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- [00:01]
Jasia Monk
Some follow the noise.
- [00:03]
Laurens Gunther
Bloomberg follows the money.
- [00:06]
Jasia Monk
Because behind every headline is a bottom line, whether it's the funds fueling AI
- [00:12]
Laurens Gunther
or crypto's trillion dollar swings.
- [00:14]
Jasia Monk
There's a money side to every story.
- [00:16]
Laurens Gunther
And when you see the money side,
- [00:18]
Jasia Monk
you understand what others miss. Get the money side of the story. Subscribe now@bloomberg.com
- [00:28]
Laurens Gunther
but it's really that the goals that parliamentarians and like the average voters agree on the goal where we should be heading in with society
- [00:40]
Jasia Monk
and now the good fight with Jasia Monk. To what extent do politicians and other political elites actually represent the views of ordinary citizens on important cultural issues like immigration? Are they just not listening to what people want? And is that perhaps one of the reasons why populism has been rising so much? Is the rise of populism in part a result of voters saying, we've been telling you what we want again and again? All of us old mainstream parties aren't listening to us. Well, I guess we're going to vote for these new populist forces in order to to finally get our voices heard. My guest today has made this argument in an influential paper he published last year. Laurens Gunther is a research fellow at the Toulouse School of Economics and the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse, and he has a really interesting set of writings about the cultural representation gap, showing, for example, that in 2013 the average member of the most conservative political party represented in the German Bundestag had more progressive views about immigration than the average voter. And this, he thinks, helps to explain a lot of political developments over the last 10 years. In the last part of this conversation, Lawrence asked me some questions about the extent to which journalists I are actually willing to report on uncomfortable issues and reflect the views of ordinary citizens. And I ask him about whether views about immigration might not be a little bit more complicated than he suggests, about whether the better representation of views isn't that voters want two things at the same time, which is less immigration in most countries where they are polled, but also no cruelty perpetrated by the state in trying to limit immigration. And it's just very, very hard to accomplish those two things at the same time. To listen to that part of the conversation, please go to writing.yashamonk.com listen and become a paying subscriber. And today I am throwing in a particularly good offer to all of you. 30% off your first year of subscription, which means that listening to two full episodes of this podcast a week costs you about a dollar a week. Go to writing.yashamonk.com to claim that special offer. Laurens Gunther, welcome to the podcast.
- [03:21]
Laurens Gunther
Thank you very much for inviting me.
- [03:23]
Jasia Monk
Well, you managed to write one of these papers that just goes viral quite quickly because it really shows something interesting. I think often in the social sciences, the best kind of papers show what we all already kind of knew, but it actually demonstrates it in a really thorough and methodological way. So what you show is that there's a significant gap of representation, particularly of representation on cultural issues, between political elites and ordinary people. To me, the most striking graph in this paper came from Germany. And it looked at the attitudes about immigration among members of the Bundestag, among elected politicians, among and ordinary voters, I believe in 2013. Tell us a little bit about that specific data and what it shows us.
- [04:09]
Laurens Gunther
Yeah, so what we have is answers to surveys of representative samples of citizens and also of parliamentarians. And these kind of two groups answer to the exact same question, which enables comparability. And in the example that you mentioned, this is about immigration. So to what extent immigration should be facilitated or restricted. And what one can see in this graph is that Germans, of course, have heterogeneous preferences, but most Germans want to restrict immigration to Germany. And then what I show is the average response of the members of all the parties that were relevant at this point in time in Germany. And all of these parties, so measured by the average position of their member, wanted to facilitate immigration. So there was a huge mismatch even in the direction in the sense that most people wanted to go to the right immigration, but all the parties wanted to go to the left.
- [05:15]
Jasia Monk
And one of the striking things about this is this is before the rise of the alternative for Germany, which I think was founded right about then, but was not yet represented in the Bundestag. And so the most right leaning political party in the Bundestag was the Christian Democratic Union, which was led at the time by Angela Merkel. And the view of the average parliamentarian, not just in the Bundestag, but in the Christian Democratic Party, was way to the left of where the average view in the population was. Is that right?
- [05:50]
Laurens Gunther
Yes, this is right. Exactly. So all of these people who are right leaning on immigration, from their perspective, it must have looked like everyone, even the supposed right wing politicians, even they are much more left wing. So they had absolutely no representation on this topic. And this is like one of the ideas of this paper. This provided fertile ground for the AfD, which then subsequently also rose.
