Emergence of the unified right- and left-wing populism—When radical societal changes become more important than ideology

Boris Podobnik, Ivona Skreblin Kirbis, Maja Koprcina and H.E. Stanley

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 2019, vol. 517, issue C, 459-474

Abstract: If among humans a single concern starts to dominate over all others, a society may start approaching a tipping point, where radical political, economic and societal changes are likely to occur. It is easy to imagine that a societal tipping point when two concerns such as economic and immigrant substantially dominate over all others can be even faster to reach than if just one concern prevails separately. Here, for a group of EEA countries comprising of old democracies and ex-socialist countries we analyse the total populist votes as the sum of right-wing (RW) and left-wing (LW) populist votes within the European Economic Area (EEA) since both populism share the negative stance towards globalization, NATO, and the EU. We find a substantial heterogeneity between old democracies and ex-socialist countries. For the old democracies we find that the percentage of the total populist votes in a given country depends on the percentage of immigrants in this country’s population and the total immigration inflow into the entire EEA. We report a negative dependence between the long-term economic growth and the total populism. For both ex-socialist countries and old democracies we demonstrate that the weaker the immigrants are integrated in a society, the stronger the total populism. However, compared to populism in old democracies, populism in ex-socialist countries is more sensitive to both (i) the rate of immigrant’s integration and (ii) the immigrants’ fraction in total population.

Keywords: Tipping point; Violence; Populism; Emerging phenomena; Globalization (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S037843711831402X
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only. Journal offers the option of making the article available online on Science direct for a fee of $3,000

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:phsmap:v:517:y:2019:i:c:p:459-474

DOI: 10.1016/j.physa.2018.10.054

Access Statistics for this article

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications is currently edited by K. A. Dawson, J. O. Indekeu, H.E. Stanley and C. Tsallis

More articles in Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().