Populism is a political logic built on one central claim: society is divided between a virtuous “ordinary people” and a corrupt elite, and politics should express the will of the former against the latter. That framing is flexible enough to appear on the far left and far right, in wealthy democracies and developing nations, and across virtually every continent. Researchers have spent decades debating whether populism is an ideology, a strategy, or a rhetorical style, but its real-world effects on economies, institutions, and public trust are increasingly well documented.
What Drives People Toward Populist Movements
The two most studied explanations are economic distress and cultural backlash, and the evidence suggests both matter. Economic grievances, such as job losses from trade competition, declining wages, and rising inequality, have long been considered the primary fuel. A study revisiting the effect of Chinese import competition on European voting patterns found that increased exposure to import shocks was positively associated with support for left-wing and populist parties, though the relationship with far-right parties specifically was not significant in the preferred analysis.1European Journal of Political Economy. Import shocks and voting behavior in Europe revisited The economic story, in other words, is real but less tidy than headlines often suggest. Trade shocks do not automatically push voters rightward; the direction depends on which parties are available and what narratives they offer.
Cultural explanations focus on a different set of anxieties: a feeling that the society you grew up in is changing too fast, that your group’s status is slipping, or that shared norms are dissolving. A cross-national study found that both economic distress and cultural backlash pathways predicted endorsement of populist ideas, and that a sense of identity threat, feeling that one’s belonging to the national community was under siege, served as a connecting link in both pathways.2PubMed. Populism, Economic Distress, Cultural Backlash, and Identity Threat: Integrating Patterns and Testing Cross-National Validity The practical takeaway is that populism rarely has a single cause. Economic hardship and cultural anxiety reinforce each other, and efforts to address only one side tend to miss the full picture.
Left-Wing and Right-Wing Populism Are Not the Same Thing
One of the most common misunderstandings is treating populism as a single political position. In practice, populism is more like a template that gets filled in with very different content depending on who uses it. Left-wing populist movements tend to define “the people” in economic terms, as working people exploited by wealthy elites who rig the system to preserve inequality.3Elsevier – ScienceDirect. Psychological similarities and dissimilarities between left-wing and right-wing populists: Evidence from a nationally representative survey in France Right-wing populist movements, by contrast, tend to define “the people” in cultural or ethnic terms, drawing lines based on nationality, religion, or heritage, and casting immigrants or cosmopolitan elites as the threatening outsiders.
This distinction matters because the two varieties push policies in opposite directions. Left-wing populists typically favor redistribution, stronger labor protections, and expanded social spending. Right-wing populists more often prioritize immigration restriction, national sovereignty, and traditional social hierarchies. What they share is the rhetorical scaffolding: a moralized division between a pure people and a corrupt establishment, hostility to intermediary institutions like courts and media, and a leader who claims to speak directly for the popular will.
The Urban-Rural Gap
Across Western Europe, support for far-right populist parties has been consistently higher outside cities. Part of this can be explained by who lives where: non-urban areas tend to have older, less formally educated populations with different economic profiles. But a study combining individual-level survey data with municipal-level data found that even after accounting for those personal characteristics and immigration rates, people in areas with shrinking populations were still more likely to vote for far-right populist parties.4The Annals of Regional Science. The urban–rural divide in radical right populist support: the role of resident’s characteristics, urbanization trends and public service supply
Access to public services turned out to be a key piece of the puzzle. Where public services were more available, the urban-rural voting gap narrowed. Where services had thinned out, support for populist parties was higher, consistent with a protest-voting interpretation: people in declining areas with fewer schools, clinics, and transit options feeling abandoned by the political establishment. This finding suggests that the geographic pattern of populism is not simply about “backward” rural attitudes. It reflects something concrete about how resources and attention flow unevenly across regions.
