TY - JOUR
AB - In recent years, significant segments of populations in rich democracies have embraced populism. Is this trend due to emergence of new media, is it driven by rising inequality or is it a consequence of the financial crisis? Three papers in this special issue on populism, which were discussed at the April 2018 Panel Meeting in Zurich, shed new light on these questions. MEDIA POWER A well-functioning democratic process requires that voters can keep their governments accountable. To do so voters need to be correctly informed by a diversified set of media. It is therefore crucial to understand where people get their news. This is the question that Patrick Kennedy and Andrea Prat investigate in their paper. They start from the observation that the literature on media has typically focused on ‘platform-centric’ data, which are inadequate to study the distortions to the democratic process that the concentration of news sources can generate. Suppose, for example, that in a country with three platforms these are known to have the same number of followers. This is consistent with a situation in which one set of voters use all three sources and the rest is totally uninformed, as well as with a situation in which all voters are informed but each by only one platform. In this latter case, each platform would have a considerable power on its followers. Thanks to their ‘person-centric’ data for 36 countries, Kennedy and Prat can distinguish between these two scenarios. For each news source they are able to compute its power index, defined as the maximal share of voters that the source can swing under different assumptions of naivety of news consumers. The emerging pattern is alarming. In all countries, there is at least one media organization with an attention share of at least 8%. If 25% of voters are naive, then every country has at least one media organization with the ability to swing a 1% vote share, corresponding to a 2% power. If 50% are naive, 31 countries out of 36 have at least one entity with the ability to control 2% of the vote share, corresponding to a 4% power. More generally, media power around the globe is concentrated in a relatively small number of news outlets, especially in television companies and in Facebook. Media regulation should therefore aim at complementing standard competition policy indices with additional media-specific measures to better assess and redress media externalities. Public service broadcasters have a crucial role in most Western democracies, which could be beneficial if state media organizations were highly independent from the government and if they focused their efforts on fighting information inequality. There seems to be room for improvement on all these counts. POPULISM AND PROSPERITY Europe has seen an electoral rise in both right-wing and left-wing populist parties over the decade following the Global Financial Crisis. Different explanations have been offered for this phenomenon. Brian Burgoon, Sam van Noort, Matthijs Rooduijn and Geoffrey Underhill focus on the relative income growth of different population groups relative to average growth. Combining individual-level data on political preferences with income growth data across different deciles for 20 European countries over the period 2002–2014, the authors find strong evidence that individuals in income deciles who experience relatively lower income growth are more likely to vote for radical parties. However, there is a critical difference between support for left- and right-wing radical parties. Support for the radical left increases in income deciles whose income growth is relatively lower compared to that of the richest decile, while support for the right increases in income deciles whose income growth is relatively lower compared to that of the country’s poorest decile. ‘Positional Deprivation and Support for Radical Right and Radical Left Parties’ contains several important messages. First, it reinforces the view that economists should look beyond average growth and consider the relative growth of different income groups and income inequality as this can have important repercussions for the economic policy decision process and, ultimately, overall growth. Second, it shows that focusing solely on overall recovery of an economy after a crisis is not sufficient. Policymakers should pay closer attention to the recovery across different population groups, making sure that pain and gain are not too unequally distributed. STRAITJACKET AND POPULISM In ‘Global Crises and Populism: The Role of Eurozone Institutions’, Luigi Guiso, Helios Herrera, Massimo Morelli and Tommaso Sonno take a novel perspective on the alleged causes of the recent surge of consensus for anti-establishment or populist parties in Europe. Their hypothesis is that populist parties are likely to gain consensus when mainstream parties and status quo institutions fail to manage the (macro)economic shocks faced by their economies. The latter can be a typical outcome in Eurozone countries, where regional fiscal policy is constrained by the straitjacket of the Fiscal Compact. The authors rely on this logic to explain the diffierent support of populist parties among European countries in response to the globalization shock and to the 2008–2011 financial and sovereign debt crisis. The theory predicts a greater success of populist parties in response to shocks in Eurozone relative to non-Eurozone countries. The prediction is confirmed by the empirical analysis, thereby lending support to the hypothesis that voters’ frustration with the lesser ability of the Eurozone governments to react to difficult-to-manage globalization shocks and financial crises might have spurred the rising consensus for such parties. This result has general implications for the speed of construction of political unions. A slow, staged process of political unification can expose the European Union to a risk of political backlash if hard to manage shocks hit the economies during the integration process. © CEPR, CESifo, Sciences Po, 2019. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Editors’ Introduction
JO - Economic Policy
DO - 10.1093/epolic/eiz001
DA - 2019-01-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/editors-introduction-IOIn0fUgkj
SP - 1
VL - 34
IS - 97
DP - DeepDyve
ER -