According to today’s workhorse definition, populism is defined as a political style centered on the supposed struggle of “people vs. the establishment” (Mudde 2004). Populists place the narrative of “people vs. elites” at the center of their political agenda and then claim to be the sole representative of “the people.” This definition has become increasingly dominant, and is now also widely used by economists (see Section 2, and the recent survey paper by Guriev and Papaioannou, 2020). Populist leaders claim to represent the “true, common people” against the dishonest “elites,” thus separating society into two seemingly homogeneous and antagonistic groups.

I'd take FAR issue more with the fact that the authors appear to have mixed up correlation and causation. e.g. the fact that, say, international conflict causes a bad economy and populism (the "war is bad" theory) appears to have flown completely under the radars of Manuel Funke, Moritz Schularick and Christoph Trebesch.

Also the fact that GDP is well known to be a shitty measure of well being for the average person. Nonetheless, it is a pretty good measure of how things are going for that particular country's oligarchy (the targets of those populists). There's also a strong causal relationship between using GDP as a measure and getting published in the AEA.

As a side-note, it's interesting to see that their data shows that populists generally stay in power twice as long as none-populists and they are often removed from office in "non-regular ways".

So I think there are two "dirty" words in this abstract, 'populism' and 'economy', both of which assume meanings as the interpreter pleases, hence my distate at the prima facie "woollyness" of the research.

A (earlier) version of the paper seems to be here: https://www.ifw-kiel.de/fileadmin/Dateiverwaltung/IfW-Public...

Ah, the paper itself is much better than I'd expected

It's also unwieldy - looks more like a PhD thesis.

(bloody shame we can't just have an internet that delivers the information concerned rather than having to wait for someone to sleuth down the actual dirt)

They do indeed define "populism" in section 2.1, rather thoroughly, as political "splitting" (I borrow a psych term here).

It's actually filled with rather good analogies.

A keyword they use a lot is "self-destruct". And yes, giving people "what they want" (rather than "what we all need together") is unsustainable short-termism.

Haven't time to read the full 190 pages, but my scepticism about the solidity of the key concepts remains. For example in the methodology:

"For each of the 1,458 leaders in our sample, we assign the value of 1 if the leader is a populist, and 0 if the leader is not a populist (non-populist)."

It's a critique of splitting that is itself predicated on a binary partition.

AEA is the economic establishment so hardly the people I would trust to fairly judge those that challenge the status quo.

I would describe it as the "conventional wisdom" account of how populism functions e.g. the Great Depression is described as a necessary context for Hitler's popularism to be effective i.e. economic grievance fuels anti-establishment / anti-elite narratives. You get the Occupy Wallstreet movement after a crash/recession, not during a boom.

Yes. It appears that Manuel Funke, Moritz Schularick and Christoph Trebesch may not have been as conscientious as they could have been about reviewing prior literature.

My definition of populism is a political doctrine whose goal is to distribute power and decision making towards the people.

It differs from socialism whose focus is the distribution of wealth, traditionally done through a centralized decision making process.

It also differs from conservatism where an elite enforces strong moral rules and traditionally defers to big private institutions.

Populism is firmly opposed to demagogy. Demagogy is the practice of charismatic leaders to make fantastic promises if they'll be given more power. They do not empower the people, the empower themselves.