Mapping Populism

Approaches and Methods

Amit Ron, Majia Nadesan, Amit Ron, Majia Nadesan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000043389
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This collection, which can serve as an introduction to the field of populism, provides an array of interdisciplinary approaches to populist mobilizations, theories, meanings, and effects. In so doing, it rejects essentialized ideas regarding what populism is or is not. Rather, it explores the political, social, and economic conditions that are conducive for the emergence of movements labelled populist, the rationalities and affective tenor of those movements, the political issues pertaining to the relationship between populists and elites, and the relationship between populist groups and political pluralism. Grappling with accord and discord in assumptions and methodologies, the book will appeal to scholars of sociology, political science, communication and cultural studies interested in populism, social movements, citizenship, and democracy.

Part I

Explaining populism

Chapter 1

Explaining populism introduction

Majia Nadesan and Amit Ron

Part I of this collection addresses how populism is represented as a political phenomenon that must be sought out and surveyed, interpreted, and ultimately contained because of the lurking suspicion that populism threatens the democratic social order. Key issues and questions addressed in this process of mapping populism include:

• What makes something “populist”?
• What does a populist discourse, performative style, or mobilization (e.g., demonstration) look like? How can we identify a network of symbolic and material practices as “populist”?
• What does it mean to be populist, as represented by various authorities and self-defined populists?
• To what extent do mobilizations and leaders labeled as populist have essential characteristics deriving from their conceptualization of “the people” that distinguish them from other types of social movements?
• What types, if any, of appeals to reason or affect (i.e., emotion) are characteristic of discourses produced by or about populist mobilizations?

Let us begin with the most basic question: “what makes something populist?” Since populism is a symbolic construct, an idea, it is far easier to address how the concept assumes significance in language than it is to define its essential nature. There are, in fact, many meanings for populism that can be found across academic and popular media sources. What matters then, is understanding how particular meanings are ascribed and for what purposes.

Following Humpty Dumpty, the important question is not what populism is, but rather how does populism mean at all? Commentators often invoke Humpty Dumpty’s words, taken from Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass (1872/1934), to capture the essential polysemy of populism, a signifier whose excesses of meanings get fixed by symbolic associations driven by power relations:

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”

(p. 52)

This framing of the problem of populism focuses less on intrinsic features, and more on how populism is made to mean in articulations produced by academics, journalists, politicians, activists, etc. As critics, we must ask: Who has the power to label something as “populist”? This power of naming privileges the namer(s) by allowing them to set up the discursive field in which so-called populists are operating.

Accordingly, when we look at how “populism” is used today in spoken and written discourses, we see the concept is most commonly deployed descriptively by observers to capture a sense of political dis-ease (i.e., lack of ease) regarding a set of political expressions, including political ideas and identities, styles, values, visions, strategies, and tactics whose reformist or revolutionary intentions imply and/or invoke a crisis of legitimacy. Those being described as populists rarely embrace the label because of its stigmatization, although exceptions can be found, especially when populists claim to speak directly in the name of “the people” in response to some pressing emergency.

Hence, in observer accounts, populism is often closely linked to legitimacy crises, but academics debate whether populist modes of identification occur only in the context of major institutional problems (e.g., growing economic inequality) that rupture imagined ideals regarding the political order. Though some accounts of populism emphasize the material conditions of crisis (e.g., agricultural policy), others emphasize how crisis is constituted in discourse as heroic individuals, political entrepreneurs, and collective agents articulate antagonistic identities and elaborated ideologies whose content and emotional economies resonate across groups, energizing social mobilizations. In this latter, more post-structuralist formulation, populism is not simply a reflection, because the discourse and mobilizations called out by observers as populist are constitutive, organizing meanings across social fields that are intrinsically fraught with conflict and political possibilities. Seen from this perspective, populism names a mode of political identification or performative act articulating and differentiating “the people,” typically by invoking lack and crisis.

Although “the people” can be invoked and performed in myriad ways, discourses labeled populist tend to be nostalgic and restorative; yet, exceptions persist. Analyses of populism are not restricted to democratic societies; yet, many observers point out that the founding mythos of a unified democratic people is readily coded nostalgically by opportunists and the disaffected, prompting a yearning for restoration, especially in the context of institutional contradictions. Populist wars of restoration led by demagogues can threaten democracy, especially as an outcome of the suspension of constitutional and legal procedures. Populism thereby raises questions about citizens’ sovereignty and their capabilities for democratic self-governance.

