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First published in Political Research Exchange, v7 i1 published by Informa UK. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/2474736X.2025.2476407

Document Type

Article

Publication Version

Published Version

Keywords

international trade, luxury goods, Populism, principal-agent theory, tariffs

Journal/Book/Conference Title

Political Research Exchange

Volume

7

Issue

1

First Page

1

Last Page

18

Abstract

Populist movements have grown significantly around the world in recent years. Populist ideologies typically view social and political elites as the enemy of the people; however, populist leaders are themselves part of the elite class, and are politically and financially dependent on other elites to some degree. We use principal-agent theory to examine whether populist leaders act as constrained agents by faithfully representing the people’s interests, or whether they actually pursue elite interests. We use panel data on more than 170 countries from 1993 to 2019 to look at total imports and imports of luxury goods under populist regimes to examine whether populist leaders try to carve out exceptions for elite interests. We find that both total imports and imports of luxury goods decline under populist regimes, and further decline over time. This suggests that populists act more as constrained agents to the people.

Department

Department of Political Science

Department

Department of Management

Original Publication Date

3-18-2025

Object Description

1 PDF File

DOI of published version

10.1080/2474736X.2025.2476407

Repository

UNI ScholarWorks, Rod Library, University of Northern Iowa

Copyright

©2025 The Author(s)

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

Language

en

File Format

application/pdf

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