What Populism Does to Democratic Institutions
Populism’s relationship with democracy is paradoxical. Populist leaders typically rise through democratic elections, often energizing voters who feel excluded by traditional parties. But once in power, the track record for institutional health is troubling. A core feature of populist governance, documented across multiple cases, is what scholars call constitutional instrumentalism: treating public law not as an independent constraint on power but as a tool to be reshaped in service of the majority’s declared will. This tends to produce frequent, executive-driven constitutional changes, often justified as returning power to “the people” but in practice concentrating it in the leader’s hands.5International Journal of Constitutional Law. Populism as a constitutional project
Turkey provides a well-documented case. Research using a synthetic control method estimated the causal effect of the 2010 constitutional referendum, which restructured the judiciary under the banner of modernization, on judicial independence. The results showed a sharp and sustained decline in judicial independence after the 2010 reforms, well before the more overt power consolidation of 2017.6Elsevier / International Review of Law and Economics. Populist constitutional backsliding and judicial independence: Evidence from Türkiye The pattern is recognizable across cases: early reforms are framed as democratic improvements, making courts more “representative” or removing “bureaucratic” obstacles to the popular will. The erosion of checks and balances happens gradually, which is part of what makes it effective.
Populist leaders also tend to challenge established diplomatic norms and question multilateral institutions, reframing national sovereignty in opposition to globalization and regional integration.7PubMed Central. Populism and foreign policy: a research agenda (Introduction) International agreements, trade organizations, and cross-border governance structures are portrayed as elite projects that override the popular will, making them natural targets.
The Economic Track Record
The most comprehensive study of populism’s economic consequences identified 51 populist presidents and prime ministers worldwide from 1900 to 2020. After 15 years under populist leadership, GDP per capita was roughly 10 percent lower compared to a plausible non-populist counterfactual. The damage was not typically one dramatic collapse but a slow accumulation: economic disintegration, decreasing macroeconomic stability, and the erosion of institutions that sustain long-term growth.8American Economic Review. Populist Leaders and the Economy
Argentina is the most-studied single case. Research tracing the economic effects of Juan Perón’s institutional overhaul from the 1940s onward found that the weakening of the rule of law and restrictions on economic freedom had lasting negative effects on growth. Using synthetic control estimates comparing Argentina’s pre-Perón trajectory against a pool of 58 countries for the period 1860 through 2015, the authors estimated that without the populist reforms, Argentina’s per capita income would be comparable to that of southern European countries today, rather than ranking far below.9PubMed Central. Long-Term Economic Effects of Populist Legal Reforms: Evidence from Argentina That is a bold counterfactual claim, and single-country estimates always carry caveats, but Argentina’s transformation from one of the world’s richest nations at the start of the twentieth century to a middle-income economy is a historical fact that demands explanation.
Latin American populism also complicates the picture in instructive ways. The “Pink Tide” governments of the early 2000s, left-wing populist movements in countries like Brazil and Argentina, were partly enabled by a commodity boom that gave them the fiscal room to fund social programs and incorporate social movement demands. When commodity prices fell, many of those governments lost both their economic basis and their political support.10SAGE Journals (International Political Science Review). Populism in Latin America: Old and new populisms in Argentina and Brazil The lesson is that populist economic policies can deliver short-term gains, especially when external conditions are favorable, but tend to build fragile structures that crack under pressure.
Populism and Distrust of Science
The populist framework, with its suspicion of elites and established institutions, extends naturally to scientific expertise. A study measuring what researchers call “science populism,” the belief that scientific elites are out of touch with ordinary people and serve their own interests, found that higher scores on this scale predicted lower trust in scientific sources across the board. The gap was largest for government-based sources and research institutions, and smaller for media-based sources.11PubMed Central. Science populism impacts perceptions of credibility across scientific professions In other words, people who view scientists as a self-serving elite distrust them most in exactly the contexts where scientific authority is strongest: peer-reviewed research and government agencies.
