Professor Matthew Goodwin
First part, thanks [applause]. Well, thank you very much. There’s the book, it’s over there, and it’s very cheap. My mother loves it. Let’s get into what we’re talking about. So, mainly Europe and the US, and I think we all accept that Europe’s in a very fragile position at the moment, that we are seeing significant political changes, you might argue, unprecedented political change, and I wanted to start with Sweden. If you were following the recent election in Sweden, I think it really reflected three key trends that are sweeping through many Western democracies. The first was the record result for the national populist Sweden Democrats. The second was that this was the worst result for the Social Democrats, since 1908, and the third is that we saw a lot of smaller parties doing well, as the party system begins to fragment. And those three things you can see in a lot of other states, but, in particular, it’s this issue of national populism that we’re looking at in the book and we think is particularly significant, when you consider where Europe and North America are heading in the coming years. These are familiar faces: Marine Le Pen, Heinz-Christian Strache in Austria, Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, Viktor Orbán, Matteo Salvini, who have each done very well, at recent elections, challenging conventional wisdom.
But what’s interesting for me, at least, as someone who’s worked in this area for quite a while, we’re now also seeing these movements breaking through in democracies that we were told, in the 1990s, we’d never really have successful populist movements. The Netherlands and Sweden, they were historically liberal, very tolerant societies. The United Kingdom, strong institutions, the civic culture and Germany, because of the legacy of the Second World War and what we thought were strong social norms against populism. But each of those democracies has seen a significant national populist rebellion, the AFB being now in 15 or 16 State Parliaments, more than 90 seats in the Bundestag. Geert Wilders having quite a clear impact on the policy agenda in the Netherlands, if not winning an election himself. Jimmie Åkesson and the Sweden Democrats and, of course, here, we had the UK Independence Party, that may now have collapsed, but only after really achieving everything that they had always wanted, namely a referendum and the vote for Brexit.
And I think sometimes we forget how quickly political change can happen, especially when we’re living in a period of significant political change. That might sound rather odd, but if you looked at the front cover of the Economist a year ago, it told us that the new political order in Europe was Emmanuel Macron, with Angela Merkel standing in the background. Of course, Macron, now, has approval ratings of about 24, 25% and very much finds himself as an outlier on the European landscape. That was the front cover of Time magazine about a week ago. Matteo Salvini, the new face of Europe, somebody who has approval ratings of around 60% and who is quickly cannibalising much of the vote in Italian politics. In fact, the only political party that’s growing, in the recent opinion polls in Italy, is the Lega and, interestingly, now, growing quite seriously outside of its northern, quite prosperous, bastions.
And, of course, as that change has kicked in, some of our traditional parties have really had a bad time. Social democracy is, essentially, in freefall. We’ve seen Social Democrats in Germany reach their lowest share of the votes since 1933. Sweden, since the beginning of the 20th Century, similar losses for Social Democrats in the Czech Republic, Austria, the French Socialists, the Czech Social Democrats. And the question, I think, increasingly, that’s facing social democracy, is not so much how can you get back into a position of electoral competitiveness, but without sounding, sort of, too polemic, how can you survive over the longer-term? Because your coalition is really being torn apart, as liberal middleclass professionals, in some cases, like Germany, are going over to the Greens, but those socially Conservative workers are sometimes either going into apathy or defecting over to national populist. And, of course, some Social Scientists spotted this coming – this trend, in the mid-1980s, where they pointed to some of the irreconcilable conflicts within social democracies electorate between those groups.
The interesting macro question for me, at least, is when you look at all of this change and you look at the rise of national populism, in particular, Brexit and Trump and so on, does this signal that we are at the end of a period of political volatility and change? Or does it, instead, actually signal that we are nearer the beginning of a period of volatility and change? And I ask that question, just as a framing device, it’s quite a simplistic framing device, because it gets us into some of the arguments in our public debate. So if you think that we are, sort of, leaving a period of churn and change, you’re probably won over by arguments that, essentially, say this is all about generational change and angry, old, white men. This argument is routinely wheeled out in some of our newspapers and magazines, that, as one generation, effectively, dies out and is replaced by tolerant, liberal university graduates, all of this, sort of, awkward stuff will go away. An Economist friend of mine even calculated that in the UK, by 2022, enough leavers will have passed away to give remain a solid majority, which is a slightly curious way of looking at things.
But if you actually interrogate the evidence, as we do in the book, and you just look at the profile of who is voting for these parties, that argument quickly falls apart. In Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, the UK and the US, these movements that have challenged, what you might call, the liberal consensus have drawn much of their support from the under 40s, in some cases, the under 30s. If you look at Marine Le Pen, one of the things that few people spotted last year was that she was just as successful among young women as she was among young men. The Austrian Freedom Party, very popular among the under 40s, the alternative for Germany, very popular among the under 50s.
In the UK, too, the argument pushed by people like Vince Cable, that, effectively, Brexit was a, sort of, old, white man revolt among people that wanted to return to the days of empire., doesn’t sit easily with the fact that about half of 35 to 55-year-olds voted to leave, or that, indeed, one in three black and minority ethnic voters in Britain, voted to leave. Brexit was not exclusively a populist revolt, by the way, but it did contain some overlaps and the US, 41% of white millennials turned out for Donald Trump. Again, a stat that we don’t really talk too much about, and, in fact, it also ignores, what you would call, lifecycle effects.
