Three perspectives dominate debate over the relationship between globalization and the welfare state in industrialized countries: that globalization constrains the welfare that hitherto legitimated openness, that globalization still sparks demands for welfare while opening few forces to flee or fight against it, and that openness has little effect on welfare. A closer look at the “globalization” and “welfare” aggregates on which most scholars focus, however, reveals varying politics connecting different elements of globalization and welfare that may help reconcile this debate. First, compared to general trade openness, low-wage competition may spark stronger pressure to expand and less pressure to constrain welfare compensation. Second, all kinds of openness affect vulnerable and thriving groups in ways that differ across social policies, especially training and relocation benefits compared to benefits for youth dependents and the elderly. Consequently, different faces of openness may spark predictably different politics that spur some aspects of welfare, retrench others, and have little effect on still others. Panel data for eighteen OECD countries supports this argument.

We explore how support for radical parties of both the left and right may be shaped by what we call "positional deprivation," where growth in income of individuals at a given point in the income distribution is outpaced by income growth elsewhere in that distribution. We argue that positional deprivation captures the combination of overtime and relative misfortune that can be expected to distinctly spur support for radical left and right parties. We explore this possibility by matching new measures of positional deprivation to individual-level survey data on party preferences in 20 European countries from 2002 to 2014. We find that positional deprivation is robustly correlated with supporting radical populist parties. First, positional deprivation generally, measured as average income growth across deciles of a country's distribution minus a respondent's own decile's growth, is associated with respondents' retreat from mainstream parties and with support for both radical right and, particularly, radical left parties. Second, positional deprivation relative to the highest and the lowest ends of the income spectrum play out differently for radical-right and for radical-left support. A respondent's positional deprivation relative to the wealthiest decile's growth in his or her country tends to spur support for radical left but not radical right parties. In contrast, positional deprivation relative to the poorest decile's growth in a respondent's country tends to spur support for radical right but not left parties. The results suggest that focusing on the combination of overtime and relative economic misfortune may be key to how economic experience shapes radical backlash of the left and right.

International audienceThis paper introduces a method and preliminary findings from a database that systematically measures the character and stringency of immigration policies. Based on the selection of that data for nine countries between 1999 and 2008, we challenge the idea that any one country is systematically the most or least restrictive toward admissions. The data also reveal trends toward more complex and, often, more restrictive regulation since the 1990s, as well as differential treatment of groups, such as lower requirements for highly skilled than low-skilled labor migrants. These patterns illustrate the IMPALA data and methods but are also of intrinsic importance to understanding immigration regulation

Support for radical parties on both the left and right is on the rise, fueling intuition that both radicalisms have similar underpinnings. Indeed, existing studies show that radical left and right voters have overlapping positions and preferences. In this article, however, we focus on the differences in the voting bases of such parties. We show that radical left and right voters have sharply diverging ideological profiles. When it comes to the historical traditions of the ‘left’ and ‘right’, these voters differ radically from each other. Both groups express the traditions associated with their mainstream counterparts—particularly with respect to (non-)egalitarian, (non-)altruistic, and (anti-)cosmopolitan values. Such differences also explain why radical left voters tend to be more, not less, educated than mainstream or radical right voters.

Radical left and right parties are increasingly successful-particularly among the less well-off. We assess the extent to which this negative effect of wellbeing on radical voting is moderated by contextual factors. Our study suggests that less well-off citizens vote for radical parties mainly under favorable aggregate-level circumstances. We distinguish two possible mechanisms underlying this effect-relative deprivation and risk aversion-and find support for relative deprivation only among radical right voters and for risk aversion for both types of radical voters, yet with predictable differences between the radical left and right supporter bases. Economic hardship leads to radical right voting when the socioeconomic circumstances are favorable and to radical left voting when net migration is modest. Our findings suggest a genuine paradox of radicalism: individual economic suffering might foster