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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Populist upheavals like Trump, Brexit, and the Gilets Jaunes happen when the system really is rigged. Citizens the world over are angry not due to income inequality or immigration, but economic unfairness: that opportunity is not equal and reward is not according to contribution. This forensic book draws on original research, cited by the UN and IMF, to demonstrate that illiberal populism strikes hardest when success is influenced by family origins rather than talent and effort. Protzer and Summerville propose a framework of policy inputs that instead support high social mobility, and apply it to diagnose the differing reasons behind economic unfairness in the US, UK, Italy, and France. By striving for a fair, socially-mobile economy, they argue, it is possible to craft a politics that reclaims the reasonable grievances behind populism. Reclaiming Populism is a must-read for policymakers, scholars, and citizens who want to bring disenchanted populist voters back into the fold of liberal democracy.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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CONTENTS
Cover
Dedication
Title Page
Copyright
Foreword
Acknowledgments
1 The Inequality Delusion and Other Scapegoats for Populism
What Makes a Good Theory for Populism?
The Conventional Explanations for Populism
Scapegoats and Deeper Causes for Populism
2 The Fairness Instinct
Distributive Justice and Economic Fairness
An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Fairness
Evolutionary Evidence for Fairness
The Eternal Threat of Unfairness
3 Economic Unfairness and the Rise of Populism
The Empirics of Economic Unfairness and Populism
The Evidence in Summary
How Fairness was Forgotten
4 The Twin Virtues of Equal Opportunity and Fair Unequal Outcomes
Substantive Equal Opportunity
Formal Equal Opportunity
Equal Opportunity with Respect to Unfair Events
Rewarding Value Creation
Disincentivizing Cheaters
The Twin Virtues in Sum
5 Constraints and Solutions to Economic Fairness
The United States: Constrained Opportunity
The United Kingdom: Left-Behind Regions
Italy: The Land of Too Many Antiquities
France: Espoir et Erreur
The Complexity of Economic Fairness
Conclusion: Scripting a Path Forward
References
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Chapter 1
Figure 1.1
USA – Gap in the share taking a conservative position by major party affiliation
Figure 1.2
UK – UKIP and Brexit Party vote share in EU Parliament elections
Figure 1.3
France – National Front/Rally vote share in first round of presidential election…
Figure 1.4
Percentage of imports from China by country, 1985–2017
Chapter 2
Figure 2.1
Average real GDP per capita growth rates, pre- and post-transition
Chapter 4
Figure 4.1
Inputs to economic fairness
Figure 4.2
Share of population aged 24–44 with tertiary education whose highest parental ed…
Figure 4.3
2018 PISA math score boost of one standard deviation increase in socioeconomic s…
Figure 4.4
Rent as a share of disposable income, 2018 or latest year
Figure 4.5
Share of bottom income quintile spending 40% or more of disposable income on ren…
Figure 4.6
Public and private health spending as % of GDP by country in 2018
Figure 4.7
Life expectancy at birth by country, 2017
Figure 4.8
Public unemployment spending as % of GDP, 2019 or latest year
Figure 4.9
Maximum months of unemployment insurance in 2018
Chapter 5
Figure 5.1
Life expectancy at birth in 2018 vs. healthcare spending per capita in 2018 at c…
Figure 5.2
Healthcare expenditure as a share of GDP in the US vs. interquartile range of OE…
Figure 5.3
Net present purchasing power parity value of lifetime returns to tertiary educat…
Figure 5.4
Direct cost of tertiary education by country
Figure 5.5
Change in employment share by skill category by economy, 2002–14
Figure 5.6
Homes per 1,000 residents vs. percentage of vacant homes by country
Figure 5.7
New homes constructed per 1,000 residents in 2018 vs. percent of household incom…
Figure 5.8
Log population vs. share of taxes revenues collected by central government in 20…
Figure 5.9
Average government gross fixed capital investment as a percentage of GDP among G…
Figure 5.10
Share of government investment conducted by central government in 2017 by countr…
Figure 5.11
Average % of firms reporting issue as major constraint to investment among EU co…
Figure 5.12
Share of firms reporting issue as top constraint in Cyprus, Czech Republic, Esto…
Figure 5.13
Employment rate among working-age population by country, 2019
Figure 5.14
Government spending as a share of GDP in 2018 vs. intergenerational income elast…
Figure 5.15
Average % of firms reporting issue as major constraint to investment among EU co…
Figure 5.16
2017 tax revenues as a percent of GDP by category among OECD members, France hig…
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Dedication
Title Page
Copyright
Foreword
Acknowledgments
Begin Reading
Conclusion: Scripting a Path Forward
References
Index
End User License Agreement
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Dedication
