Riccardo Turati will present "Digging up Trenches: Populism, Selective Mobility and the Political Polarization of Italian Municipalities" co-autored with Luca Bollodi, Frédéric Docquier, Staphano Landalo, Massimo Morelli.

The authors study the effect of local exposure to populism on net population movements by citizenship status, gender, age and education level in the context of Italian municipalities. The authors present two research designs to estimate the causal effect of populist attitudes and policies. Initially, we use a combination of collective memory and trigger variables as an instrument for the variation in populist vote shares across national elections. Subsequently, the paper applies a regression discontinuity design to estimate the effect of electing a populist mayor on population movements. It finds three converging results. First, the exposure to both populist attitudes and policies, as manifested by the vote share of populist parties in national elections or the close-election of a new populist mayor, reduces the attractiveness of municipalities and leads to larger population outflows. Second, the effect is particularly pronounced for young, female, and highly educated natives, who tend to move across Italian municipalities rather than internationally. Third, the authors find no effect on the foreign population. Their results highlight a mechanism of foot voting that could help sustain the long-term presence of populist leaders in certain municipalities.

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