Precarity, populism, and the squeezed middle: Using subjective insecurity to explain populist attitudes and populist voting in Europe

Feelings of financial insecurity and precarity among the squeezed middle classes are often evoked in discussions on the recent rise of populism in Europe. However, there is a dearth of systematic research on their role in this process. This study fills this gap by theorizing about and empirically linking three aspects of subjective insecurity – the precarity of work conditions, job tenure insecurity, and financial insecurity – to populist outlook and the voting for populist parties. We analytically separate subjective insecurity from the objective economic status and hypothesize that it is has a positive association with an individual’s populist mindset/outlook. Such a mindset is likely to translate into voting for populist parties. Our analyses use the 2018 European Voting Election Study and include respondents in 10 European countries. To connect insecurity to populist outlook, we build survey-based measures of subjective insecurity and populist attitudes and conduct regression analyses, while controlling for the level of income, overall economic activity, and a number of socio-demographic variables. To connect subjective insecurity to voting for populist left and populist right parties, we build multinomial logit models of vote intentions. We find a positive association between the precarity of work conditions and populist attitudes and between financial precarity and populist attitudes in all our cases. These factors also explain Populist Radical Right and Populist Radical Left voting in all cases except the vote for populist right parties in Poland, Hungary, and Italy. Among the dimensions of precarity, financial insecurity and the precarity of work conditions are particularly significant, while the precarity of job tenure provides mixed results, which suggests the need to investigate populist outlook and voting through broader measures of insecurity beyond the risks of losing one’s job, those that can be applied to the squeezed middle classes. This paper is part of the working package “The socio-economic and cultural drivers of populist vote” of the Volkswagen-funded project “Populism's Roots: Economic and Cultural Explanations in Democracies of Europe” (PRECEDE).