Lorenza Antonucci

Lorenza Antonucci is Associate Professor in the Department of Social Policy, Sociology and Criminology and Deputy Director of Research at the College of Social Sciences at University of Birmingham (UK). She was German Kennedy Memorial Fellow at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies (Harvard University) in 2022-2023 and Visiting Associate Professor at CEE at Sciences Po in Spring 2022. Her research is concerned with understanding how societies are changing and reacting to growing socioeconomic insecurity and inequality in Europe and globally. Her next book "Insecurity Politics" is forthcoming with Princeton University Press and offers an in-depth examination of the role of insecurity in the political sociology of populist voting.

The project

Title: The new politics of insecurity: The connection between precarity and populism in Europe

"The politics of insecurity has been empirically investigated in relation to either macroeconomic trends (trade, growth, employment rates) (Margalit, 2019), domestic security (Wojczewski, 2020; Béland, 2020), or—in the studies that investigate insecurity at the individual level—unemployment risk (as stressed also by Abou-Chadi and Kurer, 2021). “Precarity” and “socioeconomic insecurity,” however, describe more than just employment uncertainty; they refer to the experience of uncertainty about fulfilling one’s needs via work and financial resources, which is shared by individuals from the working class and the declining middle class (the “squeezed middle”) (Antonucci et al, 2021; Zhirnov et al, 2023). The sociological understanding of insecurity used in this project advances research on populism in two respects. First, economic and cultural explanations of populist support have been positioned as alternative explanations (e.g., Norris and Inglehart, 2019; Inglehart, 2018) rather than as integrated concepts. Instead, insecurity integrates these perspectives: Subjective feelings about the security of one’s work and finances do not only affect individuals materially, but also shape the construction of one’s value and social status in society and in relation to others (see the intuition by Gidron and Hall, 2017). Second, surpassing remote macroeconomic framings, the sociological conceptualization of insecurity engages with how individual subjective experiences of socioeconomic insecurity trigger not just the decision to vote for a populist party but a receptivity to populist views (or a “populist outlook”)."

Hosting institution: Sciences Po

Selective Bibliography

• Antonucci, L. (2025) "The lived experiences of the welfare state of platform workers: The barriers to accessing social protection in Italy, Sweden and the UK", International Journal of Social Welfare, 34 (1), 10.1111/ijsw.12708.
• Antonucci, L., Seo, H. and M. Strobl (2024) “Quantity over quality? How economic factors and welfare state interventions affected job insecurity and job quality before, during and after the economic crises”, Social Policy & Administration, 58 (2), 277-298.
• Zhirnov, A. and Antonucci, L. (first co-author), Thomeczek, P., Horvath, L., D’Ippoliti, C, Ospina, C., Krouwel, A. and N. Kersting (2024) “Precarity and populism: Explaining populist outlook and populist voting in Europe through subjective financial and work-related insecurity”, European Sociological Review, 40 (4), 704–720.
• Antonucci, L., D’Ippoliti, C., Horvath, L. and Krouwel, A. (2023) “What’s work got to do with it? How radical and mainstream party support is linked to feelings of precarity”, Sociological Research Online, 28 (1).
• Antonucci, L. (2016) Student Lives in Crisis. Deepening inequality in times of austerity, Bristol: Policy Press (distributed by Chicago University Press in the US).