Periodic Reporting for period 2 - LOSS (Narratives of Loss: Unravelling the Origins of Support for Socially Conservative Political Agendas)
Reporting period: 2021-09-01 to 2023-02-28
In recent years, we have experienced the rise of far-right parties in Europe that espouse a socially conservative policy program, at the same time many European economies have experienced significant economic instability and dislocation, such as the rise of inflation, economic shutdowns during the pandemic, and the rising of energy costs due to the war in Ukraine. This has left an imprint on people's ability to make ends meet and on the spending power of governments due to rising debt. The key aim of the LOSS project is to study how these two developments are linked. Specifically, it tries to understand how economic hardship affects support for socially conservative political agendas aimed at restricting the rights of marginalised groups (ethnic, linguistic and religious minorities, migrants, LGBTQIA+ and women), and how local and national contexts affect this relationship. There is surprisingly little research that addresses the precise individual-level underpinnings of how economic hardship is linked to more support for social conservative political agendas, and why the content of the socially conservative political agendas differ across context. Therefore this project studies if and how experiences of economic hardship increase demand for socially conservative political agendas in five different countries (Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Sweden and the United Kingdom) and examines regional variation within these countries based on public goods provision. The overall objectives of the LOSS project are to show how economic hardship translates into specific narratives of loss that fuel support for socially conservative political agendas, and how local and national policy contexts, specifically public service provision, affects this relationship. The innovation of the LOSS project is to theorise and empirically examine how people experiencing economic hardship give meaning to this experience, and relate it to the social and political world around them through narratives of loss. In doing so, this project is able to provide mechanisms that link the experience of economic hardship to prejudice towards marginalised groups, and support for policies and political parties that advocate the restriction of the rights of these groups. The evidence will be of great relevance to societal and policy debates about the status of marginalised groups in society, social cohesion, and welfare provisions.
The work performed from the beginning of the project has focussed on the development of a coherent understanding of narratives and to collect and analyse data from the different country and regional contexts to show the relationship between economic hardship and support for far-right parties and social conservative attitudes. In a first working paper that is now accepted for publication in the Journal of Common Market Studies is a theoretical paper on narratives and how they shape European politics. It defines political narratives as the collection of connections that citizens and elites make about the nature of a political order. Based on these theoretical insights, the continued work in the project has focussed on the relationship between economic hardship and social conservatism. The most important working paper focussed on the Italian case and regional variation in public good provision within Italy. It tries to understand why and how the electoral support for far-right parties that advocate social-conservative policy agendas is often linked to specific geographies of discontent. The paper lays out a theory of public service deprivation, defined as reduced access to public services at the local level, that helps explain these patterns in far-right support. Public service deprivation increases the appeal of far-right parties by making people more worried about immigration and increased competition for public services. We examine our argument using three studies from Italy, home to some of the most electorally successful far-right parties in recent decades. We examine cross-sectional data from municipalities, exploit a national reform forcing municipalities below a certain population threshold to jointly share local public services, and explore geo-coded individual-level election survey data. These findings are crucially important as they suggest that state retrenchment of public services created grievances that fuelled the support for social conservatism and the parties advocating it. Access to local public services gives people both material resources (such as access to health care, schooling, transport or garbage collection) and communal benefits, by defining the boundaries of political community and the meaning of citizenship. These factors closely resemble material and cultural drivers of far-right support. Feelings of being `left behind' and failing to receive a `fair share' of government are important drivers far-right parties. In additional research papers of the project, these insights have been adapted to the study of gender conservative attitudes in Germany and European more generally, and prejudice towards the elderly in Italy and the Netherlands. These insights help explain the far-right turn that we have experienced in many European countries recently.
Many European societies have recently experienced growing prejudice towards marginalised groups and the rise in support for far-right parties advocating to restrict the rights of these groups. These developments threaten the cohesion of national and local communities across Europe. While aggregate level evidence suggests that economic crises generally coincide with increased support for far-right parties, we do not understand why this happens.
The LOSS project moves beyond the current state of the art by developing a groundbreaking interdisciplinary theoretical framework that integrates insights about the role of loss from different social science disciplines (political science, sociology, social psychology and behavioural economics) to show how economic hardship translates into specific narratives of loss that in turn trigger support for social conservative political agendas. Moreover, it argues and shows that the relationship between economic hardship and the support for social conservatism varies across countries and regions within the country based on public good provision. The project has developed a new theory of public service deprivation to explain the far-right turn in politics. In the next stage of the project, the focus will be broadened geographically by adding two more countries to the analysis, Sweden and the United Kingdom, next to work already done in Germany, Italy and the Netherlands, and the scope of methodologies by focussing on more qualitative research methodologies to back up the quantitative work so far. The qualitative work will take the theoretical work already completed on narratives and the empirical work on support for the far-right to develop a more fine-grained understanding of the narratives of loss that people develop. The additional data collection in other countries will yield more insight into not only the support for far-right parties and gender conservative and anti-immigration attitudes, but also prejudice based on sexual preference, religion or language. These results will lead to additional research papers and a book project.
The LOSS project moves beyond the current state of the art by developing a groundbreaking interdisciplinary theoretical framework that integrates insights about the role of loss from different social science disciplines (political science, sociology, social psychology and behavioural economics) to show how economic hardship translates into specific narratives of loss that in turn trigger support for social conservative political agendas. Moreover, it argues and shows that the relationship between economic hardship and the support for social conservatism varies across countries and regions within the country based on public good provision. The project has developed a new theory of public service deprivation to explain the far-right turn in politics. In the next stage of the project, the focus will be broadened geographically by adding two more countries to the analysis, Sweden and the United Kingdom, next to work already done in Germany, Italy and the Netherlands, and the scope of methodologies by focussing on more qualitative research methodologies to back up the quantitative work so far. The qualitative work will take the theoretical work already completed on narratives and the empirical work on support for the far-right to develop a more fine-grained understanding of the narratives of loss that people develop. The additional data collection in other countries will yield more insight into not only the support for far-right parties and gender conservative and anti-immigration attitudes, but also prejudice based on sexual preference, religion or language. These results will lead to additional research papers and a book project.