Is Economic Alienation Driving Populist Movements?: A Regional Analysis

Abstract: Right-wing populist movements have seen considerable growth across Europe during the last few decades. This growth has been attributed both to increasing immigration and economic disenfranchisement. We test the hypothesis that economic alienation drives populist support using a regional dataset covering twelve elections in four European countries and testing the effect of regional economic factors and the regional business sector structure, controlling for immigration and demographic factors, finding some support for this theory. Our results indicate that populist support is higher in regions that are economically disadvantaged and where the proportion of workers employed in manufacturing is high. We find that the effect of immigration on the populist vote share is diminished in regions with less manufacturing. We also find some support for the theory that the growth of populist support is driven by longer-term changes. However, some of our results are inconclusive and would require further testing.