Economic Deprivation and Radical Voting: Evidence from Germany

Florian Dorn, Clemens Fuest, Lea Immel and Florian Neumeier ()

No 336, ifo Working Paper Series from ifo Institute - Leibniz Institute for Economic Research at the University of Munich

Abstract: This paper studies the impact of economic deprivation on radical voting. Using a unique dataset covering different indicators of economic deprivation as well as federal election outcomes at the county-level in Germany for the period from 1998 to 2017, we examine whether economic deprivation affects the share of votes for radical right and left-wing parties using instrumental variable estimation. Our results suggest that an increase in economic deprivation has a sizeable effect on the support for radical parties at both ends of the political spectrum. The higher a county’s rate of relative poverty, the average shortfall from the national median income, and the poverty line, the higher the vote share of radical right-wing and left-wing parties. We also provide evidence that regional variation in economic deprivation gave rise to the electoral success of the populist right-wing party AfD in the federal election of 2017. Our findings thus indicate that a rise in economic deprivation may undermine moderate political forces and be a threat to political stability.

Keywords: Economic deprivation; inequality; political polarization; radical voting; Germany (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D31 D73 I32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm and nep-pol
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

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