment to purchase a house is illiquid and it is a long-term investment (Ansell et al., 2022). ...
... As Ansell et al. (2022) have pointed out, wealth embodied in housing is distinct from labor market incomes in its connection to geographic place. Housing belongs to a specific location and the investment to purchase a house is illiquid and it is a long-term investment (Ansell et al., 2022). Housing provides a stock of wealth, which may be relied upon during times of economic risks such as unemployment and retirement, especially in the context of underdeveloped social protection systems (Ansell, 2014). ...
Do home ownership and house prices impact the shaping of individual perceptions on inequality and belief in meritocracy? We argue that home ownership and rising asset prices increase the salience of an individual’s own relative economic position, which in turn facilitates belief in meritocracy. We expect that, when house prices increase, homeowners are likely to strengthen their belief in meritocracy and defend their position by rationalizing that income distribution in society is fair and that economic success and failure are primarily determined by individual efforts. Our analysis of both a Korean panel survey and a cross-national survey finds strong and robust evidence of the asset price effect. Our findings suggest that the housing price effect on economic ideology is a general pattern, which implies that there are social and political consequences to the asset price effect.
... In short, unaffordable housing is one of the most important socio-economic issues in advanced economies. Scholarship in political science has shown that rising house prices have important political consequences, such as shaping voters' redistributive demands or voting behavior (Ansell 2014;Beckmann 2020;Hankinson 2018;Larsen et al. 2019;Marble & Nall 2021;Ansell et al. 2022). At the heart of the relationship between rising house prices and political outcomes are presumed ego-tropic and socio-tropic considerations that shape how voters react to changes in house prices. ...
... At the heart of the relationship between rising house prices and political outcomes are presumed ego-tropic and socio-tropic considerations that shape how voters react to changes in house prices. An increasingly common-yet untested-assumption in the literature is that voters generally welcome rising house prices as a sign of economic health of their local or national communities, and that such socio-tropic evaluations of rising house prices would then result in less support for populist parties or greater support for incumbents (Larsen et al. 2019;Ansell et al. 2022). However, there is little direct evidence for this assumption, and we do not know whether voters actually view rising house prices as a positive development for the economy or not. ...
... Existing work has yielded important evidence on how changes in house prices shape both electoral outcomes (Ansell et al. 2022;Beckmann 2020;Larsen et al. 2019; implies that homeowners view rising home values positively as they derive financial benefits from asset-price appreciation, while renters oppose rising property prices that often translate into higher rents for them. Such ego-tropic motives would then, for example, shape homeowners' preferences for less redistribution (Ansell 2014) or their opposition to new housing developments even if these homeowners are otherwise "liberal" (Marble & Nall 2021). ...
Rising house prices are a major political challenge in advanced economies. When examining the link between house prices and political outcomes, recent scholarship suggests that voters-both homeowners and renters-generally welcome rising house prices as a sign of economic health. In turn, such positive socio-tropic evaluations are presumed to influence voting behavior. However, we argue that voters' socio-tropic perceptions of rising house prices vary significantly across countries. Through an innovative survey experiment with 1,352 respondents in Germany and the UK, we show that German homeowners regard rising house prices as a negative economic development for their country, while British homeowners view them positively. Strikingly, this cross-national variation cannot be attributed to differences in voters' attitudes towards financialization; instead, both countries' different economic institutions likely shape voters' different reactions to rising house prices. These findings improve our understanding of the political consequences of rising house prices in advanced economies.
... Our argument about rising rents adds important insights into scholarship on the politics of housing markets (e.g. Ansell and Cansunar 2021;Ansell et al. 2022;Ansell 2014;Patana 2022;Scheve and Slaughter 2001). We also refine understandings of the conditions under which economic factors shape PRR support (Abou-Chadi and Kurer 2021; Adler and Ansell 2020; Gidron and Hall 2020;Kurer 2020). ...
... In line with this logic, recent studies have also established a connection between house prices and Brexit and PRR support at the subnational levels (Ansell et al. 2022;Adler and Ansell 2020;Patana 2022) -PRR rhetoric resonates stronger in declining areas with depreciating house prices. The economic re-structuring of post-industrial societies underpins these dynamics. ...
... By uncovering a strong link between rising rents and PRR vote at the individual-level in the German context, we add to scholarship of the politics of housing markets (e.g. Ansell et al. 2022;Adler and Ansell 2020;Ansell 2014;Patana 2022;Scheve and Slaughter 2001). We also contribute to research underscoring relative economic conditions underpinning PRR voting (Abou-Chadi and Kurer 2021; Adler and Ansell 2020; Gidron and Hall 2020;Kurer 2020). ...
The recent successes of populist radical right (PRR) parties have caused major upheavals across European political landscapes. Yet, the roots of their rising popularity continue to be widely debated. We contribute to these debates by advancing a thus far underexplored argument of rising rent burden as key to understanding contemporary PRR vote and nativist attitudes. Rising rents lie at the heart of growing concerns related to housing (un)affordability and (over)burden across Western democracies, directly affecting the economic and social well-being of substantial numbers of citizens. PRR parties, we argue, stand to gain from politicizing such concerns in distinct economic and nativist terms, especially amidst challenges like the European refugee crisis, which provoked an urgent need to house unprecedented inflows of refugees. Drawing on individual-level panel data from Germany, we uncover a strong relationship between rising rents, PRR vote, and hostile attitudes toward refugees. In calling attention to rising rents, our study adds important insights into scholarship on the politics of housing markets not only from the perspective of home ownership and housing assets, but also rents. In so doing, we also refine understandings of the conditions under which economic factors shape PRR support
... The first group of contextual predictors of the populist vote that we include in our regression models concerns housing (Adler and Ansell, 2020;Ansell et al., 2022;Bertuzzi et al., 2019;Patana, 2022;Waldron, 2021). Adler and Ansell (2020) have been the first to investigate the relationship between housing market trends and populist voting patterns. ...
... This suggests that 'housing discontent', or 'the political expression of latent anxiety regarding housing and place-based precarity' (Waldron, 2021(Waldron, : 1221, may fuel the populist vote. More recent research has also suggested that, although the effect of housing market dynamics is more evident among homeowners compared to renters, there appears to be a 'geotropic' effect that causes both categories to be influenced by (changes in) house prices in a similar way (Ansell et al., 2022;Crulli, 2023). 15 However, these attempts are still relatively rare, and further analyses of the connections between housing systems, place inequalities and populism are needed. ...
