In response to the rise of the far right in places like Europe, some researchers seek to understand what fuels people to vote for these parties, what tactics these parties use to get people to vote for them and who’s especially vulnerable.
A recent paper by Dr. Alan Jacobs, UBC professor and head of the department of political science, and Dr. Mark Kayser, professor of applied quantitative methods and comparative politics at the Hertie School in Berlin, investigates one under-explored driver of far-right voting: social mobility.
In an interview with The Ubyssey, Jacobs traced the idea for this paper to nearly a decade ago. “The far right in Europe and the U.S. was very much on the rise, but still not at the levels of electoral success that they've reached today.” Jacobs and Kayser were struck by the way these parties were “appealing to a sense of nostalgia, of looking back to times when things were ‘better’ than they are today, and promising to restore those … imagined better conditions.”
Part of that nostalgia, he said, seemed to be about the restoration of “ethnic and racial homogeneity, a time before mass immigration,” but another major piece of it was “hearkening back to better economic times.” This was the piece they decided to investigate.
While there was already a vast literature on drivers of far-right support, much of it focused on current economic circumstances, like factors of income or employment status. What hadn’t been attended to, Jacobs noted, was the “long-term [socioeconomic] trajectories that people experience throughout their lives” and how they shape susceptibility to far-right appeals.
The authors therefore foreground social mobility — or a person’s movement between social classes — as the theoretical hinge.
“[Social mobility] seemed to us like a hunch worth pursuing — that people who have slid down the social ladder compared to their parents [would have] a very profound sense … of the current economic system not having worked out for [them],” said Jacobs.
To examine that link empirically, the authors used data from the European Social Survey (ESS) across 11 European countries from 2002–2020. They looked first at political affinity, examining ESS answers to who respondents voted for in the most recent election and then which party they felt closest to. Jacobs and Kayser then examined respondents’ current occupational status and their parent’s occupational status (from when the respondent was a child) for people who had voted for parties coded as far-right. These were defined as parties that combined anti-establishment rhetoric, frustration with the political elite, and having campaign messages that prioritize the interests of the native-born population while portraying minorities as threats to national prosperity.
The study’s population was limited to those who were “native-born members of the country’s majority ethnic group” because status loss-focused arguments are meant to be applied to once-dominant groups and because immigrants and ethnic minorities are less likely to be drawn to explicitly nativist appeals.
With this data, the researchers could look at the specific effect of change in socioeconomic status on the likelihood of a person voting far-right. The results were as expected, with downward mobility correlating positively with far-right voting. Dropping one “occupational status category” below one’s parents increased the chance of voting far right by 16 per cent. Dropping three categories increased the chance by 60 per cent. However, upward mobility didn’t decrease the likelihood or have any “discernible effect.”
The Ubyssey asked Jacobs what implications this research has for Canada. While he couldn’t give precise claims without specific data, he acknowledged that the changes we’re seeing in the labour market’s occupational structure in Europe and the U.S. apply to Canada as well. If intergenerational downward mobility is becoming more common globally, it is reasonable to think some of the same political effects could be happening here (even if empirical evidence is still sparse).
That said, Jacobs emphasized a key difference: “until very recently, the far-right [in Canada] has been almost a ‘non-phenomenon.’” This may be starting to change, he said, with Pierre Poilievre’s leadership of the Conservative Party and others like Danielle Smith in the United Conservative Party of Alberta. Rather than Canada seeing the rise of a distinct far-right party, the country’s mainstream Conservative party has merely shifted right.
He also isn’t sure whether there would be much electoral support for hard-right positions in areas such as immigration and xenophobia, since culture-based anti-immigration appeals are less likely to be seen here. Hard economic times, however, could give way to a push for the far right, as financial justifications for limiting immigration may become more relevant.
When asked about solutions, Jacobs pointed briefly to obvious (but very hard to implement) economic policies that would “create more high-skilled, high-paying jobs that allow citizens to move up the occupational ladder or at least hold constant.” More important than the reduction of status loss itself, he said we need to look at broader social policies that reduce the perception and feeling of such loss. “What are things governments can do to help citizens feel more socially connected, feel more invested in the social collective and feel more invested in their communities?”
Moreover, these policies should help citizens to feel more trusting of the institutions that govern them and to feel that they have a voice in those systems. “I think a lot of what downward mobility does is it eats away at that trust … [that] the system is working for you,” Jacobs said.
“I don't know that steering the economy is going to necessarily be the best solution … But there may be other steps in the causal chain where companies can intervene so that the kind of job you have doesn't define your sense of social status, your self esteem, your sense of whether you are valued by society and have a voice.”
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