- [06:17]
Jasia Monk
Yeah, so basically there was, you know, over half of the population didn't really have their views represented in, in the Bundestag. And so what happens? Well, the AfD, which was founded as a political party by these kind of slightly stodgy economics professors who are really worried about the euro and they oppose the single currency. But the longer the party exists, the more it really focuses in on issues like immigration. And by the time it managed to get elected to the Bundestag In, I believe, 2017, its main focus really is on restricting immigration. And what this kind of paper strikingly shows is there's all of this fertile ground in which it can fish for voters because so many of the voters aren't represented by the pre existing political parties. How general is this? That's a really striking data point about Germany. To what extent do you have similar data about other countries? To what extent can we generalize from the existence of this kind of cultural representation gap in the German case to the existence of similar cultural representation gaps in other countries in Europe or beyond?
- [07:20]
Laurens Gunther
Exactly. So the main idea of this paper is to do that more systematically, like in other countries, and also to look at other issues. So this can be generalized across European countries for sure, and across cultural issues. So I look at 27 European countries and I find for all of these countries the same patterns on cultural issues. And you know, here I think of immigration as a cultural issue, but also, you know, issue like gender relation or punishment for criminals, assimilation, multiculturalism, all these, all these kind of things. Voters are much more right wing than parliamentarians of their countries. On economic issues it's much more mixed and the gaps are smaller. So notably. So there is, I think, a great article in the Financial Times where this analysis was also extended to the United States. And there you have also a similar pattern.
- [08:23]
Jasia Monk
So tell us a little bit more about each side of this. So on the cultural representation gap, what other kind of metrics do you look at where the views of ordinary citizens tend to be quite far apart from the views of parliamentarians?
- [08:36]
Laurens Gunther
Yeah, so immigration is certainly one of the way. You have one of the largest differences. Another issue where the difference is similarly large is punishment for criminals. So should sentences for criminals become harsher? Here again, majorities in basically all European countries say that this should be done, but parliamentarians disagree. And again, this is directional disagreement. So majorities of parliamentarians disagree with that. And then you have like 70% also of the population who say, yeah, that should be done. So that's a big thing. And then there are also big differences on gender relations and European unification. But European unification, for instance, is, is not so directional. So here parliamentarians seem to be super strongly in favor, and voters are also kind of in favor, but apparently want a much slower unification.
- [09:40]
Jasia Monk
Yeah, and there's a kind of interesting contrast between in one world, on some issue, political elites feel really strongly about it, but they're directionally going the same direction as ordinary voters. But when you're talking about things like immigration in particular, I think to some extent assimilation and perhaps things like how strong criminal sentences should be, it feels like. But not just far apart, but kind of going in opposite directions. Right. The average view of a parliamentarian is immigration is a good thing for the country. The average view of a voter is immigration is a bad thing for the country. And that feels like a kind of more significant gap, Even if on 1 to 10 scale, the gap is 3 points on each of them. I don't know exactly what the gap is on your scale. I'm making these numbers up. If that three means that your overall preference goes in different directions, that seems to matter more than if that three is one set of people super enthusiastic and the other is kind of enthusiastic.
- [10:37]
Laurens Gunther
Exactly. I agree. So in the public discourse, sometimes people maybe don't use that term, but I think this idea often comes up that somehow they may be differences between parliamentarians and voters, but this is always more framed in the sense that parliamentarians are somewhat a bit ahead and, you know, voters want everything to go a little bit more slowly, which of course also adds a normative dimension, which is a whole different issue. But it also, I think, does not really address these findings that I have, because as you say, this is not just a thing of Everyone in principle wants the same thing, but some want it a bit more quickly and others a bit more slowly. But it's really that the goals that parliamentarians and the average voter disagree on the goal where we should be heading with society. And this is indeed a very different thing.
- [11:35]
Jasia Monk
And then tell me a little bit about those economic metrics, because I think that especially on the left, a lot of people want to think the real disjunct between voters and the people is an economic issues. People want redistribution, they want a robust welfare state. And then there's the evil political elites that probably are from a much more affluent milieu who have to find donations for political parties, especially in the United States, but also in Europe, who are moving in these fancy circles, and they don't want any redistribution. And that's really where the gap lies. Your data seems to suggest that the story is much more complicated, where there's obviously some gaps on various issues. Of economic policy as well. But they seem to be much smaller on average than on cultural issues. Tell us about sort of the extent to which reviews of ordinary people and of political elites match up on economic issues.
- [12:26]
Laurens Gunther
Yes. So on economics it depends a bit. So redistribution. So there is an item that asks people about redistribution. And so qualitatively this is indeed like what say people on the left would think so that ordinary people are a bit more in favor of redistribution. And parliamentarians, notably, you know, rich, richer ordinary people, which means like here above median income. So maybe rich is the wrong word. But you know, like the rich share, they have similar preferences as the average parliamentarian of their country. And then the gap is driven by the poor. So the, the poor half of the population, they really want much more distribution, which makes a lot of sense. But then this gap, and I would have to look up how the exact number looks like, but this gap is much smaller than on the cultural issue. So this will be like a factor of five or so. So this gap on immigration will be like roughly something like five times as large as the gap on the distribution on other economic issues it depends a bit more. But generally speaking it looks like people want a bit more redistribution than parliamentarians and they want less state, less state intervention. So one thing that's missing here is trade. So in this data set that are used, there are no questions on trade. There may be a representation gap, we don't really know.