The impact of local contexts on populist voting patterns is receiving more attention, after being initially underestimated in the research literature. Populist support tends to be concentrated in areas ‘left behind’ or ‘that don’t matter’, but we still lack an accurate understanding of (1) the locations of these places within major cities and (2) what characteristics of urban contexts prompt the populist vote. We aim to bridge this gap by analysing precinct-level electoral results of populist parties within six major Italian cities over the 2013–2022 decade. Through novel maps of the within-city populist vote, we identify four types of urban environments: populist strongholds, emerging populist, sporadically populist and never-populist areas. We then investigate how two types of intra-urban factors – compositional and contextual – relate to the formation of populist strongholds and support for populist parties with distinct ideological profiles. The findings improve our comprehension of the urban ‘places of populism’ and highlight the need for the ‘left behind’ thesis to focus more fully on within-city patterns and divides.
... The first group of contextual predictors of the populist vote that we include in our regression models concerns housing (Adler and Ansell, 2020;Ansell et al., 2022;Bertuzzi et al., 2019;Patana, 2022;Waldron, 2021). Adler and Ansell (2020) have been the first to investigate the relationship between housing market trends and populist voting patterns. ...
... This suggests that 'housing discontent', or 'the political expression of latent anxiety regarding housing and place-based precarity' (Waldron, 2021(Waldron, : 1221, may fuel the populist vote. More recent research has also suggested that, although the effect of housing market dynamics is more evident among homeowners compared to renters, there appears to be a 'geotropic' effect that causes both categories to be influenced by (changes in) house prices in a similar way (Ansell et al., 2022;Crulli, 2023). 15 However, these attempts are still relatively rare, and further analyses of the connections between housing systems, place inequalities and populism are needed. ...
Obtaining geocoded electoral results at precinct level can be challenging in many countries. In this study, we present two validated methodologies developed to overcome these difficulties, and we build new geocoded electoral results for several Italian cities. Our dataset covers the last 20 years (1999-2022) and includes data for various types of elections, including national, regional, municipal and referendum. We provide an overview of some notable patterns in voting trends in major Italian cities. These include a high level of heterogeneity in voting within cities, an increase in spatial polarization of voting behaviour, and an increasing concentration of left-wing voters in central and wealthier areas of metropolitan cities. These trends may be influenced by a range of factors and can have significant implications for political representation and policy-making. Our dataset provides a valuable resource for understanding these trends and exploring their underlying causes.
... Political science scholarship is only slowly starting to catch up with this sudden burst in the real-world importance of rent and housing policy in Germany and elsewhere. Existing work in comparative political economy has mostly focused on the effects of house price appreciation rates on individuals' general preferences for taxation and redistribution (Ansell 2009(Ansell , 2014 and voting behavior (André and Dewilde 2016;Larsen et al. 2019;Adler and Ansell 2019;Ansell et al. 2022). In doing so, existing research has, both theoretically and empirically, adopted a stringent focus on the role of homeowners. ...
... In support of economic voting and context priming theories, Larsen et al. (2019) show that increases in house prices lead to support for both left-wing and right-wing incumbent governments, particularly in localities with high housing market activity rates. Adler and Ansell (2019) and Ansell et al. (2022), lastly, link higher local house prices to lower support for populism. Studies on renters' political reaction to local rental markets, however, are only starting to enter the debate (Hankinson 2018;Marble and Nall 2021;Abou-Chadi et al. 2021). ...
Following geographically concentrated changes in housing markets, real estate prices have skyrocketed in many cities and metropolitan areas across Germany. These developments have not only shifted the macro-level distribution of asset wealth among homeowners but have also resulted in price spikes in rental markets, which in turn have intensified social and economic risks among renters. This preregistered study aims to provide a theoretical rationale for, and first-time insights into, the determinants of individual preferences for rent control. It argues that policy preferences are shaped by individuals’ economic and geographic positions in the housing market. It not only explores differences between homeowners and renters but also considers how heterogeneity in exposure to the burden of rental costs—structured by local rents and disposable income—explains differences within the group of renters. The results reveal the precedence of egotropic considerations over geotropic effects of common market exposures. Homeowners oppose rent control far more strongly than renters do, whose support for rent control is primarily a function of income. Market rents, in contrast, only heighten support for rent control among low-income renters. These findings deepen our understanding of the politicization of housing policy in Germany and advance important debates on political reactions to housing markets.
... Future research should focus on the micro-dynamics of wealth, particularly in real estate and financial assets, to better understand their specific impacts on democratic attitudes. Moreover, broader academic investigations into the political consequences of wealth inequality -such as its role in fostering authoritarian tendencies (Nai and Toros, 2020), the rise of far-right and populist movements (Ansell et al., 2022;Mudde, 2007), and increasing political polarisation (Carothers and O'Donohue, 2019)are essential. Such comprehensive analyses will provide a more detailed understanding of the political implications of wealth inequality and assist policymakers in developing effective strategies to address these complex challenges. ...
Since the 1980s, the growing wealth disparity in advanced capitalist societies has drawn attention from political economy scholars due to its profound effects on political systems. This research explores the relationship between wealth inequality and the stability of democratic institutions, focusing on how subjective class perceptions shape support for democratic governance. The findings indicate that as wealth inequality intensifies, it significantly reshapes class identities, influencing attitudes towards democracy. Both the subjective lower and upper classes exhibit diminished support for democratic systems, albeit for different reasons, which may pose risks to democratic stability. In contrast, the subjective middle class, a stronghold of democratic values, is shrinking in both proportion and influence as wealth inequality widens, potentially weakening democratic institutions further. This study underscores the connection between increasing wealth inequality and challenges to democratic values, highlighting the importance of policy measures to protect democratic integrity in the face of rising economic disparities.
... However, the effect of economic hardship is often not limited to voters with personal losses but can affect communities through a sociotropic effect (see Ansell et al., 2022;Lewis-Beck and Stegmaier, 2000). High electric prices would in a similar fashion stir up electric grievances among voters who live in areas where consumption is affected by higher electricity prices because higher than average electricity expenditures may potentially function as a signal of the high costs associated with increased energy taxation and the continued decarbonization of the electricity supply (Aklin, 2021). ...