There’s some really nice research in the UK now, by James Tilly at the University of Oxford, who tracked the same voters over time and he found that, actually, as people go through their lives, or as you go through your lives, you will become 0.38% more Conservative as each year of your life passes. It’s usually at this point that somebody looks at me shaking their head, saying, “I will never go Conservative.” Well, trust me, you’re an outlier ‘cause most of us will. And the interesting point about that is our societies are also ageing and older folks are more likely to vote, and that begins to help explain why we see these really big generational differences between the young and the old. For example, my first year students at Canterbury, born in 2000, they don’t remember Tony Blair, they don’t remember the financial crisis, they weren’t even eligible to vote in the 2016 Referendum, but they’re passionate Corbynistas. 74% of that group are going to vote Labour at the next election. But, of course, there’s a big, striking 20 point gap between them and the over 65s. So the lifecycle effect, I think, is something we need to keep in mind.
And I think the core argument here is that we need to step back from these short-term takes and these popular takes in the media and we need to actually start looking at the long-term currents that are sweeping through the West. And we do have, what I would call, comfort blankets in this debate. But this is all about Cambridge Analytica and social media, it’s all about the legacy of the financial crash, it’s about who said what during a particular campaign, what was written on the side of a bus, the resurgence of historic fascism and Donald Trump taking us back to the 1930s. I’m not saying that these things are not important, but I’m saying they’ve been given a level of influence that is wholly disproportionate to their actual significance. And what we really need to do is try and get out of this short-term news cycle and really look at the deeper currents that are reshaping democracy.
I recently read Hillary Clinton’s book, What Happened? And I realised she still doesn’t know what happened, in that it was completely obsessed with the campaign, right? And should she have gone to Michigan? Should she not? Was that Data Analyst right? Was that Data Analyst wrong? If you’d looked at the long-term currents and you’d looked at the Democratic advantage or disadvantage among key groups, actually, it was during Obama’s period that the Democrat advantage among, particularly white voters, with only some college education or only some high school education, really falls off a cliff. And this was not the only group that voted for Trump, lots of affluent, mainstream Conservatives voted for Trump. And we forget, like in the same way with Brexit, we forget that lots of affluent Conservatives voted for Brexit. But the foundations for Trump were set before he even descended the elevator in Trump Tower, and we need to take these long term realignments much more seriously, if we’re to understand what’s going on.
Brexit, too, Cambridge Analytica has been on the front page of lots of newspapers. We’ve been looking for quite easy, convenient explanations for what’s going on and we convince ourselves into thinking that Remain was always a favourite. But, actually, if you’d looked at the long term trends, the National Centre for Social Research showed that from 1996, through to the referendum period, the percentage of voters who either wanted to leave the EU altogether or dramatically reduce the powers that the EU has, was over 50% every single year, except two, right? The currents, the underlying foundations, really always favoured Leave, that tradition of euro scepticism, we weren’t really looking too much, however, at the long term-currents. And so, that’s what we try and do in the book and we argue, essentially, that national populism revolves around four deep rooted shifts in the West, which were a long time coming, and some of them have given way to legitimate grievances, among key groups, about how the social and economic and political settlement is or is not working for them. And, as a consequence, not to depress you all before we head up to the reception, and then we can make ourselves feel much better, more better, not to depress you too much, but we argue that national populism, contrary to the popular idea that this is just a short-term passing protest, actually is likely to become a permanent feature on our political landscape for many years to come. And this is what we call the four Ds: distrust, destruction, deprivation and dealignment, which is a fairly simple device that we used to try and present about 30 to 40 years of research in an accessible way.
Let’s start with distrust. There are two key points about where we are today. The first is that throughout the history of democracy there’s always been a tradition of, what you might call, elite scepticism toward the masses. A desire to, essentially, marginalise the influence and the power that citizens have in political decisions and this found its expression at various points, the 1950s, so-called, elite theory argued that apathy was actually a good thing. That people not voting was actually preferable in that it left elites in control of key decisions. But the second key point that builds on that tradition of distrust is that we can now see a growing gap between ordinary citizens and those who are elected into the corridors of power. If you look at the US, we’re now seeing record numbers of women and ethnic minorities in Congress, that should be celebrated, but we’ve also seen record numbers of millionaires and also degree holders, and I’ll come back to that.
In the UK, the percentage of MPs, who have had some experience of manual occupations, is now down to 3%. The percentage who have only ever worked in politics is up to 18%, as is the share who have BA, MA or PhDs. Macron’s Government, very highly educated. Lots of Ministers and Politicians drawn from the prestigious great schools, as is Angela Merkel’s cabinet and, in fact, one of my favourite books, of recent years, Diploma Democracy, showed that between the 1850s and today, the percentage of Politicians who are highly educated has consistently increased. And, in a way, that’s not a problem, but what matters is that the rate of increase is wholly disproportionate to the overall rate of increase and the average population. So we’ve seen a real concentration of very highly educated and, often, very affluent individuals who are making decisions about issues that affect our daily lives and, unsurprisingly, that has fed a sense, amongst key groups, particularly non-graduates and workers, that their voice doesn’t really count in the political system. In fact, even this week, when new data came out showing that support for the EU had increased everywhere outside of Britain, it also became true that about half of people in Europe, nearly one in two, agree with the statement that my voice doesn’t count in the European Union. And that distrust is integral to explaining the appeal of national populism, it is one of the core drivers of support for these movements.
