The left behind, latte liberals and democratic attitudes. Putting nuance to stereotypical expectations

Terms such as “left behind” and “latte liberals” have gained prominence in current academic and public debates on the future of democracy. They refer to new cleavage lines that divide those who derive economic benefits from globalization, embrace cultural exchange and transnationalism (globalization winners) from those who derive objective or subjective disadvantages from these developments (globalization losers). Previous research on this new “transnational” cleavage primarily focuses on support for different political parties or policy preferences, such as the link between globalization losers and support for populist or extreme right-wing parties. However, there is a lack of research on the extent to which globalization winners and losers support democracy, how they rate the status quo, and what their preferences for specific (un-)democratic governance schemes look like. This paper addresses this research gap by investigating the link between globalization winners and losers and democratic support, evaluation of the status quo, and preferences for decision-making. Using representative samples of about 2.500 respondents each in the United States and Germany, we put popular assumptions and stereotypes such as “angry, rural anti-democrats” or “liberal cosmopolitan democrats” to a thorough empirical test. Furthermore, our paper takes recent research into account that emphasizes multiple drivers of the division between winners and losers. We consider three sets of factors in order to understand what drives the divide of winners and losers (1) the social structure (class, income, urbanity); (2) subjective perceptions (societal recognition on the cultural, economic and political dimension) and (3) attitudes (cosmopolitan attitudes as well as attitudes towards globalization and immigration). We first connect each of these factors to democratic support, democratic satisfaction and support for specific governance models (including existing representative institutions and authoritarian alternatives). In a second step we identify different constellations of “winners” and “losers” and explore their connection to democratic attitudes and preferences using a latent class analysis. This allows us to examine not only how different constellations of winners and losers view the current state of democracy, but also which (undemocratic) alternatives they prefer. Our preliminary results indicate that (1) the division between globalization winners and losers is not as clear-cut as previous research assumed. While we find stereotypical “winners” and “losers” in both the US and Germany, the majority of respondents falls in between these stereotypical categories. Moreover, societal recognition turns out to be one of the most divisive factors in our analyses; (2) social structure, subjective perceptions as well as cosmopolitan/nationalist attitudes are indeed linked to specific democratic support, democratic satisfaction and governance schemes, but in more complex ways than previously thought. Both objective (based on social structure) and subjective (based on subjective perceptions) losers are dissatisfied with democracy, but with different implications for democratic preferences. While objective losers show no clear preference for any alternative, subjective losers show a strong preference for participatory alternatives. Overall sympathy for authoritarian alternatives is low - only respondents who feel like their traditions and values are not recognized in society are associated with a preference for authoritarian alternatives and lower democratic support.