The Role of Economic Uncertainty in Rising Populism in the EU

Abstract

This paper examines the impact of economic uncertainty shocks on the populist voting behavior in the panel dataset of 24 European Union (EU) countries for the period from 1980 to 2020. In so doing, we focus on the shares of total populism, right-wing populism, and left-wing populism votes as well as a new indicator of economic uncertainty, so-called, the “World Uncertainty Index (WUI).” Using the fixed-effects, bias-corrected least-squares dummy variable (LSDVC), and Instrumental Variables (IV) estimations, we show that a higher level of the WUI is positively related to total populism and right-wing populist voting behavior. The baseline results remain consistent when we deal with potential issues of endogeneity, to address omitted variable bias, and to exclude the outliers.