ON 15 September 2008, investment bank Lehman Brothers collapsed, precipitating a global financial crash. In the years that followed, politics took an apparently unexpected turn. We saw Brexit, the election of Donald Trump and the rise of far-right movements in Europe after decades of steadily increasing social liberalism. Sweden is just the latest example.
Many are now wondering if this is the new normal. In 2015, Manuel Funke, then at the Free University of Berlin, and his colleagues turned to data analysis for an answer. They found that over the past 140 years, . The good news for liberalism is that this faded after 10 years. If this pattern holds once more, we should be on schedule to see the surge in populism petering out.
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Funke and his colleagues wrote: “After a crisis, voters seem to be particularly attracted to the political rhetoric of the extreme right, which often attributes blame to minorities or foreigners… Votes for far-right parties increase strongly, government majorities shrink, fractionalization of parliaments rises and the overall number of parties represented in parliament jumps.” Although some political after-effects are measurable for a decade, the political upheaval is mostly temporary, they add.
Funke’s work is rooted in data analysis, finding evidence for the apparent link between political trends and financial crises, but not for deeper behavioural reasons behind that link.
However, other studies already suggest reasons why, in times of turmoil, support rises for protectionist policies favoured by far-right and populist movements, be they on immigration, “unfair” trade or security. The studies point to , a common trait in which people subconsciously respond more and pay more attention to negative than to positive events.
After taking into account socio-economic factors, those who are to and devote more attention to negative events tend to favour “protective” policies.
So after a deep economic shock and the threat to livelihoods and national prosperity that follows, protective politics may simply find a more receptive audience. If Funke’s cycles hold, the appeal of such politics fades again as economic recovery takes hold, which .
Not all political scientists agree that these cycles will apply now. Justin Murphy at the University of Southampton, UK, expects the pendulum to continue to swing further in the opposite direction this time. To him, the root cause of the contemporary rise of the populist right may be linked to a backlash against social liberals overstating the extent to which freedom of thought or behaviour has been restricted – despite declines in racism and sexism in the US and UK in recent decades.
“Political and behavioural science are in a fast-moving world now – past narratives may no longer apply”
There is clearly a case to be made that at least some overzealous elements among the left are harming their own cause and may be sparking a backlash at the ballot box. This was demonstrated in an incident earlier this year when renowned liberal psychologist Steven Pinker outlined his thoughts on how to deconstruct and fight back against false and illogical racist and sexist claims made by alt-right activists.
When a cut-down clip appeared on YouTube, Pinker was branded a racist and darling of the alt-right in a that saw left-wing activists up in arms against one another. It is hard to deny that a divided left combined with self-destructive radical elements isn’t at least somewhat responsible for the rise of the far right.
A larger factor, however, may ironically be a decline in voting. Simon Hix at the London School of Economics has charted the combined votes for all political parties across Europe for the past century and points to a sharp and steady rise in non-voting over the past three decades.
Non-voters were a minority in the pre and post-war years, but they , dwarfing far-right groups and the impact of the divided left. As a result, even small shifts in support for populism may translate into outsize effects on election results.
If apathetic voters are tempted back to the polling booths, that might herald a return to a more familiar political landscape. However, it is also possible that the trend of increasing apathy will continue to grow, fuelled by the knock-on effects of the rise of social media.
Social media use may be leading to a replacement effect where people feel so satisfied expressing their feelings online that they don’t vote. It could also be changing the way we think about democracy in other ways, enabling filter bubbles, creating echo chambers and allowing the emergence of micro-targeted political messaging of the sort that has hit headlines of late.
Anyone hoping for an easy answer to the question of what happens next will probably be disappointed. Political and behavioural science is messy and exists in a rapidly changing world where the narratives of the past may no longer apply. So many new factors are at play that future elections are likely to continue to be more unpredictable than before.
With all this in mind, it would be a brave pundit that staked their reputation on Funke’s 10-year rule to predict the bursting of the populist bubble. The first test may be the US mid-terms. But they are typically a show of electoral punishment of the incumbent, says Funke, who suggests the outcome in November will be more of a reflection of Trump’s recent performance than any kind of bellwether for broader effects.
So it might take a presidential election in the US to really tell what is going on. Which means you may have to wait another few years to see if the political shake-up that followed the 2008 crisis is over. That’s if the next crash isn’t on us by then.
This article appeared in print under the headline “A bubble set to burst?”