Dedicated toDr. Taeko (Hoshi) Summerville and Jeanine McMurtrie
Reclaiming Populism
How Economic Fairness Can Win Back Disenchanted Voters
Eric Protzer
Paul Summerville
polity
Copyright © Eric Protzer and Paul Summerville 2022
The right of Eric Protzer and Paul Summerville to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2022 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press101 Station LandingSuite 300Medford, MA 02155, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4813-2
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataNames: Protzer, Eric, author. | Summerville, Paul, author.Title: Reclaiming populism : how economic fairness can win back disenchanted voters / Eric Protzer, Paul Summerville.Description: Cambridge ; Medford, MA : Polity, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “Why unfairness, not inequality, is driving the populist upsurge, and what to do about it”-- Provided by publisher.Identifiers: LCCN 2021016430 (print) | LCCN 2021016431 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509548118 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509548125 (paperback) | ISBN 9781509548132 (epub) | ISBN 9781509550364 (pdf)Subjects: LCSH: Income distribution--Political aspects--United States. | Populism--United States. | United States--Economic conditions--21st century. | United States--Politics and government--2009-2017. | United States--Politics and government--2017-Classification: LCC HC106.84 .P77 2021 (print) | LCC HC106.84 (ebook) | DDC 320.56/620973--dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021016430LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021016431
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Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
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Foreword
Enthusiasm for illiberal populist ideas is at fever pitch in nations like the United States and the United Kingdom, and democracy is under threat in a host of other developed countries. Never has it been more important for liberal thinkers from the political mainstream to correctly diagnose what drives this generational challenge and devise corresponding policy prescriptions. With that goal in mind, Reclaiming Populism argues that vulnerability to the most severe forms of populism observed in the rich world today can be explained by economic unfairness, where citizens do not get the opportunities and outcomes they believe they deserve. The book then offers concrete direction on how policymakers can identify and rectify sources of economic unfairness in their respective countries, whether they wish to guard against illiberal politics or simply make the lives of their citizens more just.
Crucially, our thesis strongly departs from conventional economic explanations for contemporary rich-world populism. The typical arguments suggest that economic loss or income inequality help to explain the populist backlash. We contend instead that populism is a consequence of more sophisticated forms of economic injustice. Reclaiming Populism holds that it matters both why individual citizens get the economic outcomes they do and whether those outcomes are fairly deserved. From this perspective, an economy is fair when each citizen has a real chance at success and when rewards are approximately meritocratic. We make this case not only by referencing existing academic research, but also by showing that low social mobility – an important type of economic unfairness, in which citizens’ earnings are deeply influenced by how wealthy their parents were – correlates with indicators of mass support for populism in a variety of settings.
Reclaiming Populism is divided into five chapters. The book exposes the most prominent theories for populism as insufficient or plainly wrong; details why biological and cultural evolution has led citizens across the developed world to especially value fairness; shows how economic unfairness is the necessary condition for contemporary populism in high-income countries; presents a framework of equal opportunity and fair unequal outcomes as policy inputs to economic fairness; and, finally, proposes a diagnostic process to identify binding constraints to economic fairness based on methodology originally developed by Harvard University’s Growth Lab.
We received vital help and feedback from many colleagues and friends. We want to thank three in particular. Ron Rogowski gave especially helpful insight on our quantitative work linking social mobility to populism, and on the broad organization of the book’s ideas. Rod Tiffen suggested that we specify fair unequal outcomes as a category of vital policy inputs in order to differentiate them from inequality which arises from cheating or rent seeking, an innovation that permits a cleaner discussion of the idea of fairness. Our editor George Owers from Polity suggested, among other important things, that our original working title “Defeating Populism” was imprecise because we argue that populism stems from genuine grievances over economic unfairness. We consequently shifted the book’s framing toward the current title, Reclaiming Populism.
