ABSTRACT
This paper investigates the impact of labour market flexibility on the share of right-wing populism votes within a balanced panel dataset of 21 European Union countries between 1995 and 2020. The findings indicate that greater labour market flexibility leads to an increase in populist votes. The evidence is robust to various sensitivity analyses, i.e. utilising different econometric techniques, including various controls (e.g. the role of globalisation), and excluding outliers.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 See the recent literature reviews by Colantone and Stanig (Citation2019) and Margalit (Citation2019).
2 See the recent literature review by Walter (Citation2021).
3 See Bruno (Citation2005) for details.
4 Foreign population data are missing in Bulgaria, Croatia, and Romania. The WUI data are not available in Cyprus, Estonia, Luxembourg, and Malta. That is why we focus on 21 EU countries.
5 The averages of 1995-9, 2000-4, 2005-9, 2010-14, and 2015-20.
6 Refer Gygli et al. (Citation2019) for details of the KOF index of globalisation.