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.