It Takes a Village: Deindustrialization, Rootedness and Voting

Drawbacks of deindustrialization are often observed to favor the radical right. Remarkable ethnographic evidence – primarily from the American context – suggests that this is most likely to occur in presence of place-based community rootedness, meaning a particular combination of social capital and place attachment. Yet, research based on quantitative data or considering the European context is much scarcer. Certain studies do investigate the role of place or community attachment, but do so by taking these two separately, while I aim at an integrated approach studying rootedness as a whole. Ethereal social capital, beyond any geographic context, plausibly favors prodemocratic stances, acting as a buffer against democratic backsliding. Similarly, place attachment as such most likely motivates regionalism rather than far-right support. Hence, it is reasonable to suspect that it is the attachment to one’s community *and* place that (mostly) activates the electoral reaction to deindustrialization. The present study thus investigates how rootedness moderates the impact of deindustrialization on far-right electoral success. I select the case of Italy and specifically the 2018 general election. I justify this choice based on the country’s experience with deindustrialization, the abundance of research and data on social capital and place attachment, and the presence of a successful far-right option within a rich party system (including notably a populist non-far-right party). I focus on one major source of deindustrialization: decadal exposure to international trade with China. I do so by measuring local exposure to changes in Chinese trade imports in Italy since the early 2000s, based on the area-specific historical sectoral specialization, and instrument it using Chinese imports in other OECD countries (Autor, Dorn, and Hanson 2013). To measure rootedness, I construct a composite indicator, based on the weakest-link method. To this end, I first conduct a factor analysis exploiting a variety of variables (associational density, volunteering rate, homeownership rate, surname diversity, among others) extracted from census data and phone directories. I find that the electoral success of the far right due to Chinese imports is twice greater in areas featuring fairly high levels of rootedness, compared to the standard. Hence, in localities where dwellers are particularly attached to their place and community, the social consequences of regional economic downturn get amplified. This effect is specific to the populist radical right, and does not extend to other populist parties or the rest of the right-wing family. Also, this phenomenon is most of concern to the left and the center-right – and equally so. Additional inquiry reveals this is not the result of a decrease in electoral turnout. This study contributes to the scholarly understanding of the electoral impact of deindustrialization by shedding light on one possible mechanism leading to a far-right response. It carries implications for the scholarly and political debates on the revival of the center-periphery cleavage and the social and political responses to regional economic divergence.