- Trump, Brexit and Le Pen: Economic misfortune and electoral consequences
In 2015, Nobel laureate Angus Deaton and his wife Anne Case dropped a bomb into a lot of social scientists’ mind sets by documenting a marked increase in the all-cause mortality of middle-aged white non-Hispanic men and women in the United States between 1999 and 2013. The change reversed decades of progress in mortality and was unique to the US; no other rich country saw a similar turnaround. The increase was largely accounted for by increasing death rates from drug and alcohol poisonings, suicide, and chronic liver diseases and cirrhosis. Rising midlife mortality rates of white non-Hispanics were paralleled by increases in midlife morbidity.
Specifically, if the white mortality rate for ages 45-54 had held at their 1998 value, 96,000 deaths would have been avoided from 1999-2013, 7,000 in 2013 alone. If it had continued to decline at its previous (1979-1998) rate, half a million deaths would have been avoided in the period 1999-2013. The turnaround in mortality was driven primarily by increasing death rates for those with low education level. (high school degree or less). All-cause mortality for this group increased by 134 per 100,000 between 1999 and 2013.
The authors concluded that ties to economic insecurity are possible. After the productivity slowdown in the early 1970s, and with widening income inequality, many of the baby-boom generation are the first to find, in midlife, that they will not be better off than their parents. Financial insecurity – defined-contribution based pension plans, stock market and earnings risks – may weight more heavily on U.S. workers, whereas in Europe, defined-benefit pensions are still the norm. Those currently in midlife may be a “lost generation”, whose future is less bright than those who preceded them.
Case and Deaton – published almost exactly one year before President Trump’s election victory –documented increasing midlife distress in the United States. If this results from economic reasons, can we find a link to the election result?
A team of economists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) explored the electoral consequences of rising international trade exposure. Previously, the MIT authors had explored in a series of widely discussed papers the large and significant negative effects that trade had on local labor markets in the United States (“China trade shock”). The local labor markets that are home to more-exposed industries have endured substantial job loss and persistent increases in unemployment and non-participation in the labor force. Analyzing outcomes from the 2002 and 2010 congressional elections, an ideological realignment that is centered in trade-exposed local labor markets and that commences prior to the divisive 2016 U.S. presidential election is detected. Congressional districts exposed to larger increases in import penetration disproportionately removed moderate representatives from office in the 2000s leading to an increase of political representatives leaning towards either extreme of the political spectrum (‘polarization effect’). Adverse trade shocks diminish vote shares for the party initially in power (‘anti-incumbent effect’). Contrary to a ‘realignment effect’, according to which voters would favour redistributionist policies, in the 2008 and 2016 presidential elections, trade shocks significantly raised the vote share of the Republican candidate.
This leads to one of the core questions social researcher have been trying to answer: Can Trump, Brexit or Marine Le Pen’s rise in France be explained purely by economic misfortune and economic have-nots or is the rise of populism due to cultural or social developments (“cultural backslash”).
The economic insecurity perspective emphasizes the consequences of profound changes transforming the workforce and society in post-industrial economies. Alternatively, the cultural backlash thesis suggests that support can be explained as “a retro reaction by once-predominant sectors of the population to progressive value change”, hence, the surge in votes for populists can be explained not as a purely economic phenomenon. In the political scientists’ words, “Post-materialist values, such as cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism, generated rising support for left-libertarian parties during the post-war decades. This cultural shift has sometimes been depicted as an inexorable cultural escalator moving post-industrial societies steadily in a more progressive direction, as opportunities for college education have expanded to more and more sectors of the population and as younger cohorts have gradually replaced their parents and grandparents in the population. But it has been clear from the start that reactions to these developments triggered a counter-revolutionary retro backlash, especially among the older generation, white men and less educated sectors, who sense decline and actively reject the rising tide of progressive values, resent the displacement of familiar traditional norms, and provide a pool of supporters potentially vulnerable to populist appeals.” The line of distinction seems not all-clear to draw.
Inglehart and Norris’ results of analyzing the demographic and social controls confirm that populist support in Europe is generally stronger among the older generation, men, the less educated and the religious and ethnic majorities. Looking at evidence for the economic insecurity thesis, the results of the empirical analysis are mixed and inconsistent. Populist parties did receive significantly greater support among the less well-off and among those with experience of unemployment, supporting the economic insecurity interpretation. But other measures do not consistently confirm the claim that populist support is due to resentment of economic inequality and social deprivation. For example, in terms of occupational class, populist voting was strongest among the “petty bourgeoisie”, not unskilled manual workers. Populists receive significantly less support among sectors dependent on social welfare benefits as their main source of household income and among those living in urban areas.
By contrast, even after applying those social and demographic controls, cultural value scales prove consistent predictors of voting support for populist parties. Populist support was strengthened by anti-immigrant attitudes, mistrust of global and national governance (“anti-establishment”), support for authoritarian values and left-right ideological self-placement. These groups are the most likely to feel that they have become strangers from the predominant values in their own countries, left behind by progressive tides of cultural change which they do not share. The article authors concluded that these factors influence voting outcomes more than pure economic reasons.
Can we draw any further conclusions after the 2017 presidential election in France? We explore whether the variation in regional unemployment rates might have influenced the outcome of the electoral vote.
There is a striking and over time highly robust geographical correlation among the 96 French départements (excluding oversees départements) between the regional unemployment rate and the Le Pen vote shares in 1st round presidential elections in 2007 (Jean-Marie Le Pen), 2012 and 2017 (Figures 2-4).
The percentage vote share figures are from the European Election Database (Norsk Senter for Forskningsdata) and departmental unemployment rates for the years 2007, 2012 and 2015 are reported by the French statistics office Institut National de la Statistique et des Études économiques (INSEE). In this simple exercise, we regress the department-level unemployment rates on the vote shares of the Front National for the three different election years (Table 1).
The effect of the unemployment rate on Le Pen’s vote shares is consistently positive and statistically significant and has been rising over time. Around a quarter of the variation in voting shares is explained by the unemployment rates. Stacking the data together in a cross-time and department panel, we can statistically control for unobserved fixed department-level effects (Regression (4)). A rise by 1 percentage point in the unemployment rate is associated with 4 percentage points higher vote share for the Front National. The magnitude and significance of the effect is such large than one can hardly deny the link between the voting behaviour and the labor market outcomes explaining almost 50 % in the variation of the vote shares.
However, there might be confounding factors. Econometricians might immediately blame the regressions for missing controls for social and cultural variables, which Inglehart and Norris have found to dominate in European election outcomes.
For example, the south-east of France (Provence Cote d'Azur) has seen reasonable GDP increases (though more modest recently), nonetheless the region is one of the FN's strongest electoral areas. Part of the reason is no doubt connected with traditional migrant inflows (‘pieds-noirs’), and later, with the trans-mediterranean migrant flows into Europe. These effects are not addressed properly in the regression. However, one could also argue that the persistence of such high levels of unemployment might provide a perfect feeding ground for cultural backslash, anti-migrant, anti-establishment and anti-Europeanism as well as opposition to reform-oriented policies.