How Social Inequality Translates into Political Behaviour: The Case of Germany 1998-2013

Inequality is on the rise in most countries. And political populism – both left and right – is on the rise, too. For many, these are closely connected phenomena. In this paper we ask whether we can observe such a nexus between economic deprivation and political radicalization or alienation for the case of Germany. We use a broad concept of inequality since income alone – and as a relative concept – might not be the ideal indicator for the various other dimensions in which socio-economic inequality becomes relevant: unhealthy life-styles, high and persistent unemployment, poor public infrastructure, unsafe neighborhoods etc. We use a novel dataset (INKAR, Indikatoren und Karten zur Raum- und Stadtentwicklung) that reports detailed information on the socio-economic composition of German counties and cities from the late 1990s until 2013 and in its last edition for the first time also included electoral data. We thereby avoid problems of representativeness and reliability of survey data with respect to socio-economically marginalized groups and their (possibly extreme) voting behavior. We find that deprivation has a substantial impact on abstention and voting for radical parties, which persists even if a major cause of deprivation, namely unemployment, declines. And we find important interaction effects with the erosion of a political infrastructure through which dissatisfaction could be articulated, i.e. with the decline of party- and trade-union membership.