- [14:04]
Jasia Monk
And we would expect that to be that political elites are probably more pro free trade and ordinary people probably less pro free trade.
- [14:11]
Laurens Gunther
I would guess so. Yeah, I would guess so.
- [14:13]
Jasia Monk
There's another way of thinking about this, which is this two dimensional graph where you look on one dimension at where people are on social and cultural issues and on the other dimension where they are on economic issues. And of course what tends to be well represented, particularly in two party systems, but to some extent, even in systems of proportional representation is the things that go on the axis from the bottom left to the top right. Which is to say on the one hand there's right leaning political parties that want less redistribution and that are reasonably restrictive on things on migration. On the other side there are left leaning political parties that often are quite open to immigration or especially want more immigration, and they also are pro redistribution. So on the one side there's libertarians who are very socially liberal, but they want less economic redistribution. Those views tend to be overrepresented in elite political discourse, but they're actually a relatively small part of a population and there's A much bigger part of the population, which is kind of often the populist quadrant in a way, which is people who actually want a reasonably high level of redistribution. They don't hate the welfare state, they're not necessarily libertarians on economic policy at all, but they're quite conservative on social issues. How does your research kind of intersect with that line of thinking? Do you think it's basically right that it's that last quadrant I talked about, the people who are socially quite conservative but economically, fiscally reasonably progressive, that are most underrepresented?
- [15:47]
Laurens Gunther
Yes. So I think if you think about these four quadrants, then for sure this is the group that's, that's the least represented. Right. Because so what you have is if you have this like two dimensional space, you basically have the parties in most countries they are this diagonal that goes up and this is like, I mean, I think this, we knew for some time people are more. So say if you condition a lot on political knowledge or participating in politics, then the more you get to this strong correlation to this line.
- [16:31]
Jasia Monk
So people who are super into politics, if they're economically liberal, they also like to be socially liberal. People who aren't that interested in politics are going to have views that are more all over the place, which doesn't necessarily mean they're less coherent because it's not bundled in the way that our political system kind of conditions us to bundle our views.
- [16:47]
Laurens Gunther
Exactly, exactly. So, you know, for the general population, right, it's more dispersed. It looks more like, you know, like a circle or something, like a two dimensional normal distribution kind of. And then what my paper shows is that this like line of say the politically active is actually shifted downward. And if you think about that, and you can see that, right, these people who are socially conservative and economically left wing, they are particularly far away, usually from the closest party. In many countries there's no major party that kind of bundles their bundles, their views, which I would predict then, you know, would be an opportunity for new parties. Now the populists that are very successful in many countries, they usually supply this policy position for the, say, upper right quadrant. So for the people who are socially right wing, conservative and also economically right wing, even though they are often quite flexible, I think on economics. And you can see in this space, if you plot it over time, how they move a bit around to get more people, I guess, on the left.
- [17:56]
Jasia Monk
Yeah, so that's interesting, right? I mean, the one thing that defines right wing populism today in most contexts, perhaps you can exclude Argentina or certain other countries. But the thing that's really at the heart of it is not economics. It is the social cultural issues. And the AfD is interesting in that sense because it was founded on an economically populist issue, but over time, it really became defined by those social cultural issues much more than the economic issues. The economic views are a little bit all over the place in different countries though, right? I mean, a party like the AfD, in part because of its roots, is probably mostly right leaning on economic issues, though it certainly isn't a radical libertarian party. It certainly doesn't want to abolish the welfare state or anything like that. But a party like the Rasmond national in France is much more left leaning on economic issues. I would think they are promising in many ways to preserve a welfare state. They opposed Emmanuel Macron's pension reform, wanting to preserve those kind of entitlements for people. Even Donald Trump plays a strange role in this. On the one hand, a lot of economic policies he's passed have actually been quite right leaning economically. Huge tax benefits for the rich, a lot less for ordinary people. But when you look at how he distinguished himself from his Republican competitors in the 2016 primaries, it was in part by saying things like, yeah, perhaps the state does have a responsibility to make sure that everybody has access to healthcare. Which was something that the 15 other Republican candidates did not say. Why is it so hard to for populist parties, particularly in systems of proportional representation, to really appeal to that quadrant? There's something surprising about the fact that you don't see more of those political movements move very squarely into the space that is economically relatively left wing and socially right wing. We've seen an attempt at something like that in a party that, for all kinds of reasons, I personally don't particularly like the Bundesagnecht in Germany, they nearly got into the Bundestag in the last elections, but they fell just short by a few thousand votes. And now they kind of seem to be falling apart a little bit. So, you know, it seems to be hard for political parties to move into that space, even though clearly that does seem to be where a significant portion of the voters are. Right.
