POLITICAL CONSEQUENCES
All of this could have profound political consequences.
Sabanci and his colleagues suspect the isolation of elites at work may have already helped to breed resentment among poorer workers who read or hear about the lives of top earners, but rarely see or meet them.
“This situation could increase feelings and experiences of being left behind, ignored, and misunderstood,” they write, adding that this could in turn have helped to fuel Trumpism and other forms of populism in Europe.
Voter polarisation between wealthy capitals or coastal cities and struggling hinterlands has certainly been a striking feature in a series of recent elections, from the 2016 UK Brexit vote to presidential battles in the US and France.
In 1988, Jean-Marie Le Pen’s 15.6 per cent vote share in the Paris region was roughly the same as the 14.4 per cent he got elsewhere, write some of the paper’s authors in earlier research.
Thirty years later, support for the right-wing populist leader’s daughter, Marine Le Pen, declined to 12.5 per cent in Paris but rose to 27 per cent elsewhere – nearly double her father’s vote share.
This change was of course not caused solely by the widening separation of top earners from the rest of the workforce. But it is easy to see that this segregation could have fuelled the shift, and may well be about to accelerate it further.
