Do Incompetent Politicians Breed Populist Voters? Evidence from Italian Municipalities

Federico Boffa, Vincenzo Mollisi and Giacomo Ponzetto

No 17997, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

Abstract: Poor performance by the established political class can drive voters towards anti-establishment outsiders. Is the ineffectiveness of incumbent politicians an important driver of the recent rise of populist parties? We provide an empirical test exploiting a sharp discontinuity in the wage of local politicians as a function of population in Italian municipalities. We find that the more skilled local politicians and more effective local government in municipalities above the threshold cause a significant drop in voter support for the populist Five-Star Movement in regional and national elections. Support for incumbent governing parties increases instead.

Keywords: Populism; Government efficiency; Quality of politicians; Political agency (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 D73 H70 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023-03
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP17997 (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:
Working Paper: Do Incompetent Politicians Breed Populist Voters? Evidence from Italian Municipalities (2024)
Working Paper: Do Incompetent Politicians Breed Populist Voters? Evidence from Italian Municipalities (2023)
Working Paper: Do incompetent politicians breed populist voters? Evidence from Italian municipalities (2023)
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:17997

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP17997

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 ().