I definitely think there's an impedance mismatch between centrist politicians, who believe in Median Voter Theorem[0], a modest policy offer, and a very specifi

I definitely think there's an impedance mismatch between centrist politicians, who believe in Median Voter Theorem[0], a modest policy offer, and a very specific kind of competence; and various kinds of populist disruptive challengers (this latter could be from the left, e.g. Jeremy Corbyn; the right, e.g. Silvio Berlusconi; or the centre, e.g. Beppe Grillo). The former approach has demonstrably worked for those politicians for decades. Bill Clinton and Blair, for example, were crushingly successful electorally and marginalised their parties' radical wings. So their followers and successors (and lots of political scientists) hold the empirical success of this kind of politics to be proven and obvious. But the latter has also worked electorally and politically: Berlusconi, M5S, Trump, whatever. And when will they work again in the future? We don't really know. Ross Perot didn't get far in the 90s - how did Trump win? There are lots of theories, but given how few elections you get per year, not enough data. Which environments support which kinds of politics? We have an idea, but not a functioning predictive model. So people tend to argue for what they personally believe in - which is obviously informed by professional knowledge but shouldn't be confused with science. Many of my colleagues were astonished and shocked by the rise of Corbyn, for example, while I'm more sympathetic to disruptive politics (and critical of the technocratic status quo) and the possibility of something populist breaking open the existing system was obvious to me. That the breakthrough candidate was Corbyn (a long standing politician with no previous evidence of either high competence or desire for leadership) astonished me too. [0]: MVT is an example of the difficulties of formal modeling in political science. It's provably true within its assumptions (a one-dimensional political spectrum and voters who support the closest candidate) but those assumptions are only weakly true for politics in reality (and the system becomes unstable if the first in particular is false).