How does income inequality affect the support for populist parties?

ABSTRACT

Recent studies provide evidence that income inequality is a relevant driver for the electoral success of populist parties all over Europe. In this article, we aim to understand how exactly increasing income inequality can lead to support for populist parties. More specifically, we discuss four different attitudinal mechanisms from previous research: economic insecurities, trust in political elites, social integration, and national identity. We rely on eight waves of the European Social Survey and find that economic insecurities, trust in political elites, and national identity are linked to rising income inequality and populist support as expected. However, a causal mediation analysis shows that these mechanisms are not sufficient to fully understand the impact of income inequality on support for populists. This finding raises questions regarding the empirical support of existing theories to explain how macroeconomic changes in inequality became a pre-condition for the rise of populist parties.

KEYWORDS:

• Income inequality
• populism
• political parties
• voting decisions

Acknowledgement

We want to thank Anselm Hager, participants of workshops at SCRIPTS, internal Humboldt University Seminar and three anonymous reviewers for valuable suggestions and helpful feedback. We also thank Johannes Lattman and Violeta Haas for excellent research support. Research for this contribution is part of the Cluster of Excellence “Contestations of the Liberal Script†(EXC 2055, Project-ID: 390715649), funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) under Germany’s Excellence Strategy.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The condensation of four separate mechanisms is made for the sake of the argumentation. Most of the papers in this section speak about multiple mechanisms that can be related to each other.

2 The countries in our study are: Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom. We exclude East-European countries as the structural relationship between inequality, representation, and rise of populist parties is characterized by transitions to the market economy and difficult to compare to West-European countries.

3 We present the parties in our sample that are classified as populist in the supplementary materials (SM).

4 As a robustness check the SM reports on the effects of market inequality.

5 Other studies rely on responses to a specific question about job security (see e.g. Scheve & Slaughter, 2004).

6 The questions are asked on an 11-pt scale. The wording reads "how much you personally trust each of the institutions I read out".

7 The trust measure in political elites is conceptually and empirically different from populist attitudes (Akkerman et al., 2014; Geurkink et al., 2020).

8 The questions are asked on an 11-pt scale. The wording reads "Most people can be trusted or you can’t be too careful", "most people try to take advantage of you, or try to be fair", "Most of the time people helpful or mostly looking out for themselves".

9 For testing their argument Gidron and Hall (2020) rely on a different question that asks respondents about subjective social status. The measure is only available in one wave of the ESS, but it correlates positively with our measure "trust in people". Gidron and Hall (2020) also describe "trust in people" as one measurement indicator for social integration.

10 For a more detailed description of the variables please refer to the SM. For the control variables, we interpolate missing country years using splines.

11 While we would prefer to explain how much of the total effect of inequality is due to changes in the mediators (Imai et al., 2011), making such inferences would require a strong assumption that there are no intermediate confounders. In our context those exist: Inequality potentially affects the distribution of income and social class, which have both an effect on the mediators and support for populism. Even if we observe those intermediate confounder we cannot address the issue and meet the required assumptions (Acharya et al., 2016). Moreover, the different channels might influence each other. E.g. economic insecurities might reduce trust in political elites. This could create an additional confounder structures that a classic mediation analysis would need to consider.

12 We rely on the R-package DirectEffects to carry out the estimation.

13 For a table with all estimates please refer to SM B.2

14 We predict values varying the main covariate, income inequality, and trust in political elites, and hold the other covariates at mean values in our sample.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft: [Grant Number EXC 2055, Project-ID: 390715649].

Notes on contributors

Lukas F. Stoetzer

Lukas F. Stoetzer is Post-Doc at the SCRIPTS Cluster of excellence of the Humboldt University of Berlin. His research focuses on comparative political behaviour and political methodology.

Johannes Giesecke

Johannes Giesecke is Professor of Empirical Social Research at Humboldt University of Berlin. His research focuses on sociology of labor markets, social inequality, and methods of empirical social research.

Heike Klüver

Heike Klüver is Comparative Political Behavior at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Her research interests include comparative european politics, political parties, coalition governments, interest groups, political representation as well as quantitative text analysis