- [20:19]
Laurens Gunther
So in Germany, there, I know the, the data well and like how big these quadrants are. So then let me answer this in two steps and look at two parties that may have moved there. One will be the Sarawagent.
- [20:36]
Jasia Monk
So, and you want to explain to people, because I should have done that. My question, just tell us a little bit about who Sarawagen Knecht is. And what this party is.
- [20:42]
Laurens Gunther
Yes. So I will first briefly Talk then about AfD and then I will explain. Right. So the first party, like in a German case that may have moved there would be the AFD who we talked about before. So it was founded as an economically ripening party, largely, I would say so like anti European Union, my economics professor, and then became very anti immigration during the refugee crisis. But I guess at this point it was probably already positioned just because of its members as this economically right wing party. And then I think at this point it's just difficult to move. So I think this plays a big role also. You know, it's difficult to completely change your position over time, which is, I think also one of the reasons why established parties don't do that. Because I think to really get the squadron, you will have to move so much that this can split the party. You would have to make much bigger moves than, for instance, Merkel did during the refugee crisis, which already like stressed them was a big stress test for the party. One thing that I should mention briefly is like in Germany, this quadrant of economically right wing and also socially right wing people is quite a bit bigger than the quadrant of socially right wing and economically left wing, the latter one. So the people that we're interested in, it's a big quadrant and it's bigger. It's in Germany, more people than the libertarians or so. But so if you want to be the socially conservative party and you just think about maximizing votes, I think it makes sense to go under people who are right wing like everywhere, and once you have consolidated them, then maybe it makes sense to move to the center or then you take the second quadrant and so on. And I think AFD kind of trying to do that a bit. But then to Sarawagen and now the explanation. So Sarah Waagenknecht was for a very long time one of the most prominent members of the party. So the left wing party, which is basically descendant of the former Communist Party of East Germany. And this is like a more like a minor party, which is around like 5 to 10% or so. And it's very economically left wing, but also very socially progressive liberal. And then Wag Nech distanced herself more from this party and this largely driven by her views on cultural issues, in particular immigration. She was more conservative on immigration than much of the rest of her party. And ultimately this led to a split where she left the party together with a few other members of parliament. She was a member of parliament at this point and she founded her own Party. So Alliance Sarabach and this party first did very well in the polls and so on, was seen as much more successful actually than the original left wing party. And then ultimately in the election they turned out to be less successful. They nearly made the threshold. You need the 5% threshold to get parliamentary representation. And the left wing party is in the parliament now. So wage not in some sense, I think it was a very respectable performance. I mean it's very rare that in Germany the new parties managed this threshold and was the first time the party participated and they nearly made it, but. Yeah, but now they seem to be falling apart. My sense is that they like on cultural issues, they were not right wing enough to capture this quadrant in the like this quadrant of socially conservative voters and like, who are left wing on economic issues. This is my guess. I think in the beginning people expected her to be more conservative on social issues. And then this looked like it was watered down a lot and I guess this was the issue for her.
- [25:02]
Jasia Monk
Oh, that's interesting. I didn't realize. That is possibly one of the things. I mean, she's also a very charismatic but polarizing figure. And of course, you know, there's always a tension between this political party really just being her personal vehicle. I mean, it has a name, bsw, which literally is the kind of Bundnestara Wagenknecht. So the kind of. I know how you state Bundes in this context.
- [25:29]
Laurens Gunther
Alliance.
