The recent rise of populism in advanced economies reveals major voter discontent. To effectively respond to voters’ grievances, researchers and policymakers need to understand their drivers. Recent empirical research shows that these drivers include both long-term trends (job polarization due...

How effective is fact checking in countervailing "alternative facts,'' i.e., misleading statements by politicians? In a randomized online experiment during the 2017 French presidential election campaign, we subjected subgroups of 2480 French voters to alternative facts by the extreme-right...

Using a randomized experiment in the context of the 2019 European elections in France, we study how fact-checking affects real sharing of “alternative facts” (false or misleading statements by politicians) on Facebook and the determinants of the decision to view the fact-checking. We expose...

The spectre of populism is haunting Europe and the West, but what is driving this populism? In this paper we look at the implications of the Great Recession on voting for anti-establishment parties, as well as for general trust and political attitudes, using regional data across Europe. Our...