In the early days of the “populist zeitgeist”, when scholarly interest in populism ballooned, debates over the appeal of far-right parties solidified into two competing camps: one that stressed economic factors and another that stressed the cultural. Yet, as this debate matured and far-right parties continued to succeed in new and surprising contexts, it became clear that this binary must be deconstructed. This begs several questions: what are the merits of each of these positions for explaining the emergent and sustained successes of the far right? How can they be combined?
The Basic Debate
Proponents of the economic grievance theory saw discontent rising from the so-called “losers of globalization”: the owners and workers of import-competing industries and firms struggling to stay competitive as well as manufacturing, low-skilled, and rural workers facing competition and outsourcing-related job cuts. Studies often find that areas hit most by deindustrialization, trade competition, and automation move consistently towards radical right-wing parties. Others add that this rising frustration exploded towards anti-systemic parties as a reaction to the Great Recession and the inequality and precarity left in its wake.
The cultural theory understood far-right support as a backlash by white majorities against the slow diminution of their numerical, social, and cultural power due to increased immigration and levels of racial diversity and the growing political momentum of movements fighting for minority rights and protections. Research here relied on survey experiments, finding far-right support to be highest among voters with nativist and anti-immigrant views and that reminding white voters of changing demographic trends increased their attraction to politicians promising to defend their identities and cultures.
On their own, neither economic nor cultural explanations can adequately explain the growth of the far right. Economic theories seem at odds with the actual rhetoric of right-wing populists, which heavily skewed towards cultural threats like “woke mobs” and demographic decline. Nor can they reliably explain the far right’s more recent successes with voting groups whose economic frustrations are less attributable to import competition. Many parties have made gains with young men despite their greater mobility, familiarity with technology, and opportunities for skill development. Donald Trump’s electoral success also relied on retaining the support of some of the richest Americans, who benefit immensely from globalized markets and production. Giorgia Meloni was surprisingly competitive in major cities which receive greater political attention due to their economic power and where citizens are more reliant on multinational economic flows for jobs and investment. Even at their best, economic theories find that increases in trade exposure and low-skilled immigration create significant—often electorally decisive—but ultimately minor increases in far-right support; the motivations of most far-right voters remain unexplained.
On their own, neither economic nor cultural explanations can adequately explain the growth of the far right.
Cultural theories, however, flattened the immense political and cultural variety among countries with ascendant far-right movements. These parties gained support in countries with both high and low levels of immigration and nativist and anti-immigrant attitudes. If anything, far-right support has grown alongside decreases in racist attitudes! Surveys on prejudices find that dominant white groups express have expressed less racial and cultural animus towards minorities over time, trends that persist even after the rise of far-right politicians.
As Berman notes, economic accounts persuasively characterize “macro level” trends producing far-right support, while cultural ones better explain individual voters’ motivations. A successful theory, therefore, must find some way of explaining the interactions between cultural and economic theories.
Which Cause Takes Priority?
One solution has been to combine economic and cultural explanations while still privileging one as the proximate cause.
The most prominent cultural-privileging view is Norris & Inglehart’s book Cultural Backlash. The backlash they describe moves beyond nativist and anti-immigration sentiments, referring instead to a broader “silent revolution” in North America and Europe eroding traditional values in favor of the younger generation’s “post-material” ones. Far-right fervor arises from those who now feel alienated from their country’s culture. Economic factors play two roles here. First, Norris & Inglehart credit economic shifts with causing some of this underlying cultural divergence: they mention urbanization, expanded access to higher education, and higher immigration, all the result of interdependent post-industrial economies with larger service and informational sectors concentrated in big cities and demanding highly educated workers. Second, they see economic hardships as “period effects” that “accelerate long-term processes of generational value change” and threat perceptions. This work thus identifies cultural cleavages that can be reproduced across countries and adapted to their contextual and attitudinal particularities.
Others have added that cultural cleavages provide individuals with frames for understanding their economic grievances. People face a variety of different economic challenges, not all of which are turned into the basis of political demands: people are often willing to support personally sub-optimal economic policies if they believe they will bring sufficient community or country-wide benefits. Consequently, those behind the cultural backlash may be more sensitive to policies that challenge their traditional values, like looser border rules and freer trade, compared to other economic threats, like automation or deregulation.