We argue in this study that higher electricity expenditures increase voter support for the radical right because these parties oppose costly climate mitigation policies. We use data from Sweden, which experiences extremely high demand for heating energy during winter months. The demand for electricity differs greatly between geographical regions due to large temperature differences, from 0 in the southern regions to − 50 Celsius in the north. We create our independent variable of electric grievances based on this variation, which increases faster with the spot price of electricity in neighborhoods with a low disposable income relative to the average electricity bill in that area. Using this setup, we find that electric grievances are associated with increased support for the radical right. We argue that soaring electricity prices tend to hurt parties with a mainstream profile since voters associate them them with more ambitious decarbonization policies, while the radical right gain support, since they tend to oppose costly solutions. Our results suggests that the transition to renewable energy can grind to a halt when electricity prices rise higher because voters may abandon the parties who push for the green transition.
... Main the total number of voters within Swedish electoral precincts. These precincts represent the smallest analytical unit accessible for researchers keen to scrutinize aggregated electoral outcomes in Nordic nations (seeAnsell et al. 2022;Brännlund and Szulkin 2023;Larsen et al. 2019, for other examples), usually encompassing between 1000 and 2000 voters. Notably, this figure can escalate in larger urban areas. ...
The world has seen a massive increase in wealth and wealth inequality over the last decades. Given the skew in policy making towards the preferences of the wealthy, this raises the question of how individual wealth affects political participation. Approaching this question empirically is complicated by the fact that random variation in wealth is rare, and many factors that can bias the estimation of the relationship between wealth and participation are difficult to measure. We address the question using a Swedish discordant identical twin design with a) register-based wealth data, b) validated election turnout for multiple elections, and c) self-reported civic participation measures. This design allows us to rule out all shared confounders, such as genetics, family background and socialization, and shared networks. We find that even though wealthy individuals descriptively vote more often, the causal effect of wealth is probably zero, and may for civic participation even be negative.
... Main the total number of voters within Swedish electoral precincts. These precincts represent the smallest analytical unit accessible for researchers keen to scrutinize aggregated electoral outcomes in Nordic nations (seeAnsell et al. 2022;Brännlund and Szulkin 2023;Larsen et al. 2019, for other examples), usually encompassing between 1000 and 2000 voters. Notably, this figure can escalate in larger urban areas. ...
The world has seen a massive increase in wealth and wealth inequality over the last decades. Given the skew in policy making towards the preferences of the wealthy, this raises the question of how individual wealth affects political participation. Approaching this question empirically is complicated by the fact that random variation in wealth is rare, and many factors that can bias the estimation of the relationship between wealth and participation are difficult to measure. We address the question using a Swedish discordant identical twin design with a) register-based wealth data, b) validated election turnout for multiple elections, and c) self-reported civic participation measures. This design allows us to rule out all shared confounders, such as genetics, family background and socialization, and shared networks. We find that even though wealthy individuals descriptively vote more often, the causal effect of wealth is probably zero, and may for civic participation even be negative.
... To assess whether the coefficients for the personality variables can be interpreted as causal effects, we use a form of sensitivity analysis that determines whether the presence of an unobserved confounder could render the coefficients of interest statistically nonsignificant (Cinelli and Hazlett 2020). Based on the omitted variable bias framework, the logic of this approach is to first identify plausible bounds for the magnitude of an unobserved confounder by benchmarking against theoretically selected predictor variables that are included in the model (see Ansell et al. 2022;Fell et al. 2022 for examples of recent applications of this method). The test is then based on an assessment of how the coefficients of interest, in our case the personality measures, would change if a predictor variable that explains as much of the residual variation in the outcome as this benchmark (or multiples of it) were added to the model. ...
In this paper, we consider the role of personality as a component of motivation in promoting or inhibiting the tendency to exhibit the satisficing response styles of midpoint, straightlining, and Don’t Know responding. We assess whether respondents who are low on the Conscientiousness and Agreeableness dimensions of the Big Five Personality Inventory are more likely to exhibit these satisficing response styles. We find large effects of these personality dimensions on the propensity to satisfice in both face-to-face and self-administration modes and in probability and nonprobability samples. People who score high on Conscientiousness and Agreeableness were less likely to be in the top decile of straightlining and midpoint distributions. The findings for Don’t Know responding were weaker and only significant for Conscientiousness in the nonprobability sample. We also find large effects across all satisficing indicators for a direct measure of cognitive ability, where existing studies have mostly relied on proxy measures of ability such as educational attainment. Sensitivity analysis suggests the personality effects are likely to be causal in nature.
... Køb af bolig udgør en af de største investeringer folk påtager sig personligt igennem livet, og udviklingen på boligmarkedet er ofte er et meget synligt signal om, hvordan det går med den lokale økonomi. Faldende eller stagnerende boligpriser er således også associeret med stigende opbakning til Le Pen i Frankrig (Adler og Ansell, 2020) og til højrepopulistiske partier på tvaers af Norden(Ansell et al., 2022). ...
Over de seneste 20 år er opbakningen til højrepopulistiske partier polariseret på tværs af land og by. Det gælder også i Danmark, hvor vi har set fremkomsten af ”Det gule Danmark”. Men hvad motiverer dette skift i stemmeadfærden? I denne artikel beskriver jeg de geografiske forskelle i opbakningen til højrepopulistiske partier i Danmark og præsenterer de centrale forklaringsmodeller fra den internationale litteratur. Jeg finder at polariseringen delvist kan tilskrives ændringer i, hvor folk bosætter sig, men også kontekstuelle forhold, som har medført fremkomsten af en landlig bevidsthed, hvor folk føler sig økonomisk-, værdimæssigt- og politisk marginaliseret.
... However, the effect of economic hardship is often not limited to voters with personal losses but can affect communities through a sociotropic effect (see Ansell et al., 2022;Lewis-Beck and Stegmaier, 2000). High electric prices would in a similar fashion stir up electric grievances among voters who live in areas where consumption is affected by higher electricity prices because higher than average electricity expenditures may potentially function as a signal of the high costs associated with increased energy taxation and the continued decarbonization of the electricity supply (Aklin, 2021). ...
