Christian Bjørnskov

Latin America has for decades been known for its political instability. In 1930 and 1931 alone, a series of coups in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatem...

Populists claim to empower ‘the people’, but do they help or hinder one of the foremost arenas in which people voluntarily engage with others – civil society? We study this question using a global panel of 79 countries (1970–2019) that combines party-level populism scores with legislative ideology and six indicators of the civil-society environment. We reduce the indicators using factor analysis to two outcomes: civil-society freedom and civil-society structure. We estimate country- and year-fixed-effects models and use lagged specifications and election-year interactions as timing diagnostics to assess whether the estimates are likely to be driven by contemporaneous electoral feedback. We find that greater right-wing populist representation is consistently associated with subsequent declines in both civil-society freedom and structure, while average associations for left-wing populism are small and often indistinguishable from zero. The right-populist association is conditioned by partisan balance, being strongest where right-wing parties dominate.

State repression frequently occurs in the aftermath of coups d’état. However, the scale and intensity of society-wide repression after these events vary substantially. In this article, we argue that the partisanship of the deposed chief executive influences the level of post-coup repression. Because left-wing incumbents rely on a network of various formal organizations with potential for (mass) mobilization such as formal party organizations, trade unions, and other civil society organizations to gain and stay in power, agents overthrowing left-wing incumbents carry out greater levels of repression during and in the immediate aftermath of a coup to repress these organizations and solidify their new rule. We test this argument on a panel of Latin American and Caribbean countries from 1920 to 2021 using new data on regimes and coups as well as data on repression of civil society organizations and civil liberties from the Varieties of Democracy database. We utilize differences between successful and failed coups as an identification strategy. The results show robust evidence in favour of the argument; successful coups against left-wing chief executives are indeed followed by greater levels of repression against civil society organizations and greater drops in civil liberties. These effects are larger in the case of military coups and when the country experiencing the coups is a democracy.

Populist leaders frequently challenge established economic institutions and policy norms, including the independence of central banks and the conventional conduct of monetary policy. While a growing literature examines the macroeconomic consequences of populism, less is known about how populist actors affect monetary policy institutions and instruments. Building on the view of populism as a political approach that contrasts a virtuous "people" with a corrupt elite and claims exclusive representation of the general will, this paper empirically examines whether and how populist forces influence monetary policy. Distinguishing between different ideological versions of populism in the economic policy sphere, we combine eight indicators of monetary policy and monetary institutions from the Economic Freedom of the World dataset with newly developed measures of populism and ideology to construct a panel dataset covering 72 countries with Western-style political institutions from 2000 to 2023. Results indicate that any negative effect of populism in government is primarily associated with economically left-wing populism that can build on left-leaning majorities in parliament. These are clearly linked to stronger capital controls, reduced financial openness, weaker protection of foreign assets, and over time higher inflation.

Populists typically frame politics as a conflict between a corrupt elite and a virtuous people and are skeptical of institutional constraints, including those protecting freedom of expression, as they seek to control the public narrative. We ask to what extent de jure constitutional guarantees of freedom of expression constrain such actors and when speech can be de facto curtailed despite formal protections, with a particular focus on emergency derogation clauses. We explore these questions in panel data for 75 countries with multi-party systems between 1970 and 2020. Findings show that right-wing populist representation is associated with lower de facto freedom of expression, but mainly where the constitution offers an opt-out in emergencies or fails to impose clear non-emergency limits on restrictions of expression. These findings demonstrate that constitutional design and populist influence jointly determine the extent to which constitutional promises of free expression are honored in practice.

Populists typically frame politics as a conflict between a corrupt elite and a virtuous people and are skeptical of institutional constraints, including those protecting freedom of expression, as they seek to control the public narrative. We ask to what extent de jure constitutional guarantees of freedom of expression constrain such actors and when speech can be de facto curtailed despite formal protections, with a particular focus on emergency derogation clauses. We explore these questions in panel data for 75 countries with multi-party systems between 1970 and 2020. Findings show that right-wing populist representation is associated with lower de facto freedom of expression, but mainly where the constitution offers an opt-out in emergencies or fails to impose clear non-emergency limits on restrictions of expression. These findings demonstrate that constitutional design and populist influence jointly determine the extent to which constitutional promises of free expression are honored in practice.

This study investigates the claim that capitalism (or neoliberal reforms) is associated with higher rates of femicide, which is often identified as an outcome of the capitalist exploitation of women in parts of the feminist literature. Employing a panel of 163 countries observed between 1990 and 2023, we find no significantly positive relationship between the Economic Freedom of the World index and different measures that approximate the concept of femicide. If anything, we partially find a significantly negative effect, particularly when not conditioning on income, which likely constitutes an important long‐run transmission channel of the impact of pro‐market institutions for reducing deadly violence against women. Even for countries with a large textile exporting sector—an industry that is heavily associated with the economic exploitation of women—more economic freedom is not significantly related to comparatively higher rates of femicide.

While most of the literature considers economic crisis as a precursor to coup attempts, theoretical considerations suggest that coups may also cause crises. Estimating effects of different types of coups on crisis risk across 32 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean between 1920 and 2022, the findings indicate that civilian-led coups and coups dismantling democracy significantly and substantially increase the likelihood of entering an economic crisis. As such, certain types of coups have severe economic consequences.