How Declining Labour Mobility Fosters Anti-Establishment Voting Behaviour

• In Event: Who Moves? Diasporas, Forced & Voluntary Migration, and Electoral Consequences

Abstract

Severe popular resentment since the great recession has shaken politics in the United States. The traditional Open Economy Politics frameworks essentially points to examining an individual’s skill level and its exposure to trade and automation, whilst newer research highlights cultural factors to explain these anti-establishment ruptures. Whereas mainstream economists have emphasized domestic labour mobility on smoothing economic shocks since the 1960s, this aspect has largely been ignored in International Political Economy. Our paper has two contributions: Firstly, we are the first in IPE to explore the role of declining labour mobility in fostering popular resentment. Secondly, we propose a novel argument in this context by arguing that housing needs to be taken into account for the mechanism. We argue that housing price differentials between major clusters of growth and the rest of the country have contributed to declining labour mobility. Our preliminary findings indicate that taking such developments seriously is necessary to understand the outcome of the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

Authors

• Florent Pepin-Proulx, University of Geneva

• Tanja Schweinberger, University of Geneva