FES International Research Seminar Series with Associate Professor Helios Herrera, University of Warwick, UK

Our next speaker in the FES International Research Seminar Series is Helios Herrera, who is an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Warwick. Helios has primary research interests in the fields of political economy, applied micro theory and experimental economics. He published in many leading journals such as Restud, EJ, JPubE, JIE, TE and GEB. 

Speaker: Helios Herrera, University of Warwick

Title: Populism: Demand and Supply

The abstract: We define as “populist” a party that champions short-term protection policies while hiding their long-term costs by using anti-elite rhetoric to manipulate beliefs. Our framework rationalizes this definition and generates significant implications for people’s support for populist platforms (the demand side), for the timing of the appearance of populist parties and their chosen orientation (the supply side) and also for the response of non-populist parties to the success of the populists (an equilibrium market reaction). Using individual data on voting in European countries, we show that key features of the demand for populism as well as its supply heavily depend on turnout incentives, previously neglected in the populism literature. Once turnout effects are taken into account, economic insecurity drives consensus to populist policies directly as well as through indirect negative effects on trust and attitudes towards immigrants. On the supply side, populist parties are more likely to emerge and prosper when countries are faced with a systemic crisis of economic security that incumbent parties (whether left-leaning, relying on government, or right-leaning, relying on markets) find hard to address, disappointing voters who lose faith in them and abstain. The orientation choice of populist parties, i.e., whether they arise on left or right of the political spectrum, is determined by the availability of political space. The typical non-populist policy response is to reduce the distance of their platform from that of new populist entrants, amplifying the aggregate supply of populist policies.

Date: April 25, 2018

Time: 13:40-15:00

Venue: Shabolovka campus, room 3211

FES Seminars webpage: https://economics.hse.ru/en/seminars/ 

For external participants: to order the pass, please contact dmalbakhova@hse.ru