The reshaping of political representation in post-growth capitalism: A paradigmatic analysis of green and right-wing populist parties

Abstract

This article aims to provide an analysis of the reconfiguration of political orientations in the face of weakening economic growth. We address a widely observed new polarization in the party systems of Western democracies, with radically universalist and ecological orientations, often represented by green parties, versus industrialist and authoritarian values, mainly represented by right-wing populism. In our effort to explain this constellation, we offer an alternative to accounts that merely focus on an underlying change of class structures or that, conversely, declare socio-economic factors obsolete in their relevance for voting behaviour. While the one side focuses on the ‘losers of modernization’ or deindustrialization, the other side emphasizes a cultural conflict between new cosmopolitan values and a defence of male, white, heterosexual, non-migrant privileges. In contrast to such accounts, we analyse how the general trend towards decelerated economic growth provoked new orientations on the (liberal) left and on the (populist) right. In a first step, we provide an overview of diagnoses of ‘secular stagnation’ and of the rise of radically universalist and right-wing parties in Western Europe, focusing in particular on the last decade and looking to the US by way of comparison. We then focus on the attitudes which the political actors in question entertain towards economic growth and offer an interpretation of their ‘cultural’ motives as struggles over economic distribution. The third and last step presents a Gramscian extension of socio-economic analysis beyond the study of voter groups and their attitudes. Here, we take into account the interests of the ruling classes along with the quest for legitimacy and projected changes in the regime of accumulation—if indeed the term accumulation is still adequate in a post-growth context.