Bad times are not good times for revolutions: Collective deprivation and the mobilization level of French radical movements (1882–1980)

Abstract

Contrary to a popular belief, research has generally found no relationship between collective economic deprivation and the rise of radical political movements. On the other hand, various studies show that collective economic deprivation generates societal surges of conservatism. I therefore hypothesize that the absence of a relationship between collective deprivation and radical movements covers up opposite effects of collective deprivation depending on the ideology of radical movements: Reactionary (i.e., conservative radical) movements should mobilize more in times of collective deprivation, whereas revolutionary (i.e., progressive radical) movements should mobilize more in times of collective improvement. This paper tests this hypothesis via a new database measuring the level of mobilization of French radical organizations from 1882 to 1980. Statistical analyses confirm that collective deprivation, operationalized by long‐term economic recession and long‐term growth of inequality, increases the mobilization of reactionary movements and decreases the mobilization of revolutionary movements. These results contradict the view that economic conditions have no role in triggering radical movements and support recent development of system justification theory implying that ideology matters in the explanation of collective action.

Revisiting the Economics and Terrorism Nexus: Collective Deprivation, Ideology and Domestic Radicalization in the US (1948–2016)

“…I used two indicators of collective deprivation: the long-term variation of the national wealth, measured by the growth of the mean fiscal income of the population, and the longterm variation of inequality, measured by the growth of the share of the pre-tax income owned by the 10% richest (WID 2017). As in the previous study (Varaine 2018), I mean by long-term the variation over 10 years of the economic indicators. However, I am agnostic on what long-term precisely mean-e.g., whether it is 6 or 14 years.…”

“…To my knowledge, there has been no empirical study directly testing the effect of long-term economic variations on the mobilization of radical groups with the exception of Varaine (2018). This study corroborated the hypothesis in the case of French radical movements-including terrorist groups-from 1882 to 1980: long-term recession and long-term elevation of inequality were positively related to the number of members of far-right movements and negatively related to the number of members of far-left movements.…”

“…The first aim of the present study is to test the hypothesis on a new historical case, based on reliable data. The previous study (Varaine 2018) focused on the effect of collective deprivation on the absolute number of adherents of conservative and progressive radical movements. Another empirical formulation of the hypothesis is that collective deprivation affects the main ideological orientation of terrorists, which is the share of far-right versus far-left radical activists at a given historical period.…”

“…The present paper investigates this hypothesis by addressing three issues. Firstly, the empirical examination of the hypothesis has so far been limited (Varaine 2018). The present paper provides a new empirical test of the hypothesis based on the PIRUS database (Jensen and Lafree 2016), gathering a sample of domestic terrorists (N = 1295) in the United States from 1948 to 2016.…”

The Political Economy of Populism

“…Based on earlier work by Algan et al (2017), Guriev (2018) argues that rising unemployment caused an increase in populist votes after the Great Recession. Varaine (2018) expands the time span of the above works and focuses on longer-term patterns of radical votes in France, while Ferkiss (1962) discusses the trends in American extreme political preferences before the 1960s, and their shift from the far-left to the far-right. Glaeser (2005) provides further evidence of longer-term voter radicalization, and Varaine (2018) concludes that recessions and income inequality can play a decisive role in triggering and driving the dynamics of long-term extreme political preferences.…”