Populism and the Transformation of European Party Systems

The transformations in the electoral alignments in Europe since the 1960s have been a widely studied subject in contemporary political science. Kriesi et al. (2006; 2008; 2012) identify two waves of transformation that reshaped North-European party systems - a first wave led by the new left in the 1970s and early 1980s, and a second wave driven by the new right since the 1990s. The term ‘new’

underscores that these actors challenged the political order at the time. Most importantly, the challenge arose from new issues and demands that these actors brought into the political process.

The new left advocated individual autonomy, the free choice of lifestyles and other universalistic values (e.g., della Porta and Rucht 1991; Kitschelt 1988). The new right, by contrast, focused on immigration and European integration as threats to the homogeneous nation-state.

The so-called second wave took place under a context marked by a deepening of the globalisation and technification process, the fall of the USSR -and thus the demise of classic far-left authoritarian platforms-, and rising inequality within Western countries. The 2008 Great Recession gave a new impulse to the paradox: precisely when structural processes (i.e. globalisation and its side effects within Western workforces and rising inequality) gave a more propitious context to protectionist and redistributive platforms, the traditional left was in a deep political crisis. Many have seen populism as being at the forefront of the new parties' answer to the aforementioned paradox, and therefore as the key feature of this second wave.

As Mudde (2013) argues within his comprehensive review of the concept, the label 'populist' should be used with caution, since it might quickly become a slippery concept unless properly defined. Following Mudde and Kaltwasser (2013) among others, we opt for what he descibes as a thin-centred ideological approach to define populism. From this point of view, populism would have anti-elitism as its key feature since it would consider society as essentially divided on moral grounds between two antagonistic camps: the good people vs the corrupt elite (Mudde and Kaltwasser 2013: 1). Populists project themselves as the bearers of the people's true will and the defenders of 'the good people'.

Everything that falls beyond the good people thus becomes the ‘enemy’, which can take different forms.

The new European far-right breeds a particular strand of exclusionary populism that contrasts with the inclusive populism typical of Latin American left-leaning parties (Mudde and Kaltwasser 2013). While inclusive populism is meant to define the people as outsiders in a fight against the elite for a more encompassing set of policies and institutions, exclusionary populists actively define a number of groups beyond the 'corrupt elite' as not deserving equal treatment. In a way, it could be said that the key difference between both types of populism is how the enemy is defined depending on the relation vis a vis the system. If one is (or feels) out of 'the system' and has always been so, the enemy is limited to those who organize 'the system' against you. However, if one is (or feels like) part of a 'system' that was working well but now it is not, then there are enemies beyond the elite. The populist right's discourse towards immigration offers a crystalline example, since they are often used by it as scapegoats for many of the malaises affecting 'the people'. The standard structure of the argument matches with the idea of exclusionary populism, pointing (explicitly or not) to an alliance between the elites and the newcomers in detriment of nationals. This dual enemy (i.e. immigrants and the elites) is what has been labelled as the tripartite structure of the PRR (Damhuis 2018).

The division between inclusionary and exclusionary populism squares well with the distinction between populist left and populist right. While the former tends to focus on economic fairness and redistribution, the latter puts more attention on protectionist and even authoritarian solutions. Without advancing any formal hypothesis yet, it therefore makes sense to expect that the latter will be supported by a specific kind of voter inclined towards these proposals.

3.1.1 Exclusion (or the fear of it) as a determinant of PRR vote

PRR parties are born and raised in the context of crises of political representation, and according to several works, they take advantage of the working class’ search for a new political home. It is what Kitschelt (1995) defined early on as "occupational risk". Scheepers, Eisinga and Lammers (1993);

Scheepers, Billiet and De Witte (1995); Eisinga et al. (1998) all find a nexus between either manual workers or the less educated and far-right vote. More recently, Arzheimer and Carter (2006) conduct one of the first comprehensive cross-country analyses on the determinants of the far-right vote and find that, as they expect, being a manual worker significantly increases the probability of voting for the PRR. Moreover, Lubbers et al (2002) complementarily observe that those in a professional occupation

are significantly less likely to vote for the PRR. This consistent finding, replicated in many comparative case studies as well as single case studies, crucially informs the debate on what determines the demand for PRR parties and poses a question that is particularly central to the intentions of the present work: why do those who are closer to the margins of society get associated with an exclusionary movement?

