Downward Class Mobility and Far-Right Party Support

• Department of Political and Social Sciences

A presentation by Mark Kayser (Hertie School) in the context of the Comparative Politics Seminar Series.

The relative effects of economic and social change on support for far-right parties persistently occupies the attention of scholars and the public. We argue that many explanations, by examining short-run economic change or levels of social and cultural characteristics, miss a core determinant of the rise of the far right: long-run material deterioration, with its concomitant implications for social status. Employing intergenerational occupational mobility, a measure uniquely able to capture both components, we provide the first broad evidence of this pattern across 10 countries and two decades. We then distinguish (a) between level and change effects with the aid of diagonal reference models and (b) between income and status effects through the use of historical occupational wage data. Downward (but not upward) occupational mobility predicts far-right voting across ten developed democracies and intergenerational differences in real income play a role independent of occupational status.

(joint work with Alan M. Jacobs, UBC)