- [25:29]
Jasia Monk
The kind of. Yeah, alliance, perhaps alliance of Sara Wagenknecht. But you know, the name is literally kind of her initials. Right. And now she's distanced herself a little bit from the party. And that I think probably means that it's not going to survive. But it was an interesting attempt at kind of trying to capture that quadrant of the electorate. You know, let me present to you a reading of your paper, which I know you deliberately don't put in the paper, but it is, I think, how a lot of people have read it. And so tell me, to what extent, speaking as a private citizen rather than a scholar of social science, you agree with that interpretation, which is number one, here's the real explanation of populism, right. We've been having this debate for 10, 15 years about why is populism rising around the world. And people are saying it's this and it's that and it's that. And the one thing nobody has really been talking about is, well, perhaps the problem is just that the established political parties aren't listening to what voters want. Now you might agree with the views of the established parties or you might agree with views of voters on many things. I'm probably closer to to the views of members of a political elite, because having a PhD in political science, I'm virtually by definition a political elite. But when we collectively become so distanced from what ordinary people think, they're going to get upset. And what happened here is that over time this cultural representation gap increased. People no longer listened to the voters. Election after election after election, people said, we want more controls on immigration. Elite political parties did not deliver on those preferences. And so finally, what did voters do? They rebelled by voting for the one dumb party that was willing to give them what they want. And then. Provocative statement number two. So perhaps one of the things that established political parties, traditional political parties, whatever you want to call them, non populist political parties need to do in order to deal with the rise of populism is to actually listen to what people want and adopt some of their policy positions. Not every single established political party. In the German context, it probably makes sense for the Green Party to continue to be very pro immigration because its electorate is very pro immigration. That's the good thing about a system of proportional representation. They can continue to represent those voters. But if the Christian Democrats, even the Social Democrats, want to compete with the AfD for the many people who have shifted towards the AfD over the last years, which is now in many polls equal with the Christian Democrats, and first place has grown from less than 5% of the vote in 2013. We start your paper to around 23, 24, 25% impulse today. Well, the easy thing to do is to actually get closer to what a lot of ordinary people want. Is that a plausible interpretation of your paper? The right window treatments change everything. Your sleep, your privacy, the way every room looks and feels. @blinds.com, we've spent 30, 30 years making it surprisingly simple to get exactly what your home needs. We've covered over 25 million windows and have 50,000 five star reviews to prove we deliver. Whether you DIY it or want a pro to handle everything from measure to install, we have you covered. Real design professionals, free samples, zero pressure. Right now, get up to 50% off with minimum purchase plus get a free professional measure@blinds.com rules and restrictions apply.
- [28:46]
Laurens Gunther
I think that is a plausible interpretation. Yeah, I mean, I mean the first is. I think the first stays relatively true to the paper. Now, I would of course say that. In some sense, I mean, the previous literature has done a lot of very valuable work and what I do doesn't really, it's not a substitute for that? No, I'm not saying everyone else was wrong, so it's just that I have the impression that the previous literature just didn't really look at this specific part of the puzzle. And they, they looked more at, I don't know how, what, how, what did the financial crisis contribute in making people vote for populist parties? What does loss of manufacturing job and so on. But, but there was, there was less focus on, like, the choices of mainstream parties and in particular, like, how they would respond. And then this ties to the second question. I think this is also fair interpretation. And so, to an extent, I think this paper is also interesting because it looks at a variable that can be easily influenced. No, we have all of these variables in mind when it comes to populism, like lack of trust or slow economic growth or certain cultural characteristics or so. But these things are all more or less given. They are very difficult to change. And if you take estimates serious, if you want to win back voters by increasing economic growth, so if you take the estimate serious, you need huge growth rates that are just completely unrealistic. And the thing of this paper or these several papers that are right there is to look at the positioning of parties. And this is a variable that can be adjusted easily, and this is in
- [30:42]
Jasia Monk
some sense a strength.
- [30:43]
Laurens Gunther
And so I do agree that I think if parties, if mainstream parties want to win back voters, and to the extent that they want to weaken populist parties, I think they have to move their political positions. And importantly, and this is often a point of confusion, I think they need to deliver on outputs. So this is not moving rhetorics. Or. So there are some questions, some papers that show that it backfires if parties just move the rhetorics. There was this famous speech of Starmer in the uk, this island of strangers and so on. There's an analysis of that that probably backfired. Sure.
- [31:25]
Jasia Monk
And the idea here being that if politicians say, okay, I've heard you, I'm going to do something about immigration, and then there's no action to follow up on it, then voters say, oh, you're just hypocritical. We don't believe you.
- [31:36]
Laurens Gunther
Exactly. I think the facts on the ground must change. And in some sense this is a chance and maybe the last chance for the mainstream parties, because populists are often not that good at delivering real results, delivering on their promises, at least in their first attempt. I mean, during the first Trump administration, for instance, he didn't build a war and there was no huge deportation effort. So you have it now the second time, and Trump is delivering a lot there, and immigration has fallen extremely, and there's all this deportation going on and so on. So, you know, he learned and second time he delivered on that. And it may be similar in Europe. I think also there we see that often, like the first attempt populists are in power. They don't really do anything. We had populists ripening, populists, like in Austria, we have Meloni and so on. Often the first time they kind of fail in a sense. So mainstream parties have a chance to then either deliver now or even if populists come to power, to take that as an opportunity to develop a new strategy, new policy positions. And then if they get the second chance after the populace then leave again power. If they do so, if they win the election after the domestic parties, then they have enough checks. But I do think it's increasingly a super difficult situation for mainstream parties across Europe, and they have one or two election cycles that if they don't deliver that, and I think the populist party will, could in the medium term just outperform them and dominate European policymaking.
