Sustainable Development and Populism

Christian Kroll,Vera Zipperer

doi:10.1016/j.ecolecon.2020.106723

Abstract

All 193 UN member states have pledged to achieve 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), following the guiding principle to leave no one behind. At the same time, rising populist movements increasingly influence the political debate in many countries by challenging multilateral cooperation and liberal democracy. This paper contains the first empirical study of the relationship between the SDGs and populism. In order to analyse the nexus between these growingly important concepts, we introduce a new “Sustainability-Populism Framework”. It allows us to asses how the performance on the 17 SDGs over time relates to electoral support for populist parties, resulting in a classification of 39 countries into four categories. Moreover, in a regression analysis, we find that for each 1-point increase on the aggregate SDG Index (out of 100) over time, the vote share of populist parties on average drops by about 2 percentage points. Our results lend some support to the notion that a strong commitment to the SDGs (overall, as well as in particular to SDGs 1, 2, 11 and 15) could be part of an appropriate and effective answer to populism. We hope to initiate a timely debate on populism and sustainable development with our study, along with more research into this complex relationship.

Highlights

All 193 UN member states adopted the Agenda 2030 with the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015 in a historic effort for international cooperation
As populism can be seen as a response by parts of the population who feel that their concerns have not been addressed by mainstream policymakers, the question arises whether the evolvement of sustainable development, which calls for integrating social, environmental, and economic policies, could be related to developments of populist vote shares
To locate our study of sustainable development and populism in the current literature, we provide the first classification of the research literature on populism in relation to macro-level factors of economic, social and environmental country performance which is structured by the 17 SDGs

Summary

Introduction

All 193 UN member states adopted the Agenda 2030 with the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015 in a historic effort for international cooperation. The increased support for populism may well be rooted in developments related to the economic, social and environmental issues underlying the SDGs (for reasons on which we elaborate below), no study has yet looked systematically at the relationship between the much-debated rise of populism on the one hand, and the historic Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development on the other hand. To address this gap, we introduce a new “Sustainability-Populism Framework” based on the first systematic classification of SDG country performance and populism.

Methods

Results

Conclusion