How Lockdown Job Losses Fueled Right-Wing Populism

🧭 The Question at Stake

A central debate asks whether right-wing populism is driven more by economic distress or by cultural backlash. Because economic and cultural factors tend to covary, identifying a clear economic effect has been difficult. This study uses the economic shock from COVID-19 business lockdowns to isolate economic motivations for support for a populist leader.

🔍 A pandemic shock that separated health gains from economic pain

Lockdown policies protected public health but imposed severe economic hardship. The economic costs fell disproportionately on workers without college degrees. The argument tested is that, in the U.S., those most exposed to the economic costs of lockdowns were more likely to shift support toward a populist president.

🔬 How exposure and political response were measured

• Exploits variation in the timing and intensity of state-level business lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic.
• Measures differential exposure via local risk of downsizing and the concentration of workers without college degrees.
• Uses a staggered difference-in-differences event-study design to compare changes in support for Donald Trump across states before and after lockdowns.

🔑 Key findings

• State lockdowns are associated with a significant increase in Trump approval where the risk of downsizing was high.
• The results show that economic exposure to lockdown costs—especially among less-educated workers—helped drive shifts toward a right-wing populist leader.
• More broadly, the findings illustrate how the pursuit of "unfunded public goods" (for example, public health measures, environmental policies, or new technologies) can generate concentrated, uncompensated costs that boost populist support.

🔔 Why this matters

These results clarify part of the economic side of the economic-versus-cultural debate over populism by isolating an economic shock. They imply that policy choices that deliver public goods without addressing concentrated local costs can have important political consequences, making the distribution of policy burdens central to understanding the rise of right-wing populism.