Social divides in the age of globalization

Abstract

In recent decades, a new integration-demarcation cleavage has emerged in Europe, pitting political parties in favour of globalisation against those opposing globalisation. Although a lot is known about the socio-structural basis and the political organisation of this cleavage, we do not know the extent to which these political divides have led to social divides. Therefore, this article investigates how losers and winners of globalisation oppose each other. On the basis of representative online experiments in Germany and Austria, this article studies attitudes and behaviour towards people with different nationalities, education, and party preferences, which correspond to the cultural, socio-structural, and organisational elements of the new cleavage. More particularly, the extent to which people are willing to interact with each other in daily life and how much they trust each other is investigated. The main results show that people who identify with different parties (especially if they belong to the other side of the cleavage) oppose each other much more strongly than people with different nationalities. There is no divide, however, between the low-skilled and high-skilled. Finally, it appears that the social divides are asymmetrical: the winners of globalisation resent the losers more than the other way round.

Keywords:

• Cleavages
• globalisation
• populism
• affective
• polarisation

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank David Art, Bart Bonikowski, Simon Bornschier, Bruno Castanho Silva, Heike Klüver, Rahsaan Maxwell, Andres Reiljan, Oliver Strijbis, Denise Traber and Markus Wagner as well as two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The sample includes German and Austrian nationals above the age of 18 who were sampled according to their gender, age and education. Respondi maintains an ISO-certified Online Access Panel with around 100,000 potential respondents per country. For more information on the respondi access panel, see https://www.respondi.com/. To control for speed and slowness, we excluded the fastest and slowest three percent of respondents from the dataset. This did not change our results in any way though. We also checked whether the removal of the small number of respondents with a migration background would alter our results. This was not the case in any of the models reported.

2 It goes without saying that political parties also represent other social groups, not just winners and losers of globalization, especially given the fact that the political sphere also consists of other cleavages. Nonetheless, as we show below, the parties included in this study represent the main political forces on the two sides of the cleavage in the two countries under study.

3 For pragmatic reasons, and in order to have sufficiently large respondent groups per treatment, we did not include other parties that might also have been interesting in this context, such as the Greens or the pro-market Free Democrats (FDP).

4 The players only used virtual money and were not rewarded with the actual sum.

5 As Die Linke has traditionally been a political party from East Germany and the AfD has been slightly more successful in East than in West Germany, we also analyzed our data separately for both regions. It appeared that the patterns we observe in our data are the same in West Germany. The overall patterns are also very similar in East Germany, with a few exceptions that are reported in the following sections.

6 In general, we see that attitudes towards out-groups are also rather positive if one takes into account the full scale. As we cannot compare these findings with other studies, it is difficult to interpret the absolute levels. This is one of the reasons why we are mostly interested in the relative differences and compare attitudes towards different kinds of in- and out-groups.

7 In East Germany, attitudes towards Turks are more negative than in West Germany. The attitudinal gap between partisan in- and outgroups is therefore similar to the gap between national in- and outgroups.

8 This finding is mainly driven by voters in West Germany. Majority party voters in East Germany have more positive attitudes towards AfD voters than majority party voters in West Germany.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Marc Helbling

Marc Helbling is Full Professor in Political Sociology at the University of Bamberg and a Research Fellow at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center. He works on immigration and citizenship policies, nationalism, national identities, xenophobia/islamophobia, and right-wing populism. His work has appeared, among others, in British Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, European Sociological Review and Social Forces. [[email protected]]

Sebastian Jungkunz

Sebastian Jungkunz is Research Associate and Lecturer at the University of Bamberg and Zeppelin University. His research interests include populism, political extremism and polarisation of public opinion. He has published in Ethnicities, Political Research Exchange, and Political Research Quarterly, amongst others. [[email protected]]