The earliest and most straightforward answer comes from the so-called Realistic Conflict Theory (Coser 1956). In its most stripped-down version, the theory poses that if a subset of a given population perceives itself as competitor for a limited set of resources with another subset that can be labelled as 'outsider', conflict is likely to follow. The analogy with the way the exclusionary populist right exploits immigration as a threat is self-evident. Lubbers and Scheepers (2000) are among the first to find support for this interpretation, at least for the German case.

Traditionally, the notions of inclusion and exclusion within a capitalist society have been linked to the idea of class: certain class groups enjoyed a higher social status than others and fought to defend it.

In the last two decades, however a new, cross-class division has been highlighted by sociologists and economists: dualisation, or the increasing breach between insider (protected) and outsider (precarious, unprotected) workers. Developed first by labour economists whose focus was to highlight the higher bargaining power of permanent employees thanks to employment protection legislation (Blanchard and Summers 1986; Lindbeck and Snower 1988), political economy took on the issue early on to explain policy equilibriums in favour of high employment protection first (Saint-Paul 1993), and the subsequent dilemma confronted by social democratic parties who aspire to attract both insiders and outsiders due to their different policy preferences (Rueda 2005). Insiders, regardless of their class belonging, were now seen as the group fighting to maintain their gained status. In consequence, if social democratic parties focus on employment protection legislation and dismiss passive and active employment policies, outsiders might turn their back to them in search for some alternative that facilitates a policy set to improve their situation.

It is important now to pause to highlight that alternative definitions to the notion of outsiderness (and therefore insiderness) have been proposed. Probably Hausermann and Schwander (2011) bring the most influential example to the table: departing from a multi-dimensional conceptualisation that is not restricted to contract type and that draws important significance from an occupational division, they find a highly relevant way to classify workers according to their exposure to potential exclusion, with consequences for their political preferences.

While the contract-based definition of dualisation has taken to identify outsiders with abstention (Rueda and Lindvall 2014) and the New Left (Marx 2013; Rovny and Rovny 2017), the occupation-based classification helps to find a link between outsiderness and far-right vote (Rovny and Rovny 2017). The latter finding is in line with a small but growing breed of nuanced studies that prove the importance of structural elements. Lubbers & Tolsma (2011), for instance, pool 2002-2008 ESS data to establish that, although migrant-related fear and authoritarian attitudes do explain why people with lower education levels tend to vote for the far-right compared to the higher educated, attitudes end up having a much weaker predicting capacity among the former group. As Dippel et al. (2015) suggest, it might be the case that these segments of the population feel the pressure of potential exclusion through the labour market and respond through exclusionary vote patterns to further shelter their position against external threats. Dippel et al. apply a causal mediation analysis to find out that at least two thirds of the voting effects provoked by trade exposure in Germany can be explained through its impact on labour markets. When they take the analysis to the individual level, it turns out that low-skilled manual workers are the ones turning towards the far-right following the trade-on-labour effect.

In a neat correlate to Dippel et al, van der Waal & de Koster (2017) find that protectionist positions diminish the weight of cultural variables in voting decisions towards the far-right, which means that economic proposals to attract voters towards the far-right seem to matter.

Summing up, we know that (1) contract-based outsiders are more likely to move away from PRR parties; (2) but occupation-based outsiders are more likely to get close to them; (3) and there seems to be some preliminary indications of competition for material-based benefits (and the loss of them) individual is more likely to have been exposed to punishment, lack of love, and a general atmosphere

of tension and aggression since early childhood, experiences which often produce deep-rooted hostilities expressed by ethnic prejudice [and] political authoritarianism" (Lipset 1959: 495).

