Whom to Vote for When Nothing Else Works? Political Behaviour of the Most Vulnerable Group in Times of Economic Insecurity

In most advanced democracies, groups at the bottom of the social hierarchy have been increasingly left behind as a result of rising inequality, but to varying degrees. We study the political reactions of this vulnerable group. Different strands of literature would predict that under the conditions of economic insecurity and rising inequality, the most vulnerable voters turn their backs away from mainstream politics, but the literature strongly disagrees whether they move to the radical right, the radical left, or withdraw from electoral politics altogether. This is relevant because these actors compete on entirely different dimensions – the radical right on the cultural dimension, the radical left on the economic dimension. Yet despite increasing hints that support for both radical parties as well as abstention is rooted in similar socio-structural contexts of relative deprivation and fear of decline, there is no overarching framework that focuses explicitly on vulnerable groups and explains when these vulnerable voters get electorally mobilised by radical right parties along cultural lines and by radical left parties on economic lines and when they simply stay at home at election day. We focus on the bottom two quintiles and explore their support for different party groups in three steps. We first look at the extent to which low- and lower-middle income support different parties, showing that the bottom quintile strongly turns towards radical left and abstention, while the radical right more strongly supports the lower-middle quintile. Second, we show that rising inequality reinforces this association of lower-middle income voters shifting away from mainstream parties. Third, and most importantly, we introduce four contextual factors that we expect to explain whether vulnerable groups move to the radical left, radical right or abstain: income source; immigration; gender; and skills. We expect that vulnerable voters turn to the radical left if a high share of their income depends on welfare state transfers and if there are many high-educated voters in the lower-middle income groups. In contrast, we expect that vulnerable voters turn to the radical right if labour market competition from immigration is high (i.e., the share of immigrants in the lower-middle quintiles is high) and if vulnerability is more pronounced among men than among women. Finally, we expect generally high rates of abstention among the most vulnerable groups in times of rising insecurity, but we also expect that abstention decreases with the presence of radical left and/or radical right parties that might activate these voters. Our empirical analysis compares 20 advanced Western democracies between 1985 and 2018, using an encompassing dataset from the International Social Survey Programme. We match this data with supplementary indicators on income inequality, income sources, the concentration of immigration, gender and skills.