It would be a mistake, though, to assume this is exclusively a right-wing phenomenon. The Covid-19 pandemic brought attention to skepticism about health policies among left-wing and environmentalist groups as well. Research examining these milieus found that their critique of science was framed differently: not as anti-intellectual rejection but as opposition to the perceived influence of capitalism on scientific production, along with claims about bodily self-determination that extended from ecological concerns to health issues.12PubMed. From Big Farms to Big Pharma? Problematizing science-related populism The common thread is a populist logic applied to knowledge production itself: a belief that established science serves powerful interests rather than the common good. The surface-level arguments differ, but the underlying distrust of institutional authority is shared.
How Mainstream Parties Respond, and Why It Backfires
Faced with rising populist challengers, mainstream parties often try to “accommodate” them by adopting parts of their message, particularly on immigration or anti-establishment rhetoric. The intuition is straightforward: if voters are leaving for a populist party because of, say, immigration concerns, then addressing those concerns should bring them back. Research testing this assumption found no evidence that accommodation reduces support for radical right parties. If anything, the results suggested that accommodative strategies led to more voters defecting to the radical right, not fewer.13Political Science Research and Methods. Does accommodation work? Mainstream party strategies and the success of radical right parties
The likely mechanism is that when a mainstream party validates a populist framing, it also validates the populist party’s claim to own that issue. Voters who care deeply about immigration, for instance, may conclude that the mainstream party is simply borrowing the populist’s position, making the original more credible rather than less. This finding has important implications for political strategy: the instinct to fight populism by imitating it may be counterproductive.
Does Social Media Create Populists?
The conventional wisdom pins a large share of populism’s rise on social media echo chambers, where like-minded users reinforce each other’s views and radicalize. The evidence is more complicated. A cross-national study of Western democracies found no evidence that online or social media use explains support for right-wing populist candidates and parties. In the United States, use of online media actually decreased support for right-wing populism. What did correlate with populist support was offline discussion with people similar in race, ethnicity, and class, particularly in the United Kingdom and France.14New Media & Society. Right-wing populism, social media and echo chambers in Western democracies
This does not mean social media plays no role. Populist leaders are often skilled at using platforms to bypass traditional media gatekeepers and speak directly to supporters, which fits the populist narrative of cutting out intermediaries. But the idea that Facebook or Twitter created populism by trapping people in information bubbles is not well supported. The echo chambers that seem to matter most are in living rooms, workplaces, and neighborhoods, the offline social environments where people spend time with others who share their background and grievances.
Affective Polarization and Populism
Affective polarization, the tendency to strongly dislike political opponents rather than simply disagree with them, is widely assumed to be driven by populism. The relationship turns out to be more nuanced than expected. A comparative study found no significant difference in affective polarization between more and less populist individuals. Instead, both people who strongly endorsed populist ideas and those who strongly rejected them showed high levels of polarization. Populism was also associated with a general disdain for all political parties, not just rival ones.15Political Psychology. Unaffected polarization? Populism and affective polarization in comparative perspective
A separate cross-regional analysis, however, argued that populism does increase affective polarization, but among both populist and non-populist citizens. As populism rises in a country, even people who reject populist parties become more emotionally polarized. The effect on non-populists grows as populism becomes more prominent.16Comparative Political Studies. The Two-Way Effects of Populism on Affective Polarization The tension between these findings reflects a genuinely unsettled area of research. What seems clear is that populism does not simply divide a society into fans and critics; it changes the emotional temperature for everyone, and both committed populists and committed anti-populists end up disliking the other side more intensely.
Psychological Patterns and Conspiracy Thinking
Populist beliefs tend to travel with other attitudes in ways that help explain populism’s gravitational pull. One is collective narcissism, an exaggerated belief in the greatness and entitlement of one’s own group. Research on older adults in Poland found that both collective narcissism and populist attitudes predicted belief in conspiracy theories, while interpersonal and institutional trust had no significant effect on conspiracy thinking.17Politics in Central Europe. The Effect of Collective Narcissism, Populism and Trust of Older Adults on Conspiracy Mentality: Evidence from Poland The combination makes intuitive sense: if you believe your group is special and that elites are working against it, conspiracy theories offer a satisfying explanatory framework for why things are not going the way your group deserves.
