Local Economic Malaise and the Rise of Anti-Everything Extremism

• In Event: Extreme Parties and Positions

Abstract

Most research into the roles of economic malaise & decline and of perceived cultural-status threat & xenophobia in the rise of anti-globalization/establishment/immigrant extremism poses the economic and cultural threats as alternative, competing bases for this rise. We argue: (1) _neighborhood_ and _communal_, more than individual, economic malaise & decline makes (2) _some_ people, but only some latent clusters of people & not others, especially susceptible to “other-izing” anti-everything extremist-populist appeals. Previous questions of “is it racism/xenophobia/culture-threat _or_ economic hardship?” are malposed, and the answers misleading. We demonstrate empirically that it’s not _or_, it’s _and_, or even _because_. Two further contributions emerge theoretically and empirically: (1) Regarding “the economy”, what matters in these regards is the decline of one’s “neighborhood” and of “me & people like me” much more than personal material circumstances. (2) Only _some_ people, for reasons both observable & modeled and unobserved & unmodeled, experiencing this local and communal relative hardship become especially susceptible to “other-izing” demagogic appeals, even while others are immune or react negatively to such distasteful demagoguery, also for reasons both observed & modeled and unobserved & latent. We deploy Ferrari’s (2019) hdpGLM to uncover these latent clusters of individuals and their heterogeneous context-conditional responses to relative neighborhood and communal malaise & decline and Miles et al.’s (2019) semi-parametric causal path-analysis to demonstrate the causal chain from economic malaise & decline _through_ sociocultural threat-perception & xenophobia _to_ support for anti-everything extremism.

Authors

• Robert J. Franzese, University of Michigan

• Diogo Ferrari, University of California, Riverside

• Hayden Jackson, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

• Byung Koo Kim, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

• Wooseok Kim, University of Michigan

• Patrick Y. Wu, New York University