The Anti-Politics of Austerity: How Inequality and Distributive Politics Produce Anti-System Parties

The recent period has seen a dramatic rise in vote shares for ‘anti-system’ parties and politicians, with the election of Trump in the US, the vote for Brexit in the UK, and the rising vote shares for parties of the radical left and populist right across Europe. This paper connects these political development to austerity politics and the distributive consequences of the financial crises and subsequent fiscal adjustments. It argues that inequality, austerity and economic distress are underlying causes of current political instability, but that the connections between inequality and the distribution of income growth are mediated by the ways in which political entrepreneurs latch onto voter dissatisfaction and articulate competing diagnoses of the crisis in ways which mobilize different parts of the electorate. It draws on a comparison of austerity, inequality and anti-system politics in four high-inequality countries: the US, the UK, Spain and Italy. It concludes that inequality and austerity generally tend to lead to political upheaval, but that anti-system pressures are filtered through local political traditions and institutions in distinctive ways.