Populist backlash against globalization: A meta-analysis of the causal evidence
cambridge.org
cambridge.org
> The literature on populism is divided on whether economic factors are significant and robust causes of populism. To clarify this, we performed the first systematic review and meta-analysis of the evidence of a causal association between economic insecurity and populism. We combined database searches with searching the citations of eligible studies and recently published reviews. We identified and reviewed thirty-six studies and presented a concise narrative summary and numerical synthesis of the key findings. Although we found significant heterogeneity in several dimensions, all studies reported a significant causal association. A recurrent magnitude was that economic insecurity explained around one-third of recent surges in populism. We tested for publication bias by conducting a funnel-plot asymmetry test and a density discontinuity test of the distribution of t-statistics. We found significant evidence of publication bias; however, the causal association between economic insecurity and populism remains significant after controlling for it.
At the risk of dating myself...my memory* is that the #1 lesson of WWII in Europe was that grim economic insecurity ==>> really nasty governments ==>> lots of war and other evil-at-scale.
True?
*not direct memory, admittedly
my personal view (pinko commie in my birth country but centre-right in my adoptive) is that "societies without grim economic insecurity" are public goods and hence governments should provide them.
The question is how to do that.
Some people argue that it's by providing competitive free markets. And that's often true, when the markets are actually competitive and free, but you can also have concentrated markets where the incumbents have captured the regulators, and that doesn't work.
Some argue that transfer payments can reduce inequality, and that can also be true (e.g. UBI), but then many of the implementations try to provide specific services or limit what you can buy with them instead of providing fungible currency. Especially when those services are provided by a captured industry, and then they just end up as a subsidy for that industry, which can absorb the subsidies by raising prices.
The problem is, when you have one of the degenerate situations as the status quo, people know that something is wrong and start clamoring for change without inherently understanding what change is necessary. And then it's easy for the exact forces that create problems and increase concentration of wealth to propose solutions that enrich themselves rather than addressing the issues. Which often makes it worse as those "solutions" accumulate, increasing overhead, inefficiency and the complexity that allows it to remain opaque and intractable.
I like our local safety net: it works by subsidising those who need it at tax time, but they acquire all their goods and services on the open market (avoiding distortion).
Q: How do you help poor people?
A: Make them less poor.
The right says lower their taxes, the left says transfer payments, mathematically these are the exact same thing. The only real dispute is whether negative tax rates should be used, and de facto negative rates are the status quo and only a real dispute because attempts to make it explicit get muddied by the factions who don't want the problem solved.
If housing is overpriced, instead of policies that would reduce the market price of housing (and so lower rents for landlords), they propose rent subsidies (so they get the money), or income-gated housing projects (so they can point to something nominally being done while the market price stays high). Which eats up the money that could have been used for transfer payments/tax cuts while it continues to flow to landlords. And likewise for healthcare costs -- instead of addressing the regulatory causes of high prices, the incumbents keep pushing government subsidies, so that the prices (i.e. their profits) can stay high at the expense of the customer/taxpayer.
The fight isn't a question of tax cuts vs. a safety net. The fight is against industry incumbents who want to keep collecting high rents through regulatory capture.
It's also odd to me that they only look at the post-WWII period. Populism was widespread in Europe during the 1800s
If you look at China, most of the rest of Asia, Africa, the Middle East, etc., those things are no-brainers. What requires a label is the new thing. The new idea that embraces freedom of movement of capital, goods, and labor, across national borders. “Populism” is nothing more than the opposition to this new, unlabeled thing.
Also its not like populism is a new term or idea. It goes back to Roman times at least.
It also avoids clashing with populist movements of the past, which dealt with issues other than those that you're describing.
If "traditional mindsets" are pursued by means of populism, it's a populist campaign. If not, it isn't. There is nothing intrinsically populist about anti-globalism, but, like many political agendas, it's easy to create a populist lozenge for it to get it down the polity's throat easily.
The elites vs the people distinction is usually the key characteristic of populism in most definitions. Populist movements also tend to be very anti-establishment. Many vectors for influencing politics don't involve viewing society as this battle between the people and the elites. For example, while it's true that left-wing populists exist in the US I wouldn't describe the current Democratic party as a populist party. It is more of an institutionalist party and they don't tend to attack elites, because most groups traditionally considered part of the elite support the party. This is in contrast to the current Republican party which very much casts itself as being opposed to the elite. All the rhetoric about battling the deep state and draining the swamp is very much populist.