... Substantively speaking, this effect is also very strong: on average, a 1 euro increase in this difference (per m 2 ) is associated with an approximate 1.3% increase in MLP support. These findings contribute to recent research (Adler and Ansell 2019; Ansell et al. 2021) that has examined connections between housing prices and PRR support in the Nordic countries, Brexit, and at the departmental level in France. By focusing on mobility and relative housing costs, I deepen understanding of how and why housing costs influence behavior and attitudes. ...
What explains variation in populist radical right (PRR) support within Western democracies? Specifically, why is contemporary PRR support often and increasingly stronger in areas seemingly detached from the effects of globalization, transnationalism, or immigration, the key issues these parties emphasize? This study articulates a theory of residential constraints to deepen understanding of these spatial patterns. I hypothesize that when citizens are residentially constrained—that is, when their means of reacting to local conditions and “voting with their feet” are limited—they are more likely to support PRR parties. To test this claim, I use a multimethod research design and exploit both quantitative and qualitative evidence from France, an important case of long-standing and geographically divided PRR support. I demonstrate that the PRR performs well in areas where locals’ access to services and opportunities is compromised and where opportunities and incentives to relocate are blocked by residential constraints. Residential constraints thus generate a set of relative economic grievances and render them highly salient in localities that may otherwise appear unaffected by more objective hardships and structural decay.
An extensive literature links the rise of populist radical right (PRR) parties to immigration. We argue that another demographic trend is also significant: emigration. The departure of citizens due to internal and international emigration is a major phenomenon affecting elections via two complementary mechanisms. Emigration alters the composition of electorates, but also changes the preferences of the left behind. Empirically, we establish a positive correlation between PRR vote shares and net‐migration loss at the subnational level across Europe. A more fine‐grained panel analysis of precincts in Sweden demonstrates that the departure of citizens raises PRR vote shares in places of emigration and that the Social Democrats are the principal losers from emigration. Elite interviews and newspaper analyses explore how emigration produces material and psychological grievances on which populists capitalize and that established parties do not effectively address. Emigration and the frustrations it generates emerge as important sources of populist success.
Affordable housing is a pressing political problem that seems to be fueling social unrest among young people. Rising rents, expensive property prices, and stagnant wages leave young adults with few prospects of entering the housing market without intergenerational financial support. In this article, we examine the role of homeownership, housing unaffordability, and intergenerational transfers in explaining welfare preference and voting behavior of young European adults. We propose the emergence of a new growing interest group composed of financially overburdened young renters and mortgaged homeowners whose welfare is increasingly threatened. We bridged HFCS 2017 and ISSP 2016 datasets through statistical matching and used ordered and multinomial logit models to analyze these trends in Belgium, Germany, France, and Slovakia. We find that homeownership polarizes young adults in terms of their welfare support. Housing unaffordability, however, coalesces young homeowners and renters by increasing redistribution support.
Housing shortages and rising rents have increased demands for affordable housing. In this paper, we examine whether electoral constraints can undermine local politicians' incentives to build public housing. Empirically, we draw on the full‐count census of all housing built in Germany, data on 19,685 local elections between 1989 and 2011, and an original survey. Using a difference‐in‐differences design, we demonstrate that incumbents are not rewarded, but rather experience moderate electoral losses after constructing new public housing. We then show that these losses are not primarily driven by homeowner opposition or native–foreigner competition. Instead, electoral punishment is largest in economically disadvantaged municipalities with relatively affordable housing, as voters prioritize spending in other local policy areas that are crowded out by public housing. Survey evidence demonstrates that electoral constraints emerge when voters' short‐term spending preferences conflict with municipalities' long‐term goals to provide affordable housing.
A growing literature examines how economic threat affects support for anti-establishment parties. While most existing work focuses on transforming labor markets as a source of anxiety, we advance the literature by studying changes in urban development and rent price appreciation. Our analysis examines the case of Germany, the country with the highest share of rental housing in the European Union. Combining individual-level geo-referenced panel data with a longitudinal data set on the cost of rental housing at the postcode level, we demonstrate that rising local rent levels increase support for radical right parties among long-term residents with lower household incomes, in particular in urban areas. Our results suggest that urban development, not unlike labor market transformation, represents an important and so far neglected source of economic insecurity and social concern with important political implications.
Institutional investors in residential real estate have become targets of political backlash against unaffordable housing. We argue that this backlash is not only about economic issues such as rising rents; it reflects a fundamental rejection of “financialized capitalism” that turns housing from a basic need into a speculative asset. Using novel geo‐coded real estate transaction data, we document the extent of housing financialization cross‐nationally and over time, and demonstrate that neighborhood‐level exposure to financialization alone is insufficient to explain the widespread support to expropriate corporate landlords in a historic 2021 Berlin referendum. We then develop nationally representative surveys to show that German citizens conceptualize housing as a social right and hold the state responsible for its under‐provision. We demonstrate experimentally that arguments about housing financialization significantly raise support for expropriation beyond rent effects. Our findings suggest that financialized capitalism can unite diverse groups of voters in favor of housing socialism.
The rise of economic inequality in the UK over the past four decades raises serious questions about the state of political equality in Britain. In this article, we analyse changes in political equality from voter participation to voting behaviour to the descriptive and substantive representativeness of Parliament. We find that voter participation in the electoral process has become substantially more unequal since the 1960s but that traditional geographic patterns of voting, where wealthier constituencies typically voted Conservative, have almost entirely vanished. Descriptively, Parliament has become more reflective in demographic and socio-economic terms of the population. In terms of substantive representation, policymaking in Britain has been more responsive to the interests of older homeowners than younger, less wealthy groups. Almost all British citizens nonetheless feel less represented by politicians and policymaking than they did several decades ago.
Do local political party members reflect the views of voters in their constituencies? Since candidate selection by local party members is the most common form of candidate selection in the United Kingdom, it is important to understand local party members’ views, and how those views relate to views in the local area. We investigate the degree to which individual members’ views match local opinion by combining the results of a large-scale survey of party members in the United Kingdom with estimates of local opinion created using multilevel regression and post-stratification. We find that individual party members’ views are moderately to strongly associated with local opinion on both left-right and liberty-authority dimensions. Even so, party members are not entirely congruent with opinion in the local area, having opinions which are either to the left or right of voters in their local area, and which are uniformly more liberal than party supporters.
