2. The age of discontent in western liberal democracies

By the end of 2016, the year of political ruptures that saw Britain leave the European Union and Donald Trump come to power as president of the United States, it could no longer be denied that the 2010s were turning into what would later be referred to as the age of discontent (Rhodes-Purdy et al. 2023). Those two events, along with the heated and polarising debates and campaigns leading up to them, surprised many. Thinkers within and outside the academic world have since thoroughly analysed those phenomena and the series of factors that may have played a part in their occurrence. Their conclusions often point to an accelerated rise in discontent and shift in political attitudes and electoral behaviour within societies since the 2008 economic crisis. (Inglehart and Norris 2016; Ford and Jennings 2020; Guiso et al. 2017). Indeed, many western states in the 2010s witnessed a steep rise in mass political and anti-establishment protests, as well as support for non-traditional political parties. According to Inglehart and Norris (2016), the average share of populist parties in national or European parliamentary elections, for example, increased from 5.1% in the 1960s to 13.2% in the 2010s in Europe. Those trends suggested a growing level of dissatisfaction among ordinary people, who are apparently increasingly frustrated with their own democratically elected governments, perceived as elitist, corrupt and detached from ordinary people’s daily lives. (Guiso et al. 2017; Inglehart and Norris 2016). Trust levels in elected representatives and government institutions dropped significantly during the decade, and the liberal democratic model, hailed as the new world order as recently as the early 1990s, appeared suddenly, and surprisingly to some, to be under threat (Galston 2018). Most concerning perhaps were the signs that the increase in discontent did not – and does not – appear to be a passing trend. As Florida (2021) remarked, such discontent is brewing as a result of “a fundamental characteristic of the wrenching economic, social and cultural transformations occurring in the nature of capitalism” (p. 4).

The two overarching approaches explaining the rise in discontent in western democracies found in the academic literature are the economic and cultural approach, both of which are summarised below. It should be noted, however, that those models cannot always be fully distinguished from one another, given that there are many overlapping factors. That appears to be the case since the 2010s in particular, due to the complexity of the 2008 economic crisis (Torcal 2017).

Many scholars have noted that increasing economic insecurities and the transition from industrial to post-industrial economies are driving high levels of discontent in western democracies (Rodríguez-Pose et al. 2023a, O’Brien and Leichenko 2003, Guiso et al. 2017). Indeed, in recent decades, western economies and labour markets have been gradually but fundamentally transformed by structural changes. The postwar industrial order characterised by class-based political parties, the struggle to achieve full employment, decent salaries and stable jobs for everyone and equal access to welfare has increasingly been challenged. (De Ruyter et al. 2021; Sandbu 2020). Since the 1980s, processes such as automation, the rise of the knowledge economy, globalisation and global markets, as well as neo-liberal austerity policies, have undermined the expectations promised by the postwar order (Sandbu 2020). Those developments have created winners and losers in society; new socio-economic and political divides mean that higher educated, mobile groups have profited especially from increasing opportunities and income, while workers in certain industries have increasingly faced job insecurity, stagnating or declining wages, unemployment and an increase in poverty (Rodríguez-Pose et al. 2023a, O’Brien and Leichenko 2003). Furthermore, the 2010s not only saw wealth becoming concentrated in a thinner layer of individuals at the top of the income scale within OECD countries, but also showed that the financial and political elite and bodies could operate outside the ordinary democratic and fiscal system (Piketty 2014, Nelo-o and Goma 2018, Streeck 2016). That growing divide and inequality between the “haves” and the “have-nots” in the 2010s, combined with significant and unpopular government austerity measures and cuts in public spending, appears to have triggered widespread discontent and resentment against the system and governments, which are increasingly showing signs of lacking accountability (De Ruyter et al. 2021; Gabriel et al. 2022).

Some scholars have argued that the rise in discontent cannot simply be explained by the economic approach. The “cultural backlash thesis” put forward and discussed by Inglehart and Baker (2000) suggests that a deeper cultural divide has occurred within the West, resulting in a backlash against progressive cultural change. Florida (2021) supplements that thesis by describing how the significant economic structural changes that have occurred in the last decades have “ripped apart the institutional and the traditional structures of class and status, and the cultural values that went along with them”. That change in social values is indeed better understood in historical perspective. In the postwar western society, as immediate material needs such as food, shelter and existential security were increasingly met, a shift towards post-material values such as self-fulfilment, independence, cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism occurred in western societies (Inglehart and Baker 2000). According to Ford and Jennings (2020), the expansion of education, empowerment of women and mass migration leading to increased ethnic diversity in the West have nourished those new values and identities. Such movements, however, have triggered a backlash among once more predominant and privileged members of the population, who feel threatened by the change in cultural values and actively reject those progressive values and criticise the decline in more traditional norms (Inglehart and Norris 2016).

High levels of immigration can be interpreted as a factor of discontent under both the economic and cultural approach. During the last decade, European countries have received large numbers of refugees and migrants from other parts of the world. Recent literature has found some evidence that migrants, especially when they arrive in large numbers, can serve as a catalyst to channel disappointment and fears of economic insecurity (Dijkstra et al. 2020). The timing of such immigration and the origin, skill level and number of migrants appear to be critical in terms of fuelling concerns that newcomers might take away jobs and/or diminish wages (Larsson et al. 2021; Guiso et al. 2017). From a social perspective, immigration can raise fears among native-born citizens that access to and quality of welfare will diminish due to the financial strain migrants might place on the system (Edo et al. 2019). Finally, from a cultural perspective, high levels of sudden immigration have been shown to trigger a fear among native-born citizens that their culture and community are under threat and that newcomers will dilute national or regional identity and traditional values. That cultural backlash is aggravated by native-born citizens’ stereotypes of immigrants and is more likely, the more ethnically, racially and culturally different the immigrants are. (Alesina and Tabellini 2020).

It should be noted that right-wing populist parties have played a substantial role in feeding such fears and misconceptions in most western countries by claiming that immigration is the root cause of citizens’ problems and by depicting immigrants as an economic and cultural threat. Doing so enables them to claim that the solutions to the problems in question are simple, short-term and can be addressed through anti-immigration policies (Guiso et al. 2017). Indeed, academics generally agree that populism is a “thin ideology” that populist leaders and political entrepreneurs combine opportunistically with a range of different ideologies and positions, such as an anti-immigration stance, for political gain (Mudde 2004).