Social mobility, education and populism

In this article, we show that the populist attitudes that lead to extremists voting and social unrests can be explained by the breakdown of the social elevator, i.e. the decline in social mobility. This explanation seems to apply to all the 27 European countries studied. It is particularly surprising in countries like Belgium and France, which devote around 30% of their GDP to social protection. It would seem that these welfare states naively believed that simply combating poverty and social inequality was enough to revive the social elevator. This does not seem to be the case.