Chronic. Why did Boris Johnson succeed in conquering the red ridings of the Midlands? What reason do American workers have for supporting Trump, whose policy favors the wealthy? How did Salvini, yesterday champion of selfishness in Northern Italy, manage to extend his grip to the whole peninsula? To answer these questions, one must understand populism.
In their own way, economists got down to it. They highlighted the devastation caused by the financial crisis, dissected the new inequalities and explained the effects of work transformations. They re-estimated the impact of the surge in Chinese exports and showed how struggling cities and regions are struggling to recover. But their analyzes regularly lead to the same conundrum: how to explain that the voters vote against their economic interests?
The effect of the stiffening of traditional social categories shaken by mutations
By emphasizing new so-called cultural divides – around values, immigration, the nation -, political scientists offer an alternative perspective. But the cultural backlash theory of Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart (Cultural Backlash. Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism, Cambridge University Press, 2019, 554 p., 28.53 euros), who sees in populism the effect of the stiffening of traditional social categories shaken by mutations, does not allow to understand why so many voters have passed from an economic definition to a cultural definition of their identity.
In a stimulating book (The origins of populism, Le Seuil, 208 p., 14 euros), Yann Algan and his co-authors see in populism the effect of a desocialization. The disintegration of class society would have left individuals in disrepair. The low level of interpersonal trust which characterizes the French would lead them to distrust towards institutions and elites. But if it sheds light on the "yellow vests" movement, this reading does not explain why countries less desocialized than France are experiencing similar drifts.
Political identity, a group stereotype
As Didier Eribon noted in Return to Reims (Fayard, 2009), the central fact is that the same popular strata which were defined yesterday in economic terms do so today in cultural terms. The question is why. The great merit of Nicola Gennaioli and Guido Tabellini, of Bocconi University, is to take up the subject head-on ("Identity, Beliefs, and Political Conflict", Mimeo, July 2019). According to their work, political identity is a group stereotype. As no camp corresponds exactly to our expectations, we choose the one to which we are closest and which is, also, the most distant from the ideas which we reject. This identification, once made, colors our perceptions of reality: a leftist voter is not only more sensitive to inequalities, he also has an aggravated perception because he assimilates to the less fortunate, while a right-wing voter tends more easily to put them into perspective. This is what Marx called class consciousness.
