The Rise of Populism and the Revenge of the Places That Don’t Matter

Abstract

Populism is on the rise, especially in the developed world. It has gone from being a force to be reckoned with to becoming one of the main challenges for society today. But the causes behind its rise remain hotly debated. Many of the economic analyses of the ascent of populism have focused on growing inequalities-both from an interpersonal and territorial dimension. In this essay, I argue that the rise of the vote for anti-system parties is far more related to the long-term economic decline of places that have seen far better times and have been disadvantaged by processes that have rendered them exposed and somewhat 'expendable' than to increases inequality. Fixing this type of 'places that don't matter' is possibly one of the best ways to tackle anti-system voting. This will imply the implementation of well-targeted placesensitive polices, going beyond the traditional wealthy and less developed places that have attracted the bulk of investment and considering long-term economic trajectories.

Breaking the Black-Box of Regional Resilience: A Taxonomy Using a Dynamic Cumulative Shift-Share Occupational Approach

“…The former, particularly, emphasises the capacity of small villages to allow healthier lifestyles and exploit the opportunities of economic growth of an ageing (silver) society [58,70]. The latter supports the idea of an uneven centrality of marginal cities and regions, often ignored by the national policy as "places that don't matter" [71].…”

Economic Insecurity and the Causes of Populism, Reconsidered

“…Some of the low explanatory power is probably due to attenuation bias resulting from measurement error. But this result is not merely an artifact of survey 3 The share of variation explained is a problematic measure when the dependent variable is a binary outcome. But other, more suitable tests-such as ROC ("receiver operating characteristic") or precision-recall tests-also show a poor fit for these models.…”

“…As Gidron and Hall (2017) report in a study of vote choice in 20 developed democracies, even after throwing into the regression a wide array of economic predictors, the share of the variation explained is 0.07. 3 Another study of individual-level support for populist parties in six western European countries (Oesch 2008) finds that employment characteristics and sociodemographics exhibited a similarly weak empirical relationship with the populist vote (R 2 ranging from 0.019 in Switzerland to 0.078 in Norway). Some of the low explanatory power is probably due to attenuation bias resulting from measurement error.…”

Determinants of regional distribution of AKP votes: Analysis of post‐2002 parliamentary elections

“…Rising deindustrialization, accelerating unemployment, accelerating place of immigrants within the economy are vital elements of the populist voting. Although populism patterns exhibit similarities with the discontent literature, Rodríguez‐Pose (2020) remark that while populism is mostly working on individual characteristics, geography of discontent is mostly related to the forgotten places. It should be kept in mind that individuals can be well‐off and can have a position in the middle of the overall income distribution.…”

“…Falling social trust and cohesion is among many other motivators of the populist voting in central‐western countries. In a very recent discussion, Rodríguez‐Pose (2020) revisits the populism arguments and expresses that certain segments of the society that used to be predominant are now in declining importance. Rising deindustrialization, accelerating unemployment, accelerating place of immigrants within the economy are vital elements of the populist voting.…”