It's funny how this starts to sound more and more like just Marxism.
"According to this religious text, this is how we should be living"
"This will be good for the economy and put more money in your pockets"
"If we don't do this, the terrorists win"
"Think of the children"
While it is easy to get people to support doing what they already want to do, people's opinions can also be swayed.
Further, while populist movements try to present their positions as widely held by the majority, oftentimes that's a bluff. It's usually the case that populists are really just a vocal minority.
A lot of people have lost trust in those experts and people who claim to know what's good for other people. They also don't appreciate being talked down to.
Which is exactly what's happening lately.
As Manchin said: "The bottom line is — will the middle speak up? Does the middle have a voice?"
You didn't hear that Sinema left the party? And Manchin is considering leaving it?
That's what I was referring to when I said they were (or at least felt) excluded from the party.
It was more obvious in 2020 (with a less complicated, more policy-driven primary) that tons of Democratic primary voters don't want Medicare For All, and that the story as Bernie had told it didn't match the reality on the ground of differing policy goals even within the party's constituents.
I disagree that populism is merely a “vector for influencing politics.” That makes it sound like a choice or tactic. But oftentimes, particular issues just happen to break down along lines where people who can be described as “elite” converge on a view, while non-elites tend to adopt a different view.
For example in India, secularism is an idea championed mainly by elites, and largely opposed by the masses. Thats what makes opposition to secularism a populist viewpoint, not Modi’s choice to point that out.
In such a case, what would you call a political movement that embraced the position of the non-elites, not as a political tactic, but because actual support of the "masses" is core to the movement?
Whatever word you would use for that, I think you'd understand Rayiner's post better if you replace populist with the word you prefer.
If (and I'm not sure this is true) the "masses" do oppose globalism (worldwide) and secularism (in India), then there is something inherently ______ about those positions.
This side discussion about the true meaning of the word "populist" only distracts from the more important question of whether the people's desires are actually being suppressed by an elite who control the levers of power and the channels of communication.
To capture the core "popularist" stuff we all agree about, you have to be willing to compromise on that 20%. Populism is defined by not doing that.
Except, in practice, secularism is a policy originating with and being championed mainly by western-educated elites like Nehru.
The fact that some of the proles might agree or disagree with the elites for various reasons (e.g. Indian Muslims) is irrelevant. Indian Muslims don’t believe in secularism either, the elite view on secularism just happens to be beneficial to their situation as a religious minority in the country. That doesn’t change the fact that secularism originates in and is advanced by the elite.
But remember, my point is that “populist” isn’t a good description of this. It’s common in politics to assign lower moral weight to the views of various groups—in India or Bangladesh, ideas of western origin are viewed as suspect. In America, anything supported by “Wall Street” or “the Harvard faculty lounge” is automatically questionable. Playing to that was a staple of ordinary liberal and conservative rhetoric throughout the 20th century. Thats not “populist.”
Occupy Wall Street was certainly a populist movement! Its slogan was a capsule summary of the whole concept of populism. They were the 99%! That they didn't in reality speak for all or even a majority of the 99% was just a detail.
Leaving aside the fact that Indian secularism as practiced by Congress has more in common with the Roman Empire than with western secularism.
Isn't that "new, unlabeled thing" called liberalism?
Or against lower class people with non-US-left-wing leanings
I consider left-wing to mean the same here in the US and abroad. But the presence of actual “leftists” in the US dialogue has decreased dramatically since the bad old Rockefeller/Carnegie days when the working class made some nominal but real progress.
These days in the US, people associate the “left” with identity politics and some vague, ever-decreasing lip service to the oppression of the working class voter. The Democrat Party establishment is staunchly neoliberal, in practice, nearly indistinguishable from the Reagan-era Republican except for some theatrics around gender and race, but they are not leftist by any reasonable measure.
Is that the distinction you are referring to here, or is this another classification of leftism that doesn’t apply to either US contingency?
Not saying Democrats are good or bad, I’m not American. But their brand of leftism is quite different from what I knew as a young person.
I think I remember some on the left calling when Bernie Sanders and Barack Obama "populists", but in a good way. Or maybe the word was "grassroots." Nowadays the word populist has a negative, right-wing connotation for many in that group.