At Chatham House, with the Europe Programme, we recently surveyed elites and voters and we asked them a series of things about identity issues that have become far more important in Europe. Is immigration good for the country? Does immigration enhance cultural life? Is it – does it make crime worse? Is it a strain on welfare? Should we, like that Donald Trump policy, ban all further migration from mainly Muslim states? What’s striking is just the complete disconnect and views held by elites and ordinary voters, and this is particularly noticeable on these big identity issues that are dominating Europe today. So when national populist voters say, “Well, I don’t feel as though there’s someone representing my values, or how I see the world around me in the corridors of power,” partly, they have a point and we need to think about that.
Second drive of destruction is really about these deep rooted concerns about migration and ethnic change, which we can’t get away from, that we have to deal with and we have to think far more imaginatively about how we’re actually going to respond to them. The simple point is that throughout history, as we argue, at least in the book, that whenever you’ve had high rates of inward migration, it’s often generated quite a negative reaction and anxiety among populations. What’s different today is the scale and the pace of that change, particularly in Western Europe and the US, it’s different in Central and Eastern Europe, but that’s really changing the issue agenda today. And the reality is that large numbers of voters, particularly non-graduates and workers, feel incredibly anxious about the pace of change within their societies. If you look at the UK and you look at the overall increase in levels of net migration, which is the grey line, and the overall increase in levels of public concern over this issue, as we headed into that referendum, they tracked each other very closely. Real world shifts were producing real world increases in concern.
If you look at the US, as you come out of the early 20th century, the overall share of the population that’s foreign born begins to decline, as you go into the Kennedy era, Belinda Johnson era, and now begins to increase, as we go into today, and is estimated to reach about 19, 20% by 2060. This stuff matters because we know that how people perceive this change is integral to how they’re voting. If you feel that this is challenging your group, your way of life, we know that that’s a core predictor of whether or not you voted for Donald Trump. In Italy, too, I won’t labour the point, but over the last decade, you get a really striking increase in the number of refugees and asylum seekers going into Italy, you get that boost of public concern and also, media coverage that plays into this issue, essentially laying the foundation for Matteo Salvini and his takeover of the Italian system.
I think we’re underestimating this change because it is completely overhauling the priority list for voters, and this is the challenging stuff for the EU. If you ask voters, today, what are the most important issues facing the European Union? In every single member state, except one, the top two answers are immigration and terrorism. The exception is Italy, where the answers are immigration and unemployment. So we’re now dealing with a shopping list, if you like, of issues that are very much around that identity security access. We’ve got a lot of voters out there that feel very anxious and concerned about these issues. Lots of voters don’t feel concerned about them. If you’re a degree holder or you’re affluent, you’re economically secure, you live in a big city, you’re pretty relaxed, probably, chances are, but if you’re not reflecting those criteria, you’re probably pretty anxious about this change. And if you look at where Europe’s going, between today and 2080, we’re going to see some significant changes, too. We’re going to see some significant increases in populations in Luxembourg, Sweden and Ireland. But what’s interesting is, in those Central and East European states, that are often the most anxious about these issues: Bulgaria, Lithuania, Latvia, we’re going to see countries depopulating by up to about 40%. This is going to be incredibly difficult for these states, in terms of supporting social care systems, in terms of welfare, and the answer will be, well, either they win some of their citizens back from West European economies and they tempt them back, as the Polish Government’s trying to do, or they have sharp inward migration, in which case, that is going to challenge a lot of these cultural sensitivities about this issue, that people like Viktor Orbán or Law and Justice and similar movements are doing elsewhere.
And the critical, sensitive, but really important stuff, is we also know that national populism is really thriving, from Islamophobia and concern over the role of Islam within European societies and, again, we can’t duck it. We have to think about it. I sat on the Government’s Working Group on Anti-Muslim Hatred for three years and we were thinking long and hard about what you – how you can respond to this. The Pew Research Centre recently looked at the forecast in Europe, under a zero migration scenario, there’s no further migration. Immediate migration scenario, we get, basically, reasonable levels of migration, and then a high migration scenario, which is if you assume that the EU basically doesn’t resolve the refugee crisis and we have the levels of inward migration that we’ve had during 2014 and 2015. And even if you take the zero or medium migration scenarios, by the time that you get to 2050, forecasts should be taken with a pinch of salt but, you know, they’re rough estimates, countries like Sweden, Italy, France, the UK, are going to see the overall share of their population that’s Muslim being around 17, 20, 18%.
