- NikkolasKing
- Apr 3, 2010
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So ever since I started to pay more attention to politics in 2016, I've generally heard the explanation for Populist Right's success attributed to there being no real Leftist alternative. Basically it's all economics - poor people are hurting and will vote for whoever will alleviate their hardship, fascists or not. I heard this a lot online of course but I also heard it from people like Professor Mark Blyth who this forum introduced me to and who was a big influence on how I understood the world going to poo poo.
But recently I had a bout of interest in trying to assess the academic consensus on this. What do the numbers and surveys and all the rest of it say? I got a lot of sources but just listing what I found to be the most interesting and relevant ones:
From what I could find, I think this is the most clear and recent exploration of the matter, particularly as it pertains to why the counterpart Left isn't winning:
https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/brandonvandyck/files/main_document.pdf
quote:
We argue, though, that in the advanced West, voter demand for left populist politicians and parties is comparatively limited. Why? In short, poverty, inequality, economic rent-seeking, and corruption are (almost by definition) less extreme in the developed world than in the developing world. As a result, voters in the advanced West suffer less absolute and relative deprivation, and regard their economies as less unfair, than do voters in developing countries. More voters in the advanced West belong to the middle class, or to what Seymour Lipset might have called the “relatively well-to-do working class.” It follows, we posit, that they place more emphasis on the promotion and protection of their core values and culture, and less emphasis on advancing their absolute or relative economic position, than voters in developing countries.
They are also less susceptible to class-based appeals and economic tribalism. After all, where the gap between rich and poor (economic and otherwise) is smaller, and where the middle class and “relatively well-to-do” working class are larger, fewer voters are liable to define themselves as lower-class, or to identify themselves in opposition to the rich or economic elite. Even in countries like the US, where inequality has become an important political issue, a large majority of citizens self-identify as middle-class and express hopes of becoming wealthy. In such contexts, there is limited demand for left populist rhetoric emphasizing class solidarity and an economy “rigged” by elites. When such demand does arise, it is often in response to cyclical – and hence temporary – downturns like the Great Recession.
Advanced Western countries also have larger welfare states and have used these welfare states to materially compensate the less well-off. In Northern Europe and North America, if a citizen loses her job, she can receive unemployment insurance and public health care. If he falls below the poverty line, he may qualify for supplemental cash transfers. The EU provides economic support to its poorest subnational regions. Over the past three decades – the very time period in which free market policies have proliferated – mean per capita social spending has increased across Northern Europe and North America. Some programs, such as the American “Trade Adjustment Assistance” fund, explicitly compensate those dislocated by free market policies.
[…]
Just as the political right led the neoliberal turn, the political left led this socially progressive turn; and just as established left forces accepted the neoliberal turn, established right forces have largely accepted the socially progressive turn. In recent decades, conservative establishments across the Western world have shifted considerably on specific policy questions such as abortion, same-sex marriage, and immigration, and with respect to broader social trends such as changing gender roles, racial and sexual diversity, and multiculturalism. An increasing proportion of “establishment” Republican elites and opinion leaders in the United States, for example, support same-sex marriage and (at least prior to the rise of Donald Trump) immigration reform.xiii Germany’s Christian Democratic Party, under the leadership of Angela Merkel, famously oversaw the “welcoming” of nearly one million migrants in 2015. Under David Cameron, British Conservatives “modernized”xiv their policies on same-sex marriage and other hot-button cultural issues. Across Europe, parties of the mainstream right now advocate a minimalist nationalism and embrace the quasi-supranational vision of the EU. In short, on the divisive social questions of recent decades, major pre-populist parties of the right sued for peace.
In contrast to left populist voters, right populist voters are socially and culturally driven. They are social conservatives, and their primary subjective political grievances are social progressivism and mass immigration. Like their left populist counterparts, they believe that they no longer have a “dog in the fight” – i.e., that there is no longer an established political force that opposes social progressivism and mass immigration. Right populists (e.g., Trump, Germany’s AfD) enter this vacuum, placing central programmatic emphasis on rejecting or reversing social progressivism. They focus on social and cultural grievances; lament the erosion of traditional values and national identities and criticize established right forces for capitulating to social progressivism and demographic change.
The shift to social progressivism in the advanced West, both culturally and politically, has alienated social conservatives, creating significant electoral demand for right populism. Traditional values and religious beliefs have fallen out of the mainstream and are increasingly regarded as outdated. Formerly homogenous communities have been disrupted by mass immigration, and new ethnic cleavages have emerged (e.g., between Muslims and non-Muslims in Europe; between Spanish-speaking Latin Americans and English-speaking Euro- and AfricanAmericans in the United States). Social conservatives in Northern Europe and the US report an increasing sense of cultural erosion and dilution, of feeling less “at home” in their countries.
