No internal link. Guriev is about past populism in Europe, not the U.S. We read yellow.

In Algan et al. (2017) we track the change in unemployment and the vote for populist parties before and after the Great Recession in 240 subnational regions in 26 European countries in 2000–2017. Unlike other studies (Inglehart and Norris 2016; Guiso, Herrera, and Morelli 2017; and Dustmann et al. 2017) that study self-reported voting from the individual-level survey data, we look at the actual region-level voting outcomes. We find that controlling for regional fixed effects, an increase in unemployment is associated with the rise in populist vote. The effect’s magnitude is large: a 1 percentage point change in unemployment implies 1 percentage point change in the populist vote. In order to identify the causal effects, we instrument the increase in unemployment by the precrisis composition of the regional economy. We find that instrumental variable results imply even a larger magnitude of the effect: 1 percentage point increase in unemployment leads to 2 percentage points increase in populist vote. The effects that we find are larger than those found in other studies. This is likely to be driven by the fact that the other studies measure the relationship between individual-level employment status and his/her vote. We study the region-level relationships and thus can better identify the impact of economic insecurity. Indeed, an increase in regional unemployment raises economic insecurity and undermines the confidence in the system even for those voters who are currently employed. Indeed, even those who have a job are concerned with higher unemployment—as they face higher risks of losing their jobs and are less likely to see significant wage increases. To identify the mechanism, we study the relationship between the change in unemployment and change in political trust. We find that the increase in unemployment causes the decline in trust in European and national political institutions and alienation from existing parties. At the same time there is no, or almost no, impact on the generalized social trust, on the trust in police, or on the trust in church—or on the trust in the United Nations. In order to understand the role of identity politics, we also study the change in attitudes to immigration. We find that an increase in unemployment results in a more negative attitude to immigrants for economic reasons—but there is no impact on the attitude to migrants for cultural reasons. It may well be that the survey respondents are ashamed to admit their adherence to identity politics and ascribe cultural aversion to immigration to an economic one. However, Barrera et al. (2017) show that even if this bias exists, it is very small.