Cultural Backlash Research Articles

Antecedents of leaving the European Union: The role of nostalgia and attitudes towards diversity in Spain, Italy, and Greece

ABSTRACT This study analyzes public attitudes towards Euroscepticism in three Mediterranean countries: Spain, Italy and Greece. Specifically, drawing upon cultural backlash theory, we investigate how the general feeling of nostalgia and the rejection of neoliberal values like social and cultural diversity affect citizens’ Eurosceptic attitudes and thus their willingness to leave the European Union. Based on survey data from the Pew Research Centre, we first find that attitudes towards ethnic, religious and racial diversity predict citizens’ willingness to leave the European Union in Spain and Italy, but not in Greece, whereas citizens with higher levels of nostalgia are more prone to leave the European Union in Spain and Greece, but not in Italy. Finally, attitudes towards diversity are explored as a moderator over the relationship between citizens’ perceptions of their country’s economic situation and Eurosceptic attitudes. This article contributes to current discussions on Euroscepticism, arguing that cultural backlash theory might play a crucial role in accounting for citizens’ cultural and political attitudes towards the EU.

The Political Economy of Populism

We synthesize the literature on the recent rise of populism. First, we discuss definitions and present descriptive evidence on recent increase in support for populists. Second, we cover the historical evolution of populist regimes since the late 19th century. Third, we discuss the role of secular economic factors related to cross-border trade and automation. Fourth, we review studies on the role of the 2008{2009 global financial crisis and subsequent austerity, connect them to historical work covering the Great Depression, and discuss likely mechanisms. Fifth, we discuss studies on identity politics, trust, and cultural backlash. Sixth, we discuss economic and cultural consequences of growth in immigration and the recent refugee crisis. We also discuss the gap between perceptions and reality regarding immigration. Seventh, we review studies on the impact of the internet and social media. Eighth, we discuss works on the implications of populism's recent rise. Finally, we outline avenues for further research.

Social Democratic Party’s Electoral Strategies Amid Social Class (Re)alignment and (Re)mobilisation

Social Democratic parties have long been steady pioneers of European democracy, but over the past decade they have suffered a humiliating collapse. It is commonly asserted that European countries have entered a classless society. Subsequently, mainstream left parties adopted broad electoral strategies to appeal widely to the median voter, exemplified by the Blair-Schröder Third Way. Electoral backlash following the British and German social democratic party’s 1990s neoliberal shift, their approach to globalization as well as their handling of the financial crisis and refugee crisis have eroded their popularity. Subsequent frustration with the political establishment is exemplified by the cultural backlash thesis. However, a countermovement signified by postmaterialism and social liberalism calls for transformative social and political change. The two convictions clash on binary issues, exacerbating a righteous divide between sociocultural liberals and conservatives, recently popularized as the “anywheres” and the “somewheres”. This paper puts forth the necessity for social democratic parties to re-engage with the cleavage politics of today. This is particularly important as today’s cleavages are largely ideologically driven. Questions of electoral strategy, ideological positioning and mobilisation tactics are contested intra-party. Attention is paid to Corbyn’s Labour, whose move towards traditionalism at first earned electoral support, only to be discredited in 2019. In comparison, the German SPD embraced centrism in 2017 and were penalized for it. They must now respond and offer a strategic alternative following competition from the Greens and Die Linke.

Female labor force participation in the US: How is immigration shaping recent trends?

Women entered the paid workforce in unprecedented numbers during the 20th century. Yet recent years have been witness to a creeping reversal in women's labor force participation. Why did the revolution stall? In response to debates over a “natural” limit to women's employment, or a cultural backlash against the dual-breadwinner household, we consider an alternative explanation, namely whether immigration has slowed the growth in female labor force participation. Using CPS data from 1998 to 2018, we show that the increase in the share of immigrants and children of immigrants in the population has reduced overall female labor force participation. However, immigration accounts for relatively little of the retreat from the labor force. Instead, the compositional effect of population change is overshadowed by behavioral shifts that affect both natives and immigrants. Lower participation rates among native-born women accounts for most of the overall decline. Despite persistent differences, we also find substantial convergence in the labor force behavior of native-born and foreign-born women, which bodes well for the long-term economic incorporation of immigrants and their children.

