A Political Theory of Populism

By Daron Acemoglu, Georgy Egorov, K. Sonin. Social Science Research Network, 2013

498 citations recorded by the source corpus.

When voters fear that politicians may have a right-wing bias or that they may be in‡uenced or corrupted by the rich elite, signals of true left-wing conviction are valuable. As a consequence, even a moderate politician seeking reelection chooses ‘populist’policies— i.e., policies to the left of the median voter— as a way of signaling that he is not from the right. Truly right-wing politicians respond by choosing more moderate, or even left-of-center policies. This populist bias of policy is greater when the value of remaining in o¢ ce is higher for the politician; when there is greater polarization between the policy preferences of the median voter and right-wing politicians; when politicians are indeed more likely to have a hidden right-wing agenda; when there is an intermediate amount of noise in the information that voters receive; when politicians are more forward-looking; and when there is greater uncertainty about the type of the incumbent. We show that similar results apply when some politicians can be corrupted or in‡uenced through other non-electoral means by the rich elite. We also show that ‘soft term limits’ may exacerbate, rather than reduce, the populist bias of policies.

Subfields: Political Science and International Relations, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/08bcdb61ae732ff875450817ec5a8d3b8c936f2a

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Citations in the corpus

Populist Leaders and the Economy (2020, background): “Third, there is the traditional “economic deﬁnition” of populism, most famously proposed by Dornbusch and Edwards (1991) and used by Acemoglu, Egorov, and Sonin (2013), among others.”
Declining inequality in Latin America: Some economics, some politics * (2011, unknown): “” Similarly, Acemoglu et al. (2010) see the rise of left populist governments with charismatic leaders and “left of median voter” policies as a response of electorates that are convinced that corruption and existing checks and balances allow elites to capture governments thereby preventing promised ”
Demand and Supply of Populism (2017, background): “The majority of European countries and the United States are experiencing an unprecedented wave of populist and anti-populist rhetoric.(1) As it previously happened in Latin America, some countries are experiencing a growth of protests against inequality and capitalist institutions, leading to left-”
The European Trust Crisis and the Rise of Populism (2017, background): “Recent theoretical works on the political economy of populism include Acemoglu et al. (2013), Mukand and Rodrik (2017), Guiso, Herrera, and Morelli (2017), Di Tella and Rotemberg (2016). A number of recent empirical works study populism’s correlates/origins in specific contexts. Becker, Fetzer, and ”