Has regional deindustrialization reduced citizens’ satisfaction with democracy? (1980-2016)

Research has shown that local manufacturing decline and subsequent deprivation often occurs in the face of national prosperity and, on the other hand, that a person’s spatial location is a powerful predictor of their political behaviour. However, little quantitative research has explored the impact of exposure to regional manufacturing decline as a cause for variation in citizens’ democratic satisfaction. The aim of this study is to investigate the influence of regional decline on the public’s support for democracy, focusing on the meso-level social context. We explore two possible mechanisms which underlie this relationship: 1) individuals are materially motivated by the decline in their local economic conditions or 2) individuals feel a symbolic sense of loss due to living in a place where industrial work is no longer the predominant mode of economic and social life. We empirically test our hypotheses by exploiting the spatial and time variation in deindustrialization at the regional level (NUTS-2) across 10 Western European countries. We use about 250,000 individual observations on democratic satisfaction from the Eurobarometer and regional data on deindustrialization from two alternative sources: Cambridge Economics data for employment in industry (1980-2016) and European Labour Force Survey data for employment in manufacturing (1993-2016). We show that differential exposure to regional deindustrialization, engendered by the social stratification of manufacturing work and geographical stratification of manufacturing production in industrial societies, has contributed to systematic individual differences in satisfaction with democracy. The findings speak to the understanding of localised political discontent currently found in several European regions.