Project

Local Social Capital and the Rise of Right-Wing Populism

Client: German Research Foundation
Project period: June 2018 - August 2021
Research Areas:

Project team: Dr. Felix Rösel

Tasks

Do sports clubs promote tolerance and cohesion – or does populism spread more rapidly when meeting in the pub after football games? To answer this question, it is important to know and understand the mechanisms within the civil society. Social networks or social capital are the “glue” that hold societies together. So far, it has been assumed that communities with intact social relationships are less susceptible to populism and promote democracy. However, the trust associated with social networks could equally accelerate the spread of populism, for example, if sports clubs are systematically infiltrated by extremists. From a theoretical point of view, social capital could thus have both effects inhibiting and reinforcing populism.

Methods

This project establishes causal links between local social capital and the spread of populism in different papers. Natural experiments in different European countries were used and unique and innovative data sets were analyzed using modern econometric methods (difference-in-differences, regression-discontinuity design).

Data and Other Sources

The studies are based on hand-collected unique data sets, compiled from administrative publications, monographs, and local and national archives.

Results

The results of the project indicate that social networks tend to promote the spread of populism. There is no evidence that social capital reduces populism in any of the cases studied. One surprising finding of this project is that real-life networks such as sports and other clubs can spread populism even more strongly than social media channels. However, preconditions for this effect are that populist attitudes are already anchored in larger parts of society or characteristics of clubs favor populism (e.g., strong focus on internal group cohesion instead of social cohesion). Thus, social networks do not per se foster populism – the context is important. The project also revealed need for further research, mainly because of a great lack of individual data. The findings of this project are largely based on aggregate data at the level of cities and municipalities. Deep insights into individual relationships between association members are hardly possible. Future research should also investigate reverse causality from governing populists to civil society. A spin-off project from the funded project is investigating this question in more detail.