Our Ask the Expert series brings academic research on public policy into the heart of Westminster.
Listen to a recording of the event here
In this talk, Eric Kaufman, Professor of Politics at Birkbeck College, University of London examined survey and election data on the drivers of Brexit, Trump and the European Populist Right. He argued that the interaction of demographic change and values offers the best explanation of this phenomenon. Those who vote for populist parties are generally not motivated by an animus against the economic and political elite, poverty, or inequality.
Speaker
Professor Eric Kaufman
Professor of Politics, Birkbeck College, University of London
Chair
Mary Ann Sieghart
Chair, Social Market Foundation
About the Speaker:
Eric Kaufmann is Professor of Politics at Birkbeck College, University of London. He is author of Changing Places: mapping the white British response to ethnic change (Demos 2014), Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth (Profile 2010), The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America (Harvard 2004) and two other books. He is co-editor, among others, of Political Demography (Oxford 2012) and editor of Rethinking Ethnicity: Majority Groups and Dominant Minorities (Routledge 2004). An editor of the journal Nations & Nationalism, he has written for Newsweek International, Foreign Policy and Prospect magazines. He is working on his next book, Whiteshift: Immigration, Populism and the Myth of Majority Decline (Penguin).
About the Chair:
Mary Ann Sieghart has spent most of her life as a journalist and broadcaster, working for The Times, The Independent, The Economist, The Financial Times and the BBC. She also sits on the boards of Henderson Smaller Companies Investment Trust and DLN Digital, the Content Board of Ofcom, and on the Council of Tate Modern.
