‘Places that don’t matter’ fuelled populism
British writer David Goodhart’s “somewhere versus anywhere” framework, pitting those who are left behind by modernity versus globalist cosmopolitans, has worked for many people as an explanation of recent populist successes throughout the Western world. But what if the places in which rooted “somewheres” live explain the populist phenomenon better than any other problems these people face in adapting to what passes for progress these days?
That, in a nutshell, is the idea London School of Economics professor of economic geography Andres Rodriguez-Pose puts forward: in other words, that populist ballot-box successes are a “revenge of the places that don’t matter”. Interpersonal inequality, he argues, isn’t the driving force here. Territorial inequality is.
“Lagging or declining regions voted differently to prosperous ones,” Prof Rodriguez-Pose writes, in the Brexit referendum, the 2016 US and Austrian presidential elections, the 2017 French presidential and German parliamentary elections – as well as, for example, in Thailand’s 2011 election.
One could add plenty of examples to this list. This year’s Czech presidential ballot, for example, was a clear case of relatively depressed countryside versus dynamic cities, with the former ensuring President Milos Zeman’s reelection. The economically struggling south and eastern parts of Poland provided strong support for the Law & Justice Party. Even in Russia, were elections are more of a fiction than almost anywhere in the West, it’s evident that President Vladimir Putin’s dominance stems from depressed and rural regions; in the country’s allimportant major cities, Moscow and St. Petersburg, his support is relatively low. A similar pattern is in evidence for Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Intuitively, the idea of shifting blame for the rise of populism from demographics to economic geography doesn’t necessarily seem productive. Big, dynamic cities just have greater shares of “achievers” and smaller ones of “the left behind”, who may vote the same as peers in the hinterland but whose will is obscured in the statistics
because they are not the majority. At first glance, this is just another way to package, perhaps less offensively, the proposition that smart cosmopolitans resist the dark tide, while their less enlightened country cousins don’t.
But the geographic focus can lead to important insights. “Anywhere” people, too, live somewhere, namely in cosmopolitan boomtowns such as London or New York; one often hears from them that they associate with the city much more than with the surrounding country. “Left behind” is an expression with geographical roots: From one of the great urban centres, people living in “flyover country” look like those who wanted to catch a plane somewhere better but missed it. But many of them, as Prof RodriguezPose points out, may be too emotionally attached to the places where they live to
uproot themselves. That’s not about being “left behind” – it’s about putting those cultural and community roots above economic interests.
The way in which “places that don’t matter” have taken their political revenge fits this pattern, too. They have put a premium on drawing attention to themselves even if it costs them. Brexit, for example, will disproportionally hurt the regions that voted for it.
This interpretation of the populist voting patterns makes things difficult for policymakers. If regional inequality is the heart of the problem, then focusing on the prosperous areas that attract the most achievement-focused people from everywhere else and hoping their tide will lift all boats is fundamentally wrong, especially in countries where regional voting patterns are important – such as
the US. In fact, even within such constellations of prosperity, there are “places that don’t matter”. In cosmopolitan Berlin, the eastern boroughs, filled with Communistera high-rise buildings, vote consistently for the far left. In Moscow, the lower the average real estate price in a neighbourhood, the higher Mr Putin’s percentage of the vote.
Fixing populism means smarter regional development policies. Prof Rodriguez-Pose and two LSE colleagues, Simona Iammarino and Michael Storper, proposed some ideas for them in a 2017 paper, but most of them are in the “easier said than done” category: Improving government quality and eradicating corruption, investing more in infrastructure, overhauling educational systems, cutting red tape to stimulate business growth. If national governments were good at this
kind of thing, the problem wouldn’t exist today. And populist governments aren’t really interested in fixing the regional disparities because big city envy is an easy resource to tap.
The current phase of global economic development is about the growth and outsized influence of major cities, but politically and practically it makes no sense to have them make all the big decisions. Governments interested in reducing political division may need to focus on devising policies to counter the trend – without turning the poorer regions into permanently aid-dependent ones.