Everyday financial anxieties and frustration with low-quality work - rather than immigration alone - helped populist politics explode across Europe from the mid-2010s, according to a new book that analyses data from over 75,000 voters.
The data suggest that populist support is rooted in everyday insecurities that affect the lower-middle classes as much as the so-called left behind
Lorenza Antonucci
While immigration is often blamed for the rise of populism, it was cost of living and male job dissatisfaction that played a major role in the European surge in support for populist politics a decade ago, according to a University of Cambridge social scientist.
Research by Dr Lorenza Antonucci and her team used data from over 75,000 people across ten countries between 2015 and 2018, when the populist wave crashed across Europe: from the UK's 'Brexit' and Poland's PiS taking power to the AfD entering the Bundestag.*
Much handwringing has focused on "left-behind outsiders" driving European populism. However, Antonucci's findings, published in the new book 'Insecurity Politics', show that working people increasingly stressed by money worries and disillusioned with their jobs became far more likely to back populist parties.
For people across Europe, feelings of financial insecurity regardless of income - from anxiety over bills to an inability to cover unexpected costs - emerged as by far the strongest predictor of an anti-elite outlook, and of voting for populist parties on both the right and left.
In fact, Antonucci's research shows that in 2018, scoring above average for worrying about finances increased the chances of voting populist by 17-20 percentage points in Germany, France and Sweden, compared to those who felt more financially secure.**
In the same year, the link between money worries and voting increased populist support in Italy, Spain and the Netherlands by between 4-10 percentage points.
The research also shows that an overall disillusionment with quality of work was linked to voting populist in most of the large European nations, by up to 12 percentage points.
Antonucci points out that, at the time, the two leading parties in several of these countries were only separated by around ten percent of the vote.
"The political party system is extremely fragmented, and most national elections are won by much smaller swings than some of the effects money worries had on votes for radical parties at the height of Europe's populist wave," said Antonucci, from Cambridge's Department of Sociology.
"The cost-of-living crisis is viewed as a post-pandemic shock, but it runs much deeper across Europe in the years following the banking bailout. The data suggest that populist support is rooted in everyday insecurities that affect the lower-middle classes as much as the so-called left behind."
"Even for people with stable jobs, many workers feel like they are fighting a losing battle against job intensification, work pressure, declining wages, and a loss of control over how they do their job," said Antonucci, who calls this the hidden face of work-based insecurity.
