Political Economy and Public Economics

Title: Informational Roots of Support for Right-Wing Populists: Evidence from Argentina

Abstract: Support for populist and authoritarian regimes is rising worldwide, despite evidence that they tend to underperform economically. To examine the role of (mis)perceptions of regime performance as drivers of political attitudes, we conducted a survey experiment with 11,400 subjects during Argentina's 2023 presidential elections. At baseline, optimistic beliefs about the performance of populist and non-democratic regimes were widespread, and correlated with support for those regimes. When exposed to randomly assigned informational treatments challenging optimistic views about right-wing populism or autocracies, individuals significantly adjusted their beliefs and their support for candidates associated with populist and authoritarian regimes. We explore the impact of different information sources, showing that academic sources and newspapers are more influential than social media. Although individuals appear to adjust their beliefs and attitudes in response to credible information, we find that information countering people's beliefs reduces their demand for additional information on regime performance, consisted with an important role for motivated reasoning.

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