David Karpa

@dkarpa.bsky.social

1871 Followers 1698 Following

Postdoc at HfP, TUM political behavior, political economy, and political psychology www.davidkarpa.com

decesion tree
Interflex binning plot showing the marginal effect of the surveillance treatment on self-censorship, moderated by international media consumption. At 0 (no international media), the effect is 0.9 percentage points with confidence intervals crossing zero. At 1 (consumes international media), the effect is 6.1 percentage points.
Bar chart showing response distributions (justified, not justified, prefer not to answer) across control, surveillance, and privacy groups for four questions. The share of 'prefer not to answer' increases in the surveillance group for all three sensitive political questions but not for the placebo question on working hours.
Abstract The rise of populist right parties is well-studied, but little attention has been given to how public service performance influences voter support. Given that public services are often the primary means through which citizens interact with the state, we argue that declining public services can create grievances that increase the appeal of populist right parties. Focusing on England’s National Health Service (NHS), we combine administrative data on local health facility closures with panel data on public preferences and voting intentions. Using a staggered difference-indifferences design, we find that closures reduce satisfaction with public services and increase support for populist right parties. These effects are moderated by migrant registrations at local health practices, highlighting the interaction between public service performance and immigration concerns in fueling populist right support. Our findings underscore the role of public service decline as a driver of support for populist parties, especially in areas undergoing demographic change.
Abstract Governments have repeatedly adjusted fiscal policy in recent decades. We examine the political effects of these adjustments in Europe since the 1990s using both district-level election outcomes and individual-level voting data. We expect austerity to increase populist votes, but only among economically vulnerable voters, who are hit the hardest by austerity. We identify economically vulnerable regions as those with a high share of low-skilled workers, workers in manufacturing and in jobs with a high routine-task intensity. The analysis of district-level elections demonstrates that austerity increases support for populist parties in economically vulnerable regions, but has little effect in less vulnerable regions. The individual-level analysis confirms these findings. Our results suggest that the success of populist parties hinges on the government's failure to protect the losers of structural economic change. The economic origins of populism are thus not purely external; the populist backlash is triggered by internal factors, notably public policies.
Abstract We investigate the bidirectional relationship between immigration and right-wing populism, which we characterize as a self-reinforcing dynamic process where anti-immigrant rhetoric and populist policies lead to a deterioration in the average education and skill level of immigrants. The deterioration in the ratio of high-skill to low-skill immigrants in turn fuels populist support and anti-immigration attitudes, creating what we call “the vicious circle of xenophobia.” We review some historical and contemporary studies that are suggestive of such a vicious circle. In particular, recent cross-country evidence shows that low-skill immigration tends to exacerbate populism, whereas high-skill immigration tends to mitigate it. Conversely, populist policies and xenophobic attitudes have a strong repulsive effect on highly skilled immigrants and result in adverse immigrant selection. We use the empirical results from those studies to inform a theoretical model of joint determination of immigrants’ skill ratio and right-wing populism levels. The model displays multiple equilibria, with the inferior equilibrium—corresponding to our vicious circle—characterized by high levels of right-wing populism and a high proportion of low-skill workers among immigrants. In this framework, structural trends such as Internet penetration, economic erosion of the middle class, demographic pressure from poor countries as well as adverse cyclical shocks make the good, efficient equilibrium less likely and the inferior equilibrium of explosive populism and adverse immigrants’ selection more likely.
A cat