ABSTRACT
Politics has polarized people with economic, social, and identity issues at least since the mid-19th century. Wars and deep economic crises have typically been associated with rising polarization. Recent political science literature has made significant progress in uncovering the defining characteristics of populism. J. Muller states the necessary and sufficient conditions for a politician to be considered a populist: the necessary condition is an anti-elitist election platform, and the sufficient condition is anti-pluralism. The promising new approaches to understanding the dynamics of populism model extreme votes – the votes for extremist political candidates and platforms – as political equilibrium phenomena in identity-motivated socio-economic markets for policies. A rising number of studies explain populism directly by looking at the patterns of voting behavior for predefined populist parties across Europe and Latin America and relating those voting patterns to a set of economic shocks.
