Revealed: populist leaders linked to reduced inequality

Populists on left and right have closed gap between rich and poor - but also eroded freedoms

Populist presidents and prime ministers are associated with significant reductions in economic inequality across the world, according to groundbreaking research that will challenge the assumption that populism only has negative consequences.

However, the research by political scientists and economists also found that governments run by populist leaders are correlated with declines in the quality of elections, a loosening of constraints on executive power, and a sometimes dramatic fall in press freedom.

The research was conducted by Team Populism, a network of academics who have worked with the Guardian to produce the Global Populism Database, which gives leaders around the world a populism “score” based on the contents of their speeches.

The team used the data, a comprehensive tracker of populist discourse among world leaders in 40 countries, to analyse what happens when populists come to power.

The most surprising finding, they said, was that populists across the political spectrum tend to narrow the gap between rich and poor. The academics described the correlation between populism and greater equality as “a fairly large effect”.


https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/07/revealed-populist-leaders-linked-to-reduced-inequality

Better stop applying the term to Trump, then. The only major law he's actually managed to pass is a huge tax cut for the wealthy.