Economic Inequality, Perceived Social Injustice and Populist Attitudes

This contribution explores how increasing economic inequality may (have) contribute(d) to the rise of populism. Previous research shows that populism is more widespread among the (self-perceived) left behind who are deeply discontent with politics and society (e.g. Elchardus/Spruyt 2016; Gidron/Hall 2019; Spruyt et al. 2016; Steenvorden/Harteveld 2018). Yet, no previous research has studied directly how economic inequality and perceptions of social injustice affect populist attitudes—to the best of my knowledge. I argue that perceptions of social injustice are a psychologically powerful source for the kind of grievances identified by previous research as reservoirs for populist ideas. As such, believing that the state of society is unfair may cause political discontent and fuel beliefs that political elites only serve elite interests, neglecting the “will of the common people”. Perceptions of social injustice may be rooted in the reality of rising economic inequality as citizens in the middle and bottom of the income distribution question the fairness of income and wealth distributions that are heavily concentrated at the top. To explore this argument of how economic inequality and perceptions of social injustice affect populist attitudes empirically, I conduct observational analysis at different levels of analysis. At the micro level, I confirm a strong association between perceptions of social injustice and populist attitudes using data from the 2017 German election study (GLES, pre/post-election cross-section). Remarkably, perceptions of an unjust society are a stronger predictor of populist attitudes than feelings of individual relative deprivation (i.e. than one does not receive a “fair share”). Analyses of the German ALLBUS 2018 cross-validate this finding using a more targeted measure of the perceived fairness in the distribution of income. Those who think that income differences are too large in Germany score much higher in populist attitudes, particularly if they hold the view that, in a fair society, income differences should be small. At the macro level, I turn to cross-national data from the 5th wave of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES). Preliminary analyses of the first advance release indicate a shaky association between economic inequality and the level of populist attitudes across countries (n=12), that has to await confirmation once more countries have been added to the dataset. I further explore the assumed mediation, i.e. the connection between the reality of rising economic inequality and the perception of an unjust society. Pooling data from different waves of the ISSP since the 1980s at the country level, I find that increases in the income share of the top decile are (modestly) associated with more people thinking that income differences in one’s country are too large. This study contributes to the debate on the (economic) sources of populism.