The threat of social decline: income inequality and radical right support

ABSTRACT

Income inequality and radical right parties have both been on the rise in Western democracies, yet few studies explore the linkages between the two – despite prominent arguments about voters feeling ‘left behind’. We argue that rising inequality not only intensifies relative deprivation, but also signals a potential threat of social decline, as gaps in the social hierarchy widen. Hence, voters higher up in the social hierarchy may turn to the radical right to defend existing social boundaries. Using International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) data from 14 OECD countries over three decades, we find that rising income inequality increases the likelihood of radical right support – most pronouncedly among individuals with high subjective social status and lower-middle incomes. Adding to evidence that the threat of decline, rather than actual deprivation, pushes voters towards the radical right, we highlight income inequality as the crucial factor conditioning perceived threats from a widening social hierarchy.

KEYWORDS:

• Income inequality
• radical right
• relative deprivation
• social decline
• social status

Editors' Note

This paper was awarded the ‘Best Paper Prize' by the Council for European Studies’ Research Network on Political Economy and Welfare. The Research Network each year offers a Best Paper Prize to a paper presented at the last CES conference.

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Klaus Armingeon, Denis Cohen, Thomas Kurer, Lucas Leeman, Elif Naz Kayran, Tim Vlandas, and audiences at University of Oxford seminars (Social Inequality Research Group, October 2018; INET Researcher Seminar, November 2018; WEALTHPOL Reading Group, March 2019), the annual conference of the Swiss Political Science Association (Zurich, February 2019), the 26th International Conference of Europeanists (Madrid, June 2019), and the ECPR General Conference (Wroclaw, September 2019) for valuable comments.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes on contributors

Sarah Engler is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Political Science and the Centre for Democracy Studies, University Zurich.

David Weisstanner is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Social Policy and Intervention and the Institute for New Economic Thinking, University of Oxford.

Notes

1 Online Appendix 1 shows that subjective social status is significantly associated with income, education and class, but these factors explain only a small fraction of the variance in subjective social status (R² = 0.24 in a fixed-effects model).

2 We focus on short-run, medium-run and long-run inequality trends. We expect an effect of long-term changes, which voters are likely to notice as permanent changes of stratification. Short-term changes, in contrast, capture more cyclical inequality swings (Pontusson & Weisstanner, 2018).

3 The 14 countries are: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland.

4 The correlation between radical right vote and affiliation is 0.52 (N = 46,223) for those cases where both measurements are available. Our findings are substantively unaltered if we include a dummy for party affiliation.

5 We coded parties in the ISSP using Armingeon et al. (2018), who provide an updated list of Mudde’s original classification and only deviate in a few (borderline) cases: the Swiss People’s Party (radical right from 1995 on), the Italian National Alliance, and the List Pim Fortuyn. We also deviate from Mudde and Armingeon et al. by classifying the Norwegian Progress Party as radical right, which turned from an anti-tax movement towards an anti-immigrant platform in the 1980s (see Oesch & Rennwald, 2018, p. 789).

6 The short-run trend measure is coded as: $1/2{\sum }_{i=0}^{1}Gin{i}_{t-i}-1/2{\sum }_{i=2}^{3}Gin{i}_{t-i}$; the medium-term measure as: $1/4{\sum }_{i=0}^{3}Gin{i}_{t-i}-1/4{\sum }_{i=4}^{7}Gin{i}_{t-i}$; and the long-term measure as: $1/4{\sum }_{i=0}^{3}Gin{i}_{t-i}-1/4{\sum }_{i=8}^{11}Gin{i}_{t-i}$.

7 Radical left was coded according to March (2011) as parties that criticize the market economy, promote strong interventionist policies and, similar to the radical right, cultivate anti-establishment sentiments.

8 We hasten to add that the increase in market inequality is not linear over time; inequality is particularly prone to jump in economic crises but can also decrease in other years (Pontusson & Weisstanner, 2018). Hence, our results do not simply indicate a spurious relationship with a linear upward trend (that could be based on any unobserved variable). Our findings are substantively unaltered with country-specific time trends, without any time trend, or with quadratic or cubic polynomial time trends (see Online Appendix 3).

9 We obtain similar results using multilevel logistic regressions, although the effects of inequality changes are estimated with slightly less precision. The interaction estimates, however, are substantially similar to our main specifications (see Online Appendix 3).