Populist voters like dark politicians

'Populist politicians' take aim at 'soft-target' doctors.

Channelling discontent? Non-voters, populist party voters, and their meaningful political agency

This article assesses the assumption that populist parties form an efficacious exhaust valve for voters, the channelling discontent thesis, as it is termed here. Drawing on in-depth interviews with Dutch PVV voters and (deliberate) nonvoters, I assess this thesis in a comparison between them. This analysis shows that non-voters do not lack political fulfilment on two of the three dimensions of ...

A Simple Coase-Like Mechanism that Transfers Control of Government Spending Levels from Politicians to Voters

Elected representatives have little incentive to pursue the interests of those electing them once they are elected. This well-known principle-agent problem leads, in a variety of theories of government, to nonoptimally large levels of government expenditure. An implication is that budgetary rules are seen as necessary to constrain politicians’ tax and spending behavior. Popular among such const...

Personalities of politicians and voters: unique and synergistic relationships.

A rare collection of personality assessments from 103 Italian politicians revealed predictable patterns of contrasts and similarities with personality dimensions from a large normative sample (N = 4,578). Three modal personality characteristics distinguished politicians, with their significantly higher levels of Energy, Agreeableness, and Social Desirability, from the general public. Comparabil...

When Do Voters Punish Corrupt Politicians? Experimental Evidence from Brazil

While there is a vast literature about the consequences of corruption, research focused on the causes of non-corrupt governments is still nascent. Electoral accountability is one important means of changing existing corruption dynamics in government, and one potential way of punishing corrupt elected officials is to give voters information about the corrupt behavior. In a randomized field exper...