This cluster of attitudes, populism plus collective narcissism plus conspiracy thinking, creates a worldview that is self-reinforcing. Evidence of elite corruption confirms the populist narrative. Fact-checking is dismissed as another elite tool. Moderate voices within one’s own community are suspected of disloyalty. Understanding this psychological ecosystem helps explain why populist movements can be remarkably resilient even when their leaders deliver poor outcomes: the belief system has built-in defenses against disconfirming information.
Gender, Religion, and the Construction of “the People”
Populism claims to speak for “the people,” but who counts as part of “the people” is always a political choice. Gender is one axis along which that boundary gets drawn. Research argues that populism is inherently gendered: the division between “us” and “them” draws on ideas about national belonging, cultural purity, and prescribed gender roles. Women’s bodies and reproductive choices become sites of political control, framed as necessary for protecting the community from outside threats. Anti-immigration rhetoric, in particular, often relies on gendered narratives about protecting “our” women from foreign men or about the need for higher birth rates to sustain the national community.18PubMed Central. Populism Is Always Gendered and Dangerous
Religion serves a parallel function. In Brazil, researchers identified what they called a “religious-populist radical right,” where evangelical Christian nationalism provided both ideational and material resources that helped the populist radical right capture state institutions through elections.19Millennium: Journal of International Studies. Statecraft under God: Radical Right Populism meets Christian Nationalism in Bolsonaro’s Brazil Religion gives populist movements a ready-made moral vocabulary, a network of institutions like churches and media outlets, and a way of defining “the people” that feels ancient and natural rather than political. The combination of populism and religious nationalism operates at both national and transnational levels, connecting movements across borders through shared theological and cultural frameworks.
Health Crises as Accelerants
Populism feeds on moments when governments visibly fail. Health crises are particularly potent catalysts because they combine physical vulnerability, economic disruption, and visible institutional performance (or underperformance) in a way that is difficult for leaders to spin. Research examining historical patterns found that perceived inadequacies in responding to intertwined health and economic crises can erode institutional trust and increase receptiveness to populist narratives.20PubMed. Why do health crises matter for populism? The Covid-19 pandemic illustrated this vividly: governments that managed the pandemic poorly saw trust plummet, while populist rhetoric about elite incompetence and hidden agendas found fertile ground. But even governments that handled the crisis relatively well faced populist backlash against lockdowns, vaccine mandates, and perceived overreach.
The dynamic is asymmetric. A government that responds well to a crisis gets modest credit, because successful prevention is invisible: you cannot see the disaster that did not happen. A government that responds poorly gets punished harshly, because the failure is visceral and personal. Populist challengers exploit this asymmetry by holding incumbents to impossible standards, then offering simple explanations and emotional validation when those standards are inevitably not met. This pattern is not unique to health crises; it applies to financial collapses, natural disasters, and migration surges. Any event that shakes public confidence in institutional competence opens a window for populist entrepreneurs.
Young People and Populism
There is a common assumption that populism is primarily a phenomenon of older, economically displaced voters. The reality is less clear-cut, and research on young people and populism is surprisingly thin. A scoping review of the literature found limited attention to the generational mechanisms behind youth engagement with populism, the strategies populist parties use to target young voters, left-wing youth populism, and the broader implications of populist attitudes for how young people participate in politics.21Political Studies Review. Youth and Populism: A Scoping Review This is a significant gap, given that young people’s early political experiences tend to shape their long-term attitudes, and many countries have seen surges of youth support for both left-wing and right-wing populist movements in recent years.
What scattered evidence exists suggests that young people are drawn to populism for somewhat different reasons than older cohorts. Economic precarity, housing costs, student debt, and bleak employment prospects create real grievances, but the cultural dimension also matters: a sense that existing institutions were built for and by a previous generation that is not willing to share power. Whether this generational populism hardens into lasting anti-institutional attitudes or dissipates as young people age into more stable circumstances is one of the more consequential open questions in political science.