The wisdom of demagogues: institutions,corruption and support for authoritarian populists |
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| Authors: | Dalibor Rohac Andreas Johansson Heinö |
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| Affiliation: | Dalibor Rohac (corresponding author) is a Research Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Email: . Sahana Kumar is a Research Associate at the American Enterprise Institute. Email: . Andreas Johansson Hein? is Director of Publishing at Timbro, Stockholm, and a researcher in political science at the University of Gothenburg. Email: . The authors are grateful to Stan Veuger, Ján ?ilinsky, seminar participants at the University of Buckingham, and three anonymous referees for their helpful comments, but are solely responsible for any errors. An empirical Appendix with additional results cited in the text and the data set is available at http://www.aei.org/publication/the‐wisdom‐of‐demagogues‐institutions‐corruption‐and‐support‐for‐authoritarian‐populists/. |
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| Abstract: | This article analyses the drivers of support for authoritarian populist parties in Europe. Such parties claim to represent the interests of ordinary people against greedy and out‐of‐touch elites. Simultaneously, they reject conventional constraints on democratic policymaking. In recent years, such parties on the political left and right have been gaining influence in countries across Europe. Using a panel data set from 1980–2016, we use semiparametric Tobit models with country fixed effects to explain support for authoritarian populists. We find that large vote shares of right‐wing – but not left‐wing – authoritarian populists are associated closely to corruption. Other commonly cited explanations such as unemployment, inequality and immigration perform poorly in predicting support for populist political platforms on the political right. While a full theoretical explanation of the link between corruption and right‐wing populism remains beyond the scope of this article, we suggest that the mechanism involves political trust. Corruption weakens trust in political institutions, which populists exploit. Curbing the rise of right‐wing authoritarian populism in Europe will thus require restoring trust in the integrity of politics. |
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| Keywords: | corruption European politics populism voting |
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