Quality of life and support for the populist radical right: evidence from Italy

The ongoing populist radical right (PRR) wave goes hand in hand with spatial polarisation of politics in Europe. Therefore, the political geography of PRR parties is increasingly under the magnifying glass of scholars. Political scientists and geographers emphasise that populists—especially on the radical right—prosper in places "that don’t matter" or "left-behind" by globalisation and the advent of knowledge societies. Places’ composition and contextual factors like decreasing house prices, limited public services, and the closure of socio-cultural hubs have been shown to explain geographical heterogeneity in PRR strength. Underlying this strand of research is thus the idea that lower quality of life favours PRR breakthroughs. This paper yields fresh insights into this argument by investigating the relationship between objective quality of life and PRR electoral support and sentiments in Italy. The latter is an apt case study, as the 2018 and 2022 general elections witnessed the surge of two PRR parties—Lega and Fratelli d’Italia (FdI)—with very different historical-territorial roots. To conduct our empirical analysis, we take advantage of the summary "Quality of Life" (QOL) measure constructed by the 24 ORE Group, a leading Italian multimedia publishing organisation. The measure is provided at the 107 provinces (i.e. NUTS 3) level, based on 90 indicators divided into six categories: wealth and consumption; business and work; environment and services; demography, society and health; justice and security; culture and leisure time. The investigation comprises an ecological and an individual-level analysis. First, we explore the ecological correlations between QOL and voting for Italian PRR parties in the 2018 and 2022 general elections. We take into account temporal dynamics, by testing whether worsening QOL over the years resulted in higher shares for PRR parties. As a second step, we build a merged dataset combining individual-level survey data from the 2022 ITANES (Italian National Election Studies) and the province-level QOL measure. Using this dataset, we verify whether living in places with lower QOL predicts higher PRR attitudes (i.e. nativism, authoritarianism, and populism) and propensity to vote for PRR parties—even controlling for individuals’ socio-demographic profiles. The study concludes by highlighting its theoretical and empirical implications for the broader debate on the geography of the populist radical right.