Voters in rural and peripheral areas have increasingly turned away from mainstream parties and towards right‐wing populist parties. This paper tests the extent to which political decisions with adverse local effects—such as school and hospital closures—can explain this electoral shift. I theorize that political decisions such as these substantiate a perception of a disconnect between “ordinary” people and the politicians in power in day‐to‐day experiences. Using data on 315 school closures and 30 hospital closures in Denmark from 2005 to 2019 in a generalized difference‐in‐differences design, I find that mayors lose about 1.6 percentage points of the valid votes in areas where they close a school. Furthermore, I find that right‐wing populist parties increase their support in both local and national elections when a local school or hospital is closed. These findings provide insight into the electoral consequences of political decisions with adverse local effects and thus contribute to our understanding of the rise of right‐wing populism.
This article reviews the housing policies in the main UK party's manifestos for General Election 2019.
This article investigates the political consequences of occupational change in times of rapid technological advancement and sheds light on the economic and cultural roots of right-wing populism. A growing body of research shows that the disadvantages of a transforming employment structure are strongly concentrated among semiskilled routine workers in the lower middle class. I argue that individual employment trajectories and relative shifts in the social hierarchy are key to better understand recent political disruptions. A perception of relative economic decline among politically powerful groups-not their impoverishment-drives support for conservative and, especially, right-wing populist parties. Individual-level panel data from three post-industrial democracies and original survey data demonstrate this relationship. A possible interpretation of the findings is that traditional welfare policy might be an ineffective remedy against the ascent of right-wing populism.
Can the diffusion of broadband internet help explain the recent success of populist parties in Europe? Populists cultivate an anti‐elitist communication style, which, they claim, directly connects them with ordinary people. The internet therefore appears to be the perfect tool for populist leaders. In this study, we show that this notion holds up to rigorous empirical testing. Building on survey data from Italy and Germany, we find a positive correlation at the individual level between use of the internet as the main source of political information and voting for populist parties but not for other, mainstream parties. We then demonstrate that this relationship is causal with an instrumental variable strategy, instrumenting internet use with broadband coverage at the municipality level. Our findings suggest that part of the rise of populism can be attributed to the effect of online tools and communication strategies made possible by the proliferation of broadband access. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved
We extend the omitted variable bias framework with a suite of tools for sensitivity analysis in regression models that does not require assumptions on the functional form of the treatment assignment mechanism nor on the distribution of the unobserved confounders, naturally handles multiple confounders, possibly acting non‐linearly, exploits expert knowledge to bound sensitivity parameters and can be easily computed by using only standard regression results. In particular, we introduce two novel sensitivity measures suited for routine reporting. The robustness value describes the minimum strength of association that unobserved confounding would need to have, both with the treatment and with the outcome, to change the research conclusions. The partial R2 of the treatment with the outcome shows how strongly confounders explaining all the residual outcome variation would have to be associated with the treatment to eliminate the estimated effect. Next, we offer graphical tools for elaborating on problematic confounders, examining the sensitivity of point estimates and t‐values, as well as ‘extreme scenarios’. Finally, we describe problems with a common ‘benchmarking’ practice and introduce a novel procedure to bound the strength of confounders formally on the basis of a comparison with observed covariates. We apply these methods to a running example that estimates the effect of exposure to violence on attitudes toward peace.
This paper asks whether early responses to de-industrialization and automation shaped how those affected negatively by technological change responded politically. It begins by examining patterns of compensation, outlining cross-national differences in the use of passive early retirement benefits, the expansion of public services, and regulation of the labor market. It then pools 20 waves of the International Social Survey Programme, and examines party choices across groups of workers. It finds that those exposed to technological change are both more likely to vote for the mainstream left and right populists. Differences in compensation have a limited direct or indirect effect. Where spending and labor market regulation does matter, it heightens both left and right-populist voting among affected groups.
Recent studies of economic voting have focused on the role of the local economy, but with inconclusive results. We argue that while local economic conditions affect incumbent support on average, the importance of the local economy varies by citizens' interactions with it. More recent and frequent encounters with aspects of the local economy makes those aspects more salient and in turn feature more prominently in evaluations of the incumbent government. We label this process 'context priming'. We provide evidence for these propositions by studying local housing markets. Linking granularly detailed data on housing prices from Danish public registries to both precinct-level election returns and an individual-level panel survey, we find that when individuals interact with the housing market, their support for the incumbent government is more responsive to changes in local housing prices. The study thus provides a framework for understanding when citizens respond politically to the local economy.
Significance
Support for Donald J. Trump in the 2016 election was widely attributed to citizens who were “left behind” economically. These claims were based on the strong cross-sectional relationship between Trump support and lacking a college education. Using a representative panel from 2012 to 2016, I find that change in financial wellbeing had little impact on candidate preference. Instead, changing preferences were related to changes in the party’s positions on issues related to American global dominance and the rise of a majority–minority America: issues that threaten white Americans’ sense of dominant group status. Results highlight the importance of looking beyond theories emphasizing changes in issue salience to better understand the meaning of election outcomes when public preferences and candidates’ positions are changing.
Following trends in Europe over the past decade, support for the Radical Right has recently grown more significant in the United States and the United Kingdom. While the United Kingdom has witnessed the rise of Radical Right fringe groups, the United States’ political spectrum has been altered by the Tea Party and the election of Donald Trump. This article asks what predicts White individuals’ support for such groups. In original, representative surveys of White individuals in Great Britain and the United States, we use an innovative technique to measure subjective social, political, and economic status that captures individuals’ perceptions of increasing or decreasing deprivation over time. We then analyze the impact of these deprivation measures on support for the Radical Right among Republicans (Conservatives), Democrats (Labourites), and Independents. We show that nostalgic deprivation among White respondents drives support for the Radical Right in the United Kingdom and the United States.
