“We have been left behind, haven't we?” Relative economic status, class voting and the populist radical right

A growing body of research attempts to reconcile economic and cultural explanations of populist radical right (PRR) voting by highlighting citizens' resentment against their gradual marginalisation within society. Nonetheless, widespread speculations about the deteriorating relative economic position of PRR voters are not supported by proper empirical evidence. This is likely because scholars’ traditional theories and methods have chiefly focused on material deprivation, that is on absolute income loss and individual-level disadvantage. The present research assesses the effect of relative economic status loss on voting behaviour by proceeding in two steps. We first review scholarly literature from various disciplines regarding the conceptualization of relative economic status, its political relevance when experienced as a class-level phenomenon, and discuss its implication for economic inequality research. Contrarily to material disadvantage per se, relative economic status loss represents a peculiar form of inequality framed as a zero-sum game and therefore lends itself well to PRR rhetoric. This discussion sets the basis for later constructing a novel measure of relative economic status which we term positional income. It measures the relative economic position of one class within the social hierarchy, by computing the ratio of its distance from the poor to its distance from the rich. Changes in positional income over time are informative of the dynamics of class relative economic status. By drawing on data from EU-SILC and ESS on 19 elections across 9 Western European countries, we demonstrate that PRR parties are most successful among social classes facing a collective decrease in relative economic status. More specifically, our multilevel model shows that voters from social classes that have moved farther away from the affluent than from the poor feature higher chances of voting for PRR parties. This result is robust across several model specifications. Additional analysis reveals that this finding is not driven by any specific electoral alternative, that is neither the left nor the center-right taken individually. Furthermore, our analysis does not confirm that the experience of material deprivation at the class level affects PRR voting, which is consistent with prior studies. Hence, the present study advances two theoretical contributions. On the one hand, it expands the debate on the economic explanations of PRR support, especially with respect to the literature on class voting. It provides evidence that class alignment to PRR parties should not be interpreted solely as a cultural phenomenon. Shifting emphasis from financial loss per se to relative economic status decline allows revealing that economic motives are consequential for PRR voting. On the other, our study provides insight into the political consequences of economic inequalities. It does so by quantifying the extent to which specific social groups are losing ground in relative (economic) terms compared to the rest of society. Therefore, our study of class relative economic status goes in the direction of recent accounts about the relevance of widening within-countries economic gaps for electoral politics.