The Measure of Machiavelli? Fear, Love, Hatred, and Trump

The rise of populist leaders like Trump certainly raises issues of leadership and effectiveness. The current populist moment may be one of “Cultural Backlash,” but there is also merit in resurrecting and assessing the work of Niccolò Machiavelli in evaluating Trump's leadership and success. Would Machiavelli, with his emphasis on a “success ethic” and a studied moral indifference, rate Trump to be a “great prince?” This article analyzes Machiavelli's role and contemporary relevance as well as what he might say about a leader like Donald Trump. Machiavelli offers one insight into a style of leader that exposes the dangers of ignorance allied with self‐interest in a nationalist pose. Also, we can visualize (with Machiavelli's help) a modern reconsideration of the dimensions of love, hate, and fear in 21st century leadership—especially among national populist leaders. This matters politically to us all.

Special issue on critical French citizenship

This special issue engages with the “cultural backlash hypothesis”—that citizens dissatisfied with democratic regimes tend to support the emergence of non representative democracy. The first article challenges classical notions of citizenship and shows that critical citizens actually call for more competent representatives. The second piece asserts that critical citizenship is more complex than what previous research has shown and that only certain types of citizenship are more likely to result in protest votes. As the introduction points out, the two pieces together paint a far more complex picture of citizenship than previously understood through an innovative approach that combines normative political theory with survey research in a country setting. A new research agenda that comes out of these findings is also proposed.

The Surge of Economic Nationalism in Western Europe

We document the surge of economic nationalist and radical-right parties in western Europe between the early 1990s and 2016. We discuss how economic shocks contribute to explaining this political shift, looking in turn at theory and evidence on the political effects of globalization, technological change, the financial and sovereign debt crises of 2008–2009 and 2011–2013, and immigration. The main message that emerges is that failures in addressing the distributional consequences of economic shocks are a key factor behind the success of nationalist and radical-right parties. We discuss how the economic explanations compete with and complement the “cultural backlash” view. We reflect on possible future political developments, which depend on the evolving intensities of economic shocks, on the strength and persistence of adjustment costs, and on changes on the supply side of politics.

Seksueel-ethische permissiviteit: trends in Nederland 1981-2017

Abstract In this study, we explore trends in sexual-ethical permissiveness in the Netherlands during the last decades. Using Dutch data from the European Values Study (1981-2017), we show that tolerance towards homosexuality, abortion, divorce, euthanasia, and suicide increased in this period. About a third of this trend can be explained by cohort replacement: because younger, more permissive cohorts slowly replace older, less permissive cohorts, the moral climate in society changes. In turn, the differences in sexual-ethical permissiveness between cohorts can be explained by differences in level of education, church attendance and religious socialization. At the same time, the results of the counterfactual analyses show that all groups in Dutch society, including the lower educated and churchgoers, have become more permissive about sexual-ethical aspects of life. Apparently, a moral progressive consensus is present in the Netherlands. Finally, our results show that the youngest cohort, born between 1990 and 1999, appears somewhat less permissive than older cohorts. If these more conservative moral convictions persist in the future and are present in new generations as well, there may be a cultural backlash.

Cultural Backlash: Trump. Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism, written by Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart

Cultural Backlash: Trump. Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism, written by Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart

The Impact of EU-based Populism on Turkey-EU Relations

ABSTRACTThe May 2019 EP elections once again highlighted the current cultural backlash throughout Europe against progressive values such as cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism, which impacts on the ‘future of Europe’ debate, raising important questions for the evolution of Turkey-EU relations. Even though Turkey is no longer a hot topic in EU political parlance and public opinion, opposition to Turkish EU membership continues in the form of nativism, particularly with reference to the issues of immigration and Islam, as the cases of AfD in Germany and UKIP in Britain show.

