Populism as Commitment: Theory and Evidence from US Congressional Elections

• In Event: Perspectives on American Political Economy

Abstract

When voters’ trust in politicians collapses, they demand simple policies that they can easily monitor. Disenchanted citizens therefore prefer committed delegates to politicians who portray themselves as competent policy makers but without a specific policy commitment (trustees). In a two-party competition, the unique asymmetric equilibrium is such that voters with lower trust select a committed delegate, while those with higher trust appoint a trustee. In this equilibrium, we show that the committed delegate also chooses all the strategies typically associated with populism, namely anti-elite and pro-people rhetoric. We bring the predictions to the data in the context of the US congressional elections. We use multilevel regression and post-stratification to create district-level estimates of voters’ distrust in federal government and we analyse the universe of tweets posted by approximately 1,500 congressional candidates between 2012 and 2020. We train a classifier to detect when a tweet contains a policy commitment, anti-elite or pro-people rhetoric. We find that voters’ distrust is strongly associated with candidates’ supply of commitments and populist rhetoric, especially when the candidates tweet about topics which enjoy a broad support among voters’. We finally show that commitments and populist rhetoric are effective at mobilising distrustful voters, who are more likely to turn out to vote for the committed candidate.

Authors

• Massimo Morelli, Università Bocconi

• Paolo Roberti, University of Bozen-Bolzano

• Luca Bellodi, Stanford University