How empty high streets contribute to support for populist parties in England

“How does decline in local neighbourhoods impact political discourse and competition? As the populist Reform UK make significant gains in local elections in England, Thiemo Fetzer , Prashant Garg and Jacob Edenhofer study UKIP, a predecessor to Reform, to explain how perceptions of the physical environment shape how people perceive progress and decline – and what that means for local and national politics. How do rapid and visible changes in our local environment leave their mark on political discourse and competition? The debate over local decline is often framed around struggling retailers due to online commerce. While undoubtedly important, an overlooked dynamic is that visible changes in the physical environment shape how people perceive progress, decline, and the evolving nature of the social contract around them. These perceptions may matter for local as well as national political competition. Visible decline, political support and the psychology of place The underlying drivers of these structural changes are manifold, and often interact. Existing research has studied individual pieces of the puzzle. These include austerity and political dissatisfaction ; housing insecurity, homelessness and political participation ; perceptions of local economic decline ; pub closures and UKIP support ; and the consequences of youth club closures . The overarching conclusion of this body of research is that local decline is experienced through the visible erosion of local services, endogenous amenities and social spaces, as well as through the decline of income and employment prospects. In recently published work we add to this debate by analysing the decline of local high streets. Specifically, we combine granular premise-level data matched with individual-level panel data, the Understanding Society panel, to examine the political ramifications of high-street vacancies across 197 towns in England and Wales between 2009 and 2019. We measure high-street deterioration as the share of shops and premises that are empty. This measure is useful from a political psychology perspective, given that empty high streets are especially visible indicators of local decline. That is, people encounter structural transformation in the physical world around them, while national accounts and other economic aggregates are usually distant from their daily experience. A rise in shuttered shops, charity shops, betting shops or pawn shops will also erode confidence in the health of the local economy. Simultaneously, the loss of spaces of social consumption matters in its own right: the disappearing bank branch, the pub that no longer functions as a local meeting point and the thinning out of places where people used to interact with one another casually. Local decline is economic, psychological and social. Our paper shows that these visible markers of decline are politically consequential. Higher high-street vacancies are positively associated with support for United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), a right-wing anti-immigration party whose popularity peaked around the time of the Brexit referendum. Substantively, a one-percentage point increase in the vacancy rate is associated with roughly an increase in the probability of supporting UKIP by 0.2 percentage points. The association appears to run more clearly through perceived local deterioration than through measures of respondents’ own immediate material distress. Politics, on this view, responds to private hardship and to how people interpret the trajectory of the places they live in and care about. This is where the psychology of place becomes central. A town centre is also part of the social surface through which a community observes itself. When the high street empties, people lose spaces of routine contact, informal sociability and shared visibility. The local environment begins to serve as a signal that the place is falling behind others and that it has left the path of renewal or collective investment. That perception of negative change can be politically powerful even when aggregate labour-market indicators look less dramatic. When causes are hard to see Importantly, this perceived decline can also induce incorrect inferences about causes. People observe real changes, but the causal interpretation of those changes is much noisier. A local shop may close because online commerce has shifted demand elsewhere. A pub may disappear because property values and rents have risen in ways that make socially valuable but lower profit uses unviable. A town centre may look run down because fiscal retrenchment has reduced maintenance, local investment and administrative capacity. A place may witness declines social density because young people and families no longer find it affordable or attractive to stay. These are all consequences of technological change, spatial re-sorting, housing-market pressures and policy choices. But these processes do not present themselves transparently. They arrive bundled together in lived experience. People see change, loss and disorder. They then infer causes. That inferential process is where politics, and specifically the supply side, enters. When the visible symptoms of decline are easy to see but the underlying mechanisms are complex, simplified or indeed simplistic narratives – often promulgated by populist parties – gain traction. The empty high street, the rough sleeper, the weakened public realm, the absence of community infrastructure and demographic change can all be folded into a single story of social deterioration. The risk is that real decline is misinterpreted and that this misinterpretation is deliberately supplied by political forces which stand to gain from doing so. When populist parties – which in the British context are on the right, including Reform UK , which did well in England’s local elections on 7 May – are the first to seize on the opportunity to supply (mis-)interpretations of local changes, they can realise a first-mover advantage in the market for narratives. In the British context, the radical right has succeeded in tying local decline – even when it was, in fact, caused by austerity or structural economic change – to immigration . Doing so has the advantage that the cause is not only easy to understand, but also allows people to blame an out-group, rather than in-group. Being first movers means that, even when Labour, the party of the current national government, and the Conservatives, the official opposition, follow suit by also (mistakenly) blaming immigration, the political gains are already exhausted. This also ignores the potential to lose more moderate voters by emulating the radical right. Those who have reason to embrace the simplistic, if incorrect, narrative – either because their personalities are such that they find simplistic narratives particularly soothing or because blaming out-groups is one of the few ways to improve their relative (non-)economic status in a society that favours the educated over the uneducated and the city over the countryside – will almost always prefer the original to the copy. What policy can do That broader perspective matters for policy. If visible decline is politically potent, policy must look beyond aggregate growth strategies and labour-market metrics. If a national government, such as Labour, wants to staunch the threat from populist parties, such as Reform, they should recognise that place-based investment should not only be about productivity gains, but also about investments in social infrastructure, the physical appeal of communities, the existence of meeting spaces, town centres, and other local institutions. Strengthening local social ties is an important part of tethering people’s perceptions and beliefs to the real-world experiences of the community as a whole and may thus make it harder for the radical right to piggy-back on local decline by blaming out-groups. This article gives the views of the author, not the position of LSE Business Review or the London School of Economics. You are agreeing with our comment policy when you leave a comment. Image credit: Jessica Girvan provided by Shutterstock. The post How empty high streets contribute to support for populist parties in England first appeared on LSE Business Review .

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