ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the link between fiscal austerity policies since the 2008 global financial crisis and the rise of right-wing populism. Drawing on quantitative cases studies of the United States and United Kingdom, it shows that districts that experienced more severe fiscal austerity saw a corresponding rise in anti-immigrant and ethnic nationalist attitudes. The chapter suggests that populist political entrepreneurs created, materially and ideologically, a zero-sum politics of scarcity that cast an ethno-national community of deserving left-outs in competition with an extractive, foreign Other.
