Published Articles and Chapters
Populist Rhetoric and Central Bank Independence
The Ideational Approach to Populism Vol.II: Consequences and Mitigation. eds. Chryssogelos, A., Hawkins, E.T., Hawkins, K., Littvay, L., and Wiesehomeier, N. New York, NY: Routledge (2025).
While much recent research on populist leaders examines their adverse effects on checks and balances and the media, there has been less on their effects on economic institutions. This chapter explores how populists affect central bank independence. Under the ideational definition of populism, populists should oppose central bank independence because (1) central banks are run by elites and (2) their independence violates populists’ claimed mandate to embody the will of the people without mediation. It finds that populists reduce central bank independence, but this effect operates mostly via central banks relaxation their standards for lending directly to the government, not via irregular turnover in bank leaders or changes in the bank’s legal operating framework. This suggests that populists reduce central bank independence informally by pressuring central bankers to conform to their policy preferences. While these effects don’t appear to differ by populist leaders’ ideology or the country’s economic performance, they are weaker in countries with higher constraints on the executive, suggesting that institutions can play a role in constraining populists.
Left to Right: Labor Market Policy, Labour Market Status, and Political Affinities
Journal of Public Policy vol. 39, no. 4: 637-654 (2019).
In recent decades, there has been a gradual decline in working-class organisations, including social democratic parties and trade unions, and an increase in support for populist radical right parties across western democracies. These trends have a plausible common cause: an increase in labour market insecurity associated with deindustrialisation may cause disenchantment with establishment organisations and support for politicians who criticise them. In this article, I examine how individual labour market status interacts with labour market policies to affect attitudes towards trade unions and populist radical right parties. I find that individuals with insecure employment status become less likely to support trade unions and more likely to support populist radical right parties as employment protection for secure workers increases. This effect is offset somewhat by spending on active labour market policies. I find evidence for these predictions in data for 27 Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development countries from 1995 to 2009.
Financialization, Technological Change, and Trade Union Decline
Socio-Economic Review vol. 17, no. 3: 477-502 (2019).
Recent research finds that financialization and technological change have had a variety of negative effects on labor, including reducing low-skill workers’ wages and increasing income inequality. In this paper, I examine the effect on trade unions of one type of financialization, equity market development, and one type of technological change, routine-biased technological change. I argue that we should conceptualize trade union strength in two dimensions: 1) the strength of their institutional structures, such as the degree of wage bargaining coordination and the degree to which firms can deviate from collective agreements; 2) the strength of their membership. Using data for 21 OECD countries 1969-2010, I find a negative effect of equity market development on unions’ institutional structures, but not on union membership. Contrarily, I find that routine-biased technological change has a negative effect union density, but an inconsistent and sometimes positive effect on unions’ institutional structures. These findings are largely robust to a variety of tests for reverse causality.
The Conditional Effect of Technological Change on Collective Bargaining Coverage (with Thomas Biegert)
Research and Politics, January-March: 1-9 (2019).
Recent work in labor economics has shown that technological change has induced labor market polarization, an increase in demand for both high and low skill jobs, but declining demand for middle skill routine task jobs. We argue that labor market polarization should affect firms’ participation in collective agreements, but only in countries where laws automatically extending collective agreements to nonparticipating firms are weak. We develop an argument in which labor market polarization increases the distance between different skill groups of workers in both preferences for unionization and leverage to realize those preferences. Because of this, an increase in labor market polarization should be associated with a decline in collective bargaining coverage. We test our hypothesis about collective agreement extension and collective bargaining coverage in a cross-national sample of 21 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries from 1970 to 2010 and our hypothesis about labor market polarization in German firm-level and industry-level data from 1993–2007. We find a negative relationship in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development sample between technological change and collective bargaining coverage only in countries that make little or no use of extension procedures. We find that higher workforce skill polarization is associated with lower collective agreement participation in both German firm-level and industry-level samples.
Learning to Love the Government: Trade Unions and Late Adoption of the Minimum Wage
World Politics vol. 68, no. 3: 538-575 (2016).