- [33:30]
Jasia Monk
What do you say to people who claim that when mainstream parties try to emulate populists, that actually only reinforces populists? This is a strand of research that I've seen repeatedly. And more than anything else, it just seems to be conventional wisdom among a lot of political scientists that, you know, there's these studies, sometimes they're kind of imaginary studies, I think, that just demonstrate that when mainstream political parties start to use the verbal register of populists, or they emulate some of the policy positions, what are voters going to do? They're going to vote for the original. This is an argument you hear a lot. How convincing do you find that argument? And why does it sound like you don't agree with that?
- [34:14]
Laurens Gunther
Yeah, so I think this depends a lot on whether you deliver results or whether you do something else. For instance, the rhetorics. This is why I made this rhetorics distinction. Indeed, there are a lot of studies, and these studies show mixed results. So some find that parties vote for the original, that people vote for the original. If mainstream party moves toward populists. An example is this analysis of Keir Starmer speech that I alluded to before. And then there are other papers that show the opposite, that show that if a party moves to the right, say on immigration, then voters vote for this party less for populists. So, for instance, there's a study in Denmark that shows that we also have a study done in Germany just before the most recent election that finds if the CDU moves to the right and fills the presentation gap, then the AfD loses voters and the CDU gains voters. So yeah, I do think it depends, and it depends most strongly on whether the actual policy positions change. I think if the policy positions really change and output is delivered, then people don't vote for the original. I mean, there is actually one thing that I will maybe say very briefly in this context that's often forgotten also. The right wing populism that we have now in Germany is only in some sense the third wave of, of right wing populism. So there were early right wing populists like just after the foundation of the German Republic that were strong like in the 50s and so on. And we also had the Republicano, so the Republicans in Germany, like in the 80s and they were in some sense similar to the AfD and in both cases the CDU. So the center right party actually accommodated them and moved over them and you know, gave their ministry posts and in the, in the, like the 50s, like under Adenauer and, and then later, you know, even the German constitution was changed to limit asylum immigration. You know, later in the, in the 80s, 90s there was this, there was an asylum wave from Yugoslavia and this was a big topic, but then already and people wanted less immigration and so on and the constitution was changed to actually limit it a lot. It didn't work in the end because America didn't really care about it. But.
- [36:32]
Jasia Monk
Well, your point is that it works at the time, right? I mean I, you know, the Republicana really were a kind of insurgent populist force in the 80s and 90s. It had some significant successes in the 90s, ended up being represented a number of state parliaments never quite made it into the Bundestag. But what you're saying, I take it is that, you know, the right leaning political party, the Christian Democrats, moved to the right in order to limit the oxygen to for that political party. And rather than people saying oh well, that somehow reinforces my impression that in fact the Republicans in the German sense are onto something, we should vote for them. They said, oh, some of our concerns are being taken care of by the political party we traditionally voted for is fine, we can move back towards voting for the Christian Democrats. And on this telling, it was the fact that Angela Merkel very deliberately wanted to capture the political middle and no longer wanted to kind of COVID the right of politics that allowed this insurgent movement to establish itself into A permanent political force. Just two ways of thinking about this. One is that Strauss, a very influential Bavarian prime minister, always used to say that between us, the Bavarian version of the Christian Democrats and the right. What was the exact phrase between us and the right and the wall, nothing has got to be able to fit in, or something like that. Basically saying that he wants to always make sure that the Christian Democrats, which are democratic political party, will always cover the flank on the right far enough to make sure that no party to the right of the Christian Democrats can establish itself. Whereas Merkel's MO was very different. It was, no, no, we will make the Christian Democrats into the party of a political center. But of course, that then leads the question for who should vote for who deeply conservative people who don't think that they're in the political center should be voting for. I mean, one way that I sometimes put this about German politics, and I'm obviously a German citizen, is to say that I have been politically socialized on the left. I continue to think of myself as being on the left, even though I have some significant criticisms of the shape that the left is taking in many countries in the world today. If I look at something like Angela Merkel and I say, I kind of like her, I share a lot of her values. I think she made a lot of bad decisions. But in terms of her basic value coordinates, she's somebody I like and respect. We kind of have a problem because there's a lot of people in Germany who are a hell of a lot more conservative than I am. And if a leader of the most conservative democratic political party in Germany is one who, I feel kind of holds a lot of similar views to me, well, that might be nice as long as that person is in charge. But it really then leaves this huge segment of a German electorate without political representation. And so what happens? Well, they go and vote for the AfD.
- [39:35]
Laurens Gunther
Exactly. Yeah.
