A Costly Commitment: Populism, Government Performance, and the Quality of Bureaucracy

Economic insecurity and the demand for populism in Europe

“…Some recent papers on the drivers of populism make the prediction that a sharp decrease in economic security and trust leads to increased demand and supply of pandering commitments, and consequent populist platforms—see, for example, Bellodi et al . (2023) and references therein. The main contribution of our analysis is to confirm this prediction while establishing an important and neglected factor, namely that a large component of the economic insecurity effect on the conditional probability of voting populist comes via a turnout depression effect.…”

“…4 As shown in Bellodi et al . (2023), the rhetoric employed by populist parties derives its strategic justification from pandering to people's fears and increased distrust. Hence the demand for populist platforms is due to the fact that populist parties are proposing platforms that rely less on trusting political representatives.…”

“…3 For the latter, we will simply adopt the classification of parties as populist or not that is prevalent in political science, based mostly on their anti-elite rhetoric and pro-people rhetoric (Rooduijn et al 2019, and the corresponding http://popu-list.org). 4 As shown in Bellodi et al (2023), the rhetoric employed by populist parties derives its strategic justification from pandering to people's fears and increased distrust. Hence the demand for populist platforms is due to the fact that populist parties are proposing platforms that rely less on trusting political representatives.…”

Partisan Alignment and the Propensity to Choose a Job in a Government Ministry

“…Whilst emphasizing that these strategies vary (Bauer et al 2021;Pierre, 2019, 2022), sidelining the bureaucracy seems to be politicians' most common approach. This involves politicization via patronage appointments (Peters and Pierre, 2019), promoting loyalists from within the bureaucracy, dismissing "disloyal" civil servants or coercing them to resign (Bellodi et al 2023;Story et al 2023), and altering merit and unionbased legal protections (Moynihan, 2022(Moynihan, , 2022a. A related strategy involves excluding bureaucrats from decision and information circles (Lotta et al 2023;Moynihan, 2022a;Peters and Pierre, 2019), and relegating them to marginal positions.…”