Most voters, a lot of voters, won’t feel that that’s an issue. A lot of the other voters, who are supporting national populism already, will, most likely, feel particularly alarmed by this demographic change. Over the last 25 years, every single study that’s been done on national populist voters, has shown that concern over migration and, increasingly, Islam, is a major driver or support for these movements. One very interesting recent study actually found that in France and the Netherlands, quite – a not insignificant number of national populist voters are at ease with LGBT communities. They support same sex marriage, but they feel quite anxious about this specific issue of whether or not Islam and Western democracies can reconcile themselves to each other.
Deprivation really taps into a sense, among these voters, an accompanying sense, that this economic system isn’t working out. And one of the unfortunate things that we’ve done in social science in the public debate is we said this is either all about economics or this is all about culture. I think that’s a very unhelpful debate. The real world doesn’t work that way, that they’re feeding off each other. But I would argue that there’s two specific issues that are really important: one is that capitalism used to be legitimised by religion and by nationalism, and the second issue is that it’s not so much objective deprivation that’s driving these voters, concerns over objective incomes, wages and jobs, but that across the West, now, we have large numbers of voters that feel a sense of relative deprivation,. That, compared to others, they’re not getting what they feel that they, and their group, should get and often, national populist voters are working in full-time jobs, often on good salaries, but they feel that they are being left behind. And, to be frank, lots of these voters have good reason to feel they’re being left behind. If you look at overall rates of income – sorry, overall rates of inequality, between the mid-1980s and the latest year, you can see that in almost every state in Europe, with the exception of three, overall rates of inequality have actually risen, compared to where they were in the 1980s. In fact, the OECD, recently, concluded that incoming equality has been growing in most wealthy countries, in recent decades, raising questions about the stability and sustainability of our social and economic systems.
Workers have good reason to feel they’re getting a bad deal. The overall share of national income going to workers has been trending downwards, since the 1980s. It reached its lowest level in the past half century, prior to the financial crash, and to my friends on the left who say, “This is all about the great recession,” the picture’s a lot more complicated and it’s not really recovered since. In fact, the overall share of national income that’s going to workers today is about four points lower than it was in 1970. So when I’m running surveys and workers are saying to me, regularly, “This system is not fair, it’s not equal,” they have good reason, I think, to feel that way because the number of jobs that are temporary, that are on low rates of pay, that are insecure, in quite volatile, low service sector positions, has increased dramatically.
In France, in Italy, in the Netherlands, in Austria, the percentage of voters, who are now working in these more insecure, short-term, you know, not particularly fulfilling jobs, has increased. And I think we don’t talk enough about dignity in work and recognition and these things really matter, right? And relative deprivation is about that sense of loss, that I’ve lost something. My community has lost something, and I think we need to think about that. And, lastly, dealignment and this, to me, is probably the most important of all of them, which is some pretty convincing evidence that this period of volatility that we’re entering into really is going to be with us for a while.
If you look at the overall share of voters across Western democracies who say, “I feel strongly aligned with one of the political parties. I feel loyal to one of the political parties,” it’s consistently declined and sometimes dramatically so. Between the 1950s and 2016, when those two big political revolts shook the West, we saw a pretty consistent decline in, what you’d call, partisan loyalty. In the US, the number of Independents is now at a record high. The number of people who say, “I want a new political party, outside of the big two,” is at a record high. If you were surprised by the recent election result in Sweden, well, the percentage of people who feel close to one of the parties, since the late 1960s, has gone from 65% to 27%. A complete abandonment of the established political parties.
If you looked at Germany, the number of non-partisans, people who reject any association with the political parties that they have, is now at record highs across the generations. Interestingly, the number one source of votes for the alternative for Germany, was non-voters. People that had given up on politics, they weren’t switching from another party, they’d given up on elections and they then came back in to vote for the alternative for Germany.
So where are we headed? One idea, and I can’t prove it, but I’m going to throw it out there and see, maybe we can come back in 50 years and see if I was right, is Central – I think Central and Eastern Europe offers us one possible future, for where we’re heading in Western Europe. Some really nice work by Tim Haughton at Birmingham and Kevin Deegan-Krause, and they looked at the evolution of party systems from 1990 to present day. The darker the bars, the older the political parties, the lighter the bars the younger the political parties. And their article’s called Hurricane Season, because what it shows is that as you come through, into 2000 and 2012, all these new parties are springing up, but then even newer parties are coming up behind them and replacing the new parties, and they call this a constant cycle of birth, death and replacement. An example might be Italy, where Five Star, within ten years, started largely as a joke and then won a national election. Emmanuel Macron stepping outside of the party system, and then becoming President.
It may be that as those stable allegiances wither away, party systems are going to enter this heightened period of volatility. New parties coming up, challenging the mainstream. It’s one possible future, because we know that since the 1940s, the overall level of electoral volatility in the West, people switching their votes from one party to another, from one election to another, is increasing. I mean, we say, “Wow, the political world’s gone a bit crazy recently.” Well, it’s been a long time coming. This trend has been visible for quite a while, and I think if you buy my evidence and you buy my argument, I think it’s difficult to escape the fact that it’s going to continue to be that way. What about the UK? People say, “Didn’t 80% of Brits just vote for one of the two main parties?” Yes, but that’s largely because of our first past the post system. Even under that surface, Jon Mellon, at the University of Oxford, has shown that the 2015 and 2017 elections were the two most volatile on record. Lib Dem voters were going Labour, Green voters were going Labour, UKIP voters were going Conservative, some Labour working class voters were going Conservative, a lot of churn under the system. Could a new party work? Possibly, because we have this extreme level of volatility that’s going on below the surface. And these parties are already having an impact, and I’m drawing into the discussion, but one of the unwritten, or the undocumented, facts about Europe today, is that national populists might not always be winning elections, but they are having a profound impact on our policy already.
