Networks of Grievances: Social Capital and Mainstream Party Decline

• Author: Francesco Colombo,Elias Dinas
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00104140221100195
• Published date: 01 March 2023
• Date: 01 March 2023
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Comparative Political Studies

2023, Vol. 56(3) 363–394

© The Author(s) 2022

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DOI: 10.1177/00104140221100195

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Networks of Grievances:

Social Capital and

Mainstream Party

Decline

Francesco Colombo

1

and Elias Dinas

2



Abstract

Why does support for mainstream parties decline? A growing literature

points to economic loss as a source of political resentment. We bring this

explanation one step further. We posit that the local economy qualif‌ies the

role of social capital in forging systemic support. When the economy thrives,

social capital buffers discontent via interpersonal interactions. When the

economy declines it exacerbates discontent, leading to a diffusion of griev-

ances. We test our “networks of grievances”hypothesis in two settings. We

f‌irst test our theory in Italy, which offers individual-level information together

with f‌ine-grained municipality-level social capital data. Second, we test the

mechanism underlying our theory combining survey and local administrative

data across 18 European countries. The results suggest that “networks of

grievances”operate as channels of political discussions with peers, converting

retrospective evaluations into systemic discontent bringing non-mainstream

parties into voters’choice sets.

Keywords

local economy, anti-establishment, social interactions, weak ties

1

Aarhus University, Denmark

2

European University Institute, Italy

Corresponding Author:

Francesco Colombo, Department of Political Science, Aarhus University, Bartholins Alle 7, 8000,

Aarhus C, Denmark.

Email: fc@ps.au.dk

Donald Trump’s election, followed by the Brexit referendum, invited col-

ourful accounts about the rising appeal of anti-systemic political actors. An

ever-growing literature documents the decline of mainstream party support

(Benedetto et al., 2020;De Vries & Hobolt, 2020;Hobolt & Tilley, 2016) and

sheds light on its implications for policy output (Folke, 2014), mainstream

parties’issue stances (Abou-Chadi, 2016), and democratic norms in more

general (Valentim, 2021). More often than not, however, the major scope of

this literature is to unpack the factors lying behind the decline of mainstream

party support.

1

A stubborn empirical pattern that emerges from this work is

that support for non-mainstream parties is not uniformly distributed

(Colantone & Stanig, 2018b;Golder, 2016), but rather geographically

concentrated—either in rural areas (F¨

ortner et al., 2021), or in urban areas with

looming economic prospects (Broz et al., 2021). The question that naturally

arises has to do with the determinants of this relationship. What makes some

areas more responsive to anti-establishment discourse than others?

The canonical response in the literature is twofold. On the one hand, the

place of residence stands as the aggregation of specif‌ic individual-level

characteristics (Maxwell, 2019). People that share sociodemographic out-

looks and attitudinal prof‌iles cluster together (Sussell, 2013). The role of

context in this case is to sort individuals with taste for non-mainstream parties

together. What then accounts for such preferences typically operates at the

individual-level. On the other hand, context can be the direct cause of such

preferences. Areas hit by economic (Ansell et al., 2021;Adler & Ansell, 2020;

Bisgaard et al., 2016;Colantone & Stanig, 2018c) or other (Hopkins, 2010)

types of shocks may see their residents grow dissatisf‌ied with mainstream

parties, either because they experience directly the consequences of the shock

(Anelli et al., 2021;Colantone & Stanig, 2018c), or because they have de-

veloped an attachment to the community and thus act by responding to losses

in group status (Bolet, 2021). This idea is particularly prominent in recent

ethnographic work (see Cramer, 2016), which speaks of a moral community:

“people interact with one another and form loyalties to one another and to the

places in which their interaction takes place”(Wuthnow, 2019).

This study enters the fray by proposing an additional mechanism through

which local communities can become hubs of non-mainstream support.

Building on Granovetter (1985), our departure point is that individuals are

neither tied to nor independent of their social environment. Individual re-

actions to the same exogenous stimulus can differ, while at the same time

communities are not the mere sum of their individual parts. Their interde-

pendence and connectedness will shape the resulting behaviour of a com-

munity (Coleman, 1994;Huckfeldt & Sprague, 1987;Katz & Lazarsfeld,

2017). Interconnectedness, in turn, will depend on the local social capital

endowments, what Putnam also def‌ined as the “networks of civic engage-

ment”(1993). Between a conceptualization of context as the amalgamation of

364 Comparative Political Studies 56(3)

individual interests, fears and perceptions and one in which context forms

group identities—which then guide preferences—we argue that communities

matter by providing information to their residents, and that the amount of

information will, in turn, depend on the density of interactions between an

individual and her community. People develop weak ties, that is, information-

carrying local interactions with the potential to affect individuals in unex-

pected ways. While not driven by the willingness to discuss about politics,

such interactions often end up opening the way to conversations rich in

political content. In so doing, they help individuals update their priors about

others’preferences and as a result alter their own preferences either through

persuasion or via a change in perceptions about what is acceptable within their

reference group (Bicchieri, 2016).

Two corollaries stem from this idea. First, local interactions will matter

when they contain new information. This is more likely when communities

have experienced a change in their perceived well-being, either on economic

or non-economic grounds. For example, economic loss leads to grievances,

which travel across the community through cheap talk. This point takes us to

the second corollary: grievances are more likely to spread when communities

are more interconnected. Interconnectedness, in turn, is, almost by def‌inition,

higher in areas vested with social capital. Taken together, these two impli-

cations lead us to our key expectation, namely that, else equal, social capital

will undermine the support for mainstream parties when the local community

is f‌illed with grievances.

There are two key ingredients in our argument, the underlying mood in the

community and the intensity of interactions between its members. The former

serves to denote the overall direction in the effects of weak ties, while the latter

moderates their strength in inf‌luencing individuals’beliefs and preferences.

Although the underlying mood could be shaped by both economic and non-

economic factors, we focus here on the former, as they are more tangible to

measure at the community level. We posit that when the local economy is

doing poorly, individual networks will be dense of malaise. Individuals

experiencing an economic loss will f‌ind conf‌irmation to their discontent in

other people’s experiences and opinions. Doing so will diffuse distrust to-

wards established political institutions, facilitating the attribution of re-

sponsibility on the parties more blatantly representing them, including but not

limited to the incumbent. Social capital enhances the density of interactions

and enriches their content. It makes such encounters both more frequent and

more meaningful, leading dissatisf‌ied individuals to update either their

preferences or their perceptions as to how popular these preferences are, or

both. On the contrary, when the economy is doing well, economic discontent

will be more sporadic, leaving little room for social networks to fuel anti-

systemic support, if not suppressing it.

Colombo and Dinas 365