Can bad economic governance explain the global rise in populism?

Over the last 40 years, populist leaders have been elected, as heads of government, to at least 27 of the world’s 105 electoral democracies. With most of these successful election bids occurring in the last two decades, researchers have had to expeditiously update their intuitions of the political phenomena, retrofitting new concepts and assumptions to a literature once illprepared for non-Latin American manifestations of populist governance. Leveraging this new, generalised understanding of populism, my paper aims to analyse the economic causes of populism through a globalised, rather than regionalist, description of the phenomena. In particular, I attempt to draw parallels between our updated understanding of populism and Brazil’s 2018 election of right-wing populist Jair Bolsonaro. Grounding my analysis in this recent example, I introduce a two-way fixed effects logistic model to estimate the relationship between macroeconomic variables and the successful election of populist heads of government more broadly. This is performed on a panel of 105 countries between the years 1980-2020. Finding limited evidence for a relationship between variables typically associated with populist success – namely, austerity, unemployment and globalisation – my research casts some doubt towards the generalisability of past European and Latin American explanations of the causes of populism. Nonetheless, my model does find a statistically significant relationship between annual GDP growth and the likelihood of a populist being elected, with a 1% increase in GDP reducing the odds of a populist being elected by 12.5%, within the next zero to five years.