The Stories We Tell Ourselves: Local Newspaper & Support for the Radical Right

• In Event: The Political Economy of Inequality: From Campaign Finance to Radical Voting (Pre-Recorded)

Abstract

Rising support for the radical right has become a hallmark of the current political landscape. Despite this, researchers disagree on the reasons driving voting decisions. One of the main debates revolves around the importance of economic anxieties – amongst them grievances related to regional disparities – as opposed to a potential cultural backlash. Previous efforts to settle this issue have focused on voters’ personal characteristics and on regional socioeconomic indicators. An underlying assumption in these models is that people accurately internalize statistical information and use it to allocate their vote. This would imply that perceptions closely track socioeconomic statistics, something I show does not necessarily occur. To tackle this issue, this article rather focuses on local narratives, which research shows strongly influence culture, opinions and beliefs. I posit that local newspapers -- and the topics on which they choose to write their articles -- reflect the prevailing worldview in a given geographical location. I use this information to explain the political geography of radical right support. Taking Spain as an example, I build a machine learning algorithm to determine the prevalence of given news topics across the national territory based on how many related articles local newspapers published on Twitter over the year 2018. Linking these results to local divergences in support for the radical right party Vox sheds some light onto the economic-regional-cultural backlash debate. Overall, I find evidence for all three explanations of radical right support, although the cultural backlash thesis appears to have the largest effect.

Author

• Beatriz Jambrina Canseco, LSE