Another brick in the wall of far-right success: reduced access to public services

Globalization and economic hardship related to financial crises are known to have boosted support for far-right parties and socially conservative political agendas.

New research by Simone Cremaschi, Paula Rettl, Marco Cappelluti, and Catherine De Vries focuses on another possible precursor of far-right electoral success:  the reduction in access to essential services such as security, education, and healthcare.

Public service provision has been under pressure for some time due to cuts, sluggish growth, or public debt pressure and research suggests that people think that access to public services is crucial to their lives. We argue that exposure to a reduction in access to public services, which we call public service deprivation, can generate grievances that make affected people more likely to support far-right. Public service deprivation creates grievances about one's community not receiving a “fair” share of public resources At the same time it raises concerns about “others” receiving more.

Italy serves as an ideal case study: its small municipalities have undergone significant administrative transformations, including a 2010 reform that required municipalities with fewer than 5,000 residents to jointly manage basic services. This reform, designed to improve efficiency, faced criticism for reducing local autonomy and, effectively, access to services.

The controversies surrounding this measure reflect the intrinsic challenges in balancing the need for rationalization with maintaining service quality and citizens’ perception of fairness.

Researchers observed that many communities affected by the reform experienced growing dissatisfaction with the central state, seen as distant and ineffective. This dissatisfaction translated into support for parties promising swift and radical solutions, often exploiting narratives that linked service deprivation to issues such as uncontrolled immigration.

Using a difference-in-differences design, the researchers compared municipalities affected by the reform with those, otherwise perfectly comparable, that were not, analyzing electoral data from 2000 to 2020. They also employed geo-referenced individual survey data and political rhetoric analysis to explore underlying mechanisms.

A detailed examination of political rhetoric revealed an increasing use of targeted messages by far-right parties that linked public service deprivation to immigration and the need for stricter policies.

The sample included 7,964 municipalities, over 65% of which were impacted by the reform. The indicators analyzed included access to services such as local police, waste management, and registry offices, showing a significant reduction in the quality and availability of these services in the affected areas. This reduction, often accompanied by organizational and operational difficulties, generated frustration within the communities involved.

In parallel, the study observed growing concerns about immigration among residents of these areas and an increasing use of messages by far-right parties linking service deprivation to immigration. These messages not only amplified perceptions of economic and social insecurity but also created fertile ground for consolidating electoral support.

The study concludes that public service deprivation contributed to increased support for far-right parties in municipalities affected by the 2010 reform. This outcome was driven by two main dynamics: on one hand, dissatisfaction stemming from the perception of an unfair distribution of public resources (demand); on the other, the far-right’s ability to strategically exploit these concerns, linking them to immigration (supply).

In advanced industrial democracies like Italy, people are accustomed to having access to public services and expect the state to be responsive to their needs. If these expectations are not met, people might become disgruntled and may turn to far-right policy solutions, as shown in the study.

Researchers, anyway, do not suggest that such deprivation is the sole or root cause of far-right parties’ electoral success.

Future research should explore the extent to which the results apply beyond Italy.

Simone Cremaschi, Paula Rettl, Marco Cappelluti, Catherine De Vries. “Geographies of discontent: Public service deprivation and the rise of the far right in Italy.”  American Journal of Political Science. 2024;1–19. DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.1111/ajps.12936.