Growing up taking survival for granted makes people more open to new ideas and more tolerant of outgroups. Insecurity has the opposite effect, stimulating an Authoritarian Reflex in which people close ranks behind strong leaders, with strong in-group solidarity, rejection of outsiders, and rigid conformity to group norms. The 35 years of exceptional security experienced by developed democracies after WWII brought pervasive cultural changes, including the rise of Green parties and the spread of democracy. During the past 35 years, economic growth continued, but virtually all of the gains went to those at the top; the less-educated experienced declining existential security, fueling support for Populist Authoritarian phenomena such as Brexit, France’s National Front and Trump’s takeover of the Republican party. This raises two questions: (1) “What motivates people to support Populist Authoritarian movements?” And (2) “Why is the populist authoritarian vote so much higher now than it was several decades ago in high-income countries?” The two questions have different answers. Support for populist authoritarian parties is motivated by a backlash against cultural change. From the start, younger Postmaterialist birth cohorts supported environmentalist parties, while older, less secure cohorts supported authoritarian xenophobic parties, in an enduring intergenerational value clash. But for the past three decades, strong period effects have been working to increase support for xenophobic parties: economic gains have gone almost entirely to those at the top, while a large share of the population experienced declining real income and job security, along with a large influx of immigrants and refugees. Cultural backlash explains why given individuals support Populist Authoritarian movements. Declining existential security explains why support for these movements is greater now than it was thirty years ago.
Coalition governments in established democracies incur, on average, an electoral ‘cost of governing’. This cost varies across coalition partners, and is higher for anti-political-establishment parties. This is because, if such a party participates in a coalition, it loses the purity of its message by being seen to cooperate with the political establishment. In order to demonstrate that anti-political-establishment parties suffer an additional cost of governing, this article builds on the work by Van der Brug et al. and refines the standard cost of governing theory by ‘bringing the party back in’. The results of the analyses, based on 594 observations concerning 51 parties in seven Western European countries, cast doubt on the conventional concept of a cost of governing that pertains to all parties equally. The findings call for a major revision of the standard cost of governing literature, while adding a significant contribution to the debate on strategies against parties that may constitute a danger to democracy.
Assessment of the nation’s economic performance has been repeatedly linked to voters’ decision-making in U.S. presidential
elections. Here we inquire as to where those economic evaluations originate. One possibility in the politicized environment
of a major campaign is that they are partisan determinations and do not reflect actual economic circumstances. Another possibility
is that these judgments arise from close attention to news media, which is presumably highlighting national economic conditions
as a facet of campaign coverage. Still a third explanation is that voters derive their national economic evaluations from
living out their lives in particular localities which may or may not be experiencing the conditions that affect the nation
as a whole. Drawing upon data from the 2008 presidential election, we find that varying local conditions do shape the economic
evaluations of political independents. Moreover, unemployment is not the only salient factor, as fuel prices and foreclosures
also figured prominently. Local economic factors, what we call geotropic considerations, shape national economic evaluations especially for those who aren’t making these judgments on simple partisan
grounds.
KeywordsEconomic voting–Presidential elections–Economic evaluations–Political geography
Recent elections in the advanced Western democracies have undermined the basic foundations of political systems that had previously beaten back all challenges—from both the Left and the Right. The election of Donald Trump to the US presidency, only months after the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union, signaled a dramatic shift in the politics of the rich democracies. This book traces the evolution of this shift and argues that it is a long-term result of abandoning the postwar model of egalitarian capitalism in the 1970s. That shift entailed weakening the democratic process in favor of an opaque, technocratic form of governance that allows voters little opportunity to influence policy. With the financial crisis of the late 2000s, these arrangements became unsustainable, as incumbent politicians were unable to provide solutions to economic hardship. Electorates demanded change, and it had to come from outside the system. Using a comparative approach, the text explains why different kinds of anti-system politics emerge in different countries and how political and economic factors impact the degree of electoral instability that emerges. Finally, it discusses the implications of these changes, arguing that the only way for mainstream political forces to survive is for them to embrace a more activist role for government in protecting societies from economic turbulence.
How do external economic shocks influence domestic politics? We argue that those materially exposed to the shock will display systematic differences in policy preferences and voting behavior compared to the unexposed, and political parties can exploit these circumstances. Empirically, we take advantage of the 2015 surprise revaluation of the Swiss franc to identify the Polish citizens with direct economic exposure to this exogenous event. Using an original survey fielded prior to the 2015 elections and an embedded survey experiment, we show that exposed individuals were more likely to demand government support and more likely to desert the government and vote for the largest opposition party, which was able to use the shock to expand its electoral coalition without alienating its core voters. Our article clarifies the connection between international shocks, voters’ policy preferences, partisan policy responses, and, ultimately, voting decisions.
This paper documents a significant association between the exposure of an individual or area to the UK government’s austerity-induced welfare reforms begun in 2010, and the following: the subsequent rise in support for the UK Independence Party, an important correlate of Leave support in the 2016 UK referendum on European Union membership; broader individual-level measures of political dissatisfaction; and direct measures of support for Leave. Leveraging data from all UK electoral contests since 2000, along with detailed, individual-level panel data, the findings suggest that the EU referendum could have resulted in a Remain victory had it not been for austerity. (JEL D72, F15, F60, H53, I38)
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”.
Cambridge Core - Political Sociology - Cultural Backlash - by Pippa Norris
As a result of the steady rise of populist parties and politicians all over the world – and particularly since the Brexit referendum and the election of Donald Trump – populism research has become increasingly popular and widespread. The field, however, also faces some tricky challenges. First, it is easy to confuse populism with related concepts like, for instance, ‘nativism’ and ‘Euroscepticism’. This brings the risk of sloppy conceptualisation, and, as a result, invalid inferences. Second, populism research remains relatively detached from adjacent fields, and fruitful fertilisation across literatures is still rather uncommon. In order to deal with these challenges, populism research should become both more and less focused. How can these two seemingly conflicting recommendations be reconciled? When it comes to conceptualisation/categorisation strategies and drawing conclusions from studies by other researchers, populism scholars should employ a narrow framework and be precise, distinctive and consistent. Yet when it comes to exploring the literature in search of new hypotheses, scholars should employ a more open mind‐set. After all, theories developed in adjacent fields can inspire populism scholars to formulate innovative new questions and expectations.
