The Causes of Populism in the West

Abstract

The global ascendance of populism has produced an explosion of research, bringing together scholarship on American and comparative politics as well as encouraging intellectual exchange among political scientists, economists, and sociologists. A good way to get a handle on what is now a wide-ranging and interdisciplinary literature is to focus on the key debates characterizing it. This article reviews the literature on the causes of populism, and in particular right-wing populism, in the United States, Europe, and other advanced industrial nations generally, but much of this literature draws on and refers to research on other parts of the world as well. This review analyzes the nature as well as the strengths and weakness of demand- and supply-side explanations of populism, economic grievance–based and sociocultural grievance–based explanations of populism, and structure- and agency-based explanations of populism. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Political Science, Volume 24 is May 11, 2021. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

Robots Don't Pay Taxes: Deindustrialization and Fiscal Decline

“…Welfare state research and policy discourse is perennially engaged with the question of how to best compensate the losers, namely, displaced workers; political economists attribute the rise of populism in the U.S. and elsewhere to a failure to adequately do so (Berman 2021;Rodrik 2018).…”

A Costly Commitment: Populism, Government Performance, and the Quality of Bureaucracy

“…A common thread in the literature on the causes of populism is the erosion of voters' trust in the traditional tools of representative democracy (Berman 2021;Dustmann et al 2017;Inglehart and Norris 2019). When trust is high, representation follows a trustee model, and politicians are entrusted to adjust policy-making to changing circumstances.…”

“…While demand-side accounts of populism consolidated the association between economic insecurity, voters' demand for protection, and hence support for populist parties, little is known about why populism should be good or bad for the economy and government performance. Dornbusch and Edwards (1991), in their study of populism in Latin America, make a clear 1 Tweet available in Italian at https://twitter.com/matteosalvinimi/status/1074036205052968960 2 Full text available at https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2015/06/16/full-text-do nald-trump-announces-a-presidential-bid/ 3 For recent reviews, see Guriev and Papaioannou (2020), Noury and Roland (2020), Berman (2021).…”

Understanding the Global Patrimonial Wave

“…Scholars disagree on the causes of rising inequality. As Sheri Berman (2021) notes, economists point to big structural factors such as trade, technology, and education, whereas political scientists stress policy choices, gerrymandering, and voter suppression that favored the rich over the poor. Piketty (2017), for example, maintained that systematic differences in returns to capital and labor account for the dramatic increases in wealth and income inequalities over the past decades.…”