Markus Wagner and Thomas Meyer have done a very nice study, looking at the positioning of mainstream left and mainstream right and radical right parties, from 1980 to today, and that nice upward curve that you see are those parties moving progressively from socially Liberal positions to more socially Conservative positions, particularly on things like migration, integration, refugees, and those kinds of things. So, an example might be Margaret Thatcher – sorry, Margaret Thatcher, Theresa May being moved over to the – and so, that’s a reference my students would not have got, actually. Theresa May being pulled over to the right by that UKIP rebellion and the Brexit – subsequent Brexit vote. Or it might be Sebastian Kurz in Austria, responding to the Freedom Party by toughening up on migration. But it’s also left wing parties, moving right on migration.
We don’t look at Scandinavia a lot, but the Sweden Social Democrats, the Danish Social Democrats, toughening up their positions on migration and integration, saying, “Actually, we should start to clamp down on welfare for asylum seekers that are refused asylum, or we should commit, as they are in Denmark, to removing all parallel societies, by 2030, and getting much tougher on integration. It might be, as well, as the German left is debating fiercely, at the moment, it might be that this is a model that we see being rolled out in other party systems. Alternatively, it may be that the rise of the Greens, in Germany, instead, is a different model and, perhaps, those culturally liberal, middle-class professionals, millennial graduates, will increasingly congregate around Green and radical left movements and workers and Conservatives will increasingly congregate around ultraconservative national populist movements. Why I worry about that is because that really will lead to the polarisation of our societies and the centre will come under growing pressure.
Last slide, is there a big risk for the EU in all of this? I would argue yes, there is. It is true that, overall, levels of support for the EU have increased significantly since Brexit, big time. If you look at France, if you look at Italy, if you look at Germany, all the data suggests that people have become more supportive of the EU, more supportive of the euro, in some cases. Italy is a bit of an exception. There’s a nice study that came out a few months ago, by some of my colleagues in Austria, and they found something very, very interesting, and I think we need to think about it and talk about it. Because what was interesting, in Britain, was in that ten years before the Brexit vote, what happened? The issue of the EU became merged with the issue of immigration. That was what you might call the UKIP affect and that’s what opened up euro scepticism to a broader audience.
This study, which finds that affect in Britain, as that blue dot moves right over to that red dot, that’s telling us that that relationship between those two issues is becoming a lot stronger, and that’s what opened up Vote Leave to a much bigger audience.
But they find the same thing now is happening in Germany, in Italy, in the Netherlands, in Finland, in Austria, and I’m not, for a second, saying that these countries are going to vote to leave the EU, but I am saying that euro scepticism is no longer just about institutions in Brussels or sovereignty or fiscal union, that actually, now, how people think about the EU is increasingly being wrapped up with how they think about migration, the refugee crisis, borders and security. So the EU has to work a lot harder than it is doing. It has to find unity a lot quicker than it is doing at the moment on these issues, because the seeds of a more significant euro sceptic pushback, I can see quite clearly in the data. And that’s it for now. We can go into some discussion and take a few questions and then we can go and drink lots of alcohol and make ourselves feel better. Any questions? There’s one down here, and then there was a chap at the back. Shall we start this one here?
Member
Hi, I’m Marie, and I’m with the US Americas Programme here, and I had one question, which was, firstly, deceptively simple, perhaps, how would you define populism? And then, a second question about your perception of an idea, which isn’t new, but I think is growing in popularity, that populism is, somehow, good for democracy, that it actually means democracy, and your thoughts on that.
Professor Matthew Goodwin
Very interesting question, yeah. So we define – there’s a whole chapter in the book on how we define national populism, which is a very intense debate, because how you view national populism comes down, ultimately, to your belief system. If you view this as a style, then you’re probably drawn to what Donald Trump’s tweeting, how the AFD are having demonstrations in Germany, you’re drawn to the external features of populism. If, instead, you view as an ideology, a thin ideology that can attach itself to different movements, then you would probably argue that we’ve underestimated the power of populism. The reason I say that is because if it’s an ideology, then it’s as much about what it includes as what it excludes, and we talk a lot about what national populists exclude, that they target immigrants, minorities, that they, at times, are openly xenophobic. But they also are advocating inclusion, that you are part of a community, and I want to try and defend your role within that community, and that’s what gives a lot of these movements the power and potency that we underestimate.