What lies behind Lipset's idea is the concept of identity. The vote for PRR parties might be understood as a search for a new set of values to relate to (Lubbers and Scheepers 2000) of a class group that feels that they exist in a world whose previously established certainties are now crumbling, or from segments of society who face problems of social integration (Gidron and Hall 2017). In its most essential version, PRR vote would be a backlash against cultural change. In his seminal work, Inglehart (1977) found that a profound turn in dominating values was taking place in Western societies, away from materialism worries and towards post-materialistic perspectives such as social justice or environmentalism. There was a new generation of middle-class professional workers who was leading the way and thus bringing a change in values that would end up feeding the New Left, as well as deep crises within classic social democratic parties. The far-right surge might be read as a backlash to this process, one that would be particularly appealing for those who are further away from the groups involved in the post-material revolution, normally manual and under-qualified workers (Ignazi 1992; Kitschelt 1995).

The link between illiberal cultural preferences and far-right vote has been well established both for the whole population (e.g. Inglehart and Norris 2016) and for the working class (Bornschier and Kriesi 2012, as well as chapter 2 of this dissertation), so it would be a rather slim contribution to bring it again to test. Our goal, rather than adding to the existing dichotomical debate between economic and non-economic factors of far-right vote, is to deepen on the former through the exploration of the insider/outsider distinction. In that sense, there is a potential dimension to the non-material side of voting for exclusionary populism to avoid potential exclusion: the loss of societal status.

The fear of 'class loss' (more commonly referred by its French name, déclassement) is defined as much more than the mere erosion of income and wealth (Bourdieu 1978), featuring in essence the displacement to a lower status level under the regards of your peers. It could be said that those who have achieved the status of insiders have gained with it a sheltering against this risk, and that any threat to its status goes beyond its economic dimension (Santos Ortega 2004). There is, however, little evidence on the influence of this particular factor as a driver of PRR vote in existing literature. Thus, it is hard to hold any strong expectation. A test should be nonetheless included in order to distinguish a purely material effect from other dimensions of labour-linked status.

3.1.2 Insiders, outsiders and the exclusionary far-right

If there seems to be an emerging consensus on outsiders leaving the social democratic (SD) coalition towards either the left or abstention, but rarely or never to the right side of the spectrum (Schwander 2017), this begs the question: would that mean that insiders are more likely to make the opposite move? There seems some preliminary evidence in that direction (see for instance Hausermann and Walter 2010 for the Swiss case, as well as Rovny and Rovny 2017). The logic behind the proposition mirrors Rueda's core contribution: if, whenever social democratic parties stick to insider interest, outsiders move away, would it not logically follow that insiders are equally prone to finding parties that are more suitable in case social democrats turn towards the right-liberal side of the spectrum, making insiders fear exclusion? The party convergence thesis is then a somewhat necessary companion for this reasoning and one that is at least partially supported by the events in the last decade (e.g.

Magalhaes 2014; Hernández and Kriesi 2016). Hence our preliminary hypothesis:

H1: Insiders tend to vote for PRR parties compared to outsiders, who tend to separate themselves from PRR parties.

With this first hypothesis, we have established the base of our theory: insiders are more interested in exclusionary populist parties than outsiders. Going beyond previous works in a similar direction (particularly Rovny and Rovny 2017), we pose that it will be mostly because they risk more in the gamble in terms of losing economic status. However, it might very well be argued that, even if we control for cultural attitudes and preferences, being a permanent worker might be capturing something else. To pin down our mechanism (i.e. loss of economic status), we propose three measures. The first measure is arguably the one closest to our proposed mechanism, and it introduces a dimension of potentially perceived competition for jobs. It does so by combining the unemployment rate and the rate of non-native workers within the occupation-country of the individual, to expect that:

H2a: Insiders in occupations displaying comparatively higher levels of unemployment and immigrant workers will be more likely to vote for PRR parties.

At the same time, we assume that not all workers face similar labour market risks of vulnerability. In that sense, combining the status-based measure of dualisation and the occupation-based measure produces an interesting possibility: to measure whether a particular permanent worker can see her status more or less threatened depending on how much competition she faces within her current job position, and how much could her material situation be damaged in the case of a more open labour market.

Although the insider/outsider division cuts through traditional class and occupational classifications, it does not make them disappear. More specifically, it could be argued that manual and service workers are more exposed to labour market risks, displaying higher unemployment rates as well as facing longer unemployment spells across Europe in recent years. As a matter of fact, chapter two showed that manual and service workers are more likely to choose far-right parties than their counterparts. It would therefore make sense then to expect manual and service insiders to display an even deeper inclination to vote for PRR.

