The political geography of discontent

Organised by

• Department of Political and Social Sciences

We explore the origins of the rise of populism in Europe by investigating how historical turnout decline shapes the contemporaneous rise of populist voting. We extend the recent political economy literature that has emphasised the role of economic shocks by adding the role of historical turnout decline as a key political moderator. As such, the main research question is to what extent the contemporaneous rise of populism is jointly explained by the economic and political geography of economic shocks and long-standing political discontent. Empirically, we exploit a novel dataset of historical turnout registers across European regions from the 1950s onwards. We reconstruct historical turnout levels at the NUTS-2 region level by aggregating turnout data from the district-level to the regional level leveraging the CLEA dataset. Afterwards, we match the historical turnout data with contemporaneous ESS data and other socio-economic covariates at the NUTS-2 level. We estimate both individual and aggregate regional-level models across European regions and show that the rise of populism is explained by the interaction of historical turnout declines and contemporaneous economic shocks. To avoid endogeneity issues, we also employ the China imports shock as an exogenous measure for economic shocks at the regional level.

Authors: Pablo Beramendi (Duke University) joint with Cesc Amat (University of Barcelona) and Jaume Magre (NYU)