Does Populist Redistribution Reveal the Heterogeneity It Denies? Italy’s Technocratic and Populist Pension Reforms

Populist movements claim to represent an undifferentiated ‘people’, yet every redistributive instrument they enact selects a subset to receive its benefits. This paper uses Italy’s two back-to-back pension reforms as a stress test of that within-people contradiction. The technocratic Fornero Reform (2011) and the populist Quota 100 Reform (2019) share an institutional environment but follow opposite political logics, the second reversing the first. Using SHARE data for 2011–2022, we identify causal effects from age-based thresholds in a difference-in-differences design with individual fixed effects. Quota 100 raises eligible individuals’ retirement probability by 5.1 percentage points, and the response is 12.5 percentage points smaller for women than men, whereas the Fornero effect is delayed and more even across genders. The gender asymmetry survives alternative outcomes, narrower age windows, and pre-COVID restrictions. When a populist coalition redistributes, it reaches the part of the people whose careers satisfy the eligibility design, in keeping with the coalition’s familialism, while younger workers bear the cost through pay-as-you-go financing. The findings move research on populist incumbency from how it damages institutions to who benefits, and clarify the contrasting distributional logics of technocratic and populist governance.