Why is populism emerging now in Europe? Why is it present in USA and Latin America? What model of political choice may explain these facts? Our paper addresses these questions by building an evolutionary game with two groups of players that decide whether to support a populist party by weighting demand for redistribution and demand for tough policy against immigration. Fundamentally, it is assumed that agents care about immigration the more they fear it and the higher number of other people care about it. Overall, positive shifts in the fear of immigration and increases in inequality drive citizens to converge toward supporting populists. The stability of the equilibria depends on the crucial parameters of the model, namely: fear of immigrants, the effect that the population type (the number of citizens supporting populism) have on individual preferences, economic inequality. Different equilibria represent different cases of populism: South-American left-wing populism and European right-wing populism. We propose that an economic society with a low inequality of wealth and with a low fear of immigrants is needed to avoid populism.

为什么民粹主义现在在欧洲出现？为什么它在美国和拉丁美洲出现？哪种政治选择模式可以解释这些事实？我们的论文通过建立一个由两组玩家组成的进化游戏来解决这些问题，该游戏通过权衡对再分配的需求和对移民的强硬政策的需求来决定是否支持民粹主义政党。从根本上说，人们认为代理人越是在乎移民，他们越会担心它，并且越来越多的其他人在乎它。总体而言，对移民的恐惧和不平等加剧的积极转变驱使公民朝支持民粹主义者的方向聚集。平衡的稳定性取决于模型的关键参数，即：由于担心移民，人口类型（支持民粹主义的公民人数）对个人偏好，经济不平等的影响。不同的均衡代表民粹主义的不同情况：南美左翼民粹主义和欧洲右翼民粹主义。我们建议，需要一个经济不平等程度低，对移民的恐惧程度低的经济社会，以避免民粹主义。