Regional industrialisering och auktoritära-liberala värderingar : En undersökning av sambandet mellan industrialiseringsgrad, ojämlikhet och den konservativa backlashen

Sammanfattning: According to Ronald Ingleharts research deindustrialized and affluent societies are expected to have increasingly open, progressive, and tolerant citizens. However, during the last decade political developments have been reversed. More than 25% of Europeans now adays vote for a right-wing populist party. In addition, the globalization has created winning and losing regions, with one of its biggest impacts being deindustrialization of the West. Big cities have flourished while disfavored suburbs, smaller industrial towns and rural communities have been marginalized. Consequently, the support for right-wing populist movements is often highest in such negatively affected areas. Inglehart have previously explained this through the idea of a “conservative backlash” caused by a combination of increasing inequality and culturally revolting age-cohorts. His arguments are mainly based on cross-national or intranational data while other research pointing at the necessity to analyze the association between regional deindustrialization and the rise of the far right. This thesis filles that gap by conducting a multi- level analysis, in which Ingleharts theory is tested by studying associations between values and changing levels of industrialization in 327 European regions. The result confirms earlier research regarding the association between industrialization and authoritarian-libertarian values, but puts in to question Ingleharts explanation of inequality as the reason for the contemporary conservative backlashes. The result shows no support for a relationship between inequality and authoritarian-liberal values.