Disobedient bodies: Gendered violence in South Asian and desi film

ABSTRACTBollywood has become a vector of India’s soft power and most successful export fostering Hinglish hybrids catering for diasporic audiences and local offshoots – Tollywood, Kollywood, or Lollywood, to name but a few. Thus, it feeds the aspirations of an upwardly mobile mass urban audience. It is packaged with a paradigm of escapism, or even anaesthetization, as it tends to eschew politically contentious issues such as gendered violence. Although violence does feature in Bollywood films, it is mainly a staple of the gangster or thriller genre. Gendered violence is still widely under-reported and seldom, if ever, features except in period movies or films either directed or produced by NRI directors. My article will study a counter-narrative to Bollywood’s hegemony, exploring forced marriage, domestic violence and honour killing against women (Yasmin, 2004), Provoked (Mundhra, 2007), Murdered by my Father (Glenaan, 2004) and Land, Gold, Women (Hari, 2011). Particular emphasis will be given to post 9/11 repercussions and the rise of Islamophobia in Western societies, the impact of which can further marginalize women in diasporic communities. Thus, institutional violence and a cultural backlash lead to identitarian closure and mistrust of assimilation/integration/hybridity. A common denominator of all these films is the subjugation of women through marriage, on the basis of ‘Zan, Zar and Zameen’ and the imposition of patriarchal norms. It will be argued that Bollywood’s reluctance to confront gendered violence or its temptation to deflect this dissonant reality and demonize the Muslim or Sikh Other may also fit its Hindutva agenda.

Cultural backlash: Trump, Brexit, and authoritarian populism

Cultural backlash is a leader in a crowded field of research on the origins and implications of populist politics in western societies. Among many contributions, the book especially adds value for scholars of international affairs in three main areas. First, by conceptually differentiating between authoritarian populism and the populist radical right, Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart imbue both concepts with more analytical purchase. Second, their exhaustive, multimethod analysis of the drivers of such politics will advance debates on their causes. Third, their finding that the origins of authoritarian populist politics reside primarily within authoritarian values, which are more strongly associated with age cohort than other variables, suggests ways in which societies may engage constructively with such politics. Norris and Inglehart use a minimal definition of populism as a ‘style of rhetoric reflecting first-order principles about who should rule’, which hold that legitimate power rests with ‘the people not the elites’ (p. 4). From that definition they move on to focus on authoritarian populism, which they argue is the predominant trend in the current populist wave. The general theory at the heart of the book is that this trend results from an ‘authoritarian reflex’ (p. 450) triggered by a ‘silent revolution in cultural values’ (p. 14). These new values differ significantly from socially conservative values that were pre-eminent in western societies into the middle of the twentieth century. While Norris and Inglehart devote significant attention to the proximate roles of economic grievances and pressure from immigration, as well as the effect of different political regimes on the relative success of populist parties, their key insight is that authoritarian populism is a cultural phenomenon, better predicted by age cohort than by political or economic conditions.

Grey Power: Towards a Political Economy of Older Voters in the UK

AbstractThe impact of age on voting behaviour and political outcomes has become an issue of increasing interest, particularly in the UK. Age divides in voter turnout and political preferences have led to claims that age is the ‘new class’. In this article, we contrast existing ‘cultural backlash’ and political economy explanations of the age divide in politics, and challenge the view that older people are predominantly ‘left behind’, culturally or economically. We show that older people have distinct material interests, related to housing wealth and pensions’ income, that are visible in their political preferences. We argue for the development of a new political economy of age.

