https://macropaperwarehouse.com/authors/frederic-docquier/Frédéric DocquierHugo -- gohugo.ioen-usThu, 01 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://macropaperwarehouse.com/papers/populism-and-the-skill-content-of-globalisation/Thu, 01 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://macropaperwarehouse.com/papers/populism-and-the-skill-content-of-globalisation/<p>This paper investigates how the skill structure of globalization shocks — rather than globalization per se — drives the long-run evolution of populism across countries, making a unified empirical case that what gets imported or who immigrates matters as much as how much.</p> <p><strong>Research question and motivation.</strong> The literature has documented that trade exposure and immigration fuel populist voting, but prior work has studied these channels separately, used narrow time windows, and relied on binary party classifications that cannot capture shifts in populism across the full party landscape. Rodrik&rsquo;s (2018) widely-cited hypothesis holds that trade shocks drive left-wing populism (as in Latin America) and immigration drives right-wing populism (as in Europe). The authors examine whether this hypothesis survives when skill content is explicitly disaggregated and both channels are studied jointly in a unified long-panel setting.</p>