The Rise of Populist Parties in Europe: The Dark Side of Globalisation and Technological Change?

Is the increasing strength of populist parties due to economic causes?

Globalisation may have increased prosperity in general, but has also led to unemployment, wage inequality, outward migration and, thus, ageing populations in many European regions. The IWH and its partners are examining whether these economic burdens have helped to cause this upturn in populism. An extensive causal analysis will show to what extent economic hardship leads to votes for populist parties. To obtain conclusive results, the researchers analyse the correlations for several European countries. This will include central and eastern European states, in particular.

The research project aims to enrich the debate, in which populism is primarily interpreted as a cultural backlash to liberalisation, open borders and migration. In addition, the results can yield important political recommendations.

IWH press release on the occasion of the project's announcement

Project information provided by the Volkswagen Foundation

Publications

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Income Shocks, Political Support and Voting Behaviour

Richard Upward Peter Wright

in: IWH Discussion Papers, No. 1, 2024

Abstract

We provide new evidence on the effects of economic shocks on political support, voting behaviour and political opinions over the last 25 years. We exploit a sudden, large and long-lasting shock in the form of job loss and trace out its impact on individual political outcomes for up to 10 years after the event. The availability of detailed information on households before and after the job loss event allows us to reweight a comparison group to closely mimic the job losers in terms of their observable characteristics, pre-existing political support and voting behaviour. We find consistent, long-lasting but quantitatively small effects on support and votes for the incumbent party, and short-lived effects on political engagement. We find limited impact on the support for fringe or populist parties. In the context of Brexit, opposition to the EU was much higher amongst those who lost their jobs, but this was largely due to pre-existing differences which were not exacerbated by the job loss event itself.

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Import Shocks and Voting Behavior in Europe Revisited

Annika Backes Steffen Müller

in: IWH Discussion Papers, No. 8, 2024

Abstract

We provide first evidence for the long-run causal impact that Chinese imports to European regions had on voting outcomes and revisit earlier estimates of the short-run impact for a methodological reason. The fringes of the political spectrum gained ground many years after the China shock plateaued and, unlike an earlier study by Colantone and Stanig (2018b), we do not find any robust evidence for a short-run effect on far-right votes. Instead, far-left and populist parties gained in the short run. We identify persistent long-run effects of import shocks on voting. These effects are biased towards populism and, to a lesser extent, to the far-right.

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This project is being funded by VolkswagenStiftung.

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