A growing ‘representation gap’ on immigration and criminal justice is fueling the populist right—even as voters and mainstream parties remain aligned on taxes and public ownership.

For decades, the conventional wisdom about democratic politics ran on a simple axis: left versus right on the economy. Debates over taxes, public spending and who should own and run key services were considered the core of electoral competition. But a mounting body of research shows that, across much of the democratic world, voters and mainstream politicians have long been relatively close on those economic questions—while drifting far apart on sociocultural issues such as immigration, crime and national identity. The result, as Financial Times columnist John Burn-Murdoch and others have argued, is a widening ‘representation gap’ that the populist right has learned to navigate with increasing ease.

The gap is not an abstraction. Comparative studies of party platforms and public opinion track two persistent patterns. First, on bread‑and‑butter economics, median voters and established parties are often aligned: majorities support broadly mixed economies, some redistribution through progressive taxation, and public ownership or strong regulation of natural monopolies. Second, on questions of border control, asylum processes, sentencing and policing, voters in many countries favor stricter, more ordered approaches than the centrist parties that have governed most of the past two decades. That mismatch creates a wide channel for challengers promising to ‘restore control’ or ‘enforce the rules’ while reassuring voters that pensions and healthcare will be protected.

Recent cycles have rendered this dynamic in high relief. In continental Europe, parties to the right of traditional conservatives expanded their vote shares where mainstream politicians appeared out of step with public concerns over irregular migration and public order. In the United States and the United Kingdom, months dominated by migration headlines and viral crime narratives corresponded with surges in salience for those issues. Survey data across 2024 and 2025 found immigration repeatedly topping lists of public priorities, even where unemployment had returned to pre‑pandemic levels and inflation was easing. Economics mattered, but cultural order often trumped it in the electoral hierarchy of needs.

It is tempting to explain these outcomes as a simple rightward turn. That misses the central nuance of the new alignment. On many economic questions, the median voter has not become a libertarian, and mainstream parties have not become socialists. Both inhabit a broadly pragmatic middle—tolerant of markets, protective of core services. The shift is instead about which issues anchor political identity and which promises feel most credible. Populist-right entrepreneurs have fused culturally conservative themes with economic assurances—sometimes even protectionist or welfare‑statist—creating platforms closer to voter preferences than those of establishment competitors that mix social liberalism with fiscal hawkishness.

Why has the representation gap opened on culture rather than economics? Three forces stand out. First, the pace and visibility of migration have accelerated, driven by conflict, climate and labor‑market demand. Even as overall crime trends in many places are flat or falling, highly salient incidents shared online shape perceptions of safety and order. Second, party systems professionalised. Candidate pipelines filtered for university‑educated elites whose social attitudes skew more cosmopolitan than the national median, even when their economic instincts remain pragmatic. Third, the communication infrastructure of politics—social media, talk radio, and partisan cable—has become an amplifier for identity signals. Campaigns now compete in an attention market that rewards emotive frames over technocratic detail.

The misalignment is not uniform. Denmark—often an outlier in the comparative research—saw mainstream parties move earlier and more concretely on border enforcement and integration, narrowing space to the right without abandoning the welfare state. Elsewhere, rhetorical hardening without administrative delivery has backfired. Voters notice if processing backlogs, removals or community impacts do not change; slogans that are not matched by state capacity breed cynicism, which in turn strengthens insurgents who promise to ‘smash the system’.

John Burn-Murdoch’s framing of a ‘two‑axis’ politics captures where this is heading. Traditional left–right competition on the economy still matters, but a perpendicular cultural axis—open versus ordered, cosmopolitan versus communitarian—now determines whether voters feel seen. Where mainstream parties cluster in the cosmopolitan quadrant while voters lean ordered on migration and criminal justice, a large tract of the map is left empty. Populist right parties have simply moved in. They present themselves as translators of everyday language into policy—closing the asylum ‘loopholes,’ recruiting more police, tightening sentencing—while promising not to privatise hospitals or cut pensions.

Does closing the gap mean chasing hard‑line culture‑war salvos? The evidence counsels against it. Voters punish inauthenticity and overreach. Attempts to mimic the rhetoric of insurgents without credible implementation can further depress trust. But neither can mainstream parties wish away the salience of borders and order. The more effective examples combine clear, enforceable rules with investment in capacity: speeding casework and appeals, return agreements that actually function, integration programs that tie language and work to residency, visible neighborhood policing, and procedural fairness that stands up in court. In short, competence beats chest‑thumping.

Critically, closing the representation gap does not require abandoning liberal principles. It requires translating them into outcomes people can see. Fairness cuts both ways—toward those seeking refuge and toward citizens who expect the rules to be enforced. The same holds in criminal justice, where public tolerance grows when communities experience timely trials, swift and proportionate sentencing, and rehabilitation tied to public safety. The policy menu here is not exotic: it is administrative reform, coordination with local authorities, and resourcing agencies that have been asked to do more with less.

There is also a communications challenge. When mainstream politicians talk primarily to activists and media allies, they import niche language that lands poorly with broader audiences. The culture‑war framing invites a minoritarian fight over symbols; voters, by contrast, want friction reduced in daily life—orderly borders, clean and safe streets, basic civility. Campaigns that foreground delivery—what will change by when—perform better than those that offer moral lectures or abstract targets. That is one lesson of municipal elections across Europe in 2024 and 2025, where practical pitches on safety and services outperformed sweeping ideological appeals.

For centre‑left parties, the path back to majorities often runs through a communitarian reset on culture married to pragmatic economics. For centre‑right parties, avoiding eclipse by their populist flank means pairing order with credible stewardship of institutions and public services. Both must rebuild trust not just with new promises, but by governing in a way that reduces ambient anxiety—about borders, crime and competence. Where they do, the populist tide ebbs. Where they don’t, the vacuum remains—waiting to be filled by voices that sound more like the electorate on culture than the establishment.

The representation gap, in short, is a product of drift: of parties that professionalised without re‑anchoring to mainstream cultural norms, and of institutions that failed to deliver visible control amid rapid change. Economics still matters and, in many places, consensus on mixed‑economy fundamentals is real. But in 2025, the axis that sorts winners from losers is increasingly cultural. Parties that learn to govern the everyday—competently, fairly, and with a sense of order—will find the gap narrowing. Those that don’t will keep losing voters to those who promise, credibly or not, to close it for them.

Sources and further reading: Financial Times columns by John Burn‑Murdoch on voter–party misalignment and immigration salience; recent survey research from Pew and Gallup on the rise of immigration as a top public concern; comparative analyses from More in Common on European attitudes; and political‑science work on culture‑issue voting in 2025. These studies converge on the same picture: a modest economic consensus and a yawning sociocultural gap shaping the new politics of representation.