The Conditional Economic Roots of Authoritarianism

• In Event: The Political Economy of Radical and Populist Parties

Abstract

In this paper we investigate further the economic roots of nationalist and radical right-wing voting in Western Europe. However, we introduce a new and key ingredient that moderates the way in which economic shocks translate into booming electoral results by far right-wing parties. The main novelty in this study is to illustrate the key moderating role played by social organizations such as trade unions and other left workers’ organizations. Specifically, we argue that the effects of trade shocks on nationalist voting are actually heavily conditioned by the local strength of workers’ associations. Therefore, we propose a new mechanism in which the electoral consequences of trade shocks (captured by import shocks) are moderated by the strength of social organizations and workers’ organizations. In order to test this mechanism we exploit an integrated cross-country ESS file with individual-level data. More specifically, we exploit the import shock measures at the regional level (Colantone and Stanig 2017) across Western European countries. However, we match the imports’ exposure data with regional data on historical density of left organizations at the local level. We employ historical regional data on mining areas to endogenize the density of social organizations (Abramson and Esposito, 2018). Crucially, the results show that exposure to import shocks is not always associated with more nationalist and radical right wing voting. Importantly, we found no significant relationship between imports’ exposure and increases in nationalist voting in regions where: (i) left-organizations have been historically present and (ii) the implementation of austerity measure after the 2008 economic crisis has been less severe. Instead, exposure to import shocks is associated with more radical right wing voting when left-organizations have not been present and where austerity measures and welfare cuts were more severe. Overall, the results point to a much more nuanced “European picture” in which the rise of nationalist and radical-right voting indeed has economic roots, but such economic roots are crucially moderated by the existence of social organizations and the strength of workers’ organizations at the regional level.

Author

• Francesc Amat, IPERG - University of Barcelona