Why Do They Vote Like That? A Discussion of Populist Voting Trends

Created and adapted by The Non-Select Committee (and distributed under the same conditions as the originals) from images by Owain.davies, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons (right), and Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons (left).

They Voted for Who?

Populism is a big issue. Especially with Donald Trump’s chaotic rise to power in the US, we’re hearing about populism all the time at the moment, or so it seems. For instance, recent polls have put the Reform Party ahead of the Conservatives in the UK. Occasionally, seat projections even have them beating Labour! Given that Reform didn’t exist a decade ago and still only has five seats in Parliament (out of 650 possible), that’s pretty surprising.

It’s not just the Anglophone world that this is happening in, either. Emmanuel Macron’s French government has been struggling to deal with Rassemblement National (National Rally; abbreviated as RN), Jordan Bardella and Marine Le Pen’s far-right populist vehicle. In Germany, Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany; abbreviated as AfD) has been on the rise and consistently polls ahead of the current governing party.

Very few places seem to be immune to this wave of populism. It’s currently mostly a right-wing phenomenon, but it can also be seen in outline in the rise of left-wing populists like Jeremy Corbyn, who delivered very high percentages of the vote-share for Labour in his two electoral defeats in 2017 and 2019. Even places with centrist or left-wing governments are giving into pressure and tightening on key areas around protectionism, immigration, and defence policy.

But all this presumes we know what “populism” is. It’s so often used as a slur rather than an analytical tool. It can seem that to call a party “populist” is to say, “they have policies that I think are stupid, but people are still voting for them!”. Certainly, there’s an element of implying that a populist party’s policies appeal to what you might call “popular prejudice” – commonly-held beliefs that are incorrect, misleading, or harmful on a policy level. The famous phrase “alternative facts”, used by a Trump staffer in 2017, is emblematic of this. The populist is presumed not to care whether a policy works, whether something is true – just whether it wins votes.

The problem is, this is broadly true of a lot of politics and political parties. In fact, it’s exactly what a lot of academic economists and political scientists would expect parties to do! To put it how an economist would, a rational political party is a “vote-maximizer”. All political parties want to win. If they have no prospect of winning, they still want to win more votes rather than fewer. The more votes you have, the more of a part you get in the national political conversation. Small “pressure” parties like UKIP can achieve policy outcomes by threatening to flip crucial seats away from bigger parties. As such, those bigger parties have to respond by shifting their policy platform towards the pressure party’s one. We saw this with the Conservatives’ adoption of the Brexit cause in the 2015 election.

It also seems hard simply to define populism by being fringe or extremist, because populist parties are winning across so much of the world. Trump and his ideology are hardly “fringe” now that we’re into his second administration. Extremist might be fairer, but it’s a hard term to define objectively. In some places, it can be measured relative to other parties’ platforms, but that’s difficult in two-party systems like the US.

While there is no one “true” definition of populism, I do think the term has meaning. The core of it is essentially rhetorical: it always presents itself as anti-elite in some way or another. It’s sometimes a bit funny, from an outside perspective: billionaire heir, New York celebrity, and big businessman Donald Trump framing himself as the outsider calling out “the elite”? Really? Some would say it’s not much better from the well-off, prep-schooled Jeremy Corbyn, either. Even so, it’s a big part of the uniqueness of populism. The Republicans in the US argue that the “liberal elite” has taken over cultural institutions and forced normal Americans to muzzle their opinions – or even deprived them of jobs. Nigel Farage has made similar arguments in the UK, while Corbyn took an economic spin on the theme by criticizing billionaires for hoarding resources and calling for massive redistribution and renationalization.

Why does this appeal – and why has it started appealing so much just around now?

But Why, Oh Why Did They Do That?

It makes some intuitive sense that populist anti-elite rhetoric could be successful. After all, nobody likes “elites”. That implies that there’s someone out there who’s richer than you, more powerful than you, more successful than you, better than you. Maybe even a whole group of them. Nobody likes to be patronized, to be told that someone else is superior to them. Everyone wants their fair due, and it’s hard to imagine that someone else could be working so much harder than you that they deserve a hundred times as much money.

Combine that with a raft of broadly popular policies addressing current issues (and, often, big money support from ideologically committed elites) and – hey presto! – you’ve got a party with a recipe to make big gains. People I’ve talked to who support Reform often say that they like how straight-talking the party is: getting straight to the issues they care about without any pandering or pussyfooting around the wording. They like that populist parties focus on issues that traditional politicians often spend less time on, or even avoid.

