Research

Inequality of Opportunity and Populist Voting Across Europe: Do Circumstances Matter?

The debate on the cause for the voter support for populist parties in Europe relies heavily on the ex post inequality of outcome measures of economic inequality such as income, relative deprivation or income polarization. However, do we understand it well? Is GINI the only measure to be used in the political context? The current paper introduces the inequality of opportunity as an ex ante measure of economic inequality to the debate, linking it to individual and regional voting data. The paper proposes two main goals. First, it provides a novel measurement of inequality of opportunity, focusing on the fair part of its decomposition, through the analysis how circumstances a person is born into define present income. Second, it links inequality of opportunity to populist voting data using multilevel modelling of the data from a combination of European Social Survey and World Inequality Database. The preliminary results point to a variation in voting depending on the extent how inequality of opportunity is present in a particular country and the moderating effect of institutional trust. In countries with high inequality of opportunity, voters are generally more prone to support anti-establishment parties, especially if they trust them as incumbent. In countries with medium level of inequality of opportunity, institutional trust plays a key role in moderating the personal decision in the voting booth. In countries with low levels of inequality of opportunity, the propensity to vote populist is negatively moderated by the trust in government and is generally low.

Positional Shifts to Economic and Refugee Crises of Populist Parties in Europe

The debate on the cause of the rise of populism between culturalists (Norris & Inglehart, 2018) and economists (Guiso et.al., 2017) point to the fact that the demand side of illiberal politics is fueled by two growing divides along cultural and economic dimensions. The current paper introduces the supply side into the debate on the comparative example of Hungary and Lithuania. While both regions have experienced growing economic inequality within both the Baltic (Lithuania- GINI score: 0.37 – third highest in Europe) and Visegrad (center-periphery divide, growing GINI), they experience different outcomes - the former does not see constant success of populists in power, while the latter one does. The historical institutional approach is implemented through an analysis of the critical junctures on the path-dependency of the supply side of populism, including, but not limited how political parties adapt/fail to adapt to the new economic and cultural divides, through making key political decisions in terms of party strategy. The anticipated results are that through a mix of charismatic, clientelist and programmatic techniques, key political entrepreneurs in Hungary have managed to shift their positions on both dimension at the expense of niche parties. The Lithuanian counterparts, by zigzagging on positions on cultural divide and welfare, have failed to offer a new social contract of loyalty to nativist values in return for minimal welfare, which led to their demise.