Thread by @Yascha_Mounk

This is going straight on the reading list for my course on populism and democracy:

"If we are to understand the depth of populist anger, we must look to the economics of regional resentment."

Read this important piece by @robertofoa and J. Wilmot now.

foreignpolicy.com/2019/09/18/the…

The article makes a few main points:

1) In virtually all countries, there is a very strong urban-rural divide: populist votes come overwhelmingly from exurban and rural areas.

2)

The urban-rural divide in politics has deepened. Why?

Because the urban-rural divide in economics has deepened.

Indeed, the 2008 Recession has long ago been overcome in cities. In rural areas, it is still going on...

3)

The answer to the populist surge isn't to empower technocrats or change the rules of the game by packing courts.

It is to deal with rural resentment by investing more heavily in developing infrastructure and closing the urban-rural divide.

And we haven't been doing that.

This article is not the first to note a strong urban-rural divide, of course.

But it carefully uses new data to tell a clear and nuanced story about the roots of populism in rural resentment.

[End.]