The 19th-century Populist movement disappeared because mainstream parties were wealthy enough to 'buy' their way out of the crisis, a solution that no longer works.
April 1, 2026
Original Paper
Railroads and the Silver Shoes of Populism: The Rise and Fall of the People’s Party in 19th-Century America
SSRN · 6504499
The Takeaway
Unlike modern populism, the original People's Party was successfully reabsorbed because the US government had the fiscal and institutional flexibility to adopt populist demands. The researchers argue that today's populism is more persistent because modern institutions have lost the 'room' to make those same credible commitments to voters.
From the abstract
The People's Party is the only major populist movement in American history that was quickly reabsorbed by mainstream parties. We study the main trigger of its risetechnological disruption from railroad expansion-and discuss its dissolution in light of the conceptual framework we develop and test empirically. We construct a novel county-level measure of Technological Disruption Exposure (TDE) that captures the change in competitive pressure each county faced from all other counties, driven by rai