How Cultural Taste Shapes Recognition and Redistribution Struggles: Far-Right Politics, Touristification and the Political Economy of Taste.

Abstract

This article connects cultural taste to capitalist mechanisms of redistribution through the concept of political economy of taste. Building on Bourdieusian scholarship on recognition struggles and drawing on Mike Savage and Nancy Fraser, it examines how public performances of taste reshape representations of working-class culture and how these representations are mobilised by both far-right and centre-left elites to advance policies that redistribute economic resources upwards. The article develops the concept through two case studies: far-right politics and touristification. Combining theoretical discussion of existing literature and new empirical analyses of Giorgia Meloni's taste performances and touristification in Naples (Italy), it shows how positive recognition of working-class culture, framed as 'authentic' by political elites, opens new possibilities for capitalist accumulation, thus widening economic inequalities. The article argues that Bourdieusian taste studies have overlooked these dynamics because of their focus on the stratification of tastes, rather than on how taste can transform mechanisms of exploitation and expropriation. The article thus proposes a different epistemic orientation: towards taste as a political weapon reshaping national political economies.