Gender, Insecurity and Populism in Europe

Abstract

The measurement of insecurity in relation to populism has been centered around the operationalization of the risk of unemployment, leaving other dimensions of insecurity largely overlooked. In this working paper, we use advanced statistical data matching with computational techniques to create a synthetic dataset of EWCS and ESS in 23 European countries based on demographics, region, industry sector, and educational attainment of respondents. By combining representative data on high work pressure and job dissatisfaction in the EWCS with the information on the political preferences of respondents and on financial insecurity in the ESS, we demonstrate the presence of a gendered association between insecurity and populist voting. We find that higher work pressure and higher job dissatisfaction are associated with a higher probability of voting for the populist right populist among men, while higher financial insecurity is associated with a higher probability of total populist party voting among women. In addition to demonstrating the advantages of statistical matching over average-based imputation, the paper argues that the debate on the socioeconomic triggers of populist voting needs to account for the role of gender in mediating the effects of insecurity in populist voting.

Contact: Lorenza Antonucci, Associate Professor, School of Social Policy, University of Birmingham, l.antonucci@bham.ac.uk.