In the past seven days, Donald Trump has urged pregnant women to avoid painkillers over unproven autism links and added a $100,000 fee to a visa whose recipients have propelled US productivity growth in recent decades. Across the Atlantic, meanwhile, his aspiring counterpart Nigel Farage proposed to retroactively strip settled status from millions who have already been working in the UK for years.
These proposals indicate the strutting confidence of a radical, emboldened populist right in both countries. But new research ponders whether the seeds of these announcements might have been inadvertently planted by the mainstream political establishment.
This is the implication of recent work by political economist Laurenz Guenther, whose exploration of the gaps between the values and policy preferences of politicians and the public provides a clear and evidence-based framework for understanding the seismic political shifts we’ve been living through in recent years.