Immigration Fears Trump Community Decline in Populist Support

Why Study Populism's Cultural Roots?

Yotam Margalit, Shir Raviv, and Omer Solodoch ask which cultural grievances best explain the surge of right-wing populist voting in Europe and the United States. Many accounts point to cultural disaffection, but that label bundles distinct mechanisms—making it hard to know which grievances actually drive voters toward populist parties. This paper teases those mechanisms apart to offer clearer, testable claims about cultural drivers of populism.

Five Competing Cultural Storylines

The authors distinguish five specific cultural explanations rather than treating culture as a single force:

• Ethnocultural concerns about immigration and demographic change;
• Rural resentment tied to place-based decline and geographic marginalization;
• Status anxiety about relative social standing and perceived loss of status;
• Community disintegration, meaning weakened local ties and civic institutions;
• An intergenerational values divide between older and younger cohorts.

Comparative Tests Across Europe and the U.S.

Margalit, Raviv, and Solodoch evaluate these storylines using extensive comparative data from multiple European countries and the United States. Their approach combines large-scale survey measures of attitudes and identities with electoral outcomes, employing multivariate statistical models to assess the relative importance of each cultural factor and to explore variation across national contexts.

Key Findings

• Concerns about ethnocultural change linked to immigration consistently stand out as the most central cultural predictor of right-wing populist voting.
• Rural resentment and status anxiety also contribute to populist support, but their effects are generally smaller and more context-dependent.
• Explanations centered on community disintegration and a generational values gap matter only in particular countries or subsets of the electorate, not as broad, general drivers.
• The populist electorate is heterogeneous: different combinations of these cultural grievances form the core coalitions in different countries.

What This Tells Scholars and Policymakers

By disaggregating cultural explanations, the paper clarifies which cultural anxieties deserve priority in accounts of populist success and where country-specific dynamics matter most. The findings imply that debates and interventions that treat cultural discontent as uniform risk overlooking the dominant role of immigration-related ethnocultural concerns and the varied composition of populist coalitions across contexts.