How Local Deprivation Shapes Political Support

Deprivation is widely considered to be a main driver of low political involvement, support for populist parties and disengagement from the political process. Thus far, much of this evidence is based on individual deprivation, i.e. in terms of citizens’ socio-economic status or social relationships. In contrast to that, we know quite little about how local circumstances in which citizens interact in their daily life (e.g. access to services, feeling at home, quality of life or regional exclusion) shape political support. Drawing on deprivation theory, I hypothesize that local deprivation decreases political support. Using data from the “Sub-national context and radical right support in Europe” (SCoRE) study (N_DE=25.976, N_NL=8.013, N_UK=25.001) and multilevel structural equation modeling I first find that feelings of regional exclusion have a strong negative effect on political support across age groups. In a second step, I combine the very fine-grained UK survey data (with identifiers on postcode district level) with macro data on mean income and income distribution of the districts along with the income difference to the next k (=2289) postcode districts. The results show a negative effect of greater income distribution on political support. Most importantly though, greater income difference from one’s own district to surrounding districts has a substantially negative effect on political support, too. This effect largely depends on the size of the unit we compare it with. The effect strength decreases with the number of compared postcode districts and virtually disappears at the size of widely used units for comparison like the NUTS-1 and NUTS-2. The results provide important implications for the deprivation literature and the application of multilevel modeling for deprivation research.