Hello and welcome to the CR podcast on Packing Europe.

This is Jake Chacki, a senior research fellow at the CR, and I will be your host today.

We are talking about populism today and what European

government should, or rather shouldn't do, to STEM its rise. And I'm joined by CERR Associate Fellow

John Springford, who just published an insight on this very topic for us. And Ben Ansel, a professor of

comparative democratic institutions at Nuffield College, Oxford University.

Welcome to the podcast both.

Hello, thanks for having us.

Thanks for having a show.

Great.

So I will start with a question to both of you.

John, your insight argues that policies that are designed to accommodate populist voters are unlikely to be effective.

But my question is, why do governments turn to them in the first place?

It's a really good question, this, and I found it a bit difficult to answer it in a really crisp way.

So shout to me if I go on for too long. But I think there are a few reasons. I mean,

one is that there are real costs to openness to trade and migration, which historically

moderates have tended to gloss over a little bit. And one big cost when it comes to trade

is that there can be really bad impacts locally. So particularly industrial regions can lose out from big expansion of,

essentially global trade integration.

And many places, and one of the interesting things about the economic literature,

particularly the work of David Orter and colleagues,

is that many places can remain depressed for quite a long time

...