One counterintuitive variation in wage-setting regulation is that countries with the highest labor standards and strongest labor movements are among the least likely to set a statutory minimum wage. This, the author argues, is due largely to trade union opposition. Trade unions oppose the minimum wage when they face minimal low-wage competition, which is affected by the political institutions regulating industrial action, collective agreements, and employment, as well as by the skill and wage levels of their members. When political institutions effectively regulate low-wage competition, unions oppose the minimum wage. When political institutions are less favorable toward unions, there may be a cleavage between high- and low-wage unions in their minimum wage preferences. The argument is illustrated with case studies of the UK, Germany, and Sweden. The author demonstrates how the regulation of low-wage competition affects unions’ minimum wage preferences by exploiting the following labor market institutional shocks: the Conservatives’ labor law reforms in the UK, the Hartz labor market reforms in Germany, and the European Court of Justice's Laval ruling in Sweden. The importance of union preferences for minimum wage adoption is also shown by how trade union confederation preferences influenced the position of the Labour Party in the UK and the Social Democratic Party in Germany.
Unpublished Papers
Regional Economies, Relative Deprivation, and Radical Voting
While there is a very large literature on how contextual factors affect individual support for right-wing populist parties, there is relatively little work addressing the puzzle of why support for these parties often varies so much across regions within countries. Recent successes of populist radical right parties and ballot initiatives such as Brexit have however exhibited strong regional patterns, receiving a great deal of support in deindustrialized areas. This raises the question of whether this support may be driven more by local/regional economic considerations than national economic considerations. Using data on primarily NUTS 2 regions combined with waves 1-7 of the European Social Survey, I find that while most regional economic factors have inconsistent explanatory value across radical right and left parties, there are some important consistencies. Most notably, higher regional GDP consistently predicts lower individual support for populist right parties but has little relationship with support for populist left parties. I also investigate the role of relative economic deprivation, which I code as the difference between individual income and average regional income. Contrary to recent work, I find little consistent relationship between relative economic deprivation and support for radical parties, suggesting that the effect of regional economic performance may be driven more by sociotropic concerns.
Ulysses Berated: Populism, Ideology, and Central Bank Independence
Recent attacks by populist leaders on central banks have drawn attention to the incompatibility between populism and central bank independence (CBI). Populists are anti-elite leaders who claim to rule in the ‘name of the people’ and under such a view, the independence of such a crucial macro-economic function is illegitimate. Yet several populist leaders have been on the right and came to power on the promise of enacting pro-market economic reforms. In this paper, we examine the relationship between populism and CBI using three new datasets. While we find little overall relationship between populism and CBI, we do find differences based on populists’ substantive ideologies. We find that left-wing populists reduce CBI but right-wing populists increase it. We divide right-wing populists into those who come to power primarily on cultural appeals and neoliberal populists and find that CBI is higher under both types. These results suggests that scholars examining economic outcomes under populism should be more sensitive to substantive ideological differences between them and the socio-economic contexts in which these leaders come to power.
Foreign and Domestic Investment Under Populist Leaders
While there is research on how populists affect economic outcomes, there is less on how they affect investment. But we might expect an effect because populist leadership often creates uncertainty, which previous research shows lowers investment. We investigate two types of investment: (1) inward foreign direct investment flows and (2) domestic Gross Fixed Capital Formation. We argue that populists will lower FDI but not GFCF because (1) many types of populists are explicitly hostile to foreign interests, (2) foreign investors will be more sensitive to political uncertainty in potential host countries and have outside options, and (3) domestic businesses do not have these outside options. Using a new global database that identifies 46 populist leaders from 1990-2018, we find that foreign direct investment is lower under populist leaders, but that domestic investment isn’t. We also find that populists worsen regulations for foreign investors, but not for domestic businesses.
Trade Unions and the Minimum Wage (with Matthew Dimick)
Why do labor unions support the statutory minimum wage in some countries, such as the United States, but oppose it in others, such as Denmark or Sweden? This paper presents a formal model of trade union preferences for the statutory minimum wage. The minimum wage presents certain dangers: it may (1) set wages higher or lower than unions prefer, (2) reduce the incentives of workers to join unions in the short term, and (3) undermine the social custom that sustains union membership in the long term. For these reasons, we predict that unions will support a statutory minimum wage only when unions are too weak---when unions bargain with a smaller share of firms, when they are legally restricted from engaging in certain strike actions, and wage bargaining is less coordinated---to sustain high wages on their own. We first motivate our focus on union preferences by demonstrating a negative correlation between two of our key variables, collective agreement coverage and secondary strike permissiveness, and government involvement in minimum wage setting in fixed effects regressions for 21 OECD countries from 1970-2010. After presenting the model, we illustrate its various mechanisms with case studies of union preferences in the US, UK, Germany, and Sweden.
Please contact me at [email protected] if you are interested in reading a draft of any unpublished papers.
