The electoral strategies of a populist candidate: Does charisma discourage experience and encourage extremism?

Abstract

I model an election between a populist candidate with little government experience and high charisma and a mainstream candidate with much government experience and low charisma. Taking a step back in time, I also model the career choices of this populist candidate: he must consider how much governing experience to acquire before running for high office, and then he must decide how extremist his campaign platform should be. The model finds two major trade-offs that are unfortunate for the median voter: candidates who are attractive in terms of their high charisma will be unattractive in terms of their low experience and high extremism. The model also finds that popular discontent, coming from an economic or political crisis, makes an inexperienced outsider more likely to win an election with an extremist agenda; this helps explain the recent ‘rise of populism’ identified by several authors around the world. This theory is also able to explain numerous empirical findings: I connect the model to the literature from different academic approaches (behavioral, comparative, and institutional) and different geographical regions (the United States, Latin America, and Europe). Special reference is made to four prominent outsiders: Donald Trump, Hugo Chávez, Alberto Fujimori, and Jean-Marie Le Pen.

Beyond Presidentialism and Parliamentarism

“…First, they are not systematically developed on the basis of psychological theory or empirical evidence. It is unclear to what extent the supposed psychological mechanisms exist, what their variability is, and how their putative benefits are to be weighed against their potential downsides (see also dos Santos 2020: 21-24;Serra 2018).…”

Access Denied: How Bureaucrats Shape Politicians' Incentives to Choose Restrictive Asylum Policies

“…Thus, for reasons endogenous to the strategic interaction we consider, anti-refugee politicians' behavior is more extreme whenever the es-tablishment is, in fact, more lenient. Our model, therefore, differs from other models in the formal literature on populism in which the populist politician's concerns with the establishment are assumed (Buisseret and Van Weelden, 2020) or abstracted away from (Serra, 2018;Acemoglu et al, 2013;Sasso and Morelli, 2021;Serra, 2018;Fox and Stephenson, 2015). Yet, our model shares some familiar features with existing models of populism: as in Fox and Stephenson (2015) and Sasso and Morelli (2021), the populist politician in our model has anti-minority attitudes and state-independent preferences.…”

Explaining the 2016 Vote for President Trump across U.S. Counties

“…For example, a voter who relies on public welfare would ceteris paribus be ill-served by a presidential candidate who promises to shrink such a program. 2 We complement previous studies on the 2016 election, which largely have been carried out by non-economists (e.g., Major, Blodorn, and Blascovich 2016;Monnat 2016;Serra 2017;Mutz 2018), by using county-level data. This allows us to examine as a dependent variable the actual vote percentages in the 2016 presidential election, rather than voting intention, or after-the-fact statements about the vote cast or preferences about the candidates.…”