- [39:37]
Jasia Monk
What about another line of argument, which is that some people have said, look, the problem really is that left wing political parties in particular haven't made sufficiently large redistributive demands. And so there was a period in which the left and the right had very similar positions on economic policy. Nowadays you look at Germany and the Social Democrats and the Christian Democrats, you look at Britain and the labor and the Conservatives, they're not that far apart in a lot of economic policy issues. And so people no longer invest significance in economic policy. And that's why those cultural issues become so salient. Right. Why are we debating about immigration? Well, if there's no big deep ideological differences in economic policy. That's the only thing there is. And that's really what is explaining the rise of these right wing political parties. And one way to fight that is particularly for left wing political parties to move to the left on economic policy so that that becomes a more charged political issue. That's what people care about. And then you can kind of move the whole public debate away from issues like immigration. This again is an argument that's been made by a number of political scientists and that I often hear in the debate. I imagine that you're skeptical about that line of argument as well.
- [40:58]
Laurens Gunther
I am indeed skeptical about the line of arguments. So. And this certainly leads to an interesting deeper question. But first I will talk about that. So, I mean, I do believe that in principle the theoretical argument is correct and like categorized parables. I would guess that if left with parties would move more to the left, that then we would probably talk more about economic topics. And so because people's attention is limited, they would probably think a bit less about cultural issues. I would however guess, and I think we don't have like super good studies on the relative importance of this effect. And this would be my main criticism here. Sure, this effect probably exists, all kind of effects exist. But how big is this? And I would guess it's relatively minor thing. So I don't think that people will stop caring about immigration because people in talk shows talk more about economics or the choice options are somewhat more different. And this is just so this belief is driven by two things. I mean, the first thing is just talking to Germans. So I'm German and most of my friends are and so on. And I do a lot of interviews and survey work where you talk with people and people tell their stories and so on. And immigration and issues related to that is such a huge issue and touches on so like fundamental fears that people have and their identity and so on. So I think this will for these people, as long as immigration is relatively high or it looks like it could increase in the future even more than it will always be, it will always be salient for them. And the second thing is that if you look at the immigration that people care about, that they say they care about, which is like asylum seek immigration, like from the Middle east and Africa, the actual immigration of these groups is extremely highly correlated with how much people care about it. So you can, like during the refugee crisis, for instance, you know, people are asked, even have that in this paper that we were talking about, people were asked how important immigration is. This line is extremely, extremely similar to the actual number of people who apply in Germany, which suggests that this is tied to things that really happen on the ground. So notably, and this is an argument that's often made, but it's nearly like, I don't know, strawman argument or so I think. So how important people find immigration is not really predicted by immigration overall. You know how many people come to Germany. But the thing is, most people don't really care about some French guy coming to Germany to study or things like that. It's about very specific groups. And there is this correlation with the real world. Is there?
- [44:00]
Jasia Monk
So you said a little while ago that perhaps the last chance for established political parties to win the race against the populace is, is not just to shift a rhetoric, but to actually show results. Of course, the problem is that especially in systems of proportional representation, that in some ways becomes more and more difficult the higher a share of a parliamentary seats populists have in Germany now, it is barely imaginable that there's going to be a right wing governing majority in the Bundestag, which has a majority without the involvement of left wing political parties. And that maintains the cordon sanitaire, the Brandmauer, the kind of separation between the traditional Democratic parties and these new right wing populists. And so the last German government was a left leaning one in which Social Democrats and Greens were in a coalition with a right of center political party, the Liberal Party, the fdp. Now there is a conservative chancellor in power who is in various ways more conservative than Angela Merkel, the previous Christian Democratic Chancellor was. But his coalition partner are the Social Democrats, the left of center political party. And so even though Merz was talking a lot about the need to curb immigration in the election campaign, it is actually very difficult for him to deliver on those policies because his coalition partner with Social Democrats are opposed to a lot of those things. So. So do you think realistically traditional political parties are going to be able to rein in immigration to nearly a sufficient extent to sort of make voters feel that the preferences are being represented? Or do you think we're basically now in a structural situation in which the inability of those mainstream political parties to deal with that issue is just going to lead to them continuing to decline in vote share and parties like the AfD continuing to grow?
