The Financial Drivers of Populism in Europe

This Element aims to contribute to the understanding of the evolution of populist attitudes and preferences among voters as well as the evolution of the supply of parties and party platforms in Europe, linking various novel insights on populism to the comparative politics literature on the transformation of political parties. Most importantly, we focus on the role of the financial crisis, since it has been the watershed of populism in Europe, and we need to understand why. We provide a simple theory that connects in a parsimonious way the effects of a crisis on voters’ preferences, on turnout, and on incentives to enter the electoral race by different parties. Moreover, the theory allows to make and then test hypotheses on the interaction effects between changes on the demand side and on the supply side of politics.