Downward Class Mobility and Reactionary Populism

• In Event: Right­-Wing Populism in Western Europe

Abstract

Recent populist party success in developed democracies has been dominated by the right. Much scholarship has either ignored this partisan asymmetry or -- observing that the attraction of right-wing populism often extends to relatively well-to-do voters -- explained it with racial, cultural or identity politics rather than with economic stress. We argue here that cultural explanations are at best incomplete. The rise in reactionary populism has not been caused by a surge in group identity but rather from a decline in economic security relative to expectations. Rather than measuring economic welfare as an absolute level (e.g., as income or social class), we focus on downward changes relative to baseline expectations. We posit that expectations are formed in two ways. First, children's economic expectations are formed by the conditions in which they are raised. Second, individuals take their own prior economic circumstances as a baseline against which current economic circumstances are judged. When individuals cannot reach the same standard of living in adulthood as their parents, they experience disappointed economic expectations. Likewise when individuals suffer economic loss relative to their own prior circumstances. Economic disappointment, in turn, leaves voters open to rightwing populist appeals, including those that blame external forces (immigration, globalization) for decline and those that idealize a more prosperous past -- a period that was also less ethnically diverse and less gender-egalitarian. Social groups with historically low income and economic security, in contrast, are not susceptible to nostalgic appeals. We test for these relationships with data from panel surveys (capturing individual-level change) in four developed democracies -- the United States, Britain, Germany, and Sweden – and with European Social Survey data allowing us to capture intergenerational occupational change.

Authors

• Alan M. Jacobs, University of British Columbia

• Mark A. Kayser, Hertie School of Governance, Berlin