The Shift to Commitment Politics and Populism
Abstract:
The decline in voters’ trust in government and the rise of populism are two concerning features of contemporary politics. In this paper, we present a model of commitment politics that elucidates the interplay between distrust and populism. Candidates supply policy commitments to mitigate voters’ distrust in government, shrinking politicians’ levels of discretion typical of representative democracies. Alongside commitments, candidates rationally choose the main strategies associated with populism, namely anti-elite and pro-people rhetoric. With novel data on voters’ distrust towards the U.S. federal government, which we match with the Twitter activity of more than 2,000 candidates over five congressional elections, we show that distrust is strongly associated with candidates’ supply of commitments and populist rhetoric, which are also effective strategies at mobilizing distrustful voters. We also show theoretically that the shift to commitment politics determines greater aversion to checks and balances, and hence even illiberal populism can emerge.
About Massimo Morelli:
Massimo Morelli has been elected Fellow of the Econometric Society – and Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory – mostly for his contributions to bargaining, political economy and economics of conflict, while his current work also deals with causes and consequences of populism and law and economics in general.
He obtained the Ph.D in economics from Harvard in 1996 and came back to Italy (Bocconi) in 2014, after having taught at multiple American universities including Columbia.
He has been an active member of the Council of the EEA and now chairing the Minorities in Economics (MinE) committee, with growing passion for all diversity and inclusion concerns.
Language: English
This is a free seminar. Registration is mandatory.
Supported by the Luxembourg National Research Fund (FNR) 17931929