November 15, 2017
Brian Rathbun (University of Southern California)
[With Evgeniia Iakhnis (USC) and Kathleen Powers (Dartmouth)]
Conventional wisdom has a ready explanation for populism’s success: the declining economic fortunes of the working class. As the story goes, the “losers of globalization: take out their frustrations on the political establishment. Populism is the cry of the financially forgotten. However, this argument has not been systematically tested and also neglects a more likely alternative: that populism— the goodness of ordinary people, hostility to self-serving elites, and support for direct democracy — is strongly predicted by a belief that the rich are doing very well financially compared to the past, while the working class and middle class are in decline. Personal economic circumstances matter little in explaining populism per se, measured separate from other substantive concerns like immigration with which it is often conflated.