It Takes a Village: Economic Decay, Rootedness, and Voting

Abstract

Drawbacks of deindustrialization are often observed to favor the radical right. Remarkable ethnographic evidence – primarily from the American context – suggests that this is most likely to occur in presence of place-based community rootedness, meaning a particular combination of social capital and place attachment. Yet, research based on quantitative data or considering the European context is much scarcer. To address this gap, I study whether political reactions to deindustrialization – which I analyze in an instrumental variable setting – are more acute in Italian municipalities featuring higher levels of rootedness. To do so, I create a composite indicator of it, by conducting a factor analysis and leveraging a variety of data sources including census and phone directory data. I find that the far right gets an electoral benefit from deindustrialization in municipalities featuring fairly high rootedness levels, while localities with below-average levels are immune to this dynamic. This is not the case of other populist parties. This study contributes to the scholarly understanding of the electoral impact of deindustrialization by shedding light on one possible mechanism leading to a far-right response.