Place-based Grievances and Political Trust: Unravelling the Micro-Foundations of the Geography of Discontent in France

In this article, I explore the potential role of place grievances and political trust as a micro-level mechanism for the 'geography of discontent' argument. Research has shown that measures of regional deprivation and decline correlate with the geographically unequal success of populist far-right parties. This literature puts forth the argument that citizens in declining or “left behind” places turn to populist-far-right parties to express their discontent. However, individual-level discontent remains to be further explored as a political attitude held by individual citizens embedded in their place. I examine a possible micro-foundation of the “geography of discontent” empirically by matching a survey with commune-level context data in France. Specifically, I explore how the objective context of deprivation and decline translates into individual-level place grievances and how these perceptions, in turn, structure political trust and proximity to far-right parties. In doing so, I conceptualise political trust as a metric of discontent, which is geographically rooted in perceptions of place grievances and represents a fundamental rupture of the citizen-state relationship. Grievances differ by type of residence. Typical rural place grievances are associated with lower political trust and greater proximity to the far-right Rassemblement National in France. Importantly, local infrastructure decline, such as the closure of the last remaining boulangeries and budget allocations to communes, is related to the expression of rural grievances. Citizens perceive a lack of social meeting places and the isolation of their commune report lower political trust and higher closeness to far-right parties. Urban grievances such as lack of green spaces, noise and pollution, or lack of security are not robustly related to lower political trust. These findings put political trust as a measure of discontent at the heart of the geography of discontent debate and point to particularly rural grievances that underpin the geographically unequal success of populist far-right parties.