Prior to that, his populist designation was generally framed as a positive: a man who represents and embodies the will of the working class voters.
The establishment Dems and their media allies found him useful to engage their base, but never intended for him to be considered for the actual nomination (as was made clear from the guccifer leak). Very interesting case study and a blueprint for weaponizing a term like “populism” in public discourse.
Not passing judgement to US politics because I am not even there, but this is what I mean.
The US left is traditionally different from other places, though. Today it is completely different from the traditional left. The gap is narrowing due to US influence, though.
It just comes at it from a racial angle, and focusing more on reforming society rather than politics.
"Populism is a range of political stances that emphasize the idea of "the people" and often juxtapose this group with "the elite".[1] It is frequently associated with anti-establishment and anti-political sentiment.[2] The term developed in the late 19th century and has been applied to various politicians, parties and movements since that time, often as a pejorative. Within political science and other social sciences, several different definitions of populism have been employed, with some scholars proposing that the term be rejected altogether.[1][3]"
In the context of WWII-era history, that would fit quite well with both Russian (Stalinist-Leninist) communism ("the people" = "workers" and "the elite" = "nobility & capitalists", roughly) and with German (Nazi) fascism ("the people" = "Aryans" and "the elite" is a mish-mash of socialists, communists, foreigners, Jews, etc.). I don't know about Spain or Italy...but compared to Hitler and Stalin, Franco and Mussolini were rather small fish.
For reference this is what the paper says. Seems like they are taking a broad approach.
> The most conventional approach in the literature identifies populism as a ‘thin-centred ideol- ogy’ that frames the fundamental political cleavage between the elite and the pure people (Mudde 2007). The strengths of this approach are that it is agnostic about the causes and the specific pol- icy content of populism; is broad enough to capture a wide range of the phenomenon, such as left- and right-wing; inclusionary or exclusionary populism; and specific enough to exclude non- populism. Despite the ubiquity of this definition, empirical researchers often include parties influenced by the notion of anti-establishment politics, a term closely related to populism (Barr 2009; Mudde 2007).1 Our aim is not to clarify the concept of populism or decide between different approaches but to capture a wide variety of populist outcomes to reflect the heterogeneity of the literature. Thus, our definition includes the radical left, the radical right, and historical pre- cedents of populism, such as fascism in Europe or Latin-American import-substitution populism, such as Peronism (Guriev and Papaioannou 2022, 11–13).
Populists usually know that their points are fallacies, they're just telling people what they want to hear. But they're doing nothing to solve the problems because really they're not caused by the things they claim.
And of course actually solving problems is not in their interest because they thrive on the anger of people with those problems.
I sort of agree, but it’s also a bit more nuanced than that (and of course more nuanced than what I write here. The world is incredibly complex and we simply never know in history where some event must inevitably have been followed by another or that something else could have happened under slightly different circumstances.)
Hitler at the peak received only about 40% of the votes, but he got in because the autocracy thought he would not become much anyway and still hamper the autocrats opposition. Also not the whole of Europe was having nasty governments. Most were trying to appease the Nazi regime in the hope to avoid further escalation. Churchill, for example, was considered a war monger at that time since he didn’t trust Hitler and wanted to stop the appeasement politics.
Also, in Eastern Europe the first causality arrow should be reversed. Really nasty governments caused economic problems in the Soviet. Not necessarily the other way around.
Since there is currently a lot of capitalism hate going around, I’ll defend why the Soviet was nasty regime. The idea of Karl Marx for example was that capitalism is wage slavery and Marxism-Leninism was the only solution. So what they did in their fight against capitalism is to round up everyone who had too much capital. And to still get money into the goverment, farmers were enslaved. Next, factories received weird metrics and incentives, all centrally managed, which caused factories to often produce low quality products. In some cases the sum of the value of the products going into the factory was higher than the products coming out of the factory.
Soviet regime is a terrible straw man to attack if you want to go against capitalism hate. Try Northern European social democracies instead.
I did not read the full paper yet.
1. Owner class outsources manufacturing operations to cut labor costs (i.e. globalization)
2. Working class loses stable full-time union jobs with good pay and benefits, relegated to part-time minimum wage service jobs with no benefits (from the Chrysler factory to the Arby’s drive-thru)
3. Working class voters support leaders who advocate restoring manufacturing job sector, controlling immigration, regulating the “fat cat” owner class
4. Owner class labels working-class advocates as “populist” and their anti-globalization stances as “nationalist”
So they’ve always been associated in my mind, and many others who grew up in this era.
