Geographies of Discontent: Manufacturing Decline and Democratic Satisfaction

• In Event: Support for Democracy and Distributive Policies

Abstract

To investigate how the decline of manufacturing affects citizens’ support for democracy, we study the role of regions as sources of differential contextual exposure to deindustrialization. Deindustrialization has been a regional phenomenon because regions are historical-spatial contexts of industrial production. This has resulted in a temporal and regionally uneven pattern of transition from a manufacturing to service-based economies. Some regions have offset the loss of manufacturing with a growing service sector economy, while others have fallen into deprivation.

It is well known that economic conditions are central to how much citizens perceive their country's democracy to be legitimate. According to the economic performance hypothesis, a person’s satisfaction with democracy is a rational performance-based and ‘geotropic’ response to macro-economic conditions. The hypothesis is grounded in an instrumental view of the economy whereby individuals benefit from economies that are prosperous and thus think positively about the political systems that sustain these economies. Traditional approaches have focused on macro-economic fluctuations and little is known about the role of permanent economic structural changes. Empirically, the ‘economic performance’ hypothesis relating to democratic satisfaction has been examined the role of economic development or cyclical economic changes such as surges in growth or a financial crisis but there is mixed evidence and it seems that the economic effects of these are only temporary or weak.

We test the economic performance hypothesis in the context of economic restructuring, regarding which there is little to no research. Manufacturing decline is substantively different from cyclical economic change because it is a permanent structural change rather than a temporary fluctuation. Positive citizen assessments of democracy have become, as a part of industrial society, contingent upon improving living standards and availability of work. We reason that the geographical stratification of deindustrialization exposes some regions more than others to economic insecurity, and that this can cause individuals living in those regions to question the legitimacy of their national democracy.

We begin our analysis by geographically visualising the regional manufacturing decline in European regions (NUTS 2) from 1983 to 2017. Next, we estimate the impact of regional manufacturing decline on citizen satisfaction with democracy by exploiting its regional and temporal variation in Europe using Eurobarometer data (1983-2017). Because the extent of manufacturing decline depends on the regions’ initial level of manufacturing production and this may be endogenous to democratic satisfaction, we employ an instrumental variable analytical strategy. We exploit the geological presence of carboniferous strata to instrument for the deindustrialization of regional manufacturing sectors of the economy.

Our results show that regional industrial decline has significantly reduced citizen satisfaction with democracy, regardless of a person’s social class. By shedding light on the importance of regions as sources of contextual exposure, we demonstrate that the detrimental political effects of manufacturing decline are not merely due to occupational exposure as is conventionally believed. An important implication of our study is that the democratic discontent brought about by manufacturing decline is not simply a working-class phenomenon. Rather, geographic contextual exposure, such as regional manufacturing decline, has its own contextual political consequences.

This study extends existing research in several ways. First, while regions have shaped the contours of ordinary citizens' experiences of deindustrialization and its aftermath, this aspect has been overlooked in conventional research which has been primarily occupied with explaining cross-national patterns of satisfaction with democracy rather than sub-national ones. We contribute by proposing conceptual and empirical framework for how regional manufacturing decline constitutes a contextual basis for individual differentiation in levels of democratic satisfaction in post-industrial societies. Our sub-national comparative research design, combined with an instrumental variable approach, allows us to overcome common challenges in cross-national research that make it difficult to isolate the causal role of economic restructuring from unobserved historical, cultural, and institutional explanations.

Authors

• Anne Jeannet, University of Milan

• Chiara Allegri, Bocconi University