An opposing set of economic-privileging views seeks to explain the centrality of cultural frames for economic problems. One such solution probes the voter composition of far-right parties, finding that, while their core base of support comes from voters who oppose immigration for cultural reasons, their electoral success is largely predicated on their ability to attract voters with more economically motivated anti-immigration views. This perhaps explains why cultural attitudes better predict far-right support: though voters with economic worries are more numerous, they also have more options as their views on immigration are less principled.
And what of the far right’s rhetorical emphasis on cultural values? Culture is understood in these theories as a useful frame both for communicating and understanding economic struggles. Given that industrial cities and regions were often specialized, their disappearance has produced community-wide dislocations, diminishing local businesses, housing prices, and employment, and causing deeper social issues, like increases in “deaths of despair.” Thus, economic grievances are likely experienced in ways that emphasize local features and history and cut across traditional class lines. Many have explained this is terms of “status anxiety,” where economic insecurity causes groups to feel disrespected by others in their country, disillusioned in social norms and principles, and threatened by other, outside groups who are receiving concern and support.
Similarly, invocations of “economic nationalism” create more accurate and mobilizing expectations for voters than outright rejections of neoliberalism would. Most explicitly in Central Europe, leaders frame economic policies as national projects—like Orbán’s “Eastern Winds” approach or the Law and Justice party’s promises of economic “repolonization”—allowing them to connect more aggressive neoliberal reforms in some areas with autarchic and welfare chauvinist ones elsewhere.
These efforts solve some of the issues of the simpler economic and cultural grievance theories. However, they only reproduce the same macro- and micro-level weakness at a higher level. Explanations privileging culture risk isolating the movement towards the far-right from broader, simultaneous political trends, like the general fall in voter turnout across rich countries or the frustrations of those on the other side of the “silent revolution” who also moved towards more radical left-wing options in the mid-2010s. Economic-leaning narratives offer little guidance for explaining why voters continue supporting far-right parties even after periods in power failed to bring about better conditions, local investment, and greater social status.
Reciprocal Theories
Perhaps it is a mistake to see culture and economics as separate, discrete causes for far-right support. Instead, sociological writing can demonstrate their irrevocable entanglements. No assessment of economic conditions can be done without addressing normative questions, like asking what outcomes should be considered most important and what constitutes economic fairness. As such, studying social and economic changes in isolation may be insufficient: probing dominant ideas and the identities people build around them is crucial for understanding how they react to those changes.
Studying social and economic changes in isolation may be insufficient: probing dominant ideas and the identities people build around them is crucial for understanding how they react to those changes.
This is well demonstrated in Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land. The Louisianians interviewed switch freely between economic and cultural explanations for their frustrations. The nationally shared vision of the American Dream is increasingly unachievable, but it has also “become strange, un-Bibled, hyper-materialized, and lacking in honor.” The combination of social and economic changes challenges the self-understanding of locals.
They look for ways to reassert their old values, but inevitably those concepts take on different, often nostalgic emphases. Hochschild finds that those who refuse to leave Lake Charles for better opportunities come to see themselves as “rememberers,” tasked with preserving the memory of its flourishing past. This memory is not neutral though: it reflects their economic needs and preferences. Despite the environmental destruction wrought on local bodies of water by private corporations, many see reinvigorated private sector investment as the most reliable path to resurgence, prompting the rememberers to forge “alternative spaces” to resurrect and celebrate their lost seafood and fishing cultures. Nostalgia is selective, malleable and highly responsive to economics.
