Commentary: Economics can’t explain all the anger of voters
Source: Latest News
NO LINK BETWEEN ECONOMIC CIRCUMSTANCES AND POLITICAL CHOICES
Let me anticipate one: That general enrichment can mask, or even create, particular hardships. Higher housing costs for the young, to take one example. But this is so much statistical cherry-picking. In all economies at all times, there are sectoral problems to be cited.
If economic determinism is to be serious, it has to be falsifiable. It has to reckon with the fact that Ireland, despite a savage crash in 2008, is richer than it was a couple of generations ago, and to little obvious glory for the established political order that oversaw most of that success.
Other facts have to be faced. Donald Trump got elected in a high-inflation context (2024). But also in a low-inflation one (2016). Populists thrive in free markets with huge income disparities (the US). But also in social democracies (France). In the Britain of 2016, dispossessed young people voted for the status quo of Remain while the asset-owning old chose the rupture of Leave.
Greece, which had a scarring economic experience in the last decade, and an excuse to turn to the fringes, has a prime minister who is the toast of international moderates. Italy, which underwent less structural reform, has a populist. Not only is there no faithful correlation between economic circumstances and political choices, there isn’t even a useful line of best fit.
If not just economics, then, what is bugging voters? Immigration, in large part. But even this isn’t a clincher. Why hasn’t populism taken off in high-immigration Australia? (There, perhaps, economics does explain a lot.)
The strength of the hard right in France seems out of line with the size of the foreign-born population there, which isn’t exceptional by Western European standards.
Another explanation for what is going on is “hedonic adjustment”. As incomes rise, so do expectations. Voters become quicker to revolt. In other words, economics is decisive, but not how you’d imagine.
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