The New Working-class Vote: Rise of the Populist right, Challenges for the left and Consequences for the Welfare State

Abstract

Recent political events have brought the working class back into spotlight. While it had almost disappeared from the public and academic discourse, it has made its big comeback with the political upheavals of the year 2016. Such transformative political events as Brexit and the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States have been associated with widespread dissatisfaction among the working class. In the United States particularly, Trump’s gains in the former industrial regions of the Rust Belt have been a decisive element in his successful campaign. These recent developments have raised numerous questions on the transformation of the working-class vote and have demonstrated the necessity of intensifying the research in this domain. The weakening link between class and vote for the Left is of particular relevance for welfare state research, as the working class has long been seen as the main supporter of a strong social safety net. In this context, the panel proposes to deal with the electoral realignments of the working class and its consequences for contemporary welfare states. The research on the sociology of the vote in Western Europe has shown important moves in the class basis of both the Radical Right and the Left. Populist radical right parties have gone through a process of proletarization of their electorate and mainstream left-wing parties have gone through an inverse process of de-proletarization. At the same time, the decline in turnout has hit particularly low-income voters. Although most scholars agree that the Left and the Radical Right compete over the working class, we still know little about the contours, the causes and consequences of this new competition. Are the Left and the Radical Right really in competition among the same segments of the electorate? Do concerns about a changing employment structure and the related decline of routine jobs matter and which parties benefit from it? Does the new working-class basis of the Radical Right make it change its positioning on socio-economic issues and abandon its former neoliberal positioning? And what are the implications of these realignments for welfare state reforms? The panel proposes to address these questions from multiple perspectives. The panel aims at advancing both the class voting and the welfare state literature. On the one hand, we wish to improve our understanding on the mechanisms linking classes to specific parties and how the long-term structural changes of the economy impact on this relationship. On the other hand, we wish to contribute to a better understanding of how these shifts in the social basis of political forces affect the development of Western European welfare states.