[…]
Two additional points bear mention in this context. First, because many immigrants and refugees in advanced Western countries are low-skilled workers, their growing presence in the population has made native-born low-skilled workers less susceptible to broad class-based appeals. Native-born workers often do not identify culturally or ethnically with these immigrants and refugees, and to some extent they compete with them for jobs. The result is fragmentation rather than solidarity among the working class. This further limits electoral demand for left populism, which depends on class appeals.
Second, there have not been – and arguably, there cannot be – policies compensating social conservatives for mass immigration and the rise of post-materialism. In other words, there is no analogue of the welfare state in the more “zero-sum” sociocultural domain.xvii If same-sex marriage or abortion is legalized; if a country changes demographically and becomes more culturally plural due to increased immigration; if traditional gender norms and roles erode, politicians cannot, at the level of national policy, provide compensation to citizens who oppose these shifts. They can only roll back the socially progressive policies themselves (e.g., reimpose bans on same-sex marriage or abortion). In areas like immigration, this would require extreme measures (e.g., mass deportation) regarded as unthinkable or infeasible.
[…]
In short, not only have social progressivism and mass immigration generated a comparatively large number of right populist voters in the advanced West, these right populist voters are more subjectively aggrieved than left populist voters. Right populist voters reject both the left-wing social status quo (i.e., social progressivism, demographic change) and the rightwing economic status quo (i.e., neoliberalism). By contrast, left populist voters only reject the economic status quo, tending to support social progressivism. Thus, whereas left populist voters only feel economic alienation, right populist voters feel social and economic alienation, making them an especially committed and combustible electoral constituency. Consequently, electoral demand for right-wing populism is not only higher but also more intense and persistent than electoral demand for left-wing populism (Demand-Side
[…]
Right populists have a clear advantage over left populists in internecine electoral contests (i.e., in electoral contests between mainstream forces and new populist entrants on either side of the political spectrum). Why? Very simply, right populists are more programmatically distinct from their mainstream rivals than are left populists. Right populists differ from the right-wing establishment socially and economically; by contrast, left populists only differ from the left-wing establishment economically. Consequently, right populists have a clearer, more effective brand vis-a-vis their mainstreamxxi counterparts and can siphon more votes from them (Supply-Side Argument 1).
[…]
Right populists also hold an advantage over left populists in open, nationwide elections. Why? From the perspective of ordinary voters, left populists are more radical than the mainstream left on economic issues and roughly indistinguishable on social issues. By contrast, right populists are more radical than the mainstream right on social issues but more moderate on economic issues. This has two effects. First, right populists can more easily attract former left-wing voters than left populists can attract former right-wing voters. After all, they hold some anti-neoliberal economic positions, whereas left populists do not hold any conservative social positions. Second, because right populists mix right and left positions, ordinary voters perceive them as, on balance, more programmatically moderate than left populists – although not necessarily more moderate in their attitude toward democracy. Consequently, right populists can also more easily attract moderate, centrist voters – at least those primarily concerned with programmatic issues. Both dynamics advantage right populists in open, nationwide elections (Supply-Side Argument 2).
The data bear out this set of arguments . Before the 2016 US presidential election, for example, American voters regarded Donald Trump as the most moderate and least partisan GOP nominee in a generation.xxv Trump’s winning electoral coalition included a plurality of moderates and independents, and his popularity with both groups substantially exceeded that of previous Republican nominees. France’s National Front and Germany’s AfD, despite drawing most of their support from traditional constituencies of the mainstream right, made crucial inroads with formerly non-right voting blocs. The National Front performed well in France’s “Socialist strongholds,”xxvi and the AfD siphoned nearly a million votes from the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) and far-left Left Party (Die Linke) in the 2017 German elections.xxvii In the 2019 EU Parliament elections, Britain’s right populist Brexit Party drew 13 percent of its support from erstwhile Labour Voters, while the Labour Party, under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, did not draw significant support from the Conservative Party.xxviii
TL'DR: The Far Right galvanizes greater support because it offers a wholesale change. Bernie and friends say the exact same social things as regular Progressives but have more radical economic policies. This dual prongs of right wing social policy and left wing economics allows the Far Right to lure in people from all over while Left Wing Populists can only draw from the usual voter pool.
On that topic,
ttps://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1467-9477.12147
quote:Secondly, many countries have seen a realignment in which the sociocultural dimension has increased in salience, at the expense of the socioeconomic axis of conflict (Rydgren 2002; Kriesi et al. 2008; Bornschier 2018). This tends to benefit radical right‐wing parties, as their profile issues belong to the sociocultural dimension (Oesch 2008). In Sweden, for example, there has been a marked increase in the degree to which voters consider immigration – SD's core issue – to be an important political issue. In 2010, only 19% of the Swedish voters considered immigration to be an important political issue; in 2014 this proportion had increased to 27% and in 2015 to 53% (Bergström & Oscarsson 2015; Demker & van der Meiden 2016).
