Populism

In their pursuit of being elected, politicians might not provide their constituents with independent viewpoints, but just try to outguess popular opinion. Although such behaviour compromises the quality of policy proposals, a candidate can not resist resorting to it when the spoils of office are too large. Importantly, the public's trust or distrust in politicians may be self-fulfilling prophecies. The reason is that when voters evaluate policy proposals, they put more faith in their prior opinion the lower is the supposed quality of a proposal. Hence, if voters think that a politician is a populist, any discrepancy between her proposal and their own prior becomes more damaging for the politician's election chances. Ironically however, this only increases the politician's incentive