People may not think of Trump as a working-class advocate (and I would agree). But the truth is that he leveraged the nationalist sentiment tied to the loss of strong employment opportunities for working people, promising to bring manufacturing jobs back and control immigration. On those two fronts, he and Bernie Sanders were more aligned than either were with so-called “corporatist” politicians on either side of the aisle in Washington. Hence both were labeled as populists, along with leaders like AMLO in Mexico and Johnson in the UK
1.) Return the money to the country of origin via a blank check.
2.) Use the money to fund NGOs which help importers like Nike, etc. audit their foreign contract manufacturers for US level environmental regulations and labor regulations. This would reduce foreign countries from enabling arbitrage via lax regulation.
3.) Distribute the money equally to all tax paying US citizens via tax rebate or something.
I think the issue with globalization is that CEOs of multinationals are seen as the primary beneficiaries of environmental/labor arbitrage.
It seems like that using import tariff duties to subsidize more imports would encourage more importation of goods by lowering the final cost to the end user. It would also likely just directly benefit the domestic importers and the foreign exporters. It would also further exacerbate the differential over domestic producers and domestic alternatives and do nothing to prevent economic/labor regulation arbitrage.
Here's an analysis that raises it in the context of the broader problem: https://new-wayland.com/blog/the-uk-energy-crisis-mmt-analys...
Think of what a great country this could be if the only people allowed to vote in national elections were graduates of Ivy League schools. /s
Looking forward to a literature meta-analysis of the economic factors leading to the rise of elitism and kleptocratic oligarchic rule in America - pretty sure the outsourcing of manufacturing and resulting reduction in domestic wages and rise in the billionaire count had a lot to do with it, along with the consolidation of ownership of media outlets (which is getting worse and worse) into a unified propaganda borg supporting the interests of the new American aristocracy.
I won't dismiss all these arguments offhand, because there's a lot of valid things to be said about how poorly informed the average voter is. But it troubles me that a lot of people seem comfortable openly saying that maybe things would be better if Those People (substitute group of your choice) weren't allowed to vote, and I see those kinds of arguments from various points on the political spectrum, even if they are often just angry venting i.e. 'if retirees stopped voting that would fix things, since they want bad things'
A specific example I've seen a lot is that climate change would have been fixed already if only The Olds weren't voting, since they (at least according to this PoV) are actively voting against climate measures since they'll be dead before the sea levels rise. Not going to express an opinion on this one.
These ideas have always been present in the USA and around the world. But specifically in the USA, it's one of the reasons states decide their own voting laws. Nowadays it's relatively small rules like early voting and vote by mail, but historically it allowed the states a lot of power to limit suffrage to their linking. Even after women and PoC were given the right to vote, there was poll taxes and literacy tests in some states [1][2].
[1]: https://www.carnegie.org/our-work/article/voting-rights-time...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_United_Sta...
> a political approach that strives to appeal to ordinary people who feel that their concerns are disregarded by established elite groups. [...] the quality of appealing to or being aimed at ordinary people. (via Google)
In which case, yeah, sounds like an obvious title. Ordinary people dislike globalization.
But I think your read (and your take) are right. It's in the first line. This paper does seem meant to be read assuming "populism" means the manipulation of the masses, and with little regard to wether or not these masses are correct in their concerns.
The usual implication of populism is that you are appealing to the base masses, who lack the knowledge to understand the implications of the policies, and don't understand how they will likely be negatively effected by the more subtle (or even overt) implications.
Of course, that is very convinent to the aristrocrats whose power is threatened, but i still think there is a very clear implication with the word populism, that it implies something akin to letting a child eat as much candy as they want.
cf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Frogs_Who_Desired_a_King
Perhaps you're thinking about anarchism or communism.
That was fun. Not heard that since I was about 5.
Seeing it now, Thomas Hobbes spent about two volumes on the same story and gave us the "social contract". The log is the social safety net. The snake is the ever present threat of violence, "at our own request and for our own good".
They made exalted ridiculous promises to the public as an excuse to acquire more power for themselves. At the other end of the spectrum, Populism seeks to directly distribute power.
Re: Snakes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Farmer_and_the_Viper
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=boss+vs+leader+meme