Populism: the Bulgarian case

The Digital Library – The Bulgarian Case

...Teilhard de Chardin described the world as if he were outside of it. He was sure that every change, every new bifurcation, was going in the right direction – in the direction of increased spirituality. On the contrary, I am more impressed by the existence of multiple time horizons. A bifurcation can lead us to the best or to the worst. We are participating in an evolution whose outcome isn’t...

Rise of populism

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...

A Political Theory of Populism

When voters fear that politicians may have a right-wing bias or that they may be in‡uenced or corrupted by the rich elite, signals of true left-wing conviction are valuable. As a consequence, even a moderate politician seeking reelection chooses ‘populist’policies— i.e., policies to the left of the median voter— as a way of signaling that he is not from the right. Truly right-wing politicians r...

The rise of anti-EU populism

rise in most European countries – North and South, East and West – and that they resort to anti-EU rhetoric to increase their political and electoral support. The combination of the global financial and economic crises (since 2008) with the specifically European sovereign debt crisis (since 2010) has only strengthened this trend. It is equally undeniable that mainstream parties now embrace some...