Downward Mobility Drives Far‑Right Support Across Europe

Why This Question Matters

Alan M. Jacobs and Mark A. Kayser investigate whether long-term losses in social status help explain growing support for far‑right parties. Social status is treated as a mix of economic position and social esteem; the authors test whether losing status across generations—rather than short-term economic hardship alone—shapes voters' turn to radical-right options.

What They Did

The paper offers the broadest empirical test to date of the status‑loss argument by linking individual vote choice to intergenerational occupational mobility across 11 European countries. The authors focus on long‑run status change—operationalized as whether an individual's occupational standing is lower, higher, or similar to their parents'—and evaluate how that mobility relates to far‑right party support.

How They Measured Status and Identified Effects

• Long‑term status change: intergenerational occupational mobility (downward, upward, or stable).
• Comparative design: cross‑national analysis spanning 11 European countries to assess generality.
• Modeling strategy: statistical models that explicitly separate status change from status level and control for potential confounders, allowing the authors to isolate the effect of mobility itself.

Key Findings

• Downward intergenerational mobility predicts higher likelihood of voting for far‑right parties across the sample of countries.
• Upward mobility has little or no detectable effect on far‑right voting, producing a clear asymmetry between losses and gains in status.
• The relationship between downward mobility and far‑right support remains after accounting for baseline status and other observable controls.

What This Suggests for Politics and Policy

The results imply that long‑run economic processes that have depressed the occupational prospects of native‑born workers—manifesting as intergenerational status loss—contribute to the rise of far‑right parties. The asymmetry found by Jacobs and Kayser points to the political weight of perceived status decline rather than mobility per se, with implications for how scholars and policymakers think about economic dislocation and radical‑right appeals.