So we define national populism as a movement that prioritises the interests and the culture of the nation and claims to give voice to people who feel that they’ve been neglected or held in contempt by traditional elites, and we can spend all day defining elites, but there’s a lot more in the book. And the second question, which I find especially interesting, is, is populism good? And that’s an interesting question ‘cause most people, particularly if you lean a bit left, you think this is all bad stuff, and Margaret Canovan, who sadly passed away this year, was a very, very interesting thinker and she built on arguments, older arguments, in a way, to get across this point that populism, in its various forms, can be a corrective. And by that, I mean it can put issues onto the table that people feel have been ignored, but it can also put groups into the conversation that feel that they’ve been left behind and let out. And this is a delicate conversation to have because it’s hard for some folks to consider that Donald Trump might actually have put values or groups onto the table that felt they were being neglected. But we talk far more about what’s wrong with populists than we do about what’s wrong with our political systems, and that’s a real problem, right? And we need to think about why do these groups feel that they’re just not at the table. I ran a survey shortly before Brexit, 45% of working class voters said, “People like me have no say in Government,” because you could argue that, actually, they are quite voiceless, within the corridors of power. So maybe we need to think about political reform a lot more seriously than we are doing. But let’s go to another question. There was a chap at the back and then I’ll come down to the front. Just behind you, just up…
Elizabeth Cobbett
And I’m not a chap, and that’s fine.
Professor Matthew Goodwin
Oh sorry, I couldn’t – I’m not wearing glasses, sorry.
Elizabeth Cobbett
It’s not a problem. Elizabeth Cobbett from the University of East Anglia, and I really appreciated your talk and you say, sort of, macro, but I do even more macro. So, for example, for me, there’s two things I’m looking at: one, that the centre of global economic power is moving back to Asia. So I think your point about relative decline is absolutely spot on and I think we’re only just beginning. Then, the other thing I teach my students is that by 2000 and – 2100, one in three people in the world will be African. The demographics are absolutely changing global political power and spread. So if we think of, you know, most of the population being in the Global South, that the relative wealth, the centre of wealth, is moving to Asia, and I think we’re only just starting to really see, in a way, Europe and North America unravel. So I don’t know if you have any perspectives, from a global perspective, to add into what you’re saying.
Professor Matthew Goodwin
Well, maybe we should do a paper together ‘cause I, sort of, do some things on that, too, and there’s a lot in the book. You’re absolutely right, the popular – the long-term population dynamics are really, they’re going to be very challenging for Europe. Europe is ageing. It’s not productive enough. It’s not as dynamic as it needs to be and the pressures that we, I would argue, that we got a glimpse of in 2014 to 15, are the beginning of something much greater, and we talk at length about this. And it’s, in a way if you want to just come down a level from that, it’s essential, in East European states, that are going to have a very difficult few years and decades and, of course, we, in the West, I would argue that we’ve underestimated and misdiagnosed where those countries are, philosophically, and how they view these issues and how they view liberalism. I think we bought into a view misleading stereotypes and theories. But, you’re absolutely right, that if you accept my argument that anxieties over demographic change are a very important driver or support for these movements, then that demographic change will accelerate increasingly.
Now, if you’re an optimist you’d say to me, “But Matt, there’s a lot of work in social sciences that says contact between groups and between the different communities is going to lower prejudice over the long-term and get us into this period with minimum backlash,” and I’d say, okay, that is definitely one thing that can happen. The issue I see, the challenge I see, is that a lot of that contact that’s happening between communities is, what you’d call, fleeting contact. It’s not taking place under the conditions that Gordon Allport put out in the 50s, which is that if you want to lower prejudice and you want to bring people together, essentially, you have to have people working towards a common goal in a supportive framework where, you know, they respect one another and so on. And what I worry about, and maybe this is where social media does come in, is that, actually, we’re just having lots of fleeting contact, that you’re meeting people at work and that’s basically it and you’re going back to your communities, or you’re in a polarised social media environment that is giving you a particular view of the world. So, there’s some real scope for some interesting work to be done around how communities can navigate this great period of democratic change, because it is going to be a profound period for many in the West and it will be quiet unsettling for many voters, too, and that will have political effects. There’s a question down here, and I’ll try and make my way around.
Hilda
Thank you. Hilda and I’m from the National Peacebuilding and a Member. Just to pick up on your last point, you know, having gone from the macro and looking at societies and solidarity amongst people and the break up anyway of life conditions that makes this, kind of, solidarity relationships difficult. We often, I think, forget to look at actual life conditions where we look at what’s happened in mining communities in, say, in the UK, or what happens in agricultural communities in Italy, where there’s a long tradition of social cohesion, of solidarity, which is absolutely necessary for survival, and we tend to, kind of, look at the ideas and the views that people have. And so, I’d like you to say a little bit more about the shift from thinking about people’s perspectives and views and identity, perceptions of identity, to the actual underground inequalities that are moving people towards looking for more context of solidarity collective action, and so on.