Our book has been written on the shoulders of many others alive and dead. We are most grateful for their assistance, and are, of course, responsible for any errors or omissions.
Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank the Harvard Growth Lab and the Peter B. Gustavson School of Business for their support.
Many people had a significant impact on this book’s ideas from their most incipient stages. We thank Ron Rogowski, Rod Tiffen, Ricardo Hausmann, David Autor, Elisabeth Reynolds, Jeffry Frieden, Robert Lawrence, Gustave Kenedi, Shane Rimmer, Joel Smith, William Irvine, Barry Olshen, Norman Penner, Jeff Brinen, Ze’ev Mankowitz, Michiel Horn, John Holmes, Jim Laxer, Larry Pratt, David Dewitt, Paul Evans, Johanna Falk, Robert Orr, Kenneth S. Courtis, Kumon Shumpei, Michael Donnelly, Charlie McMillian, John Donald, William MacDonald, Rick Wolfe, Wendy Dobson, Robin Sears, Andrew Shipley, John Soukas, David Butler, Chuck Winograd, Mark Faircloth, Mark Redmond, John Hart, David Wolf, Greg Guichon, Steve Paikin, Anne Baumann, Marcus Fedder, John Drake, Carole James, Evan Leeson, David Merner, David Schneider, Nevin Thompson, Bob Rae, Andrew McLeod, Robert Houdet, Jeff Kucharski, Michael Summerville, Tracy Summerville, and Chongfan Tai.
1The Inequality Delusion and Other Scapegoats for Populism
The response of my 14-year-old students – half of whom qualify for free school meals – to the Veblen suite [London’s most expensive hotel room] was interesting. Almost none saw anything wrong in a society where such inequality persists, or anything wrong in the heads of those who wish to spend their money in this way. The consensus was that anyone who made vast sums of money should have vastly expensive things to spend it on. “If I was Jeff Bezos,” said one boy who has every intention of becoming him one day, “I would definitely go there.” The only shame from the students’ point of view was that their teacher didn’t get to try it out.
Lucy Kellaway, “My Night as an Oligarch,” Financial Times (May 2019)
Recent events have given populism a poor reputation. Many countries, like Italy, Greece, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia, are now caught up in populist eruptions that have moved them away in varying degrees from pluralist democracy, and in some cases, near authoritarian rule. More troubling is the fact that this list also includes countries that have served the world as important beacons of liberal democracy, like the United States, the United Kingdom, and France. The populist politicians who have captured and shaped this upheaval claim that society is rigged for elites, by elites. They correspondingly advocate various illiberal “solutions.” Free and fair elections, the rule of law, freedom of religion, press freedom, free speech, free trade, nondiscriminatory immigration, nonpartisan state bureaucracy, and international institutions have all become targets of the contemporary populist onslaught.
In response, scores of commentators, academics, political leaders, policymakers, and citizens are not just concerned, but horrified. Populism, in this view, is an aberration that has no place in liberal democracy and must simply be vanquished. Yet it is important to remember that populism has not always been an obviously bad thing. The term “populism” was first used to describe the People’s Party in late nineteenth-century America, which was not only anti-trade and anti-immigration but also, critically, anti-monopoly and anti-corruption. The People’s Party fused with the Democratic Party in 1896, and a number of its core proposals ultimately became seminal American economic policy under the New Deal: ending the gold standard, instituting progressive taxation, and regulating anti-competitive business practices. However uncomfortable it may be to accept, the fact is that populist voters have historically protested key societal injustices and often paved the way for much-needed reform.
Liberal democracy is indeed in peril today, but we will argue that this is not because the populist electorate is somehow villainous. Instead, contemporary developed-world populism stems from voters who think that the rules of society are unfairly rigged. These disenchanted citizens have reason to believe that opportunity is not equal, that economic rewards do not match contributions, and that the much-cherished rules of meritocracy are broken. The burden to address this problem in a way that preserves freedom and the rule of law rests, of course, with mainstream politicians. Unfortunately, these leaders have largely met populist grievances with misapprehension and condescension instead of empathy – leaving illiberal actors to fill the vacuum. This disconnect is especially tragic because, properly diagnosed and prescribed, addressing the problem of economic unfairness could turn the illiberal shift now underway into something positive.
