How to think about Donald Trump’s long-term effects on the US? His opponents often compare him with 1930s authoritarians, in part because that’s the era that westerners know best. But a better comparison may be with other populist leaders, past and present.
Making that comparison requires an understanding of the populist heartland that is Latin America. It also requires a working definition of “populism”. The standard definition in political science was developed by the scholar Cas Mudde. He says populism casts society as a struggle between “the pure people” and “the corrupt elite”. In other words, populists are defined largely by their rhetoric. Trump unquestionably fits that tradition.
So where did previous populists take their countries? That’s the question of the paper “Populist Leaders and the Economy”, published in the authoritative American Economic Review. Its authors — Manuel Funke, Moritz Schularick and Christoph Trebesch of the Kiel Institute for the World Economy in Germany — studied 60 countries, representing over 95 per cent of global GDP, to assemble a database of 1,482 leaders from 1900 to 2020. They “digitised 770 books, chapters, and articles on populism” to assess which leaders followed the populist playbook.