I am blessed ! After Andrés Chiriboga’s successful defense, Alexis Baudour, another of my PhD student, is defending this afternoon in Sciences Po his thesis: What kind of economic relation impacts right wing populist vote?
https://www.sciencespo.fr/ecole-doctorale/fr/content/avis-de-soutenance-de-these.html
www.sciencespo.fr

In academic conferences, just after a surge in right wing populist vote, all (non-electoral specialist) social scientists suddenly claim that the phenomenon x (inequality, unemployment, segregation, deunionization, etc.) they are studying explains y, y being Sarah Palin 2012, Brexit, Trump 2016, Trump 2020… etc.

But, once you dig into it, right wing populist vote is much more difficult to explain than non-specialist may think. For instance, as shown by A. Baudour, classical societal variables like unemployment or inequality do a poor job for explaining right wing populism.

For instance, even economic chocks like layoffs (or la “France des plans sociaux”) don’t explain right wing populist vote.

More subtle explanation are needed. Alexis Baudour shows that deindustrialization, especially in the North of France, had critical effects:

Second element, increased divergence between winners and losers, for instance middle classes and lower classes, also contributed to the Le Pen increase between 2012 and 2017. This fuels, third element, a fear of falling feeling, to which voters react by distancing themselves from people at the bottom: unemployed and migrants.

Fourth, a subjective feeling of downward mobility fuels also right wing populist vote. But the link is strong mostly for males, but not for females. How does this happen? For males, downward mobility increases the opinion that elites are corrupted and leads to populist right wing voting as a consequence.

And a lot more to discover in the manuscript. 

Congratulations Alexis !