RESPOL

Funding: ERC Starting Grant (2025–2030)

Polarization over cultural issues and the rise of the populist radical right indicate a fundamental realignment of electoral politics in established democracies around a new political cleavage characterized by an antagonism between parochial and cosmopolitan values. RESPOL introduces residential mobility as a fundamental determinant of these developments.

Residential mobility exceeds the volume of international migration, on which much research on the rise of the radical right focuses, by a factor of three. Although its significance is recognized in demography and psychology, residential mobility has yet to be widely recognized in political science. Psychological research considers residential mobility an essential driver of cultural change and has shown how mobile communities foster individualism and tolerance through frequent interactions with strangers. In contrast, immobile communities promote stability and stronger social ties but intensify perceptions of in-group and out-group differences.

Drawing on research in psychology and social capital theory, the project will develop a comprehensive theoretical account of how residential mobility affects political attitudes and behavior to explain electoral realignment in established democracies. The project will use innovative combinations of cross- and sub-national data on residential mobility and political outcomes to systematically test its theoretical propositions at the individual and aggregate levels.