Populists are Attacking Science to Undermine Global Governance

The election of populist outsider Javier Milei to the Argentine presidency has alarmed the country’s scientific community. The firebrand economist has promised deep cuts to government spending, vowing to eliminate Argentina’s Ministry of Science and defund its National Scientific and Technical Research Council, widely considered Latin America’s finest scientific research institution.

Milei joins a growing list of populist leaders who have clashed with the scientific community. Populist leaders like Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro spent the pandemic downplaying the severity of COVID-19 and promoting pseudoscientific remedies. Others—including Milei himself—describe the scientific consensus on climate change as a hoax. 

Populist antagonism towards science has its roots in a deeper distrust of the elite expert class. Populist leaders claim to view the everyday experience of ordinary people as superior to expertise gleaned from education—and their electoral success is often based on the support of voters with relatively low levels of formal education. Populists may also benefit from associations with interest groups that oppose specific scientific causes—for instance, the agribusiness lobby backed Bolsonaro in Brazil in an effort to speed deforestation of the Amazon, and carbon-intensive industries supported Trump with the goal of slowing the climate transition.

In addition to their anti-elitism, populists strongly oppose constraints on national sovereignty. Populists dislike international organizations (IOs), occasionally leaving or threatening to leave them and using other methods to impede their work, particularly when IOs deal in science. The international implications of this friction, however, remain underexamined.  

By withholding or corrupting data necessary for global responses to public health and environmental issues, populism hinders IOs’ ability to address areas of international concern.

Our research highlights an underappreciated means by which populists sabotage global governance: distorting scientific information. By withholding or corrupting data necessary for global responses to public health and environmental issues, populism hinders IOs’ ability to address areas of international concern.

International efforts—cooperation among states facilitated by IOs—are needed to confront issues that do not respect state boundaries, such as public health crises and environmental disasters. In this fight, scientific information is necessary to inform action and monitor outcomes. 

While the World Health Organization has struggled in recent years under tightening budgets and political interference—and has been roundly criticized for its response to the pandemic—when empowered to do its job, the organization has an impressive track record in disease surveillance, eradicating smallpox, and tackling the 2003 SARS outbreak. 

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) likewise has its faults, but can be commended for inducing accelerated global climate ambitions as its COP process grows in prominence. At the last COP in Dubai, the first Global Stocktake—a nation-by-nation inventory of climate progress—highlighted the role information sharing plays in combating climate change.

For IOs to succeed, states must act in good faith to provide the scientific information they need to accomplish their mission. However, populist leaders are increasingly inclined to withhold or misreport such data. This compounds their efforts to defund and otherwise interfere with scientific knowledge production domestically. 

While populists’ ideological opposition to IOs is widely recognized, our research finds that populists fail to provide IOs with accurate scientific data either because of their curtailment of scientific capacity at home or to purposefully weaken global governance. 

While populists’ ideological opposition to IOs is widely recognized, our research finds that populists fail to provide IOs with accurate scientific data either because of their curtailment of scientific capacity at home or to purposefully weaken global governance.

To better understand how populists undermine IOs, we tested two hypotheses: whether populists report less scientific data than their non-populist peers, and whether the information they report is less accurate than that supplied by others. 

In the first case, we investigated whether environmental or public health information supplied to the World Bank is missing more often when populists are in charge. We also sought to find if the relationship is more consistent for types of data provided directly by states rather than by third parties. In the second case, we examined whether populists report less reliable greenhouse gas emission (GHG) data to the UNFCCC.

We evaluated the level of “data missingness” among the World Bank’s World Development Indicators (WDIs) in types of data which are typically supplied by states. We examined 252 WDI variables between 1990 to 2018, using measures from other social scientists to determine which states’ leadership should be coded as populist and comparing against data sourced from third parties. We found that populism produces statistically significant results in measures of missing data. Further, when populists leave office, their successors supply the missing data relatively quickly.

To test our second hypothesis, we measured the quality of emissions data given to the UNFCCC, which is then verified by independent experts. By comparing against independently collected emissions data from the EU’s Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research (EDGAR), we found that populism produces a 25 percent gap between populists’ reported emissions and data from EDGAR. In other words, the quality of data produced domestically under populist leaders deteriorates.

Our research demonstrates that populism presents a significant obstacle to IOs’ ability to function in scientific realms. Providing data to IOs cuts against populists’ anti-elite and anti-global governance beliefs. Moreover, by eroding the capacity of their bureaucracies to collect data, populism degrades the quality of data available to IOs, regardless of their intent to distort. 

Are populist leaders driven primarily by ideological commitment—and does this withholding of data advance the interests of the “populace”? The answer to both is: probably not. The hallmark of modern populism is that populist coalitions include elites who use the language of populism to advance elite interests. The Bolsonaro and Trump examples cited above illustrate this trend: both leaders partnered with interest groups that benefited from the suppression and distortion of scientific information. The public, meanwhile, most often loses when data is withheld from international bodies since this undermines their ability to combat global health crises and reduce greenhouse gas emissions that are sparking record levels of deadly natural disasters, for instance.

Still, populists continue to find electoral success even in countries which have supported—and in turn relied on—IOs, notably Argentina. How the ascent of populism will damage global governance in the long term remains to be seen, but so far, populist leaders are succeeding at chipping away at the ability of IOs to deliver public goods globally.

Allison Carnegie is a professor at Columbia University. Richard Clark is an assistant professor at Cornell University. Noah Zucker is an assistant professor at the London School of Economics. Read their working paper, Global Governance under Populism: The Challenge of Information Suppression.

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