The Gender Backlash in the Vote for Brexit

Despite a relationship between gender and support for populist causes in cross-national research, including in the 2016 US Presidential election, the role of gender has been missing in analysis of support for Brexit, most likely because women and men showed no average aggregate-level differences in voting Leave or Remain. This misses an important explanation for Britain’s vote to leave the European Union. We demonstrate how gender-based resentment motivated Leave votes in the EU referendum, through perceptions of discrimination against men, among men. Using novel survey measures, we demonstrate (i) the distinct nature of perceptions of discrimination towards men in comparison with discrimination towards women; (ii) the sociological sources of perceptions that men are discriminated against; and (iii) the role of these perceptions in Brexit support. Findings reveal that the Brexit referendum provided an opportunity to express broader social grievances than have, to date, been identified as relevant. The paper therefore offers a novel contribution to understanding the cultural backlash behind Britain’s vote to leave the EU, and by so doing, insight into the potential for gender-based backlash effects in elections where gender isn’t significantly primed, unlike the 2016 US presidential election where gender was a major political focus.

What is new and what is nationalist about Europe's new nationalism? Explaining the rise of the far right in Europe

AbstractFar‐right parties are on the rise across Europe. Their shared populist rhetoric, emphasis on sovereignty and policies that promote a ‘national preference’ has facilitated the term ‘the new nationalism’. According to an emerging consensus, this new nationalism is primarily a demand‐side phenomenon triggered by cultural grievances, i.e. a cultural backlash, driven by those on the wrong end of a new transnational cleavage. This explanation we argue tends to overlook important variations across countries and across time. As such, in this article, we contest the view that the ‘new nationalism’ is a linear and coherent phenomenon best understood as a cultural backlash. Specifically, our argument is threefold: (1) it is important to conceptually distinguish between populism, nationalism and the far right in order to draw meaningful conclusions about the extent to which this phenomenon is linear, coherent and comparable across cases; (2) voters' economic concerns remain pivotal within the context of the transnational cleavage, entailing that voting behaviour is structured by two dimensions of contestation; (3) the explanatory power of nationalism is in the supply, i.e. the ways in which parties use nationalism strategically in an attempt to broaden their appeal.

Long-Term Economic Distress, Cultural Backlash, and Support for Brexit

Economic and cultural factors are often presented as alternative explanations of Brexit. Most studies have failed to recognize the interplay between contextual economic factors and individual attitudes such as nativism and Euroscepticism. We argue that both economic and cultural factors matter to explain the outcome of the referendum. Economic factors are critical because they shape cultural attitudes. British citizens who live in economically depressed and declining districts are more likely to develop anti-immigrant and Eurosceptic views. These cultural grievances, in turn, explain support for Brexit. Using both aggregate economic and electoral data at the local level (380 districts) and data from the 7th wave of the British Election Study 2014-2017 panel, we find strong support for our argument that cultural grievances mediate the effect of long-term economic decline on support for Brexit. Our results have important policy implications, and suggest targeted economic policies are necessary to protect the “losers of globalization.”

Economic or cultural backlash? Rethinking outsiders’ voting behavior

Political economists show that outsiders (unemployed and temporary workers) support redistributive policies more than insiders (standard dependent workers) and infer outsiders' voting behavior from their desired degree of State intervention in the economy. However, it has been suggested that international interdependence is reshaping the political space along two dimensions: the traditional economic left-right scale, and an emerging cultural integration-demarcation dimension. How do outsiders behave in this two-dimensional political landscape? This research note answers this question by combining individual data from the latest five waves of the European Social Survey (2008–2016) with party positions provided by the Comparative Manifesto Project on 27 European countries. Integrating research based on party families with parties’ policy positions, results show that the economic State-market dimension is still more linked to outsiders’ voting behavior than the cultural integration-demarcation dimension.

Beyond economic insecurity and cultural backlash: Economic nationalism and the rise of the far right

AbstractFar‐right parties gain in electoral support across the globe. Studies describe this phenomenon either as a cultural backlash or as a reaction to growing economic inequality. The economic inequality perspective suggests that the transforming workforce in post‐industrial societies gives rise to economic insecurity among those who feel left behind. In contrast, the cultural backlash thesis argues that the increasing support for far‐right parties represents a rejection of values such as cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism. More recent scholarship sought to show how economic and cultural factors combined increase the support for the far right. Most of these studies investigate public opinion polls, voting behaviour, and voters´ socio‐economic contexts. This paper reviews these studies and argues that the way in which far‐right political parties construct an interconnection of economic and cultural ideas in discourse is largely neglected in the existing body of literature. The paper concludes that the concept of economic nationalism captures how these two components are intertwined; economic nationalist discourse in far‐right political manifestos and speeches provides a more complete comprehension how public opinion is being shaped. This contribution offers a starting point for future studies to examine how cultural values, such as nationalism, reconstruct and influence articulation of economic policy.