Crucially, the problem of economic unfairness as discussed herein is very different from, and in important respects incompatible with, typical ideas about how economic inequality or economic losses could lead to political disruption. In fact, Reclaiming Populism contends that modern economic thought has taken a serious wrong turn by analyzing economic injustice almost wholly in such rudimentary terms. In reality, humans do not care simply about whether economic losses, gains, and inequalities occur, but about the underlying reasons why they occur – and, accordingly, whether those outcomes are fairly deserved by each individual. In this view, it is fundamentally absurd to attempt to explain populism in terms of a society’s overall economic inequality, because that calculation does not consider whether the inequality in question results fairly or unfairly from differences between citizens.
The chapters that follow will answer a number of important questions about populism and economic fairness. How should we understand the contemporary populist complaint of unfairness? How has that unfairness led to populism? Why have mainstream political parties failed to credibly tackle the problem of unfairness, leaving it to the radical fringe? What policy prescriptions can be used to address unfairness, and which ones are relevant in any particular country? Is there a script that political leaders who value pluralism can follow to win back disenchanted voters?
This task will be accomplished in three main ways. First, with reference to established academic research. There are good reasons to doubt many of the major extant theories of populism, for instance, and there is much evidence that biological and cultural evolution have led citizens of modern high-income societies to care profoundly about fairness. Second, through original regression analysis. We will show that low social mobility (an important type of economic unfairness, where citizens’ economic success is strongly influenced by how wealthy their parents were) consistently correlates with measures of populism across the developed world. While virtually no country is completely free from any populist influence, relatively worse social mobility is systematically associated with relatively higher support for populism. In contrast, many of the “scapegoats” for populism exhibit no such systematic correlation. Third, through a policyoriented diagnostic framework based on methodology developed by Harvard University’s Growth Lab. We will organize key policy inputs to economic fairness under the twin virtues of equal opportunity and fair unequal outcomes; and then explain, with examples, how a policymaker can identify and rectify the binding constraints to economic unfairness in their particular country.
To begin, this chapter critically examines the main existing theories for populism other than economic unfairness. It will show that many are attractive at first glance, but that under scrutiny none can fully explain the populist wave and several are not very credible at all. Together, however, the most useful and robust insights point toward another hypothesis, which the remainder of the book investigates in detail: economic unfairness.
What Makes a Good Theory for Populism?
Prominent theories for populism include immigration, social media, generational value differences, income inequality, international trade shocks, and the Global Financial Crisis (GFC). There are compelling anecdotal arguments for each, but in order to systematically understand which ideas are most useful to explain populism we need a framework to assess them. Three criteria are arguably important. First, hypotheses for populism must be theoretically plausible. One should be able to imagine why the supposed root cause is problematic, and how it could lead to populism specifically. Second, theories ought to match the geography of developed-world populism. While illiberal populism is threatening, it is conspicuously not all-encompassing across every rich country. Third, the timeline of the theory should match that of the contemporary populist wave from its early bloom to full flowering. A useful theory must, in sum, address the why, the where, and the when of populism.
Applying the first of these criteria requires some comprehension of the key characteristics of populism. While there is no universally accepted definition of populism, several good ones exist and they generally have common features. Müller (2016) describes populism as a form of political expression that sets a supposedly unified people against elites who are somehow corrupt or morally inferior. Populist leaders also claim exclusive representation of the “true people,” to the point that opposing candidates are inherently illegitimate. Thus populism, to Müller’s mind, is an essentially anti-elite and anti-pluralist type of identity politics. Norris and Inglehart (2019) emphasize the anti-elite and identitarian aspects of populism, but also contend that populism is a specifically authoritarian style of governance. Eichengreen (2018) largely agrees with Norris and Inglehart’s definition.