Professor Matthew Goodwin
Yeah, I mean, it’s a question that I’ve got a lot – I mean, I’ve got a lot of sympathy for that perspective, in that if you take the Brexit moment, which was – as we show in the book, i.e. the debate in Britain’s been slightly misleading in that we focused only on those communities, right? Boston and Skegness and Clacton and Blackpool and Hartlepool, Brexit was actually delivered by three very different groups, and if you want to know the other two you have to buy the book. But the notion of community loss and decline is absolutely paramount and it’s also wrapped up, not just in a, as you rightly point to, the fraying bonds that were once provided by local employers, trade unions, that solidaristic sense that we’re in it together. It’s also, now, coinciding with this rapid churn and rapid change. So, if you look at the community that gave the strong – I’ve only used Brexit as an example, but we could have a similar conversation about Trump. If you look at the constituency with the highest Leave vote in the country, it wasn’t Stoke, actually, which became the Brexit capital, it was Boston and Skegness, 75% voted Leave. But in the ten years before that referendum, that area had undergone considerable change, considerable change, and we talk about it, that if you’d lived within that community, you really would have felt that, actually, you were on the frontline of globalisation, that you really would have seen some pretty profound changes.
And we know, from a lot of studies, now, particularly in the US, too, with Trump, that it’s often in the communities that have experienced this rapid change, that you get elevated levels of support for movements that are basically saying, globalisation’s going too quickly, you can, effectively, get off the train and you can use me to try and slow this pace of change down. So the narratives that came out after the referendum, that this was all white places that didn’t have any experience with diversity, it was very, very misleading, very misleading, indeed. So, I agree with you and we can talk at length about it.
Hilda
Just think about the, kind of, people who are increasingly in part-time and insecure work.
Professor Matthew Goodwin
Yes, absolutely.
Hilda
It’s a very, very big chunk of your statistics, that’s really what I was talking about. [Inaudible – 43:45] the loss of solidarity.
Professor Matthew Goodwin
Yeah, oh that’s – and that’s – yeah, yeah. The loss of solidarity and also, the lack of dignity, now, that comes with these positions, right? And that notion of loss isn’t just objective, it is subjective and it’s something that we’re going to have to deal with. There was a question, sorry, here, and then there was one over here, if we can squeeze them in. Just one on the front row here and I think there was one over here.
Julian Egan
Thanks very much for that. My name’s Julian Egan and I’m the Head of Advocacy at International Alert. You spoke about what the trend in populism might mean for the EU, what do you think it might mean for the international system, if we look at where the US is tracking? And bearing in mind that Congress has put considerable constraints on what that administration had to do.
Professor Matthew Goodwin
Yeah, very interesting question. I mean, the short answer is, the jury’s out and we don’t know. I mean, I’m particularly interested in the midterms and to see if we see any evidence that the Trump phenomenon is going to be responded to electorally. But that protectionist spirit that he’s hacked into at the international level that – and this gets us into a, somewhat, awkward, perhaps controversial, conversation. But Donald Trump, come 2020, has a lot to say, right? If he decides to stand again, and one of those things will be about trying to – for his electorate, trying to take on a system that they perceived to have been unfair. And yes, he’s also done a lot of bad things along the way, but he has a story to tell about being seen to stand up to certain powers.
In the EU, you can see a, sort of, similar, different alliance emerging between the Southern and the Eastern periphery, if you like, Hungry and Italy and Austria, that’s trying to reposition the EU more within their lens and less within the, so-called, liberal conception of Europe. And I think there’s a nice essay, actually, in this week’s New Statesman about this, that one of the big challenges for the EU in that global system now, is not so much dealing with things like Brexit, which are now external, in a way, but actually, now, dealing with increasingly popular movements that want to remain within the EU, but change it from inside and push it in that more protectionist spirit and where they would find, I think, some agreement with some of the things that Trump is trying to do. So, I think it will have effects, but I think the jury is still out. There was a question, sorry, here and then there was one here, sorry. I’m just trying to make this one is equal as possible, yeah.
Kisimee Cohen
Kisimee Cohen, Member of Chatham House. My question is, what happens when the people, who actually supported the populist parties and movements, realise that the narrative doesn’t actually work in their favour? It doesn’t – it, of course, applies to Brexit, but it applies to a lot of other movements as well.
Professor Matthew Goodwin
Well, it’s a very familiar question. I think I take a slightly different view from some of my colleagues. So the one thing we’ve learnt, in 2016, is that voters are not driven by economic self-interest, and this is one of the fateful calculations, miscalculations, that united remain and partly united the Democrats. And it was an unfortunate legacy of rational choice theory in economics that voters are just all about self-interest and profit maximisers. That if we can just convince them that the EU gave them structural funds that made their areas stronger and more prosperous or if we could just convince them that, actually, Donald Trump would bring more pain and disruption to the Rust Belts, then they’ll change their minds.
So, actually, what we learnt in 2016 was that lots of voters are less anxious about their self-interest and more anxious about the broader community and the broader group, as they see it, and we need to reflect a lot more on that and think about what that means. The two slogans that we saw in the UK are stronger in, which was quite passive, it was quite dry, it was technocratic, was your household will be £4,600 worse off. On the other side, it was take back control, which was emotionally resonant, was about personal agency, was about tapping into that notion of loss. And I think now, for people to get back in the game on their, kind of, if you like, the anti-Brexit, anti-Trump side, they have to put themselves in uncomfortable territory now and start to think about campaigns and messages and conversations that aren’t just about economic costs and benefits, right? And we need to think about what those look like and what those mean. Whatever your politics, whether you agree with this stuff, whether you disagree with this stuff, it’s quite clear that a lot of assumptions that were made about voters were wrong.
