'There’s a problem there - and the responsibility of the mainstream is not to dismiss that'

A Q&A with Harvard research fellow Eric Protzer and University of Victoria professor Paul Summerville, authors of Reclaiming Populism

Populism has gotten much coverage in America in recent years. But the trucker convoy in Ottawa took many Canadian commentators by surprise, and many are still trying to make sense of what happened — and what it means for our country, and our democracy, going forward.

So the timing for a book from two Canadian academics, Reclaiming Populism: How Economic Fairness Can Win Back Disenchanted Voters, could not be better.

Eric Protzer is a research fellow at Harvard University’s Growth Lab, and Paul Summerville is an adjunct professor at the University of Victoria’s Gustavson School of Business, a former chief economist for RBC Dominion Securities, and a former political candidate.

Here, the pair outline their theory on populism, why they believe the trucker convoy was not the kind of political discontent that transforms societies — and how they see things playing out in this country going forward.

Reclaiming Populism is an interesting book, with a lot of surprises. Let's start by defining populism.

ERIC: In the book, we try to synthesize the relevant academic literature around populism. There’s no universal agreement on a definition, but there’s two common characteristics that people talk about. One is anti-pluralism, which is the sense that only people within a certain political tribe have the right to make legitimate political decisions, and people outside of that tribe do not. The other key quality is anti-elitism, which is the sense that the system is rigged by the elites for the elites, so that regular people don’t get to play on a level playing field and, as a consequence, have trouble getting ahead. With regard to examples, there are the really obvious ones, like Trump, like the Brexit movement in the UK, like Marine Le Pen in France. There are also ones that are perhaps less well known; you can think of Alternative für Deutschland in Germany.

PAUL: There’s one-off political moments, where there’s expression of discontent; obviously we’re going talk about that later when it comes to Canada. But then there’s long-brewing dissatisfaction that creates huge institutional change. It’s really understanding a spectrum of political discontent and where populism might fit on that spectrum.

You go through some of the common explanations for populism. I’d like to pull a few threads and hear why you believe these explanations are insufficient. Let’s start with immigration. What were your findings there?

ERIC: The basic message around immigration in our book — and also other cultural factors like social media — is that those things can be accelerating factors, but they’re not necessarily systematically associated with populism. We show in the statistical work behind the book that, in fact, levels of immigration and changes in immigration rates are pretty poor matches for the geography of contemporary rich world populism. That’s not to say that the issue is irrelevant, or meaningless to the conversation. It’s just that it’s maybe not the key impetus that leads some countries to come to huge levels of support for populism.

In countries where there are prevalent levels of economic fairness there tends to be better toleration for immigration, because people aren’t led to blame newcomers for all the problems in the system. But if the economy fundamentally doesn’t work in most regular people’s interests, if they can’t fairly get ahead and have a fair chance of success, then that can lead people to draw conclusions.

PAUL: If you think about the levels of foreign-born people, in Australia, New Zealand it is around 30 percent. Canada’s around 25 percent. Yet in those countries, we haven’t had the kind of populist disruptions that create huge institutional change. It’s occurred in places where the foreign-born percentage is half of that. So, if immigration of foreign-born is such an issue, why isn’t it happening in places like Canada or New Zealand? We are making a case that it has doesn’t have anything to do with immigration. It has to do with economic unfairness. But that immigration, and these other issues, are amplifiers of discontent.

Am I understanding correctly that you also see social media in that light — that it amplifies existing populism, but it’s not driving it?

ERIC: That’s pretty well it. If there are the conditions in place economically, then that can be channeled by social media in ways that build up frustration and push it in illiberal directions. But it’s not really convincing that social media by itself is a huge cause of populism. You can think of countries like South Korea and New Zealand and Japan, and even Canada, that have some of the highest rates of social media use in the world. Yet the extent to which populism exists in those places is certainly lesser than both Europe and the U.S., where social media usage is lower. So there’s not a very good match there.

Walk us through how economic unfairness is different from income or wealth inequality.

ERIC: For economic inequality, you’re thinking of things like income inequality and wealth inequality. What that’s really captured is simply whether outcomes are unequal in a given society, or in a given region. Economic fairness is instead characterized by the extent to which opportunity is equal, and reward is according to contribution. You can think of the characteristics of a well-functioning, fair meritocratic system. Importantly, those are not the same characteristics as whether outcomes are equal or unequal.

Now, from a behavioural perspective or a philosophical perspective, there are really good reasons to think that people care a lot more about fairness, and fair process, as opposed to simply whether outcomes are equal or unequal. You can imagine, for example, that somebody could get really rich in a variety of ways, which would increase income inequality or wealth inequality. But it could be by creating a wonderful new technology that saves the planet or makes everybody more productive and well-off. Or it could be through things like corruption or monopoly or rent seeking. So, you can have the same results in terms of inequality, but very different paths to that result.