We document a causal response of local retail prices to changes in local house prices, with elasticities of 15–20 percent across housing cycles. These price responses are largest in zip codes with many homeowners and are driven by changes in markups rather than local costs. We argue that markups rise with house prices because greater housing wealth reduces homeowners’ demand elasticity, and firms raise markups in response. Shopping data confirm that house price changes affect the price sensitivity of homeowners, but not that of renters. Our evidence suggests a new source of business cycle markup variation.
We investigate the impact of globalization on electoral outcomes in 15 Western European countries over 1988–2007. We employ both official election results at the district level and individual‐level voting data, combined with party ideology scores from the Comparative Manifesto Project. We compute a region‐specific measure of exposure to Chinese imports, based on the historical industry specialization of each region. To identify the causal impact of the import shock, we instrument imports to Europe using Chinese imports to the United States. At the district level, a stronger import shock leads to (1) an increase in support for nationalist and isolationist parties, (2) an increase in support for radical‐right parties, and (3) a general shift to the right in the electorate. These results are confirmed by the analysis of individual‐level vote choices. In addition, we find evidence that voters respond to the shock in a sociotropic way.
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.
Several recent studies link rising income inequality in the United States to the global financial crisis, arguing that US politicians did not respond to growing inequality with fiscal redistribution. Instead, Americans saved less and borrowed more to maintain relative consumption in the face of widening economic disparities. This article proposes a theory in which fiscal redistribution dampens the willingness of citizens to borrow to fund current consumption. A key implication is that pretax inequality will be more tightly linked with credit in less redistributive countries. The long-run partisan composition of government is, in turn, a key determinant of redistributive effort. Examining a panel of eighteen OECD democracies, the authors find that countries with limited histories of left-wing participation in government are significantly more likely see credit expansion as prefisc inequality grows compared to those in which the political left has been more influential.
The 2016 referendum marked a watershed moment in the history of the United Kingdom. The public vote to leave the EU –for a Brexit’- brought an end to the country’s membership of the European Union (EU) and set it on a fundamentally different course. Recent academic research on the vote for Brexit points to the importance of immigration as a key driver, although how immigration influenced the vote remains unclear. In this article, we draw on aggregate level data and individual-level survey data from the British Election Study (BES) to explore how immigration shaped public support for Brexit. Our findings suggest that, specifically, increases in the rate of immigration at the local level and sentiments regarding control over immigration were key predictors of the vote for Brexit, even after accounting for factors stressed by established theories of Eurosceptic voting. Our findings suggest that a large reservoir of support for leaving the EU, and perhaps anti-immigration populism more widely, will remain in Britain, so long as immigration remains a salient issue.
The major economic story of the last decade has been the surge and collapse of house prices worldwide. Yet political economists have had little to say about how this critical phenomenon affects citizens' welfare and their demands from government. This article develops a novel theoretical argument linking housing prices to social policy preferences and policy outcomes. I argue that homeowners experiencing house price appreciation will become less supportive of redistribution and social insurance policies since increased house prices both increase individuals' permanent income and the value of housing as self-supplied insurance against income loss. Political parties of the right will, responding to these preferences, cut social spending substantially during housing booms. I test these propositions using both microdata on social preferences from panel surveys in the USA, the UK, and a cross-country survey of 29 countries, and macrodata of national social spending for 18 countries between 1975 and 2001.
The central political claim of Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism is that class actors, through the instruments of the democratic process, can modify capitalism. Where working-class mobilization is strong, left parties have sufficient electoral support in the political arena to alter markets politically in ways that decommodify and thereby empower workers. The decline of traditional class voting, however, has profoundly changed this dynamic of welfare politics. We show that the political support coalition for welfare states has been reconfigured through two processes. On the one hand, the Left may have lost support among the traditional working class, but it has substituted this decline by attracting substantial electoral support among specific parts of the expanding middle class. On the other hand, the welfare support coalition has been stabilized through increasing support for the welfare state among right-wing political parties. We discuss the possible consequences of this ‘middle-class shift’ in the welfare support coalition in terms of policy consequences.
Why does the relationship between income and partisanship vary across U.S. regions? Some answers to this question have focused on economic context (in poorer environments, economics is more salient), whereas others have focused on racial context (in racially diverse areas, richer voters oppose the party favoring redistribution). Using 73 million geocoded registration records and 185,000 geocoded precinct returns, we examine income-based voting across local areas. We show that the political geography of income-based voting is inextricably tied to racial context, and only marginally explained by economic context. Within homogeneously nonblack localities, contextual income has minimal bearing on the income-party relationship. The correlation between income and partisanship is strong in heavily black areas of the Old South and other areas with a history of racialized poverty, but weaker elsewhere, including in urbanized areas of the South. The results demonstrate that the geography of income-based voting is inseparable from racial context.
Some survey research suggests that economic self-interest influences the American voter. However, Sears and Lau suggested that these positive findings are essentially a methodological artifact, produced by the proximity of the economic and political items in the survey questionnaire. After a systematic analysis of the personal finance and vote items in 1956-82 Michigan CPS-SRC election surveys, the author concludes that no such artifact is operating to inflate the relationship between the two. Thus, the published work which reports a link between individual economic circumstances and political preferences remains standing. Of course, this does not mean that it is impossible, under any conditions, to induce artifactual connections between items. As Sears and Lau indicated experimentally, at the extremes of questionnaire design, such artifacts may be produced.
Despite much scholarly research on the link between macroeconomic evaluations and political behavior, relatively little is known about the influence of government economic policy on this process. Margaret Thatcher's recent sales of public assets (privatization) in Britain provide a unique opportunity to examine the link between microeconomic activity (measured by privatization), macroeconomic evaluations, and voting. By applying multivariate analysis to data collected during the 1983 and 1987 general elections, we show that privatization (measured by share purchases and council house ownership) stimulates positive judgments about the country's economy. However, the effect of privatization on the vote is almost entirely indirect, via these retrospective judgments about the economy. While privatization has undoubtedly benefited the Conservatives electorally, the evidence on council house purchases suggests that the impact may be temporary.
