Socio-Economic Conflicts and Political Behavior

Session Submission Type: Virtual Full Paper Panel

Session Description

This panel investigates novel socio-economic conflict lines and how they affect political behavior. The structure of political competition in post-industrial democracies has fundamentally changed in the past three decades. While the dominant political parties of the post-war era have witnessed strong electoral decline, new challengers such as green or radical right parties have become established actors in many party systems. In addition, these political systems have seen an increase in developments that challenge basic norms and principles of liberal democracies such as populism, anti-elite rhetoric or extreme polarization. The papers in this panel seek to explain these political transformations against the backdrop of socio-economic changes that have affected questions of distribution, status and power. They all link social and economic grievances and opportunities to patterns of political attitudes and political behavior.

The first paper by Cremaschi et al. studies the effect of rural isolation on political dissatisfaction in Italy. While the distributional and status conflict between urban and rural areas has often been regarded as a driver of anti-elite politics, specific empirical investigations of what drives this conflict from a political economy perspective still remain scarce. Abou-Chadi et al. take a similar spatial perspective on changing socio-economic conflicts. They focus on the economic risk that results from increasing rent prices and how it affects support for the main anti-elite challenger in Germany, the AfD. While a growing vertical antagonism between the people and the elite has been a problem for many liberal democracies in the past 20 years, the same can be said of horizontal antagonisms in the form of growing affective polarization. Adams et al. analyze how patterns of affective polarization are related to the descriptive representation of women. The COVID-19 pandemic has constituted an external shock to nearly all patterns of socio-economic inequalities. The paper by Sophie Hill analyzes how this exogenous shock has affected the link between occupational position and political preferences and how this is moderated by the political agency of collective actors.

The papers of this panel thus all provide novel conceptual and empirical perspectives to studying the transformation of politics in post-industrial societies. They all move beyond an understanding of democratic competition that focuses on simple programmatic linkages between political actors and democratic citizens and takes preferences as exogenously given.

Sub Unit

• Division 15: European Politics and Society

Chair

• Tarik Abou-Chadi University of Zurich

Discussant

• Rahsaan Maxwell University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Individual Presentations

• Rural Isolation and Political Dissatisfaction in Italy - Simone Cremaschi, Bocconi University; Paula Rettl, Bocconi University; Catherine E. De Vries, Bocconi University

• Affective Polarization and Women’s Descriptive Representation - James Adams, University of California, Davis; David Bracken, UC Davis; Noam Gidron, Hebrew University; Will Horne, Princeton University; Diana Z. O'Brien, Rice University; Kaitlin Senk, Rice University

• Political Orientation of the Self-Employed in the Postindustrial Economy - Sophie Hill, Harvard University

• The Political Economy of Rental Housing - Tarik Abou-Chadi, University of Zurich; Denis Cohen, University of Mannheim; Thomas Kurer, University of Zurich