Anxiety in Times of Globalization: Populism and the Advent of Ontological Insecurity in Germany

The German right-wing populist party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) has varying success on the regional level in gaining electoral support. Research concerned with the rise of right-wing populist parties often attributes their success to the increased stages of economic and cultural globalization and negative attitudes towards globalization by the electorate (see e.g. Arzheimer and Berning 2019; Kriesi and Pappas 2016; Rodrik 2018). In line with this reasoning, we find that German AfD voters have strong negative attitudes towards economic and cultural globalization processes. While the standard political science perspective is that such negative attitudes towards economic and cultural globalization are usually rooted in weak socioeconomic predisposi-tions (see Kriesi et al. 2008; Rehm 2011; Rommel and Walter 2018; Walter 2017) as well as the perception of having a low social status (see Gidron and Hall 2017; Margalit 2019), both connected to the need to be sheltered from globalization by a strong state, our analysis shows that AfD voters do not show systematic differences in their socioeconomic predispositions and social status when compared to voters of other parties. The varying electoral success of the AfD thus has to be rooted in other factors than in the individual predisposi-tions of voters. This leads us to our research question as to why voters that due to their predispositions are most likely not to be harmed by globalization vote for an anti-globalization party? We answer this question by connecting globalization and populism research with the concept of ontological insecurity, drawn from international relations research. This concept defines a state of being deeply threatened by transition processes that lead to ambivalence, uncertainty, and disorder (see Giddens 1991; Kinnvall and Mitzen 2017). Ontological insecurity is rooted in the individual preference for identity preservation as well as stability and security, and the perceived inability of the state to provide it (see Huysmans 1998; Kinnvall 2004). Based on globalization research, we reason that globalization is one such process of transformation, through which some people experience this particular kind of anxiety, namely ontologically insecurity. In a novel way, we thus argue that ontological insecurity, not negative attitudes against globalization, shapes the political preferences of the electorate and makes people vote for right-wing populist parties as these parties envision a strong state and promise to restore order and stability currently disrupted by globalization (see Inglehart and Norris 2016; Mudde 2013). To test our arguments, we use the European Social Survey (ESS) to construct an inno-vative index on ontological insecurity on the individual level. This approach gives us, on the one hand, the unique opportunity to describe how ontological insecurity amongst voters has evolved in recent years. On the other hand, it allows us to analyze the predictive power of ontological insecurity in terms of the likelihood of voting for the AfD. In analyzing the most recent ESS, we already found ontological insecurity to be a strong predictor of voting for the AfD, even when controlling for nationalist and xenophobic sentiments.