Economic Status Loss, Class Voting and the Populist Radical Right

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Abstract

Researchers and policymakers tend to interpret the success of PRR parties as a consequence of current economic transformations, which inevitably create winners and losers. Nonetheless, empirical evidence demonstrates that material deprivation is not a driver of PRR voting. This observation has led certain scholars to refute economic explanations in favour of cultural ones, while others are more cautious in this respect. The latter see PRR voting as the citizens' expression of resentment against their gradual marginalisation within society, presumably due to a deterioration of their relative economic position. Unfortunately, empirical evidence that PRR voters face a decrease in their economic status has been so far limited, although inquiries on voters' perceptions and on the political consequences of economic inequalities seem to point in that direction. This is likely because economic status loss and its implications for class politics have not been fully theorised and empirically tested, as extant research has chiefly focused on absolute income loss and individual-level disadvantage.
The present research assesses the effect of economic status loss on voting behaviour by proceeding in two step. We first review scholarly literature from various disciplines regarding the conceptualization of economic status, its political relevance when experienced as a class-level phenomenon, and discuss its implication for economic inequality research. Contrarily to material disadvantage per se, economic status loss represents a peculiar form of inequality framed as a zero-sum game and therefore lends itself well to PRR rhetoric. This discussion sets the basis for later constructing a novel measure of economic status which we term positional income. It measures the relative economic position of one class within the social hierarchy, by computing the ratio of its distance from the poor to its distance from the rich. Changes in positional income over time are informative of the dynamics of class economic status.
By drawing on data from EU-SILC and ESS on 19 elections across 9 Western European countries, we demonstrate that PRR parties are most successful among social classes facing a collective decrease in economic status. More specifically, our multilevel model shows that voters from social classes that have moved farther away from the affluent than from the poor feature higher chances of voting for PRR parties. On the one hand, in the case of a positive change in positional income, the probability of voting for a PRR party is around 12,5%, holding other variables constant. On the other hand, the probability decreases to circa 10% in the case of a negative change. Therefore, the difference in the probability of PRR voting between these two scenarios is equal to roughly 2,5 pp. The magnitude of this figure is nonnegligible if we consider that the proportion of supporters of populist far-right parties in our sample is 11%. This result is robust across several model specifications. Additional analysis reveals that this finding is not driven by any specific electoral alternative, that is neither the left nor the center-right taken individually. Furthermore, our analysis does not confirm that the experience of material deprivation at the class level affects PRR voting, which is consistent with prior studies.
Our research empirically corroborates the widespread (though previously unproved) statement that the inequality trends observed in post-industrial economies do foster (individual-level) disadvantage thereby creating a breeding ground for PRR support. Nonetheless, it also clarifies that such disadvantage has not a mere financial nature, as previous studies already suspected. On the contrary, PRR parties enjoy broader support among those classes suffering a downgrade of their economic standing. On the whole, our work lends support to previous warnings that status-driven resentment, not economic disadvantage per se, spurs PRR voting. At the same time, it also questions previous research refuting economic explanations of PRR voting.
Hence, the present study advances two theoretical contributions. On the one hand, it expands the debate on the economic explanations of PRR support, especially with respect to the literature on class voting. It provides evidence that class alignment to PRR parties should not be interpreted solely as a cultural phenomenon. Shifting emphasis from financial loss per se to economic status decline allows revealing that economic motives are consequential for PRR voting. On the other, our study provides insight into the political consequences of economic inequalities. It does so by quantifying the extent to which specific social groups are losing ground in relative economic terms compared to the rest of society. Therefore, our study of class economic status goes in the direction of recent accounts about the relevance of widening within-countries economic gaps for electoral politics.

Author

• Giuseppe Ciccolini