- [45:59]
Laurens Gunther
Good question. I think this depends a lot on the country. So I think in Germany also for historical reasons, the resistance to accommodation
- [46:13]
Jasia Monk
is
- [46:14]
Laurens Gunther
particularly high, even though as we discussed before, it did happen in past episodes. So I think I would guess, which is of course, a guess has to be taken with a grain or so. But I would guess that the current coalition is the last one that has a real good shot at delivering results and really reducing asylum immigration and pursuing deportation efforts. Because I think after that it will indeed, I guess the AfD will be stronger in the next election in this one, and then it will be very difficult to find a coalition that does that effectively leaving the AfD aside. So I would guess if the efforts don't increase a lot, and I guess that they don't, then the next government will probably also not really deliver and then AFD will be even stronger, then probably it will become part of the governing coalition. That's my guess, of course. I mean, we can check maybe in, I don't know, eight years, 10 years, nine years. So for other countries, I think the picture is a bit different. I mean, populists are participating or supporting governance in several countries. And yeah, for instance in Sweden, with support of the Swedish AfD, like Sweden Democrats, immigration policy has turned around quite a bit. And I think even the net immigration is now negative of asylum seekers in Sweden and so on. It is possible. We always Germany look a lot at Germany, but in other countries or for instance like in Denmark, these things have happened.
- [48:19]
Jasia Monk
Let me ask you about how this theory applies in some other contexts. We haven't talked a lot about the United States. America actually on a lot of the kind of generic questions about immigration that are asked cross nationally, continues to have more pro immigrant attitudes than most European countries, which is interesting. You know, the failure of a Biden administration to deal with the southern border with Mexico is clearly one of the big reasons why Donald Trump won reelection in 2024. It was even one of the reasons why new voting groups like Latinos shifted to the Republican Party. At the same time, we're now seeing that as you said earlier, the administration is in one sense very successful in its policies. It has reduced the number of immigrants coming to the United States very significantly. But it's done that using cruel and indiscriminate tactics, but actually turn out to be very unpopular. So ice, the Immigration Enforcement Agency, is very unpopular. Donald Trump's approval ratings on migration are quite low. Is that an American specificity where American attitudes about immigration are just somewhat more permissive leaning than European efforts? Or do you think that if, let's say Marine Le Pen or she's not allowed to run, Jordan Bardela become the next president of France and they actually effectively manage to just crack down on immigration, really deport a lot of Undocumented people living in France, they might come to feel backlash as well, not just from people with more progressive attitudes who become activated because they dislike those policies, but perhaps from some of the swing voters that help them get into power in the first place, as according to polls, seems to be happening in the United States.
- [50:17]
Laurens Gunther
Yeah, so for sure, I think that you always can overdo it. So right now, like vast majorities of Europeans, they want low immigration level. But I mean, sure, you can also have too low levels. And I think like so say the amount of cruelty, for lack of a better word, that voters are willing to tolerate is certainly limited. So I do think that voters will support a lot of severe actions to reduce immigration. But there is some limit. And I guess you're right. I guess the threshold in Europe might be a bit higher than in the United States. So the Europeans might be fine with more severe measures than Americans. But even there, some limit will exist and it is possible that the populace, when they come to power, they will overdo it to some extent. One could think that Trump somewhat overdid it. And relatedly, this is a slightly different version. But I mean, it also depends on how efficiently you do that. Some cruelty, sometimes it's maybe just necessary to achieve a goal. But there's also cruelty that maybe indiscriminate and may not serve any the purpose of achieving the desired goal, which I mean, I would guess tendency, because they are much less experienced populists will be less efficient. So there will be problems. If they come to power and they do the immigration policies, there will be problems. And this is like something that I guess mainstream parties can exploit by shifting their positions but then saying, well, we are the professional guys. We are going to do that in a discriminate way and in a more say, like directed way, more to the point. And we won't overdo it. And I think this is one way that they can advertise the safe actually one briefing. So I noticed before I told you, like when you asked me about this narrative, there's some political scientists saying about like left wing partner should shift more to the left.
- [52:47]
Jasia Monk
Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Good Fight. In the rest of this conversation, we turn the tables a little bit and Lawrence asks me some questions, for example, about whether journalists are any better at representing the views of ordinary people, whether they sometimes omit to report on certain things because it goes against the values that are common in their social milieu, even if they're widely held among ordinary people. That might be one of the reasons why mainstream media has been losing in influence so much. I also ask him about whether views about immigration might not be a little bit more complicated than he suggests, whether it isn't the case that most citizens want a lot less immigration, but they also don't want the state to be cruel in enforcing immigration, and is the tension between those two objectives which explains why voters seem to be going back and forth on migration so much? To listen to that part of the discussion to make sure that you get all episodes of this podcast directly to your favorite podcast app, go to writing.yashamonk.com listen and click on Set Up Podcast and I'm throwing in the best offer I give on the podcast this week. If you go to writing.dashamonk.com 2022-62026 you get 30% off your first year of subscription. That means that listening to two full episodes every week costs you just $1 per week. Writing.yashamonk.com 2026.
- [54:23]
Laurens Gunther
Foreign.
- [54:29]
Jasia Monk
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