Economic performance under populist leadership and liberal democracy (two decades overview)

Populism poses consequences to domestic and global economic growth as it has a strong tendency to destabilize established political and economic regimes through means of un-constitutional interventions or even implementation of economic policies based on exclu-sionary rhetoric, such as economic nationalism. While it is commonly agreed that populism brings adverse effects to globalization, it is still not quite clear whether populist leadership brings a positive or negative impact to the economic growth rate in the country level. This research paper regress the latent variable of economic performance against a set of ex-planatory variables, including the variable of populist leaders from 40 countries and their respective civil liberty score (as a proxy to liberal democracy) from 1998 to 2018. The re-gression results show that there are significant correlations between the economic growth rate and all of the explanatory variables presented in the main specification model in this paper. In the country level, the degree of civil liberty seems to have a significantly greater impact on the economic growth rate if compared to populist leadership.