The rise of populism and the collapse of the left-right paradigm

Yann Algan (1, 2) , Martial Foucault (3) , Daniel Cohen (4, 5, 6) , Elizabeth Beasley

1 ECON - Département d'économie (Sciences Po)
2 CEPREMAP - Centre pour la recherche économique et ses applications
3 CEVIPOF - Centre de recherches politiques de Sciences Po (Sciences Po, CNRS)
4 PSE - Paris School of Economics
5 CEPR - Center for Economic Policy Research
6 PJSE - Paris Jourdan Sciences Economiques

We examine the dislocation from the traditional left-right political axis in the 2017 French election, analyze support for populist movements and show that subjective variables are key to understanding it. Votes on the traditional left-right axis are correlated to ideology concerning redistribution, and predicted by socio-economic variables such as income and social status. Votes on the new diagonal opposing “open vs closed society” are predicted by individual and subjective variables. More specifically, low well-being predicts anti-system opinions (from the left or from the right) while low interpersonal trust (ITP) predicts right-wing populism.

Keywords: French presidential election; Populism

Keywords: Election présidentielle; Populisme

Domains: Economics and Finance; Political science; Methods and statistics

Yann Algan, Martial Foucault, Daniel Cohen, Elizabeth Beasley. The rise of populism and the collapse of the left-right paradigm: Lessons from the 2017 French presidential election. 2018. ⟨hal-03393123⟩