Politsplaining: Populism Breeds Populism

Hans Gersbach and Köhler-Schindler, Laurin

No 13919, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

Abstract: We suggest a particular notion of populism. A populist is a politician who engages in so-called "politsplaining": He explains complex developments and assigns weights to potential causes and potential remedies as it best suits his objectives. We present a simple model of politsplaining in which two candidates compete for office. The income of citizens is affected by two shocks (say automation and globalization), but citizens only observe the joint shock impact and cannot identify which shocks occur. By using politsplaining, a candidate turns into a populist and he can reallocate beliefs about the causes of income shocks in the society. This results in two types of consequences. First, a populist may be able to form a majority for measures that are not only inefficient, but are applied in areas in which the underlying cause is not present. Second, a populist forces the other candidate to become populist, but the two populists are not offsetting each other.

Keywords: Politsplaining; -; populism; -; elections (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 D78 D83 H11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mic
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP13919 (application/pdf)
CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org

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:cpr:ceprdp:13919

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP13919
orders@cepr.org

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers Centre for Economic Policy Research, 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by (repec@cepr.org).