Extreme Pessimists? Expected Socioeconomic Downward Mobility and the Political Attitudes of Young Adults

Mitrea, Elena Cristina; Mühlböck, Monika; Warmuth, Julia

doi:10.1007/s11109-020-09593-7

Cited by 25 publications

(20 citation statements)

References 66 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Adherents of both claims can find support for their arguments. Proponents of racial anxiety can offer cross-sectional and experimental evidence showing a connection between support for populist positions in the United States and United Kingdom and racial anxiety (1)(2)(3)(4)(5), while advocates of economic anxieties can point to negative longer-term trends in the economic and social well-being of middle class voters (6,7) and its correlation with polarized sentiments (8).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Polarization under rising inequality and economic decline

2020

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Social and political polarization is an important source of conflict in many societies. Understanding its causes has become a priority of scholars across disciplines. We demonstrate that shifts in socialization strategies analogous to political polarization can arise as a locally beneficial response to both rising wealth inequality and economic decline. In many contexts, interaction with diverse out-groups confers benefits from innovation and exploration greater than those that arise from interacting exclusively with a homogeneous in-group. However, when the economic environment favors risk aversion, a strategy of seeking lower-risk in-group interactions can be important to maintaining individual solvency. Our model shows that under conditions of economic decline or increasing inequality, some members of the population benefit from adopting a risk-averse, in-group favoring strategy. Moreover, we show that such in-group polarization can spread rapidly to the whole population and persist even when the conditions that produced it have reversed.

show abstract

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Polarization under rising inequality and economic decline

2020

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…As our response options did not include 'do not know' or 'do not want to answer', and there were no missing responses, it is very likely that many different respondents gave 'middle' responses. For example, Mitrea et al (2020) reported that about 18% of the respondents, aged 18-34, in their study, did not place themselves on a similar left-right scale. In the following analysis, we will therefore conduct a robustness test, which excludes those respondents giving 'middle' responses from the group of 'moderates'.…”

Section: Testing Our Hypotheses With Boosted Datamentioning

confidence: 89%

Explaining youth radicalism as a positioning of the self at opposite extremes

Uba

Bosi

2021

Politics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The concept of ‘young radicals’ is gaining ground in a context of generalized discontent – often, this is due to the fact that young people engage increasingly in unconventional forms of political activism. Much less is known about young people holding radical political attitudes. This article advances our understanding of those young people who place themselves on the extremes of the ideological scale and investigates how those with radical right attitudes differ from those with radical left ones. Drawing on a survey that gathers data from nine European countries, with a sample of young people aged 18–35, we test those factors that have been used to explain why people use violent repertoires of action: social background, gender, political values, and prior experience in protest activism. The results relate ‘radicalness’ to experienced economic difficulties and the more contentious political activism. The difference between the young ‘radicals’ in right and left are, however, defined by gender and adherence to authoritarian values.

show abstract

“…The former is found to be associated with political distrust (Daenekindt et al 2018). Studies confirm that is it is influential for voting for radical parties on both sides of the political spectrum (Kurer and van Staalduinen 2020;Mitrea et al 2020), albeit mainly on the right (Mayer 2002;Peugny 2006).…”

Section: Social Descent and Radicalismmentioning

confidence: 95%

“…On the one hand, the argument that upwardly mobile citizens disproportionately support inequality reduction and cultural progressivism is not corroborated by empirical evidence (Abramson and Books 1971;Alesina and La Ferrara 2005;Ares 2020;Breen 2001;Corneo and Grüner 2002;Jaime-Castillo and Marqués-Perales 2019;Piketty 1995;Siedler and Sonnenberg 2012). On the other, although the claim that dissatisfaction stemming from downward mobility favours radical voting has received some support (Daenekindt et al 2018;Mayer 2002;Peugny 2006), it remains unclear whether this is most relevant for parties on the left or the right (Kurer and van Staalduinen 2020;Mitrea et al 2020) and why (Paskov et al 2020;Tolsma et al 2009).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Intergenerational Foundations of Class Voting: Social Mobility and Electoral Choice in Western Europe

Ciccolini¹,

Härkönen²

2021

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Scholarly explanations of the survival of left parties and the upsurge in mainstream politics discontent often refer to voters' intergenerational mobility resulting from the post-industrial transition. As the occupational structure evolves, voters across generations are exposed to heterogenous life chances, and the social elevator progressively alters class voting patterns. Yet empirical evidence for the electoral implications of social ascent and decline as well as their reasons is mixed at best – likely because most empirical studies seek for homogenous average mobility effects. To address this limitation, we analyse the diverse consequences of mobility across social groups in a quasi-descriptive fashion by applying a cutting-edge ANOVA-based OLS model. Contrarily to prior studies, this approach allows us to identify class-specific mobility effects on voting (ceteris paribus), consistently with theory. Our analyses draw on individual-level detailed information on both intergenerational social mobility and political behaviour from the European Social Survey (rounds 1-9) across 19 Western European countries. Although scholarly accounts on the consequences of social mobility averagely find little to no support in our analyses, we do observe some significant and substantial class-specific effects of both social ascent and descent on voting choice.

show abstract

Extreme Pessimists? Expected Socioeconomic Downward Mobility and the Political Attitudes of Young Adults

Cited by 25 publications

References 66 publications

Polarization under rising inequality and economic decline

Polarization under rising inequality and economic decline

Explaining youth radicalism as a positioning of the self at opposite extremes

The Intergenerational Foundations of Class Voting: Social Mobility and Electoral Choice in Western Europe

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About