Geographies of Discontent: Regional Industrial Decline and Satisfaction with Democracy

Regions have shaped the contours of people’s experiences of deindustrialization and its political aftermath but conventional research has overlooked this. To investigate how the decline of manufacturing affects citizens’ support for democracy, we study the role of regions as sources of differential contextual exposure to deindustrialization. Deindustrialization has been a regional phenomenon because regions are historical-spatial contexts of industrial production. This has resulted in a temporal and regionally uneven pattern of transition from a manufacturing to service-based economies. Some regions have offset the loss of manufacturing with a growing service sector economy, while others have fallen into. We revisit this economic performance hypothesis in the context of economic restructuring, regarding which there is little to no research. Manufacturing decline is substantively different because it is a permanent structural change rather than a temporary fluctuation. Positive citizen assessments of democracy have become, as a part of industrial society, contingent upon improving living standards and availability of work. We reason that the geographical stratification of deindustrialization exposes some regions more than others to economic insecurity, and that this can cause individuals living in those regions to question the legitimacy of their national democracy. This paper aims to theoretically explain and empirically investigate how exposure to regional manufacturing decline has affected citizens’ satisfaction with democracy and identify how cultural changes in political values have moderated this effect. We being our analysis by geographically visualizing the e Our results show that, regional industrial decline has significantly reduced citizen satisfaction with democracy, regardless of a person’s social class. By shedding light on the importance of regions as sources of contextual exposure, we demonstrate that the detrimental political effects of manufacturing decline have not merely due to occupational exposure as is conventionally believed. An important implication of our study is that the democratic discontent brought about by manufacturing decline is not simply a working-class phenomenon. Rather geographic contextual exposure, such as regional manufacturing decline, has its own contextual political consequences. This study extends existing research in several ways. First, while regions have shaped the contours of ordinary citizens' experiences of deindustrialization and its aftermath, this aspect has been overlooked in conventional research which has been primarily occupied with explaining cross-national patterns of satisfaction with democracy rather than sub-national ones. We contribute by proposing conceptual and empirical framework for how regional manufacturing decline constitutes a contextual basis for individual differentiation in levels of democratic satisfaction in post-industrial societies. Our sub-national comparative research design, combined with an instrumental variable approach, allows us to overcome common challenges in cross-national research that make it difficult to isolate the causal role of economic restructuring from unobserved historical, cultural, and institutional explanations.