This doesn’t explain why populism wasn’t that big of a deal in, say, 2005, and why it is a very big deal twenty years later in 2025. People have always disliked elites. The rhetoric hasn’t changed that much. Yet the AfD has gone from nonexistence on an electoral scale in 2013 to polling second-highest of any party in Germany. There are historical parallels, but they are few and far between. Often, they require reaching so far back in the past that comparisons start to get a bit muddy.

This is, of course, what we invented academics for. There’s now quite a big body of research on populist voting, using and debating a range of definitions and employing an impressive arsenal of methods. Summarizing it all would be an immense task, so I’m just going to focus on a few results that I think are particularly important for understanding populist voting patterns. Most of these come from recent working papers (called “Discussion Papers”), so they’re super up-to-date but not yet thoroughly peer-reviewed. Though I personally think the results work pretty well to explain what we see, do inject a bit of caution into your interpretation as I discuss them.

Explanation 1: Why Not At This Point Anyway?

My personal “favourite” explanation is that people with disappointed expectations end up with high risk tolerance. Put another way, they become willing to vote for politicians who are most likely to do them harm, but have a small likelihood of really improving their situation. They in fact prefer these “risky” politicians to “safe” (but perhaps disappointing) normal politicians, whose impact they can reliably predict.

This makes intuitive sense. Let’s say you had it good when you were in your twenties. Managed to get a few promotions pretty fast, got a starter house back when they were cheap, married, settled down. The years roll on. The promotions stop coming in; maybe your company stagnates, dragging your pay down with it in real terms. You’re not necessarily doing badly in any real sense: you mostly own your house, and are at no risk of being unemployed. It’s just that you’re not doing well. Not like you were; not like you’d like to be.

In that case, voting for someone who will probably just make life worse in small ways (which is happening anyway!, you grumble to yourself) but who might start getting you those promotions again starts to make sense. This is what a group of economists suggested in a recent paper in The Economic Journal. They found that Germans were more likely to vote for populist candidates if they described themselves as being risk-lovers. Using some funny models, they also argued that people are more likely to become risk-lovers if they have disappointed expectations.

For me, this really resonates with a lot of what I’ve heard from people who support Reform and its ilk. It’s not necessarily that they’re poor, unemployed, or really ideologically far-right. It’s just that they’re disappointed, and they want some change from the status quo. They don’t really care what it is, as long as it’s a prospect of “real change”. This might also explain why less engaged voters tend to be more populist. They don’t care much about politics in its normal form, because normal politics doesn’t bring with it enough possibility of change for them.

Explanation 2: How Come His Is Better Than Mine?

 

Another big part of it is that the globalized market just has winners and losers. See, people by and large don’t actually like competitive markets. They like what competitive markets give them – cheap goods, variety, and so on – but they don’t like being exposed to them. You know, my life would be a lot easier if there were no other academics out there. If I were the only one, I could just hold myself to my own standards and become the arbiter of all knowledge. It’d be great! Sadly, because of the existence of other academics, I have to produce work of a certain, collectively agreed-upon quality – and I have to produce it better than other people do. That sucks.

A Discussion Paper from the Institute for Labor Economics (IZA; don’t ask why it’s abbreviated that way) has suggested that some populism is explained by the anti-competitive impulse. Put more sympathetically to the populist voters in question, they get the rough end of globalization’s bargain. While other people enjoy cheap goods from east Asia, people working in the manufacturing sector lose employment (or just have to work harder for the same pay). On a basic level, that’s just not what anyone wants.

Of course, not all globalization works this way. Sometimes you’re the one working in the winning export industry. In that case, the authors of the Discussion Paper argue, you’re less likely to vote for a populist. All of the data they marshal are pretty convincing. People don’t like losing competition, but they do like winning. Maybe that seems pretty obvious, but what’s less immediately obvious is why that would drive populist voting specifically. After all, lots of bog-standard political parties propose some form of protectionism (effectively subsidies to “protect” certain industries) or otherwise try and stop jobs from disappearing. What’s so important about populism?

