Social and Political Consequences of Spatial Inequalities: East-Central Europe Case Study

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This project contributes to the recent political and scholarly debate on the social and political consequences of spatial inequalities. Growing inter-regional disparities within EU countries have been described as a risk to social cohesion, repository of social and political cleavages, and source of perceived injustice and marginalization. The debate about “the revenge of places that don’t matter” argues that spatial inequalities within nation states lead to widespread discontent in the populations of disadvantaged regions who feel “left behind” by ongoing economic changes and neglected by central governments. The rise of (right-wing) populist parties and movements are seen as a consequence of these “feelings of being left behind” in disadvantaged regions, and thus a “geography of discontent” is posited.So far, the geography of discontent debate has been informed mostly by the situation in Western Europe and the United States. However, in comparison to East-Central Europe, the socio-spatial circumstances for the rise of populism are vastly different. While in the US and Western Europe, the economic, demographic, and infrastructural decline of left-behind regions has been attributed to post-industrialization, technological change, and globalization, spatial inequality in East-Central Europe has been formed in a different context. Spatially unequal effects of the post-socialist transition, out-migration, inflows of foreign direct investments, low-wage job economies, and agricultural poverty are among the concepts that explain existing spatial inequality patterns and their consequences in East-Central Europe. Accordingly, we consider a focus on East-Central Europe, to which we include the Central European countries that experienced the post-communist transition, and the former East Germany, to be a promising area in which to contribute insight concerning populism in the context of spatial inequality. In this project (1) we take a detailed empirical look at important arguments of the debate about emerging geographies of discontent. In particular, we examine how inter-regional inequality contributes to individual-level socio-economic inequalities, how it is reflected in subjective perceptions of individual and community prospects and feelings of being left-behind, and how regional effects manifest in political opinions and electoral behavior; (2) We conduct an international comparison of the topic, which enables us to go beyond single-country studies and deliver a more nuanced analysis; (3) we focus on three East-Central European countries where regional inequalities have grown in recent years and where populism plays an important role in their political arenas; (4) We apply a mixed-method approach to the issue so as to both identify the measurable effects of spatial inequality and understand the perceptions and perspectives of people living in “left behind” places.