Crisis, Austerity and Populist Insurgencies: An Analysis of Economic Voting during the Great Recession

The recent 2014 European Parliament elections have made waves in the mass media on both sides of the Atlantic. Newspapers, news networks, commentators, blogs, and analysts have lamented at the Eurosceptic, neo-Nazi, populist, radical right as well as radical left, and libertarian political parties that have made significant gains since the start of the financial crisis in Europe. In light of these events, this paper asks the question whether economic voting is responsible for anti-establishment party success. I test this for six EU member states between 2008 and 2014 with the help of zero-order correlations involving a selection of macro-level variables. I also employ a binary logistic regression model for one available case –Sweden – where I also control for gender, education, views of political parties and attitudes towards immigrants. What I find is a relatively strong relationship between economic structural factors and anti-establishment party success.