The Nordic countries are no longer characterized by a stable five-party system. Not only have small Christian parties and Green parties emerged in most countries, so-called ‘populist radical right parties’ have also been increasingly successful in recent decades. This article examines to what extent the populist radical right parties in the Nordic countries represent a new party family. Based on various and original data, including archive material, interviews with key representatives, party manifestos and expert surveys, the processes of deciding party names, the development of transnational linkages and ideological transformation are analyzed. The article demonstrates that even though the Danish People's Party, the True Finns and the Sweden Democrats have different historical legacies, they have converged ideologically (i.e., socioeconomically centrist and socioculturally authoritarian), adopted similar names and are on the verge of becoming a more formalized transnational actor. The Progress Party in Norway is better seen as a hybrid between a populist radical right party and a more traditional conservative party. The findings challenge several classifications in the extensive literature on populist radical right parties. Most importantly, the True Finns should be included as a populist radical right party, whereas the Norwegian party should be treated more carefully. Furthermore, Nordic populist radical right parties are no longer – if they have ever been – so-called ‘neoliberal populists’. Finally, the findings suggest a re-freezing of the Nordic party systems in which a phase of divergence has been replaced by a phase of convergence.
Methodological problems associated with selection bias and interaction effects have hindered the accumulation of systematic knowledge about the factors that explain cross-national variation in the success of extreme right parties. The author uses a statistical analysis that takes account of these problems to examine the effect of electoral institutions, unemployment, and immigration on the support for these parties. The data set used in this analysis is new and spans 19 countries and 165 national elections. There are four substantive conclusions. The first is that it is important to distinguish between neofascist and populist parties on the extreme right because their fortunes depend on different factors. The second is that populist parties do better in countries where the district magnitude is larger and more seats are allocated in upper tiers. The third is that although immigration has a positive effect on populist parties irrespective of the unemployment level, unemployment only matters when immigration is high. Finally, there is evidence that the permissiveness of the electoral system mediates the effect of immigration on populist parties.
We examine the systemic conditions that have influenced the electoral success of parties of the extreme right in West European politics from 1970 through 1990. Empirical estimates based on 103 elections in sixteen countries suggest that electoral and party-system factors interact with each other to generate conditions conducive to these parties. Specifically, increasing electoral thresholds dampen support for the extreme right as the number of parliamentary parties expands. At the same time, multi-partism increasingly fosters parties of the extreme right with rising electoral proportionality. Our analyses also indicate that higher rates of unemployment provide a favourable environment for these political movements. These results suggest that levels of electoral support for the extreme right are sensitive to factors that can be modified through policy instruments.
This article studies the changing impact of social class, sector employment, and gender with regard to party choice in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, from the 1970s to the 1990s, using election survey data. Political parties in the three countries are grouped into four party groups: left socialist, social democratic, centrist, and rightist parties.
Class voting has declined in all three countries. The focus on the four party groups shows that differences between the wage‐earner classes have declined for the social democratic and rightist party groups. By contrast, ‘class voting’ has increased for the left socialist parties, which increasingly have concentrated their support among the new middle class.
Sector employment became an important party cleavage in all three countries in the 1990s. The impact of sector was generally largest in Denmark and Norway in the 1980s and 1990s. The sector cleavage also follows the left–right division of parties to a greater degree than previously. Sector differences in voting behaviour are most pronounced with regard to voting for the left socialist and the rightist parties.
Gender differences in voting behaviour have increased and changed character in all three countries. In the 1970s, men supported the socialist parties to a greater extent than women; in the 1990s men supported the rightist parties to a greater extent than women in all three countries, whereas women supported the left socialist parties and (in Sweden) the Green Party to a greater degree than men. The effects of gender are generally reduced when sector employment is introduced into the multivariate analysis, indicating that the different sector employment of men and of women explains part of the gender gap in voting behaviour.
American elections depends substantially on the vitality of the national economy. Prosperity benefits candidates for the House of Representatives from the incumbent party (defined as the party that controls the presidency at the time of the election), whereas economic downturns enhance the electoral fortunes of opposition candidates. Short-term fluctuations in economic conditions also to appear to affect the electorates's presidential choice, as well as the level of public approval conferred upon the president during his term. By this evidence, the political consequences of macroeconomic conditions are both pervasive an powerful. But just how do citizens know whether the incumbant party has succeeded or failed? What kinds of economic evidence do people weigh in their political appraisals? The purpose of our paper is to examine two contrasting depictions of individual citizens - emphasizing the political signifigance of citizens' own economic predicaments, the other stressing the political importance.
Home ownership has potentially significant consequences for welfare state policy. High owner-occupancy rates may function as private insurance where social spending is low (a substitution effect). Alternatively, state income redistribution policies could raise the number of home owners (an income effect). Cross-national time-series data show that social spending is negatively related to home ownership, and mediates the positive relationship between income inequality and owner-occupancy rates. This suggests that owner-occupancy acts as a form of social insurance over the life course. Future welfare state researchers should consider the issue of home ownership in analyses of inequality and the social safety net.
The Vlaams Blok is one of the most successful extreme right-wing parties in Europe. We empirically identify contextual determinants that contribute to its political success in the municipal elections of October 8th, 2000 in Flanders. The use of the Tobit II estimator allows disentangling the party's decision to participate in an election and its (latent) political success. We find that the Vlaams Blok is particularly successful in municipalities with a small network of social organisations. The presence of Turkish or Maghrebian citizens and a high average income also foster extreme right success. Economic deprivation reduces the probability of Vlaams Blok participating in elections, while a high crime rate positively affects the party's decision to participate in the elections. The findings on municipal elections are confirmed by an empirical analysis of the Vlaams Blok's success in the federal elections of 1999.
Abstract Since the 1980s the rise of so-called ‘populist parties’ has given rise to thousands of books, articles, columns and editorials. This article aims to make a threefold contribution to the current debate on populism in liberal democracies. First, a clear and new definition of populism is presented. Second, the normal-pathology thesis is rejected; instead it is argued that today populist discourse has become mainstream in the politics of western democracies. Indeed, one can even speak of a populist Zeitgeist. Third, it is argued that the explanations of and reactions to the current populist Zeitgeist are seriously flawed and might actually strengthen rather than weaken it.
The paper describes the Luxembourg Wealth Study (LWS), an international project launched in 2003 by the Luxembourg Income Study and by institutions from Canada, Cyprus, Finland, Germany, Italy, Norway, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The aim of the project is to assemble and to harmonise existing micro-data on household wealth, in order to provide a sounder basis for comparative research on household net worth, portfolio composition, and wealth distributions.