THE rIGHT IS THE lEFT:

[W]e conducted a historical analysis on the ups and downs of populist leadership worldwide over the past 120 years and gauged its political and economic fallout. Three main takeaways emerged.

Populism has a long history and it is serial in nature

The first populist president was Hipólito Yrigoyen, who came to power in the general election of Argentina in 1916. Since then, there have been two main populist peaks: during the Great Depression of the 1930s and in the 2010s. The 1980s was the low point for populists in power. However, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, from 1990 onward, populism returned with a vengeance. The year 2018 marked an all-time high, with 16 countries ruled by whom the political science literature describes as populists (more than 25% of the sample). The most recent increase can mainly be attributed to the emergence of a new populist right in Europe and beyond.  

A particularly interesting insight from our long-run data are the recurring patterns of populism over time.  Specifically, populism at the government level appears to be serial in nature, as it is observable in the same countries again and again. We identified long and repeating spells of populist rule. Having been ruled by a populist in the past is a strong predictor of populist rule in recent years. Interestingly, half of the countries in our sample with recurring populist spells saw switches from left-wing to right-wing populism or vice versa.

Populism is economically costly

To study the  economic consequences of populist politics, we measured  unconditionally averaged performance gaps in annualized real GDP growth based on Blinder and Watson's measurement of a Democrat-Republican president performance gap in U.S. postwar data. We found that countries underperformed by approximately one percentage point per year after a populist came to power, both compared to their country's typical long-run growth rate and the (then-)current global growth rate. This is true for the short term of five years and the long term of 15 years after a populist gains power. 

Tweet   @brothersjudd