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Comment by LaundroMat | Hacker News Reader

I don't have access to the article, but do they define "populism" in it?

The same Wikipedia article you linked to also says

> In popular discourse—where the term has often been used pejoratively—it has sometimes been used synonymously with demagogy, to describe politicians who present overly simplistic answers to complex questions in a highly emotional manner, or with political opportunism, to characterise politicians who seek to please voters without rational consideration as to the best course of action.

With this definition, it's not about getting people what they want.

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I think that's closer to the definition I adhere to as well.

So I think there are two "dirty" words in this abstract, 'populism' and 'economy', both of which assume meanings as the interpreter pleases, hence my distate at the prima facie "woollyness" of the research.

They define what they mean by populism and economy is effectively GDP, if I read it right. Doesn't seem that wooly to me in the paper itself.

A (earlier) version of the paper seems to be here: https://www.ifw-kiel.de/fileadmin/Dateiverwaltung/IfW-Public...

Thanks for digging that up!

Ah, the paper itself is much better than I'd expected

It's also unwieldy - looks more like a PhD thesis.

(bloody shame we can't just have an internet that delivers the information concerned rather than having to wait for someone to sleuth down the actual dirt)

They do indeed define "populism" in section 2.1, rather thoroughly, as political "splitting" (I borrow a psych term here).

It's actually filled with rather good analogies.

A keyword they use a lot is "self-destruct". And yes, giving people "what they want" (rather than "what we all need together") is unsustainable short-termism.

Haven't time to read the full 190 pages, but my scepticism about the solidity of the key concepts remains. For example in the methodology:

"For each of the 1,458 leaders in our sample, we assign the value of 1 if the leader is a populist, and 0 if the leader is not a populist (non-populist)."

It's a critique of splitting that is itself predicated on a binary partition.

Do they control for the fact that populists will have more electoral success during financial crises and such?

AEA is the economic establishment so hardly the people I would trust to fairly judge those that challenge the status quo.

Is that even true on populist and financial crises?

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3289741

Yes. It appears that Manuel Funke, Moritz Schularick and Christoph Trebesch may not have been as conscientious as they could have been about reviewing prior literature.

Well, for starters this is newer than their initial work. Also, isn't this looking at the issue the other way around and at a single example?

Edit: post changed the paper linked, but generally my point stands.

This paper was just released.

Yes and no. This is work a few years old. And as I said, the paper you cite is looking at the situation from the other end, i.e., economic effects on governments.

I'd be curious about what the data shows.

I would describe it as the "conventional wisdom" account of how populism functions e.g. the Great Depression is described as a necessary context for Hitler's popularism to be effective i.e. economic grievance fuels anti-establishment / anti-elite narratives. You get the Occupy Wallstreet movement after a crash/recession, not during a boom.

Yes, it would indeed be interesting to see a proper analysis on timing of populism vs the economy.

I'm a populist and read and follow quite a few populist intellectuals.

My definition of populism is a political doctrine whose goal is to distribute power and decision making towards the people.

It differs from socialism whose focus is the distribution of wealth, traditionally done through a centralized decision making process.

It also differs from conservatism where an elite enforces strong moral rules and traditionally defers to big private institutions.

Populism is firmly opposed to demagogy. Demagogy is the practice of charismatic leaders to make fantastic promises if they'll be given more power. They do not empower the people, they empower themselves.

Yeah someone else linked it. It was fairly meaningless:

According to today’s workhorse definition, populism is defined as a political style centered on the supposed struggle of “people vs. the establishment” (Mudde 2004). Populists place the narrative of “people vs. elites” at the center of their political agenda and then claim to be the sole representative of “the people.” This definition has become increasingly dominant, and is now also widely used by economists (see Section 2, and the recent survey paper by Guriev and Papaioannou, 2020). Populist leaders claim to represent the “true, common people” against the dishonest “elites,” thus separating society into two seemingly homogeneous and antagonistic groups.

That's possibly vaguer than it could be but it doesn't seem meaningless.

I'd take FAR issue more with the fact that the authors appear to have mixed up correlation and causation. e.g. the fact that, say, international conflict causes a bad economy and populism (the "war is bad" theory) appears to have flown completely under the radars of Manuel Funke, Moritz Schularick and Christoph Trebesch.

Also the fact that GDP is well known to be a shitty measure of well being for the average person. Nonetheless, it is a pretty good measure of how things are going for that particular country's oligarchy (the targets of those populists). There is a strong causal relationship between using GDP as a measure and getting published in the AEA, though.

Well, it's vague, but not that meaningless. For one, it refutes the notion that populists' actions are actually what the people want, let alone benefit the people, because populists only claim to act against the elites and for the common people. This means grandparent's reading of the paper that what the people want does not benefit them (at least not economically), because populists only claim to act in the interest of the people.

As a side-note, it's interesting to see that their data shows that populists generally stay in power twice as long as none-populists and they are often removed from office in "non-regular ways".

Why do you consider it meaningless (section 2 goes a bit deeper)? For example, not every politician claims to be the sole representative of the people vs an elite.

That seems to fall neatly into the previous definition without saying the words "demagogue", "opportunism", and "simplistic". It's more of a practical characterization than a definition.

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