Social Mobility Explains Populism, Not Inequality or Culture

What is driving contemporary populism? Commonly-accepted answers are divided into two schools of thought, one economic and one cultural. In his latest working paper, Growth Lab research fellow Eric Protzer utilizes geographic variation in the incidence of populism to apply cross-sectional regression analysis to these arguments, and concludes that they are highly unconvincing. Instead, the thus-largely overlooked factor of social mobility is found to have far greater explanatory power. In this podcast, Rushabh Sanghvi, Research Assistant at the Growth Lab, interviews Eric about his research on Social Mobility and Populism.