“Red Vienna” and the rise of the populist right

Juergen Essletzbichler,Johannes Forcher

doi:10.1177/09697764211031622

Juergen Essletzbichler, Johannes Forcher

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1177/09697764211031622

Copy DOI

Abstract

While research on the spatial variation in populist right voting focuses on the role of “places left behind”, this paper examines the spatial distribution of populist right voting in one of the fastest growing capital cities of Europe, Vienna. Combining detailed electoral data of the 2017 national elections at the statistical ward level and the location of municipal housing units, the paper examines why the populist right “Austrian Freedom Party” (FPOE) performs better in the former bulwarks of socialism, in the municipal housing areas of “Red Vienna”. The paper links the socio-demographic development of Vienna and its municipal housing policy with election results and explores three possible reasons for elevated FPOE shares in municipal housing areas: rising housing costs pushed an increasing number of socially and economically vulnerable into the municipal housing sector and so increased the FPOE voter pool in those areas; European Union accession and changes in regulation allowed foreign citizens to apply to and obtain municipal housing flats triggering a backlash from Austrian municipal housing residents; and municipal housing is located in disadvantaged neighbourhoods further enhancing the FPOE voter pool. The paper demonstrates that higher FPOE vote shares in areas with high municipal housing shares are due primarily to higher shares of formally less educated residents, neighbourhood context and they are marginally elevated in those municipal housing areas experiencing a larger influx of foreign residents.

Highlights

While research on populist movements has long been the domain of historians and a selected group of political scientists (Mudde, 2016; Mudde and Kaltwasser, 2013), the recent surge of populist right parties and agendas in European countries injected new vigour in the debate on the drivers of populism (Mair, 2013; Mouffe, 2018; Mudde, 2016; Müller, 2016)
Focusing on a city “not left behind” illustrates that regional decline is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for rising populist vote shares and that urban growth may generate a different set of challenges and resulting “geographies of discontent”; and in addition to the wellknown individual and geographical variables influencing voting behaviour, the paper examines whether increasing pressure on welfare services through immigration influences populist radical right voting shares (Cavaille and Ferwerda, 2017; Rodrik, 2018)
The paper examines if voters perceive increased immigration from non-European Union (EU) countries as competition for a specific local welfare service, municipal housing, that may prompt them to vote for the populist radical right “Austrian Freedom Party” (FPOE)

Summary

Introduction

While research on populist movements has long been the domain of historians and a selected group of political scientists (Mudde, 2016; Mudde and Kaltwasser, 2013), the recent surge of populist right parties and agendas in European countries injected new vigour in the debate on the drivers of populism (Mair, 2013; Mouffe, 2018; Mudde, 2016; Müller, 2016). Vienna’s high share of residents in municipal housing units, legal changes in access criteria for municipal housing and the rapid increase in foreign nationals over the last 20 years makes Vienna an interesting case study of the role of competition for welfare services to explain within city-variation in the populist vote. The paper is structured as follows: the second section reviews the literature on the economic and cultural drivers of rising populist vote shares, the geography of discontent as well as recent literature on the role of immigration into social welfare states as possible explanatory variable for the rise of the populist right; the third section will briefly summarize recent demographic, political and legal changes, the impact on the Vienna housing market and its implications for the municipal housing sector. Accession to the EU forced the city of Vienna to open up its municipal housing sector to EU and third country nationals apparently producing conflict between the “native” Austrian residents and “foreign” newcomers; the fourth section discusses the methodology and empirical operationalization of the theoretical drivers of populist right voting; the fifth section provides the empirical results; and the sixth section concludes the paper

Objectives

Methods

Findings

Conclusion