The Periphery Against the Center: Peripheral Discontent and its Consequences in the Netherlands

The geographic patterns behind support for the populist radical right and Brexit have led to a resurgence of interest in center-periphery conflicts in politics. While this notion already has its origins in the earliest work on political cleavages, and reflects longstanding social and political divisions in many countries, it has allegedly gained a new relevance and resonance in recent years due to the emergence of populist actors and their discourse. One of the core elements of populism is its claim that the country is ruled by an ‘evil’ and/or incompetent elite (consisting of politicians, journalists, civil servants, etc.). This elite resides in the ‘center’: an area that usually consists of the capital, but often includes a larger area in which political, economic and cultural power is allegedly concentrated. To the extent that this populist story strikes a chord in peripheral areas, it is likely to resonate with and bolster feelings of peripheral discontent: a rejection of the dominance of the ‘center’ and what it stands for. Indeed, it is often argued that this aversion against the political, economic and cultural dominance of the arrogant “cosmopolitan” center is a key component of the backlash against mainstream parties visible in the peripheries of many countries. However, due to a lack of systematic measures, we do not know what role such peripheral discontent plays in shaping citizens’ political preferences. We developed a measure of peripheral discontent consisting of three items capturing feelings of respectively economic, political and cultural suppression by the center, and fielded it among a representative sample of 8000 Dutch citizens stratified by province and urbanity. We show that the three components create a reliable scale that captures a very substantial difference between citizens in the periphery and the center of the Netherlands. Importantly, this difference does not appear in conventional measures of nativism and political discontent, which thus fail to detect this potential source of grievance mobilization. Indeed, we show that peripheral frustration is a good predictor of support for both the populist radical left and populist radical right – especially in contrast to cosmopolitan “center” parties such as the greens or liberals. In our study, we explore in more detail how this center-periphery opposition plays out politically; how it relates to other types of political discontent; and how it interacts with the urban-rural cleavage. The fact that peripheral discontent has such important political implications even in a small and urbanized country like the Netherlands confirms its potential as a defining feature of 21st century politics.