ABSTRACT
Populist politicians usually enlarged the apparatus of the state and introduced all kinds of controls and public works programmes
in order to cope with unemployment. The scale of this kind of politics reached from Roosevelt’s New Deal to the compulsory measures of fascist dictators. The specific course which this kind of politics would take in different countries depended on the historical preconditions. In political systems with a great deal of stability, such as Great Britain, populism did not have much of a chance. In some countries social democratic parties came to power without breaking with the established political process (Sweden in 1932, France in 1936). But in many countries new types of political systems emerged during the depression, for instance in Latin America and in Central and Southern Europe. It would go beyond the scope of this book to review all of them. We shall also skip a discussion of the New Deal, because it did not really change the American political system.