Guriev and Papaioannou (2020) review the relevant academic literature, and observe that most modern definitions characterize populism as anti-elite and anti-pluralist. Different authors then variously argue for additional qualities such as authoritarianism, shorttermism, and nativism. For our purposes, we will rely on the two essential qualities of anti-elitism and anti-pluralism, which capture the main thrust of today’s populist politics. Anti-elitism, for one, depicts society as an unlevel playing field rigged against the “real” people to benefit an immoral elite. This does not mean that populism is spiteful about every powerful individual, as Donald Trump overwhelmingly proved. Populism is specifically suspicious of those elites who are perceived to get ahead by cheating others. In part this leads to the populist view that good leadership is down to personal identity – that it’s important to have the right kinds of elites in power, who purportedly ally themselves with the “true” people.
This nuance informs the second key characteristic of populism: anti-pluralism, or the claim that all opponents of the populist leadership are inherently illegitimate. If good leadership is thought to be a function of personal identity rather than institutional constraints or democratic legitimacy, populist voters may insist that their candidate alone is qualified to govern. The consequences of anti-pluralism can range from conspiratorial claims of election-rigging to calls to incarcerate political opponents.
These two characteristics of populism, anti-elitism and anti-pluralism, also help establish what it is not. First, populism is not characterized by a left- or right-wing political orientation. Although right-wing populists such as Trump (in the US) and Marine Le Pen (in France) may be somewhat more common in the developed world today, there are also left-wing populist movements like Greece’s Syriza that are just as anti-elite and anti-pluralist. Left- and right-wing populists simply offer different policy prescriptions to address similar underlying anger. Second, populism is not automatically interchangeable with political extremism of any sort. Twentieth-century fascism was frequently pro-elite, for instance, and Jeremy Corbyn’s platform for the 2019 UK general election was largely thought to be hard left but certainly not anti-pluralist.
An important but overlooked nuance of theories for why populism occurs is whether it results from changes in political demand or supply. The bulk of the academic and popular discussion around populism concentrates on demand-side factors, or causes which have led to changes in voter preferences. But it is also conceivable that there could be supply-side effects, where political parties change their platforms in response to some event regardless of voter preferences. For example, one could theorize that political parties could deliberately take more extreme cultural positions after an unexpected migration inflow to inflame and excite the electorate. Although this book will primarily concentrate on demand-side theories, it is important to bear in mind the possibility of this alternative channel.
Next let us examine where the populist wave has most forcefully taken root. The focus of our concern is on high-income countries with advanced democratic institutions. To be sure, there are populists in the developing world, for example Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines. But this pattern is not especially surprising. Many developing countries have long histories of fragile democracy and troubled demagoguery. What is so unsettling about the current wave of populism is that it is even affecting countries that were long considered to be core examples of liberal pluralist democracy.
It is very important to understand that populism, insofar as it occurs within this particular scope, is not a binary outcome. It differs substantially by degree, and there is a crucial difference between countries where populism explodes the status quo and those that keep support for populism within manageable levels. On the one hand, Brexit and the populist forces behind it have thoroughly upended British politics and institutions, and will undoubtedly be remembered as a major disruption to its democracy. The Trump phenomenon has likewise massively altered American politics, economic policy, international relations, and more. In contrast, the Netherlands has experienced non-negligible electoral support for populist parties like the Party for Freedom, but this has not led to the same level of upheaval. Some of that electoral success, in fact, undoubtedly derives from the Netherlands’ proportional representation election system, which gives even small political groups a voice in parliament. Several Nordic countries have also experienced material levels of populism, especially in the wake of the 2015 European migrant crisis; but, as Chapter 3 will discuss, this arguably led to a reassessment of multiculturalism rather than to any substantial abandonment of the liberal democratic status quo. Support for populism is tangible in these latter cases, but it has neither imperiled democracy nor seriously disrupted institutions.
The nonbinary nature of populism makes it difficult to analyze through qualitative, anecdotal comparisons alone. How can you appropriately judge the strength of populism in a way that is valid across different settings? When is a chosen comparator either valid or invalid vis-à-vis another? Because of issues like these, this book will chiefly approach the question of where populism has taken hold, and to what extent, through quantitative analysis. Even more specifically, we set out to exclusively examine quantifiable measures of populism that are directly comparable across each comparator, and eschew measures which may have different interpretations in different settings. In Protzer (2019), a technical companion to this book that is available online, we accordingly perform multiple regression analysis to investigate correlates of the geography of populism in four settings.