That’s why fairness matters. It’s not simply about whether people have equal or unequal outcomes; it’s the reasons for those outcomes that are so key. People really care about whether people have a fair shot at getting ahead in life. Quantitatively, how we investigate that relationship in the book is we do a statistical analysis, like I’ve said, where we look at how various factors match up to the geography of populism across the rich world, both in North America and in Europe, and broadly throughout high-income countries.

Immigration and social media really don’t match up very well with the geography of populism, and neither does income or wealth inequality. France and Poland and Hungary are all in the bottom third of OECD countries with the lowest income inequality, and yet they have quite high levels of populism. In contrast, New Zealand, for example, has relatively high levels of income inequality that are comparable to the UK. And yet it’s led by Jacinda Ardern. There’s really not a match between income and wealth inequality and the geography of populism. Where we find there is a really good match is with social mobility.

Social mobility is essentially a measure of: Do your chances of economic success depend on how wealthy your parents were? That’s a really important type of economic unfairness, because if you have a situation where people are only getting ahead because they came from a wealthy family, that’s atrocious. It means that success depends on family wealth when it should fairly depend on things like talent and effort. We see a really good match between the geography of social mobility and populism around the world. Places like Australia, New Zealand, Canada, all have relatively high rates of social mobility, and they’re comparatively populism-resistant. Not necessarily one hundred percent immune, but comparatively resistant. In contrast, places with low social mobility, like the U.S., and the UK, and Italy, and France, have been home to some of the most defining populous events we’ve experienced in the last couple of years.

There’s a lot of factors that go into this. You explore things like housing, transportation, healthcare, education. Talk to me about housing — that’s something top-of-mind for so many people right now.

ERIC: There are a wide variety of inputs that support social mobility, and we have a framework in the book for organizing those categories of policy inputs under the twin pillars of equal opportunity and fair unequal outcomes. For equal opportunity, there are some obvious things like education and healthcare — but also less obvious things like housing, like transport infrastructure. Like prudent financial regulations, so you don’t have to go through financial crises all the time.

Then, on the flip side, you also need fair unequal outcomes, because you have to have a competitive market so that people can translate that opportunity in principle to actual success. That’s what makes social mobility a reality.

Now, with regards to the role of housing, it is something that I imagine a lot of Canadians probably have at the top of their minds. The severe unaffordability of housing can actually cut off opportunity for a lot of people. The reason for that — and this is especially true in Canada — is that economic opportunity is overwhelmingly concentrated in cities. So if you have a system where housing prices are growing far and away beyond the rate of income growth, people can no longer afford to live in places where they have the best job opportunities, the best business opportunities and the best educational opportunities. The consequence is that you could eventually get a system where it’s almost hereditary — where if you’re born into a reasonably well-off family, maybe you’ll have enough family wealth that you can afford a condo or a house in an urban centre. But sadly many people from working class backgrounds may not ever be able to afford that kind of opportunity. That’s deeply unfair.

PAUL: Having run for federal office twice, I’m on the doorstep and someone says, “What about the housing situation?” [I think] maybe Canada now has to face the fact that it’s time to tax capital gains on a principal home. But how would you present that to the public? I was told it was the third rail of Canadian politics — no one’s going to go there. But maybe you could reframe the conversation around fairness, the way Eric just has. How are people going to get access to economic opportunity? Perhaps that’s how you change the conversation.

Fairness is a moving target; you have to keep thinking about public policy in such a way that you continue to give people the chance to live life on their own terms — that life outcomes are not dependent on how their parents have done. Moving that conversation is one of the things we’ve tried to do with the book.

Your approach is also just more respectful to citizens. What you’re saying here is, “Take seriously the concerns of populist voters.” And that the political class should also take those concerns seriously. You bring up the Hillary Clinton example, the “basket of deplorables,” as a counterproductive strategy. Walk me through your thinking on that.

ERIC: Part of the problem — and this is especially pernicious issue on the left — is that there’s this thinking that the only reasons people would ever support a populist candidate, or a populous idea, is because their moral view of the world is flawed. Thus, the only adequate response is to excoriate those people, to condemn them. The problem with that approach, as we point out at length in the book, is that that’s a really bad assumption. It’s not true that people are solely motivated by having some sort of skewed moral system. The reality is that people are largely motivated to vote for populist candidates who promise to overturn the system because they think that the system is rigged. There’s low social mobility. There’s an unfair system. There’s not equal opportunity. There’s no reward according to contribution.

If you go around calling people deplorables, or racists, or stupid, you’re just dismissing them. You’re not able to talk to them in any meaningful way. Not only are you going to push those voters in an illiberal direction — because the mainstream isn’t speaking to them — but it’s actually tragic because you’re missing an opportunity.

