Gozgor Giray
Istanbul Medeniyet University, Istanbul, Turkey.
CESifo, Munich, Germany.
Public Choice. 2022;190(1-2):229-246. doi: 10.1007/s11127-021-00933-7. Epub 2021 Oct 24.
Economic interests are assumed to be the leading driver of political preferences, and various empirical studies have examined how economic conditions affect political views and voting behavior. Meanwhile, populism is on the rise in European Union (EU) member countries. Against that backdrop, this paper aims to examine the effect of economic uncertainty on populist voting behavior based on a panel dataset of 24 EU countries from 1980 to 2020. We focus on whether total populist, right-wing populist, and left-wing populist votes are affected by a new indicator of economic uncertainty, namely, the World Uncertainty Index (WUI). Relying on a fixed-effects, bias-corrected least squares dummy variable estimator and instrumental variable estimations, we show that a higher WUI increases total populism and right-wing populist voting behavior. The baseline results remain consistent when dealing with potential issues of endogeneity and reverse causality, addressing omitted variable bias, and excluding outliers.
The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11127-021-00933-7.
经济利益被认为是政治偏好的主要驱动因素，并且各种实证研究已经考察了经济状况如何影响政治观点和投票行为。与此同时，民粹主义在欧盟成员国中正在兴起。在此背景下，本文旨在基于1980年至2020年24个欧盟国家的面板数据集，研究经济不确定性对民粹主义投票行为的影响。我们关注总体民粹主义、右翼民粹主义和左翼民粹主义选票是否受到经济不确定性的一个新指标——世界不确定性指数（WUI）的影响。依靠固定效应、偏差校正最小二乘虚拟变量估计器和工具变量估计，我们表明较高的WUI会增加总体民粹主义和右翼民粹主义投票行为。在处理潜在的内生性和反向因果关系问题、解决遗漏变量偏差以及排除异常值时，基线结果仍然一致。
在线版本包含可在10.1007/s11127-021-00933-7获取的补充材料。
