Western democracies serve as breeding grounds for political discontent and populist voting behaviour (McCann 2020, Rodríguez-Pose 2018). Scholars argue that people living in places that are economically disadvantaged and relatively deprived are feeling left behind by globalisation, society, and/or politics. This feeling of lacking societal recognition possibly fuels political discontent and distrust. However, this two-step mechanism has rarely been tested directly (McKay et al. 2021) with previous studies often focusing on either the attitudinal level (Gidron and Hall 2020) or the direct, aggregate-level effects of local contexts on voting behaviour (Scala and Johnson 2017).
To add to this line of research, this paper examines whether the individuals’ living place affects their feeling of lacking societal recognition and subsequently, contribute to political distrust.
The study focuses on Germany as a particularly interesting case because of the inconclusive picture of regional inequalities relating to political discontent and populist right-wing voting behaviour. I will use georeferenced survey data based on a probabilistic sample of the German Longitudinal Election Study 2021. First, I will analyze the association of living in a ‘left behind place’ and the subjective ‘feeling of being left behind’ by relying on fine-grained measures of local living conditions - such as economic situation, access to infrastructure, and rurality - and a multidimensional measurement of perceived societal recognition. Subsequently, I will test if the lack of societal recognition is associated with political distrust. Thirdly, the analyses are integrated to test the underlying mediation model.