Drinking Alone: Local Socio-Cultural Degradation and Radical Right Support—The Case of British Pub Closures

• Author: Diane Bolet
• Published date: 01 August 2021
• Date: 01 August 2021
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/0010414021997158
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0010414021997158

Comparative Political Studies

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DOI: 10.1177/0010414021997158

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Article

Drinking Alone:

Local Socio-Cultural

Degradation and Radical

Right Support—The Case

of British Pub Closures

Diane Bolet1

Abstract

Little is known about how local context influences radical right voting. This

paper advances the theory that the degradation of local socio-cultural hubs

is linked to radical right support by contributing to loss of community and

cultural identity. I examine this thesis by exploiting an original dataset on

British community pub closures. I argue that the disappearance of community

pubs triggers social isolation and signals the decline of the British working class

condition, which is associated with UKIP support. Combining district-level

data with UK panel data (2013–2016), I show that individuals living in districts

that experience one additional community pub closure (relative to the total

number of pubs per district) are more likely to support UKIP than any other

party by 4.3 percentage points. The effect is magnified under conditions of

material deprivation. This paper highlights the significance of local socio-

cultural degradation as a mechanism to explain radical right support.

Keywords

radical right support, elections, public opinion, and voting behavior, social

capital, social isolation, material deprivation

1London School of Economics and Political Science, UK

Corresponding Author:

Diane Bolet, King’s College London, 22 Kingsway, Holborn, London, WC2B 6LE, UK.

Email: diane.bolet@kcl.ac.uk

997158

CPSXXX10.1177/0010414021997158Comparative Political StudiesBolet

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2021, Vol. 54(9) 1653 –1692

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Introduction

The sustained and growing electoral successes of radical right parties in sev-

eral Western European countries has provoked extensive media coverage and

widespread public concern. The question of how to explain such parties’ elec-

toral support has also been the subject of intense academic study, including

by scholars such as Evans (2000); Lubbers et al. (2000); Norris (2005);

Arzheimer and Carter (2006); Ivarsflaten (2005); Kitschelt (1995), among

others. Drawing from cross-sectional or individual-level survey data, the

majority of studies have focused on the macro-level and individual-level fac-

tors behind this phenomenon. It is theoretically and empirically agreed that

radical right supporters are socially conservative individuals who live in

countries experiencing changes in overall immigration levels (or migration of

particularly salient outgroups) and high levels of material deprivation, mostly

proxied by the unemployment rate (Arzheimer & Carter, 2006; Mayer, 1998).

Yet, the individual and macro factors fail to explain all variation in radical

right support. On the one hand, contextual studies restrict themselves to

aggregate national or regional indicators that ignore local variations and

potential ecological fallacies (Golder, 2003). On the other hand, individual-

level data are detached from any local contextual dynamics and suffer from

an under-reporting of radical right supporters in surveys due to social desir-

ability bias. Some recent studies have begun to look more closely at subna-

tional levels to investigate the local contextual determinants that explain

radical right voting. These determinants include economic factors such as

economic hardship (Carreras et al., 2019; Colantone & Stanig, 2018a), labor

market competition (Bolet, 2020), austerity reforms (Fetzer, 2019) and

changes in housing prices (Ansell & Adler, 2019); as well as changes in

immigration levels (Patana, 2020), changes in the share of non-Western resi-

dents (Arzheimer & Carter, 2006; Lubbers et al., 2002; Rydgren & Ruth,

2011); and institutional and party system variables (Kestilä & Söderlund,

2007). Studies that combine the two units of analysis mostly use hierarchical

models with cross-sectional data consisting of a handful of attitudinal mea-

sures and a set of sociodemographic variables (Arzheimer & Carter, 2006).

The rare exceptions have investigated the role of local economic shocks and

austerity in driving radical right nationalism (Colantone & Stanig, 2018b)

and Brexit (Carreras et al., 2019; Colantone & Stanig, 2018a; Fetzer, 2019).

While these studies bring important causal evidence of economic factors

behind radical support, their focus is limited to material deprivation.

In this paper I advance the claim that another significant motivator

pushes individuals to support a radical right party: the decline of local

socio-cultural hubs, which increases the sense of social isolation and status

Bolet 1655

Bolet 3

anxiety among the affected community. I develop what I call the “‘Local

Socio-Cultural Degradation Theory,” which improves upon social capital/

social isolation theories. The latter posit a link between people’s lack of

connectedness in their community and radical right support at the individ-

ual level, but they do not adequately capture the distinctive reasons why

people would vote for radical right parties (as opposed to radical left voting

or abstention). I draw on recent work on local sociotropic influences, which

stresses the importance of people’s local socio-cultural hubs in shaping

their political behavior, and status decline theories, which show how status

loss of the white working class, a once dominant social-cultural group,

translates into radical right support. The Local Socio-Cultural Degradation

Theory advances that the closure of social places that are at the heart of a

local community sparks a sense of social marginality among the people

who used to frequent these places, causing them to question their place in

their society. For many such people, these closures also mark the disappear-

ance of their cultural heritage, and they experience a loss of cultural iden-

tity as a result. This process ultimately leads these individuals to vote for

radical right parties, whose rhetoric and ideology tap into precisely such

social and cultural grievances (Gest, 2016; Norris, 2005).

In my study, I aim to provide accounts of the role of local socio-cultural

degradation in driving radical right support by using a novel empirical indica-

tor: community pub closures in the United Kingdom. Community pubs are a

focal point of local communities in Britain, through which social connections

are established and sustained. My study focuses on community pubs because

they embody the traditional “working-class white” identity, meaning their

decline is likely to foster the processes of social isolation and cultural identity

loss that eventually translate into radical right votes. Combining the UK

Household panel study with a novel pub closure ratio—the ratio of the num-

ber of community pub closures per year to the number of pubs per district—I

examine vote preferences for individual voters with logit and hierarchical

models. I use year, wave and regional fixed effects in order to observe the

intra-regional variability of radical right support while keeping time and

wave constant. Conditional on individual and contextual variables, I find that

individuals living in districts more affected by the closure of community pubs

are more likely to vote UKIP. The propensity for an individual to support

UKIP increases by around 4.3 percentage points as there is one additional

community pub closure relative to the number of pubs per district. In addi-

tion, the effect of social deprivation is amplified under conditions of local

material deprivation at the district level. My results are robust to controlling

for several pub types, district characteristics, and alternative dependent and

independent variables.