Populism and Feminism: Odd Bedfellows

Populism and Feminism: Odd Bedfellows

In this era of populist insurgency breaking the mold of democratic politics, two movements clashed.They represented opposite sides of the political spectrum, one emancipatory, the other exclusionary. One may be identified as feminism, the other as populism. This essay analyzes both concepts and explores their connection.

Inefficient lobbying, populism and oligarchy

This paper analyses the efficiency consequences of lobbying in a production economy with imperfect commitment. We first show that the Pareto efficiency result found for truthful equilibria of common agency games in static exchange economies no longer holds under these more general conditions. We construct a model of pressure groups where the set of efficient truthful common-agency equilibria ha...

Imperfect Information, Democracy, and Populism∗

The modern world is complex and difficult to understand for voters, who may hold beliefs that are at variance with reality. Politicians face incentives to pander to voters’ beliefs to get reelected. We analyze the welfare effects of this pandering and show that it comes along with both costs and benefits. Moreover, we explore optimal constitutional design in the presence of imperfect informatio...

Politics and Medicine — Strange Bedfellows

Every individual is influenced by his personal experiences and background. This means that we each bring to our everyday interactions with others our biases, religious beliefs, and even our political agendas. While most physicians do an excellent job of focusing on patients and leaving personal opinion and biases aside, this neutrality can be hard to completely achieve. In this season of intens...

Rise of populism