The politics of social status: economic and cultural roots of the populist right.

By Noam Gidron, P. Hall. British Journal of Sociology, 2017

631 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper explores the factors that have recently increased support for candidates and causes of the populist right across the developed democracies, especially among a core group of working-class men. In the context of debates about whether the key causal factors are economic or cultural, we contend that an effective analysis must rest on understanding how economic and cultural developments interact to generate support for populism. We suggest that one way to do so is to see status anxiety as a proximate factor inducing support for populism, and economic and cultural developments as factors that combine to precipitate such anxiety. Using cross-national survey data from 20 developed democracies, we assess the viability of this approach. We show that lower levels of subjective social status are associated with support for right populist parties, identify a set of economic and cultural developments likely to have depressed the social status of men without a college education, and show that the relative social status of those men has declined since 1987 in many of the developed democracies. We conclude that status effects provide one pathway through which economic and cultural developments may combine to increase support for the populist right.

Subfields: Political Science and International Relations, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4c471925ec5a301d4c2e85b44faed07fda314729

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Citations in the corpus

The threat of social decline: income inequality and radical right support (2020, methodology): “Following Gidron and Hall (2017, 2018), however, we do not think that the rise of radical right parties should be discussed in a solely economic framework.”
Importing Political Polarization? The Electoral Consequences of Rising Trade Exposure (2020, neutral): “Glaeser et al. (2005) formalize this intuition in a model where politicians deploy strategic extremism (e.”
Populism and the economics of globalization (2018, background): “Gidron & Hall (2017) focus on perceived social status, and changes therein, as a determinant of right-wing populism.”
The Economic Origins of Authoritarian Values: Evidence From Local Trade Shocks in the United Kingdom (2021, neutral): “As we demonstrate, economic change can shape peoples’ values and value change may be an important mechanism linking economic change with opposition to economic integration (Carreras et al., 2019; Gidron & Hall, 2017; Hays et al., 2019).”