Beyond Decline: Global Value Chain Dependence And The Populist Backlash In European Regions

Does the political response to globalisation depend on how regions are integrated into global production networks? We combine regional input-output measures of global valuechain exposure with lower-house election outcomes for 249 NUTS-2 regions in 24 European countries over 2000–2010. We distinguish seller-side exposure to foreign final demand (FPEX) from buyer-side exposure to foreign production (FPEM), and measure regions' average position relative to final demand. In two-way fixed-effects specifications, FPEX is positively associated with populist vote shares: a one-within-region-standarddeviation increase in FPEX (about 1.1 percentage points) is associated with an increase of roughly 3.5 percentage points in the populist vote share. When FPEX and FPEM are included jointly, FPEX remains positive and statistically significant, the buyer-side estimate is small and statistically not significant, and a formal test rejects equality of the two coefficients. The FPEX association is weaker in regions with higher average upstreamness and higher service-employment shares. The FPEX point estimate is larger in Central and Eastern Europe; a pooled interaction confirms a positive difference, although it is significant only at the 10 percent level under wild-cluster-bootstrap inference. Results are qualitatively similar under an alternative, narrower authoritarian-populist classification and are not reproduced for green-party voting. The findings highlight a politically relevant distinction within the architecture of international integration: dependence on foreign final demand is more consistently associated with populist voting than total buyer-side dependence on foreign production.