Thirdly, voters are less likely to vote for alternative parties if they can easily find policy alternatives among mainstream parties (Rydgren 2002). Across the Western world parties have been converging across the left‐right divide on socioeconomic issues (Kitschelt 2018). In Sweden, this process was further intensified after 2006 when the centre‐right coalition Alliance1 was established. Such converging may lead voters to perceive all mainstream parties as being very similar, thereby contributing to a depoliticization of the traditional socioeconomic issues and increasing salience of (and voting based on) sociocultural issues (Rydgren & van der Meiden 2018).
[...]
Thus, individuals may vote based on their social class, attitudes on specific issues such as taxes or immigration, and/or underlying values and ideological worldviews. Importantly, recent changes in voter behaviour seem to reflect an increased prioritization of sociocultural issues in politics, rather than a shift in the values and attitudes that explain these sociocultural preferences (Ivarsflaten 2008; Mudde 2010; Rydgren & van der Meiden 2018). By being less focused – or even intentionally vague – on socioeconomic issues, radical right‐wing parties can attract voters from different positions on the political spectrum, as long as voters agree that their core sociocultural issue, most notably opposition to immigration, needs to be prioritized in politics (Rovny 2013).
[...]
Social class and socioeconomic status
To gain a clearer picture of social class among voters who are currently of working age, we compared voter groups after excluding retirees from the analyses. A chi‐squared analysis revealed statistically significant group differences in occupation categories, χ 2 (21) = 175.45, p < .001. SD supporters who previously voted for the Social Democrats more commonly come from the working class (50%) compared to current Social Democrat voters (38%), as well as SD voters who previously voted for the Conservative Party (30%) and current Conservative Party (27%) voters. Also, being unemployed or on a long‐term sick leave was more common in this group (12%) compared to SD voters who previously voted for the Conservative Party (9.9%), as well as current Social Democratic (6.9%) and Conservative Party (3.6%) voters. Complete distributions of occupation are presented Table S1 in the Supplementary Material.
Regarding education, a chi‐squared analysis (excluding students) confirmed statistically significant group differences, χ 2 (3) = 72.35, p < .001. To have university education was approximately 1.7 times less common among SD voters who previously voted for the Social Democrats (25.1%) than among SD voters who previously voted for the Conservative Party (41.8%) and current Social Democratic (44.3%) voters, and twice less common compared to current Conservative Party (51.0%) voters.
Concerning income, a chi‐squared analysis (excluding retirees and students) revealed statistically significant group differences, χ 2 (21) = 101.29, p < .001. Low income was more common, and very high income was less common, among previous and current Social Democratic voters than among previous and current Conservative Party voters: 27.7 per cent of current, and 26.5 per cent of previous, Social Democratic voters belonged to the two lowest income groups (<20,000 SEK/month), which can be contrasted with 15.6 per cent of SD voters who previously voted for the Conservative Party, and 14.7 per cent of current Conservative Party voters. Reversed patterns are observed at the other end of the income distribution: 4.0% of current Social Democratic voters, and 2.8 per cent of SD voters who previously voted for the Social Democrats, belonged to the three highest income groups (≥50,000 SEK/month), compared to 10.0 per cent of SD voters who previously voted for the Conservative Party, and 14.1 per cent of current Conservative Party voters. Complete distributions over income are presented in Table S2 in the Supplementary Material.
Finally, ANOVA analysis showed statistically significant group differences in subjective socioeconomic status, F (3, 2571) = 55.6, p < .001, η 2 = .06. SD voters who previously voted for the Social Democrats ascribed the lowest status to themselves (M = 5.82, Sd = 1.7), followed by current Social Democratic voters (M = 6.19, Sd = 1.7), SD voters who previously voted for the Conservative Party (M = 6.68, Sd = 1.6), and current Conservative Party voters (M = 6.92, Sd = 1.4). Bonferroni post hoc analysis confirmed that all these group differences were statistically significant (ps < .05).
In sum, these results support hypothesis 1a and (partly) 1b: SD voters who previously voted for the Social Democratic party had lower socioeconomic status than SD voters who previously voted for the Conservative Party. SD voters reported lower subjective socioeconomic status than the voters of the Social Democrats and the Conservative Party, but in terms of education, income, and subjective socioeconomic status, SD voters nevertheless resembled voters of their previous parties more than other SD voters.
I've always heard how Sweden is THE progressive country. Apparently this was agreed upon even in academia since they had a term for it. "Swedish exceptionalism" referred to how they had no far right parties in power. Then the Sweden Democrats got a lot of votes and some of that is due to luring away Social Democrats.
