2024/02/13 by L. Guiso, Luigi Guiso, Helios Herrera +5 · 109 citations
Social Sciences · #Demographic economics #Economic policy #Economics #Electoral Systems and Political Participation #Media Influence and Politics #Political science #Politics #Populism #Populism, Right-Wing Movements #Survey data collection #Turnout #Voting
paper · pdf · doi:10.1111/ecca.12513
published in Economica 91(362), 588-620 (Wiley)
openalex publication_date 2024/02/13 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
We document the spiral of populism in Europe and the direct and indirect role of economic insecurity shocks. Using survey data on individual voting, we make two contributions to the literature. (i) Economic insecurity shocks have a significant impact on the populist vote share, directly as demand for protection, and indirectly through the induced changes in trust and attitudes. (ii) A key consequence of increased economic insecurity is a drop in turnout. The impact of this largely neglected turnout effect is substantial: conditional on voting, when economic insecurity increases, almost 40% of the induced change in the vote for a populist party comes from the turnout channel.