Populist Rhetoric and Central Bank Independence
The Ideational Approach to Populism Vol.II: Consequences and Mitigation. eds. Chryssogelos, A., Hawkins, E.T., Hawkins, K., Littvay, L., and Wiesehomeier, N. New York, NY: Routledge (2025).
While much recent research on populist leaders examines their adverse effects on checks and balances and the media, there has been less on their effects on economic institutions. This chapter explores how populists affect central bank independence. Under the ideational definition of populism, populists should oppose central bank independence because (1) central banks are run by elites and (2) their independence violates populists’ claimed mandate to embody the will of the people without mediation. It finds that populists reduce central bank independence, but this effect operates mostly via central banks relaxation their standards for lending directly to the government, not via irregular turnover in bank leaders or changes in the bank’s legal operating framework. This suggests that populists reduce central bank independence informally by pressuring central bankers to conform to their policy preferences. While these effects don’t appear to differ by populist leaders’ ideology or the country’s economic performance, they are weaker in countries with higher constraints on the executive, suggesting that institutions can play a role in constraining populists.
Left to Right: Labor Market Policy, Labour Market Status, and Political Affinities
Journal of Public Policy vol. 39, no. 4: 637-654 (2019).
In recent decades, there has been a gradual decline in working-class organisations, including social democratic parties and trade unions, and an increase in support for populist radical right parties across western democracies. These trends have a plausible common cause: an increase in labour market insecurity associated with deindustrialisation may cause disenchantment with establishment organisations and support for politicians who criticise them. In this article, I examine how individual labour market status interacts with labour market policies to affect attitudes towards trade unions and populist radical right parties. I find that individuals with insecure employment status become less likely to support trade unions and more likely to support populist radical right parties as employment protection for secure workers increases. This effect is offset somewhat by spending on active labour market policies. I find evidence for these predictions in data for 27 Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development countries from 1995 to 2009.
Financialization, Technological Change, and Trade Union Decline
Socio-Economic Review vol. 17, no. 3: 477-502 (2019).
Recent research finds that financialization and technological change have had a variety of negative effects on labor, including reducing low-skill workers’ wages and increasing income inequality. In this paper, I examine the effect on trade unions of one type of financialization, equity market development, and one type of technological change, routine-biased technological change. I argue that we should conceptualize trade union strength in two dimensions: 1) the strength of their institutional structures, such as the degree of wage bargaining coordination and the degree to which firms can deviate from collective agreements; 2) the strength of their membership. Using data for 21 OECD countries 1969-2010, I find a negative effect of equity market development on unions’ institutional structures, but not on union membership. Contrarily, I find that routine-biased technological change has a negative effect union density, but an inconsistent and sometimes positive effect on unions’ institutional structures. These findings are largely robust to a variety of tests for reverse causality.
The Conditional Effect of Technological Change on Collective Bargaining Coverage (with Thomas Biegert)
Research and Politics, January-March: 1-9 (2019).
Recent work in labor economics has shown that technological change has induced labor market polarization, an increase in demand for both high and low skill jobs, but declining demand for middle skill routine task jobs. We argue that labor market polarization should affect firms’ participation in collective agreements, but only in countries where laws automatically extending collective agreements to nonparticipating firms are weak. We develop an argument in which labor market polarization increases the distance between different skill groups of workers in both preferences for unionization and leverage to realize those preferences. Because of this, an increase in labor market polarization should be associated with a decline in collective bargaining coverage. We test our hypothesis about collective agreement extension and collective bargaining coverage in a cross-national sample of 21 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries from 1970 to 2010 and our hypothesis about labor market polarization in German firm-level and industry-level data from 1993–2007. We find a negative relationship in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development sample between technological change and collective bargaining coverage only in countries that make little or no use of extension procedures. We find that higher workforce skill polarization is associated with lower collective agreement participation in both German firm-level and industry-level samples.
Learning to Love the Government: Trade Unions and Late Adoption of the Minimum Wage
World Politics vol. 68, no. 3: 538-575 (2016).