First, we examine support for Trump in the 2016 and 2020 US presidential elections. We specifically look at the county-level vote swing in the Republican presidential vote share from 2012 to the year in question; Trump was an insurgent within his own party, and thus support for populism cannot be readily inferred from the raw Republican vote share. This is a standard approach in the academic literature, used, for example, by Broz et al. (2019).
Second, we examine the department-level vote share for Le Pen in the second round of the 2017 French presidential election. In contrast to Trump, Le Pen was not an insurgent in her own party and thus the raw vote share rather than the vote swing best reflects populist voting preferences.
Third, we analyze the national vote share for populist parties in the 2019 European Parliament election. We use the PopuList classification of populist European parties from Rooduijn et al. (2019) to tabulate each country’s vote share for populist and far-right parties (the latter of which we use to cast a wider net that includes, for example, Greece’s Golden Dawn), and, in a robustness check, we examine purely populist parties. Although European Parliament elections are stereotypically considered unimportant by European Union (EU) citizens, the 2019 election had an unprecedentedly high turnout rate of 51 percent – comparable to levels in American presidential elections. European Parliament elections are also advantageous to consider because they are perhaps the only valid example of cross-national elections where citizens of different countries vote under the same rules.
Fourth, we consider the World Gallup Poll’s surveyed confidence in national government across different developed countries (averaged for each country over 2015 to 2019 to capture the key years in the eruption of modern populism) as a proxy for populist political discontent with the status quo. This measure has previously been used by Aksoy et al. (2018) in the context of international support for populism. Although it is an indirect proxy, its uniformity makes for valid cross-national comparisons.
For the reasons touched on above, we refrain from simply comparing electoral results from separate elections in our quantitative analysis. Vote shares cannot readily be compared across different electoral systems, and thus will not yield valid indicators of relative support for populism. For instance, the first-past-the-post system used in countries that follow the Westminster Model strongly discourages voting for small parties, whereas proportional representation tends not to penalize voting for political parties based on size.
In its totality, the quantitative analysis considers at various points countries that either belong to the EU or have GDP per capita levels of at least $25,000. Perfect data coverage for all our variables of interest (especially social mobility) is never fully available, and we discard severe outliers as needed, but in each setting we manage to examine a consistent and substantial portion of potentially relevant comparators. In the US, we consider 2,750 out of 3,143 counties; in France, we consider 39 of the largest metropolitan departments out of 96, which together cover more than 60 percent of the French population; in the EU, we consider 19 of 28 of its 2019 members, which in general are its largest and wealthiest;1 and in the context of national confidence in government from 2015 to 2019, we consider 24 developed countries.2 In robustness checks for the last two settings we selectively examine wealthier countries to ensure our results are not sensitive to these definitions of what it means to be “developed.” Importantly, the international analyses allow us to examine not just classically Western but also East European countries, including Croatia, the Czech Republic, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia, in addition to Japan.
Although this book relies on the quantitative correlations established in Protzer (2019), it complements them with qualitative discussion. As noted, such comparisons are not as precise as their quantitative counterparts. But they are essential to flesh out the theoretical reasons why certain countries have experienced pronounced support for illiberal populism. Why, for instance, has the US been so severely disrupted by Trump (a deep threat still, given Joe Biden’s razor-thin 2020 victory and Trump’s hold over the Republican Party) when populism has not gathered steam in Australia, Canada, or New Zealand? When most European countries have managed to keep the thrust of populism at manageable levels, why has the UK been so thoroughly derailed by the populist forces behind Brexit? Why did a third of the French citizenry back Le Pen in both presidential and EU Parliament elections, and more than 70 percent claim to support the populist, massively disruptive Gilets Jaunes (Yellow Vests) movement? Why is Italian politics dominated by the populist Northern League and Five-Star Movement, which have at various points advocated for Italy’s exit from the EU, northern Italy’s secession from the rest of the country, and the implementation of direct democracy?
Finally, we need to trace out the timeline of the current populist wave, the when. In particular, it is important to overcome a common misperception that populism has been a “bolt from the blue” – that a series of political earthquakes simply started appearing from roughly 2015 onwards. It’s vital to understand that such severe discontent cannot easily be flipped on like a light switch, but more plausibly builds up over a considerable period of time.
