Precarity and populism: explaining populist outlook and populist voting in Europe through subjective financial and work-related insecurity

Abstract

Precarity is often evoked in discussions about the rise of populism, but there is a dearth of systematic operationalization of the sociological concept of insecurity in populist research. This study fills this gap by theorizing about and empirically linking work-related and financial insecurity to populist outlook and voting in ten European countries. We propose a theoretical framework that links insecurity, respectively, to populist attitudes (symbolic link) and to populist voting (instrumental link). Our empirical investigation of 10 European countries finds a positive association between work and financial insecurity and populist outlook (people-centrism and anti-elitism, in particular) in all our case study countries. Precarity explains votes for Radical Populist Right and Radical Populist Left in all cases except populist right voting in Poland, Hungary, and Italy. Among the dimensions of precarity, financial insecurity and insecurity of work conditions show a particularly significant association with populist attitudes and voting, while the insecurity of tenure provides mixed results. These results suggest that insecurity may have an effect on the diffusion of populist attitudes and populist voting. It also indicates that populist outlook and voting should be investigated by not simply examining the insecurity of tenure but also using measures of insecurity that capture the conditions of work and financial insecurity of individuals.