These political movements “are strongly and causally associated with an individual’s or an area’s exposure to austerity since 2010,” Fetzer writes. Examination of economic trends, welfare policy and polling data shows, according to Fetzer, that

the EU referendum (Brexit) could have resulted in a Remain victory had it not been for a range of austerity-induced welfare reforms. These reforms activated existing economic grievances. Further, auxiliary results suggest that the underlying economic grievances have broader origins than what the current literature on Brexit suggests. Up until 2010, the UK’s welfare state evened out growing income differences across the skill divide through transfer payments. This pattern markedly stops from 2010 onward as austerity started to bite.

There are significant parallels between voting patterns for and against Brexit and the patterns in the 2016 and 2018 elections in this country.

In a separate 2017 paper, “Who Voted For Brexit,” Fetzer and two fellow economists at the University of Warwick, Sascha O. Becker and Dennis Novy, found that “in particular, fiscal cuts in the context of the recent U.K. austerity program are strongly associated with a higher Vote Leave share.” This held

all across the board: more deprivation is tightly associated with a larger Vote Leave share or, vice versa; less deprivation is tightly associated with a lower Vote Leave share.

The results here and in England reinforce the conclusion that the worse things get, the better the right does.

As a rule, as economic conditions improve and voters begin to feel more secure, they become more generous and more liberal. In the United States, this means that voters move to the left; in Britain, it means voters are stronger in their support for staying in the European Union.

In his forthcoming book, “Democratic Capitalism at the Crossroads: Technological Change and the Future of Politics” Carles Boix, a political scientist at Princeton, describes how postwar prosperity from 1945 to the mid-1970s led to a liberal international consensus:

In light of the historical experience of advanced countries, embracing the program of embedded liberalism made economic and political sense. Twentieth-century democratic capitalism had proved to be both successful and resilient: it had delivered high growth; it had allowed governments to fund generous social programs; and it had sent its main political and economic competitor — communism — to the ash heap of history.

As global competition, outsourcing and later, automation, began to produce significant economic disruption, beginning in the 1970s, this liberal consensus frayed.

Boix writes,

The structure of electoral participation became strongly polarized across the Atlantic — very much in line with the economic transformations brought about by the decline of industry and by globalization in the last forty years.

In the United States, economic adversity helped produce Trump, whose inaugural speech (reportedly the handiwork of Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller) Boix cites as emblematic of the hostility emerging with the fall of liberalism:

For too long, a small group in our nation’s capital has reaped the rewards of government while the people have borne the cost. Washington flourished, but the people did not share in its wealth. Politicians prospered, but the jobs left. And the factories closed. The establishment protected itself but not the citizens of our country. Their victories have not been your victories. Their triumphs have not been your triumphs. And while they celebrated in our nation’s capital, there was little to celebrate for struggling families all across our land. That all changes starting right here and right now.

Together, the trends described above raise an intriguing question: If the Republican Party now depends on the votes of those who are falling behind, does the party have a vested interest in economic stagnation and decline?

I asked scholars and officials at the Niskanen Center — a Washington think tank that recently received favorable coverage for its efforts to resolve contemporary ideological division — whether they thought the Republican Party has come to recognize that prosperity helps Democrats, while economic adversity engenders hostility to immigrants, resentment of liberal elites and animosity among rural voters toward urban America. Does this awareness give politicians on the right a motive to support policies and actions that foster government dysfunction and further impair sections of the country that are in decline?

Jerry Taylor, president of Niskanen, replied to my inquiry by making the case that “as conservatives see it, the more visible government dysfunction is, the better. It provides civic education.”