Are radical right-wing populist parties in Western Europe “cultural backlash”?

Are radical right-wing populist parties in Western Europe “cultural backlash”?

Look Back in Compassion

Look Back in Compassion Arie M. Dubnov (bio) More than law in a general, abstract sense, it is the fraught, almost hostile relationship between state laws on the one hand and international law and international human-rights organizations on the other that occupies a distinctive place in contemporary debates concerning Israel's character. Is Israel offering us a one-off case? I doubt it. The tendency of nationalist leaders to oppose vehemently any international arrangement that might curtail national sovereignty is as old as the history of the modern nation-state and is certainly not unique to the trembling Jewish and/or democratic republic. Quite on the contrary: despite its contemporary image as an inward-looking pariah state that dismissively ignores what others (i.e., the goyim) have to say about it, Israel today seems to fit quite elegantly into a broader, global pattern marked by the rise of right-wing populist politics and the general decline of liberal and social-democratic values. Next to unprecedentedly high levels of existential insecurity and xenophobia, the clear symptoms of this global influenza include a heated cultural backlash or "nausea" rhetoric—an audacious, reprehensible attack on so-called progressive virtues captured in slogans about political correctness, cosmopolitanism, and multiculturalism—coupled with an equally disgraceful attempt to undermine democratic values that seems to have been taken for granted by the so-called old elites. As one of the New York Review of Books' bigwigs declared recently, "We are in the full gale of a conservative counterrevolution that could last for some time and reshape modernity in a reactionary direction."1 Contemporary Israel follows this pattern. It would be a crude simplification, of course, to argue that there are no fundamental differences that set Viktor Orbán's Hungary apart from the rising antialien sentiments that brought the Brexiters to power in Britain or between both of these and Israel's hypernationalist hawks. But it would be equally silly to hold on to the rose-tinted neoliberal vision that was offered to us by [End Page 179] Francis Fukuyama and his acolytes, who predicted the "end of history" after the fall of East European communism. Unlike liberal democracy, so far history shows no signs of ending anytime soon. And yet, each unhappy state is unhappy in its own way. Structurally, part of what does make the Israeli situation different is the fact that Israel lacks a constitution. Thus, to navigate through murky waters, Israel's Supreme Court judges must rely on a limited list of Basic Laws—the local equivalent of a law with constitutional authority—or on a creative interpretation of some of the clauses in the yellowed seventy-year-old scroll on which the Israeli Declaration of Independence was written and signed, despite the fact that the document is neither a law nor an ordinary legal document in the proper sense. Moreover, the basic task of settling "the unfinished constitutional business of defining Israel's legal character," as Simon Rabinovitch put it recently, is not left to lawyers but to politicians.2 Indeed, adding a new Basic Law to the list is arguably one of the highest achievements any coalition government can aspire to. Thus, passing the Basic Law that defined Jerusalem as Israel's capital in July 1980 can perhaps be seen as one of Menachem Begin's biggest political achievements—even though, and maybe precisely because, it avoided using words such as annexation and sovereignty and did not specify Jerusalem's exact municipal borders—while passing the Basic Law on Human Dignity and Liberty (March 1992) is remembered as one of the last remaining legacies of Yitzhak Rabin's government (although technically the legislation process started earlier, under Yitzhak Shamir's prime-ministership). Historically, part of what makes the struggle between human rights and national sovereignty especially interesting in our case is the fact that Jews, and often Jews who have conceived of their identity in ethnonationalist terms and who have openly defined themselves as Zionists, have been found in both camps. I am writing these lines in summer 2018, shortly after the Knesset adopted a nationality law that defines Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people, mentions no...