Austerity and Populism in Europe

This paper seeks to empirically show the importance of austerity policies in driving populist voting patterns in Europe. Extending the empirical research of Guiso et al. (2017) into the economic insecurity mechanism underlying populist voting, and making use of recent data on austerity from Alesina et al. (2019), I show that economic factors are more strongly associated with populist voting in scal consolidation years than otherwise. I also nd that more left-wing individuals vote for populist parties during expenditurebased consolidations and more right-wing individuals vote populist during revenue-based consolidations. This analysis provides tentative evidence for an \austerity channel" of the economic insecurity mechanism, where austerity policies increase individuals' disappointment with traditional \status quo" parties by increasing economic insecurity, leading to an increase in populist votes.