The Role of Economic Uncertainty in Rising Populism in the EU

Giray Gözgör

No 8499, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: This paper examines the impact of economic uncertainty shocks on the populist voting behavior in the panel dataset of 24 European Union (EU) countries for the period from 1980 to 2020. In so doing, we focus on the shares of total populism, right-wing populism, and left-wing populism votes as well as a new indicator of economic uncertainty, so-called, the “World Uncertainty Index (WUI).” Using the fixed-effects, bias-corrected least-squares dummy variable (LSDVC), and Instrumental Variables (IV) estimations, we show that a higher level of the WUI is positively related to total populism and right-wing populist voting behavior. The baseline results remain consistent when we deal with potential issues of endogeneity, to address omitted variable bias, and to exclude the outliers.

Keywords: populist attitudes in the European Union; voting behaviour; right-wing populism; left-wing populism; uncertainty shocks; economic policy uncertainty (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C33 D72 D81 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-eec, nep-mac and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ceswps:_8499

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