Populist discourse and entrepreneurship: The role of political ideology and institutions

Abstract Using institutional economic theory as our guiding framework, we develop a model to describe how populist discourse by nation’s political leader influences entrepreneurship. We hypothesize that reduces entrepreneurship creating regime uncertainty concerning the future stability of environment, resulting in entrepreneurs anticipating higher transaction costs. Our highlights two important factors moderate relationship. First is strength checks and balances, which weakens negative relationship between providing with greater confidence actions will be constrained. Second, ideology moderates The anti-capitalistic rhetoric left-wing populism create than right-wing populism, often accompanied critical free trade foreigners, but also supportive business interests. effect centrist mix contradictory ideas make it difficult discern costs, have weaker on either or populism. empirically test using multi-level design dataset comprised more 780,000 individuals 33 countries over period 2002–2016. analysis largely supports regarding moderating role ideology. However, surprisingly, findings suggest nations stronger balances.