One counterintuitive variation in wage-setting regulation is that countries with the highest labor standards and strongest labor movements are among the least likely to set a statutory minimum wage. This, the author argues, is due largely to trade union opposition. Trade unions oppose the minimum wage when they face minimal low-wage competition, which is affected by the political institutions regulating industrial action, collective agreements, and employment, as well as by the skill and wage levels of their members. When political institutions effectively regulate low-wage competition, unions oppose the minimum wage. When political institutions are less favorable toward unions, there may be a cleavage between high- and low-wage unions in their minimum wage preferences. The argument is illustrated with case studies of the UK, Germany, and Sweden. The author demonstrates how the regulation of low-wage competition affects unions’ minimum wage preferences by exploiting the following labor market institutional shocks: the Conservatives’ labor law reforms in the UK, the Hartz labor market reforms in Germany, and the European Court of Justice's Laval ruling in Sweden. The importance of union preferences for minimum wage adoption is also shown by how trade union confederation preferences influenced the position of the Labour Party in the UK and the Social Democratic Party in Germany.
Unpublished Papers
Regional Economies, Relative Deprivation, and Radical Voting
While there is a very large literature on how contextual factors affect individual support for right-wing populist parties, there is relatively little work addressing the puzzle of why support for these parties often varies so much across regions within countries. Recent successes of populist radical right parties and ballot initiatives such as Brexit have however exhibited strong regional patterns, receiving a great deal of support in deindustrialized areas. This raises the question of whether this support may be driven more by local/regional economic considerations than national economic considerations. Using data on primarily NUTS 2 regions combined with waves 1-7 of the European Social Survey, I find that while most regional economic factors have inconsistent explanatory value across radical right and left parties, there are some important consistencies. Most notably, higher regional GDP consistently predicts lower individual support for populist right parties but has little relationship with support for populist left parties. I also investigate the role of relative economic deprivation, which I code as the difference between individual income and average regional income. Contrary to recent work, I find little consistent relationship between relative economic deprivation and support for radical parties, suggesting that the effect of regional economic performance may be driven more by sociotropic concerns.
Ulysses Berated: Populism, Ideology, and Central Bank Independence
Recent attacks by populist leaders on central banks have drawn attention to the incompatibility between populism and central bank independence (CBI). Populists are anti-elite leaders who claim to rule in the ‘name of the people’ and under such a view, the independence of such a crucial macro-economic function is illegitimate. Yet several populist leaders have been on the right and came to power on the promise of enacting pro-market economic reforms. In this paper, we examine the relationship between populism and CBI using three new datasets. While we find little overall relationship between populism and CBI, we do find differences based on populists’ substantive ideologies. We find that left-wing populists reduce CBI but right-wing populists increase it. We divide right-wing populists into those who come to power primarily on cultural appeals and neoliberal populists and find that CBI is higher under both types. These results suggests that scholars examining economic outcomes under populism should be more sensitive to substantive ideological differences between them and the socio-economic contexts in which these leaders come to power.
Foreign and Domestic Investment Under Populist Leaders
While there is research on how populists affect economic outcomes, there is less on how they affect investment. But we might expect an effect because populist leadership often creates uncertainty, which previous research shows lowers investment. We investigate two types of investment: (1) inward foreign direct investment flows and (2) domestic Gross Fixed Capital Formation. We argue that populists will lower FDI but not GFCF because (1) many types of populists are explicitly hostile to foreign interests, (2) foreign investors will be more sensitive to political uncertainty in potential host countries and have outside options, and (3) domestic businesses do not have these outside options. Using a new global database that identifies 46 populist leaders from 1990-2018, we find that foreign direct investment is lower under populist leaders, but that domestic investment isn’t. We also find that populists worsen regulations for foreign investors, but not for domestic businesses.
Trade Unions and the Minimum Wage (with Matthew Dimick)
Why do labor unions support the statutory minimum wage in some countries, such as the United States, but oppose it in others, such as Denmark or Sweden? This paper presents a formal model of trade union preferences for the statutory minimum wage. The minimum wage presents certain dangers: it may (1) set wages higher or lower than unions prefer, (2) reduce the incentives of workers to join unions in the short term, and (3) undermine the social custom that sustains union membership in the long term. For these reasons, we predict that unions will support a statutory minimum wage only when unions are too weak---when unions bargain with a smaller share of firms, when they are legally restricted from engaging in certain strike actions, and wage bargaining is less coordinated---to sustain high wages on their own. We first motivate our focus on union preferences by demonstrating a negative correlation between two of our key variables, collective agreement coverage and secondary strike permissiveness, and government involvement in minimum wage setting in fixed effects regressions for 21 OECD countries from 1970-2010. After presenting the model, we illustrate its various mechanisms with case studies of union preferences in the US, UK, Germany, and Sweden.
Please contact me at [email protected] if you are interested in reading a draft of any unpublished papers.