The fact is that there’s a problem there and the responsibility of the mainstream is not to dismiss that problem, but rather to address it in a constructive and positive way, so that those energies are directed into reform. That’s the impetus for the title of the book, Reclaiming Populism. It’s about taking those motivations and pushing them in a positive direction to build a fair, more socially mobile economy.

PAUL: What’s interesting is our journey in terms of understanding this. We did six months of a research, a literature review, which is what you do when you write a book like this. It was pretty clear that if you need to start taking the populist complaint seriously, you need to understand the complaint. And, of course, it was wrapped around economic unfairness. The working title of the book was Defeating Populism. It wasn’t until we submitted our book proposal, our contributing editor came back to us and said, “I really don’t think you’re talking about defeating populism. I think you’re talking about reclaiming populism.” We were like: How did we not see that? So, even our own prejudices got in the way of how we thought about this. … [That] just opened up a whole different way to think about the problem. And it was much easier to write. The road was open to a very different kind of conversation.

Let’s turn our attention now to Canada. Canada has just been through a large populist wave that shook our democracy to its core, with the invoking of the Emergencies Act. What’s your analysis of what happened?

ERIC: People tend to look at events like these and conclude that the sky is falling. As soon as there’s any sort of anti-establishment movement going on, people worry we are we going the way of the U.S. ... It’s really important to compare and contrast Canada with other historical examples to get a sense of where Canada is likely heading. Canada has quite high social mobility. It’s not quite as high as in the Scandinavian countries, but it’s still fairly good. It’s a lot better than the U.S. and UK. Our take is that the anti-establishment politics that have played out in Canada thus far are likely to be, similarly as in the Scandinavian countries, relatively contained. We don’t think it’s likely over the medium-term future for it to spill out into anything like Trump or Brexit.

PAUL: I would take issue with anyone who would make the claim that what we saw in Canada was populist. It was very much driven by a one-off moment of political discontent rooted in a very unusual experience, which was this two-year pandemic. … The problem got deeply rooted because the policing was so bad. These guys were moving backwards from the moment the police started to move on them. This was not some kind of threat to Canadian democracy.

It was certainly a warning. But it has nothing to do with the populist eruptions we saw elsewhere.

Now, that’s not to say that populism might not become a problem for Canada. Fairness is a moving target. In the last 40 years, there has been extraordinary technological change, which has restructured the economy and created big winners and big losers. The whole challenge for the political system, then, is how do you mitigate those winners and losers? How do you make sure that the next generation has an opportunity to live life on their own terms? And not create, as we’ve seen in the UK and in the United States, the hereditary ruling class, where taxes are unfair, where there’s unfair access to the political system.

Canadians have to think about that too. [In the book] we didn’t only do the diagnosis. We’ve also provided a very powerful prescription for how politicians and policy makers and citizens have to think about these challenges going forward.

That’s where I’d like to end. With the trucker protests, some of the reporting on the ground did emphasize economic issues, and particularly the unfairness of the last couple of years, and how some workers were way more impacted than people who work from home. That that’s one concern I had. The other was, to your point earlier about how the political class deals with such concerns, we saw dismissive rhetoric from Justin Trudeau. Given that we’ve had this moment — you’ve called it a warning — what does Canada’s political class need to pay attention to going forward?

ERIC: What we really emphasize is that there are necessary changes that need to happen, both in politics, political messaging, and also policy, the substantive laws and public programs that are being passed. With regard to the politics of it, as we’ve discussed earlier, it’s really important to get over this trend of dismissing people as deplorables. If you don’t actually address the structural reasons behind the problem, they’re going to keep getting worse and worse and worse. It’s really important to connect with the people who have these concerns in a concrete way before that happens. You still have to defend democracy; you still have to stand against discrimination. But don’t go so heavy on the social justice messaging that these people are deplorable and stupid and racist.

Then, we centre our policy response to social mobility as being around equal opportunity and fair, unequal outcomes. … Things like more affordable housing, better education, better healthcare, those can all fall under the bucket of equal opportunity.

But things like wealth taxes, things like universal job guarantees, those are aggressive measures to equalize outcomes. They have failed terribly at the ballot box in many countries. So, it’s about government intervention to equalize opportunity, not to equalize outcomes, and simultaneously to support a fair competitive market economy that rewards people according to contribution and productivity.

PAUL: Fairness and social mobility are not easy things to achieve, but it can be achieved. Embracing those policy choices are critical. I would add that the creation of a national childcare strategy for Canada — that’s actually why I went into politics and ran for the NDP, in 2006 — this is an example of something that can fundamentally arc up fairness and make social mobility a greater possibility for people. But there’s lots of work to do. Because, as we said earlier, fairness is a moving target.

This interview has been edited and condensed.