AUDIO: Why populism comes and goes

In this first weekly audio edition of On Our Radar, Adrian Monck looks at the history, the causes and the consequences of populism.

On our Radar this week draws from three articles:

One powerful element in the Presidential Campaign, and one of the driving forces for the first 100 days of the new president, will be the rise of populism, the calling out of immigrants as scapegoats for some of the economic challenges faced by parts of the US electorate, and the policy solutions for some of those problems, such as closing borders, dismantling of trade agreements and aggressive clampdown on illegal immigration.

These themes aren’t exclusive to the United States – we have seen the rise of populism across Europe – many of the arguments against Britain’s membership of the EU came from the populist side of British politics, in France the rise of the Front National, on the left Syriza in Greece, in Germany, Holland, in Iceland with its Pirate Party… and beyond in Asia in the Philippines, in Australia with One Nation, all around the world we are seeing the rise of right wing populist parties and the fragmentation of politics as they fracture established structures.

So today I have chosen three pieces that provide some insight into both the causes and the consequences of these trends:

One article from nearly two hundred years ago written by a civil servant in Manchester England, on the causes of poverty in that first industrial revolution factory two

One academic piece taken from VoxEU from three social scientists, on the link between the financial crisis and the drift to political extremes

And the last – what happens when populists actually gain the levers of power – are they any good at actually running things, and if not, why not?