In this day and age, there’s an almost inextricable association between “globalization” and “the elite”. You don’t have to think that “the elite” is all lizardmen or whatever to make this connexion. It’s both a left-wing and right-wing populist trope, whether you think the “elite” in question is multinational capitalists or Marxist crusaders against national sovereignty. Populists will very explicitly attack both in the same breath, and that appeals to people who are sore from exposure to globalized trades.

This is one of those explanations that tends to clash with what most populist voters will say about their preferences. It seems to work in aggregate, at least statistically. Some people will even explicitly agree that this is why they’ve become populist. However, many more won’t. This is pretty common for economic explanations – forgive them Father, for they know not what they do! It’s most useful to view this as a kind of underlying driver. People may not be thinking consciously about it, but if someone comes up and starts talking about the “globalist elite” trying to take your jobs just after you get denied a pay rise… it might resonate with you more.

Explanation 3: I Didn’t Mind Them, But These New Ones…

Migrants have got to come into this at some point. Ask a Reform voter (or a Trump voter, or an AfD voter, or…) about politics, and migrants will come up. It kind of doesn’t matter what you were speaking about initially – it will happen. I had a weird experience with one I knew recently: we were talking about housing markets, and after briefly zoning out, I found myself being talked to about migrants coming into a “Christian country” who “don’t have our values”. How did that come up?, I thought to myself; surely we were just talking about planning law?

You can argue until the cows come home about how many migrants is the right number, whether there is a right number, about culture, about economics, and so much more. What’s definitely true is that some people really don’t like them. This tends to be a right-wing populist thing, but you will see the odd left-wing populist attacking them in their own unique way, like Bernie Sanders in the US recently.

Another IZA Discussion Paper has pointed out that populism may cause a vicious cycle of migrant self-selection. Basically, very clever and well-informed migrants don’t want to come to countries that are very hostile to migrants. They usually have other options – because they’re clever and well-informed – and will avoid areas they’re likely to be unwelcome in. This means that a greater proportion of the people who come over are poorer and perhaps less well-informed. Not only that, but high-skilled immigrants living somewhere that starts to get hostile to migration will often leave. This leaves people who are low-skilled.

You may have noticed that lots of populists and other critics of immigration will never say they want zero immigration. Doctors are ok; we don’t mind athletes, celebrities, or top-tier engineers. Well, most populists don’t mind them anyway – it seems the American populist right is turning against even them in recent months. It’s just people who come over here and “leech off benefits” or work low-skilled jobs that they don’t like, they say. Yet if their own attitudes are selecting for immigration from these very low-skilled people, we have a problem.

This is an interesting extra “working part” in the whole model of populism we’ve got going here. Once populist anti-immigration rhetoric gets going, it makes the very problem it rails against worse. This may lead to slow spirals of support for populism that are quite hard to stop – because it’s the migrants themselves leading this behaviour by acting rationally and avoiding places they won’t be welcome.

Tying It All Together? Or Not

So, what does this mean practically? Not all that much, honestly. I don’t have a Stephen Hawking-esque Grand Unified Theory of Populism. What we can say from the evidence we have is that people get disappointed in conditions of stagnation (or even just very slow improvement). They don’t like being on the losing end of systems that seemed so beneficial for them not that long ago. After all, for a while globalization was all the rage. It was bringing people together and getting stuff to people for much cheaper. We all like having Amazon to get parcels to our doors in 24 hours flat. But once they start getting angry, the problems only get worse.

In a lot of ways, I wonder whether the Great Financial Crisis was the catalyst for this reaction beginning. Financial systems that had fuelled a globalized and heady 1990s and 2000s suddenly became the source of all ills in society. Voters saw everything going wrong for reasons that were (or seemed to be) completely out of their control. It was elites in financial institutions, and the politicians who enabled them, who were calling the shots. This began a kind of revolt against interconnexions between nations’ economies, against a perceived elite consensus, and against any rapid change to society. This happened to take the form of anti-immigrant and often anti-intellectual sentiment due to the specific circumstances of the 2010s.

You can argue that this is all the seed of self-destruction in globalization’s very essence. You can argue it’s simple short-sightedness from populist voters. You can even argue that it’s just a rational economic response. By understanding populist voting patterns a bit better, you can get one step closer to an explanation. With an explanation, you can start crafting a response – whether that response is in support of populism or against it. For most of us, it just might give us some keys to understanding the populist voters we know in our lives. Either way, with conditions as they are, populism is here to stay.