This belief in private investment—particularly from oil companies—as the path to prosperity is likewise both economic and cultural. Corporations and local and national governments have all failed these communities in fairly spectacular ways, prompting suspicion of both. In this devil’s bargain, opposition to redistributive policies stems from a hope to make their area more attractive to big industry. But that preference is intrinsically bound up in cultural invocations: the political elites advocating redistribution are the same ones supporting minority groups “cutting in line,” regulating traditional masculine pursuits, and incentivizing new lifestyles. In defense against these elites, norms of loyalty and localism come to also imply an attachment to traditional life and the industries that sustained it. This explains the trust put in populist politicians, even if they fail to improve economic conditions: at least they are pursuing change in the right way. The anti-immigration and ethno-nationalist ideas underlying these perceptions had been a normalized part of political life before; they have just taken on a new salience in the political identities of the locals.
Beyond identity, others note how the cultural and economic changes brought with globalization are often indistinguishable from each other. Falling trade barriers and revolutions in communications technology have produced an immense concentration and unification of global wealth, power, information, social capital, and media. However, these changes also create an opposing process, often referred to as “glocalization,” where the local—whether that is one’s community or nation—takes on a new significance for people to distinguish themselves and to find home and stability in an increasingly homogenous and rootless world.
These changes morph the economy and the culture in a few ways. The communities that lose economic power due to globalization also lose cultural power and media representation as conglomerate media companies cater to a much wider array of tastes. Populist supporters thus increasingly favor media with “monocultural” frames—those accentuating the “heartlands” and more exclusive conceptions of national culture—as these emphasize their unique characteristics, thereby deepening intra-national polarization.
Likewise, those on the other side of the cultural revolution described by Norris & Inglehart have become integrated on a more global scale because of their greater mobility: they meet in universities, work in multinational firms, move to different countries, consume similar media and inhabit the same online spaces. These elites become less recognizable to those “left behind”; their sense of a shared national community becomes ever more tenuous. As Kazin notes, one of the most enduring rhetorical inventions of the American far right in the 1990s was their language about “global cabals,” “world finance,” and “globetrotting” elites.
Finally, globalization attaches a new emotional importance on nation-states, now seen as the most powerful bulwark against global economic, financial, migratory, and cultural flows. Duyvendak explores how Dutch notions of citizenship become increasingly “culturalized” as citizens rely more on their country to provide them a “home,” a feeling of belonging and familiarity. Citizenship “evolve[s] from a status or practice into a deep sentiment,” where individuals expect their state and all its inhabitants – most notably immigrants – to reflect local feelings and norms.
Conclusion
This vast array of explanations may suggest that we are asking too broad a question: perhaps answering this puzzle requires asking more granular ones. Earlier mono-causal theories identified the most generalizable trends, where support for far-right parties seemed to be most directly motivated by their opposition to immigration and successful social justice movements but was rising most saliently in areas negatively affected by long-term changes in the global economy, namely the neoliberal turn. Explanations consolidating the two theories give more agency to political leadership, asking how different rhetorical frames allow for the linking of cultural and economic pressures. Finally, more sociological approaches ask questions that more closely link the far-right surge to the political and social pasts of North American and European states: they locate the continuity between today’s groups and older hegemonic cultural, economic, and political beliefs, demonstrating how they mesh together in the process of identity-formation.
Alberto Polimeni is a researcher based in London. He has an MA in Comparative Politics from the London School of Economics and a BA in War Studies and Philosophy from King’s College London. His research is interested in how far-right populist parties make strategic political decisions, how they prompt systemic changes in political systems, and their emerging foreign policy ideas.
Image made by John Chrobak using “Calais – Manifestation contre les clandestins, l’immigration-invasion et l’islamisation de l’Europe, 8 novembre 2015 (23),” by Jérémy-Günther-Heinz Jähnick licensed under GNU Free Documentation License version 1.2; “20240410 Pleno-10,” by VOX Congreso licensed under CC CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication; “Common face of one euro coin” licensed under European Union copyright legislation; “The Europa series 100 € obverse side,” by Robert Kalina licensed under European Central Bank regulation outlined in ECB/2003/4 and ECB/2003/5; “Sandakan Sabah Plywood-Factory-36,” by CEphoto, Uwe Aranas licensed under CC Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported; “P0146700009H,” by European Commission licensed under CC Attribution 4.0 International; “02019 1173 Rzeszów Pride,” by Silar licensed under CC Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International.
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