Populism from the Cold War to Today: Case Studies and Quantification

This paper compares the use of populism to control the middle class during periods of economic turbulence in the Soviet Union, its satellite states during the end of the Cold War, and Deng’s China. These case studies show anecdotal evidence that falling economic expectations coincide with rising populism.We next survey academic literature describing economic and social drivers of populism as well as the relationship between populism and nationalism. This survey is leveraged to construct a critique of existing attempts to quantify the drivers of populism, examining both supply and demand models. We attempt to add to this discussion by constructing a model tracking macroeconomic variables across time series data available from the Global Populism Database. We find meaningful inverse relationships between measures of supply side populism as measured in national leader speeches and Real and Nominal GDP, and direct relationships to GINI coefficients and Unemployment.Post COVID economic forecasts show a step down in global growth. This step down is forecast to be most extreme in India, the Philippines and Thailand, indicating the highest chance for rising populism. China, by contrast, is forecast to see a strong recovery, which when combined with stable middle class share of income trends suggest that populism / nationalism fears in China may be overblown. We leverage our prior case studies to understand the actors that might seek to use nationalism in these countries, and for what purposes.Incremental research questions include the development of fuller populism data sets allowing for deeper statistical analysis, work to understand if economic drivers impact right wing vs. left wing populism differently, as well as work to ascertain a feedback loop between falling economic conditions driving populism, and the economic efficacy of populist policies (and if these vary with left vs. right wing populist policies).