Social Mobility and Fairness Correlated to Populism
Anxiety over populism in democracies has engulfed countries large and small, leftist, and conservative, newly democratic and established, and threatens the very existence of liberal democracy. Populism has been addressed by Fifty Year Perspective in the past, most recently in “Roots of Populism.” The search to explain the rise in populism has centered on distrust of government and its responsibility for rising inequality.
The pursuit of better understanding of causes and cures of populism has launched a flurry of research. A recent working paper from the Center for International Development at Harvard University offers an explanation in its title, “Social Mobility Explains Populism, Not Inequality or Culture.” Research Fellow Eric S. M. Protzer is the author. The working paper is the basis for a book titled Reclaiming Populism, to be published in 2022.
Understanding why people join populist movements is essential to addressing their distrust of government. Explanations have typically cited either cultural roots, such as immigration, social media, globalism, and backlash of older population against younger generations; or economic roots, such as job losses following off-shoring of manufacturing, and individual financial hardship after the international financial crisis.
Protzer challenges the contention that economic inequality explains the rise of populism. Economic outcomes may be fair or unfair. He says, “unfair economic outcomes are linked to the rise of contemporary developed-world populism.” Someone who succeeds by working hard or innovating has received a fair outcome; someone who succeeds by stealing or engaging in nepotism benefits from an unfair outcome.
The paper uses regression analysis to find correlation of populism with social mobility in four settings: US counties in the 2016 and 2020 Presidential Elections; French jurisdictions in the 2017 Presidential Election; the 2019 European Parliament elections; and a cross-sectional regression of 24 developed countries across the world with GDP per capita levels of at least $25,000.
Protzer uses social mobility as signified by the relation between each individual’s income and the income of the individual’s parents when they were the individual’s same age.
In places with low social mobility an individual’s economic success strongly depends on how wealthy their parents were. This situation clearly violates economic fairness… because rewards are allocated according to a standard that is not intrinsically linked to an individual’s potential productivity…. Low social mobility is consistently and significantly correlated with populism.
Protzer makes no claim to have definitively established causality. He concludes that “repeated, compelling correlations” suggest policymakers “focus on questions of economic fairness and social mobility to defuse populism,” by investing in “public goods that create substantive equal opportunity, like education, healthcare, and infrastructure, or market reforms that allow citizens to translate that opportunity to fair rewards.” He cites previous research arguing against redistribution, as such a platform “may be likelier to repulse rather than attract would-be populist voters.” Apart from the merit of Protzer’s policy recommendations, the underlying challenge remains: to restore trust in government.