Webinar in December 2023

Cultural Background of European Democracies: Examining the Role of Values and Social Inequalities (December 06, 2023)

Much of the democratic backsliding literature sees reactionary ideological shifts in large population segments as a key reason for the rise of Right-Wing Populism (RWP)—shifts that supposedly fuel citizens’ distrust in democratic institutions and accordingly increase readiness to support RWP in its efforts to cut back on democracy’s liberal principles. The assumptions underlying this “standard narrative” of RWP’s rise are, however, more often stated than tested. Filling this void, we analyze data from the European Values Study/World Values Survey, tracing the development of institutional trust among the EU's populations over a twenty-five years’ time span. Focusing on the four largest national populations from the EU's Western core, Nordic region, Mediterranean South, and post-communist East as exemplifications, we examine whether these national publics' middle class spectrum experienced polarizing ideological shifts on four key value dimensions: right-vs-left on economic issues, nativism-vs-cosmopolitanism on immigration issues, patriarchy-vs-emancipation on sexuality issues, economy-vs-environment on the sustainability issue. 

Specifically, we identify to what extent voter segments especially at the lower end of the middle class spectrum drifted ideologically away from the majority's emancipatory progression on immigration, sexuality and sustainability issues, thus increasing value polarization in ways that erode institutional trust and diminish support for liberal democracy, again especially in the lower middle class spectrum, with the consequence of increased readiness to support RWP in its efforts to weaken democracy’s liberal constitutional elements. Contradicting this "democracy eroding" narrative, our preliminary results provide no consistent confirmation that polarizing ideological shifts among European electorates' middle-class segments account for growing institutional distrust or anti-liberal shifts in voters' democratic preferences. Moreover, RWP-supporters are social class-wise only weakly differentiated and do not show a particularly high concentration in the lower middle class. Instead, the nature of their distinction is primarily socio-psychological, manifest in a deep-seated opposition against the non-RWP parties' liberal consent on immigration policy and the resulting institutional distrust for not having a voice among the parties of the pre-RWP era. These two distinctions –immigration opposition and its associated institutional distrust– reach into all middle-class segments and exist in spite of the fact that, overall, European electorates and especially their middle-class spectrum have actually become more (instead of less) tolerant of cultural diversity and immigration. We conclude that the problems accounting for RWP’s success do not originate in the electorates and the supposedly reactionary public opinion shifts in parts of them. Instead, the problems reside in accrued representation deficits with respect to grown non-voter camps whose immigration skepticism found no credible voice in the party systems of the pre-RWP era [click here for the full paper text].