H2b: Insiders in working class occupations will be more likely to vote for the PRR than outsiders.

Another way to look at the same phenomenon would be achieved by creating a two-by-two classification to distinguish between high- and mid- or low-skilled insiders and outsiders. Skill level is a good predictor of exposure to the consequences of labour market risks by itself, with high-skilled workers normally being more prepared to cope with the woes that might come with unemployment.

Following the logic of H1 and H2a, it would therefore make sense to expect it to have an additional effect over PRR vote. As a matter of fact, it could be argued that skill interacts with job status on the distribution of risk exposure, particularly for low-skilled outsiders who might face a lower probability of building a stable career path, with temporary jobs becoming some sort of dead ends for certain profiles (Booth et al 2002, Autor and Houseman 2005). Low-skilled insiders, instead, may perceive the risk they face as higher since the gap between the status they hold as insiders and the one they could fall into is wider. Moreover, if job status and occupational/skill dimensions come to interact to define PRR vote probability, it would make sense to expect a combined category to be more accurate.

H2c: Mid- and low-skilled insiders are more likely to vote for the PRR than any other group.

A broader comparative perspective suggests that labour market and welfare systems under different institutional setups may well condition the exclusionary populist framing of “the people” and the

“other”. These structural and institutional attributes of distinct welfare states not only influence levels of social stratification, or inequality; more important for an understanding of populism, perhaps, they influence the degrees of social integration, cohesion, and segmentation. Bluntly, what makes an insider has very much to do with the regulatory setup.

Esping-Andersen (1990) delineated a division between the 'three worlds of welfare capitalism': Nordic states featuring inclusive institutions (i.e. encompassing trade unions and a universalistic welfare safety net); Anglo-Saxon (or liberal) economies favour flexibility (i.e. free choice and competition to the detriment of equality); and Continental (also called Bismarckian) states displaying a corporatist approach to welfare that tends to protect active workers with long careers through the generation of rights throughout their working lives. Essentially, Nordic countries countervail segmentation and inequality while liberal economies prioritize individual and firm decisions, and Bismarckian states tend to favour dualisation since it distributes protection to its citizens depending on their work status and occupational profile. Hausermann and Schwander (2012), for instance, finds stronger insider-outsider divide in Southern welfare models.

Afonso and Rennwald (2018) suggest (as an intuition) that PRR electorate contains an oversized portion of insiders in Bismarckian welfare systems who are afraid of sharing their safety net with outsiders. Their work focuses on how welfare chauvinism fits well with the preferences of these groups, normally composed by 'male breadwinners'. Complementarily, Swank and Betz (2002) prove that universal welfare states diminish the direct effects of globalization (in particular, the increase in people-flows and the decline of manufacturing employment) while wiping out the effect of other variables (i.e. rises in trade openness and capital mobility). Thus, it makes sense to expect that, if insiders are in a country where they have a lot to lose (status-based), they will vote for the exclusionary populist right with even more intensity since they will be particularly interested in protecting their own positions (Roberts 2017). A variation of our first hypothesis can thus be formulated:

H3a: Insiders in status-based countries (with Bismarckian welfare states) will be more likely to vote for the PRR than in non-status-based countries.

Voting is by no means the only political activity taken by workers to shelter themselves against labour market risks. Probably the main (and historically the earliest) political decision taken by any employee to pursue a better job status is to join a union. Unionised workers tend to be less exposed to unemployment and to the risk of income loss (Johnson and Mieszowski 1970). Moreover, it makes sense to expect that unions serve as a mechanism to homogenise working class vote and keep it

Voting is by no means the only political activity taken by workers to shelter themselves against labour market risks. Probably the main (and historically the earliest) political decision taken by any employee to pursue a better job status is to join a union. Unionised workers tend to be less exposed to unemployment and to the risk of income loss (Johnson and Mieszowski 1970). Moreover, it makes sense to expect that unions serve as a mechanism to homogenise working class vote and keep it