Why Does Globalization Fuel Populism? Economics, Culture, and the Rise of Right-wing Populism

By Dani Rodrik. Annual Review of Economics, 2020

387 citations recorded by the source corpus.

There is compelling evidence that globalization shocks, often working through culture and identity, have played an important role in driving up support for populist movements, particularly of the right-wing kind. I start with an empirical analysis of the 2016 presidential election in the United States to show that globalization-related attitudinal variables were important correlates of the switch to Trump. I then provide a conceptual framework that identifies four distinct channels through which globalization can stimulate populism, two each on the demand and supply sides of politics. I evaluate the empirical literature with the help of this framework, discussing trade, financial globalization, and immigration separately. I conclude the review by discussing some apparently anomalous cases in which populists have been against, rather than in favor of, trade protection.

Subfields: Political Science and International Relations

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fbcc71eef923dbbd1d0d95ca15ee99942ebff9f4

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In Political Science and International Relations

1. Manuel Funke
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Citations in the corpus

• Populist Leaders and the Economy (2020, methodology): “27 Figure 11 (left panel) shows the estimated doppelganger gap using the after-tax income Gini index from the World Income Inequality Database (SWIID) by Solt (2019, 2020).”