And on the topic of economic explanations vs. cultural explanations:
https://academic.oup.com/esr/article/35/5/637/5491585?guestAccessKey=c27a7344-078f-43ab-9d73-ccc3dbb96a47[/URL]
quote:
Yet evidence from the American case casts doubt on the hypothesized relationship between declining economic conditions and support for right-wing populism (Mutz, 2018). Examining electoral behavior in the American 2016 elections, Manza and Crowley (2017) conclude that there is no empirical support to the claim that Trump’s right-wing populist appeals resonated especially with economically disadvantaged voters; if anything, the evidence points in the opposite direction (but see Morgan and Lee (2017, 2018)).
In the European context, another line of research suggests that support for the populist right is strong among those who are just a few rungs above the bottom of the socio-economic ladder, but not among the most economically vulnerable (Bornschier and Kriesi, 2013; Gidron and Hall, 2017; Im et al. 2019). Biggs and Kanuss (2012) find that active support for the radical right British National Party is in fact lower in localities with high unemployment. In Belgium, Rink, Phalet and Swyngedouw (2009) find no relationship between local unemployment and voting for the radical right party Vlaams Blok. These findings resonate with recent studies of mass public opinion which situate anti-immigration attitudes in cultural rather than economic concerns (Hopkins and Hainmueller, 2014); this more cultural perspective has become the established common-wisdom in the field.
[…]
Economic downturns are often followed by growing support for populist appeals and the radical parties that voice them; but is this increased support for radical parties in hard economic times driven by those people personally experiencing loss of income? In our effort to answer this question, we took as our starting point the literature on populism across Western democracies in general, and in Europe in particular. Scholarship suggests that populist parties benefit from economic crises (Roberts, 2017) and documents a correlation between low socio-economic status and voting for these parties (Rooduijn and Burgoon, 2017; Visser et al., 2014), as well as regional-level associations between economic hardship and these parties’ bases of support.
Our findings are interesting in light of evidence that economic crises primarily benefit the populist radical right (Funke, Schularick and Trebesch, 2016). Our results suggest that if this is the case, the electoral success of the radical right likely comes from people other than those most directly and personally affected by the crisis. Previous work suggests that greater commitment to redistributive policies is required in order to deal with the challenge of radical right parties (Colantone and Stanig 2018). Yet our findings cast doubt on this conclusion, since individual-level economic losses do not serve as a major driver of support for the radical right. At the same time, the small increase in nativist attitudes among those hit by the crisis in the Netherlands suggests there is a potential incentive for right-wing political actors to make anti-immigration appeals in times of economic downturn. The fact that, at least in the case of The Netherlands, growing nativist attitudes did not go hand in hand with increased support for the radical right may suggest that other parties, including the mainstream right, have found ways to capitalize on such sentiments in the short term.
Another implication of our findings, which resonates with research on European populism, is that different mechanisms drive support for the radical left and the radical right (Akkerman, Zaslove and Spruyt, 2017; van Hauwaert and van Kessel, 2018). These results are relevant for the literature on support for populism in the American context, where scholars have mostly focused on what drives support for populism on the right (Manza and Crowley, 2017; Morgan and Lee, 2017, 2018).
Our analyses also invite further discussion about the relationship between economic, cultural and societal factors in driving support for populist radical parties (Gidron and Hall, 2017). For instance, ethnographic research locates the core concerns of populist and radical right supporters in demand for social recognition, which likely stems from a combination of economic and cultural factors (Cramer, 2016; Gest 2016). We hope our findings will help push forward the literature on the determinants of the rise in populism and the intersection of economic and cultural factors.
In conclusion, it bears emphasis that our findings do not suggest that economic factors are irrelevant for understanding support for the radical populist right. Economic factors may shape support for such parties not through personal income loss, but by an increased scarcity of welfare services (Cavaille and Ferwerda, 2017), a sharpening of moral boundaries toward outgroups (Mijs, Bakhtiari and Lamont, 2016), or by growing concerns over subjective social status (Gidron and Hall, 2017). There are likely to be multiple sources feeding right-wing populism, some of them more closely linked to economic factors than others (Harteveld and de Lange, 2018; Stockemer, Lentz and Mayer, 2018). Our findings call for renewed thinking about alternative mechanisms through which changes in economic circumstances shape the populist politics of our time.
I've seen this addressed in many articles and books but this one explicitly cites how it's the "common-wisdom" that culture is the dominant motivation for the success of the Right and that's why I selected it. If you'd like some other sources, I have them.
In any event, hope some of this might be illuminating. If you perhaps disagree with the listed reasons why the Right is beating the Left, that could also be an interesting discussion.
NikkolasKing fucked around with this message at 17:17 on Nov 21, 2020
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Nov 21, 2020 17:15
