ABSTRACT
Populism emerges and gains traction when political entrepreneurs with strong leadership qualities explore already existing identity conflicts. The search for political gains is more likely to succeed in times of economic transformations because recessions, austerity, and inequality produce a variety of distributional consequences. In addition, incumbent populism takes two forms with distinctly different impacts on policy-making. When populists serve as junior coalition partners, they are usually unable to significantly affect either the democratic process or economic policy-making, in line with conjectures by Taggart and Rovira Kaltwasser. An economic redistribution platform for the 21st century stands on three broad pillars of a new social consensus: wealth, technology, and the environment. To alleviate the strain, direct aid programs have been designed in the past. However, they have had controversial effects for most developing countries and could therefore be re-evaluated and phased out.
