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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Polit. Sci.

Sec. Elections and Representation

Volume 7 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpos.2025.1565020

This article is part of the Research Topic What's Going On? European Electoral Change in Historical Context View all articles

Frugal populists: Fiscal management under populist rule in Europe and the OECD

Provisionally accepted
  • Department of Economics, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, United Kingdom

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Populists weaponize economic hardships and identity conflicts for political gain. This strategy has propelled many of them to the political mainstream across Europe, the Americas, and elsewhere. However, does their toxic rhetoric necessarily map into poor management of government finances? This paper investigates one aspect of their governance -its correlation with government debt spanning the period between 1950 and 2022 in Europe and the OECD countries. Although previous evidence suggests that populist governance spells a rise in indebtedness, new evidence in this paper mitigates this conclusion. The results in this work do not provide sufficient evidence of an increase in debt specifically linked to populist governance. Three mechanisms may be at play. First, fiscal rules and checks and balances embedded in the democratic process in those countries make bad governance punishable in the following elections. Second, most populists in Europe and the OECD have so far been allocated junior coalition roles, limiting their potential damage on policy design and implementation. Third, the parliamentary democracies studied in this work may operate differently from the presidential regimes that have, until recently, dominated empirical evidence. As a result, most of the evidence in this work points to a relatively small, if at all significant, effect of populist governance on public debt. Nuances do emerge along the political spectrum, but they are evident after the Global Financial Crisis of 2008-2009.

    Keywords: Fiscal policy, populism, populist governance, far-Left, far-right, government debt

    Received: 22 Jan 2025; Accepted: 25 Mar 2025.

    Copyright: © 2025 Stankov. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Petar Stankov, Department of Economics, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, United Kingdom

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

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