Now, you might say, “Well, Matt, this was all about a few key swing states and if, you know, 2% had gone the other way and this state had gone that way, then it would have all been different.” Absolutely, but we would still be here today, with very strong levels of support for Trump or for leaving the EU or for Marine Le Pen, and this stuff, as we argue, isn’t going to go away. And I think liberalism, if we want to get even more, sort of, philosophical about it, liberalism is, obviously, very individualistic and has struggled to build solidarity across groups and to meet this argument on the other side that, actually, this is as much about community, as it is about individuals, and this is going to be difficult for progressives to deal with.
But it’s the only way, and for social Democrats especially, it’s the only way. You can’t just keep reinventing the same arguments of the 90s and the early 2000s because, clearly, you know, these parties are reaching levels of support that I didn’t think I would see, you know, 15% for the German Social Democrats in the opinion polls, and this is truly remarkable. 9% in Bavaria, I mean, this is really striking stuff and I think it’s no coincidence, right, that that’s happening at a time that National Populism is increasing, because one movement is a bit more in tune, maybe, with that notion of collective loss than the other. I mean, maybe class isn’t going to do it anymore. We need to think about something else.
There was a question here, the chap had his hand up for a while, and I think this one will have to be the – sorry, it’s this chap here, will have to be the last question. Have we got time for one more? Is this… ?
Member
I can fit one.
Professor Matthew Goodwin
One more after this.
Member
Thanks, and I’ll make it a quick one. The rise of robotics and AI is another topic that makes the front cover of Time magazine and The Economist on a regular basis and I wondered is there any, sort of, impact you’ve seen on National Populism, for example, in reinforcing the relative deprivation you said you noted earlier?
Professor Matthew Goodwin
We allude to a few things. We talk about some of the forecasts as to how that’s going to affect particularly low-skilled service sector workers. So if you look at the key groups that are voting for most of these movements in Europe, blue collar workers, the self-employed, and some parts of the lower middleclass, particularly service sector workers. And if you look at how this technological change is going to hit different industries, I’m not entirely convinced it’s going to have the sweeping negative effects that we’re often told. I, kind of, want to wait and see, but we know and we can see it in our daily lives, it is going to hit a lot of industries where you often find higher than average levels of support already for these movements.
But don’t forget that, you know, if you look at Italy, as a microcosm of this argument, the unemployed in Italy voted Five Star. It was the people in precarious jobs, and sometimes reasonably solid jobs in the North and in the North of the country that voted for Salvini and Lega, and these movements are not – they’re very different from interwar fascists, but it is also worth remembering that, even in the interwar period, all the studies that we have now show that it was the unemployed that voted for the Communists and the radical left. It was the working poor that ended up shifting over to the more revolutionary, kind of, ethnic based movements. I’m not saying that these movements are similar, because they aren’t, but we do need to pushback against the popular claim that this is all about, you know, the unemployed and those at the very bottom, and it’s a little bit more complex.
And there’s one more question at the top there and then, I think we need to end it. Just this chap here.
Member
[Inaudible – 52:27], Member of Chatham House. What I’m – my question is, what do you think about the subliminal messages delivered by the mass media and change the people’s mind?
Professor Matthew Goodwin
Yeah, very good question. We don’t go into media effects in a big way because media effects are very, very difficult to pin down in a conclusive way. So, my argument to this, and my colleagues in communication studies will take me outside and have a vigorous argument about it, but I don’t think the persuasion effects that are attributed to media are as great as people imply. So this stuff is, ultimately, rooted in some really big value divides in electorates. That you’re socially liberal, you lean towards a more cosmopolitan, internationalist view of the world. You’re, on the other hand, socially conservative. You prioritise stability, group conformity, or you’re a little bit in the middle, right? We should get away from presenting these binary open and closed things, ‘cause society is a lot more multifaceted. But values don’t tend to change. There are a few things that can shift values, higher education, the experience of going to university, your social networks. But while media can exacerbate some of those divides, and we all see that on social media, I would argue that they are a surface affect, not a core underlying driver and my critique of some of my friends, who make the argument that everybody’s being manipulated by media, that there is a, kind of, Wizard of Oz that is, effectively, shifting people around to certain voting blocs. I don’t – when I do studies of voting behaviour, I think it’s actually a bit more fundamental than that. I think what we’re seeing is that some new movements, relatively new movements, you know, we’ve only had liberal democracy for 100 years, so it’s still a new thing, right? Some new movements are actually much better at mobilising one side of that value divide than other movements. Social democracy is struggling, National Populism is doing well. The Greens are doing well and some radical left parties are doing well, better than traditional parties, but they are mobilisers. And I just want to pushback a little bit on this idea that it’s the media that’s secretly controlling everything, or even with social media, don’t forget social media is a highly low trust environment. Only about 30% of people trust what they see on Twitter and Facebook. About 65-70% trust broadcast print media. It’s a low trust environment and we know that most of the people on social media who are committed to Twitter, for example, are already pretty clearly on one side of that value divide. But we can carry on that conversation.
But thank you for your time and thank you for coming along, and I hope to see you upstairs for a glass of wine, and I don’t know if we have any food or nibbles, but we do, thank you very much. Thanks for your time [applause].