This pessimistic reading of populism is not shared by all; some scholars see populism as a corrective to liberal democracy, reinvigorating it by countering institutional inequities (Arditi, 2003). Yet, it is true that discourses and conduct labeled populism are more often coded as dangerous to democratic society because of the threat they pose to democratic principles, especially pluralism (understood as respect for differences across people) and representative democracy, concerns that are detailed in Parts II and IV of this collection. Although populism is most often used to name a perceived or imagined dangerous excess or rupture in democratic political practice, it is important to acknowledge that not all expressions of social malaise get labeled as populist. As explained in the “Introduction,” populism expresses a social fracture (most often in democracies) by putting into a language/speech (i.e., articulating) fundamental dualisms or antagonisms that rupture the imagined coherence of “the people”/the nation. Mudde’s (2018) definition of populism as a belief system organized by a dualism between “the pure people” and the “corrupt elite” seen as threatening the “volonté générale (general will) of the people” illustrates this fundamental schism expressing and/or driving the dangerous excess that populism represents.

The idea of a “thin” populist ideology is usually predicated in this formal dualism between “the people” and the elite, with “thick” populism referring to the other contexts of meaning inflecting this foundational and binary relationship (Mudde, 2004). The idea of resentment or “ressentiment,” as articulated by Nietzsche (1887/1967), often explains this dualistic rupture of the idealized unity of “the people” so emblematic of populism. Van Krieken (2019) traces this approach, beginning with Adam Smith’s idea of resentment as the motivating emotional force driving the pursuit of justice, a force producing risk of excessive passion, but whose moderations are critical for justice among citizens. Van Krieken argues that Nietzsche’s idea of ressentiment symbolizes the excesses of resentment turned sour by powerlessness, envy, and the desire for revenge. Although ressentiment was inescapably tied to the Christian order for Nietzsche, subsequent thinkers sociologized the concept, grounding it in contradictions between lived and idealized experiences in democratic societies. Van Krieken’s insight about the importance of ressentiment as an inescapable feature of democracy reinforces the idea that populism can both disorder and restore perceived legitimacy.

The undecidable nature of the relationship between populism and democracy is navigated in Chapter 2, “Populism and citizenship,” by Matthew Dean Hindman, who invokes Albert Dzur’s (2012) distinction between “thin” and “thick” populisms in yet another way to differentiate mobilizations that are restorative from those that are antithetical to pluralist democracy. In Hindman’s usage, thin populism names discourses/ideas that represent government as a technocrat-driven obstacle to popular sovereignty, and therefore its proponents are willing to cede authority to anti-elite demagogues. In contrast, thick populism is characterized as reformist, naming mobilizations that aim to hold institutions accountable and promote public virtue. Hindman argues that academics should avoid stigmatizing the latter, believing that thick populist mobilizations are not inherently dangerous to democracy when they are inclusive and dedicated to democratic proceduralism.

Hindman’s deployment of the thin–thick distinction to explain attitudes toward institutional change is notably divergent from academic formulations of thin populism as a distinctive form of social discourse defined structurally by the binary relationship between “the people” and the elite. Yet, across divergent uses, we see that academics are concerned certain formulations of populism are dangerous for democracy because they threaten revolution and social exclusion. But in raising the question of dangerousness we must also ask who has the power to label and explicate populist forms, emotional valences, and effects. Academic and media observers typically exert this authority in their detached etic (outsider) accounts, which are not grounded in the day-to-day experiences and interpretations of the so-called populists.

Chapter 3, “From personal opinion to social fact: Interactional dynamics and the corroboration of populist support,” by Marco Garrido, remedies this etic orientation with a sociological account of corroboration aimed at understanding populism from an emic (insider) perspective. Garrido is interested in political beliefs and conduct that are socially constituted within particular milieus (experientially grounded and shared lifeworlds). Garrido’s ethnographic interview data reveal that the durability of populist support lies less in beliefs about leaders, than in interpersonal and group dynamics embodied in community experiences, and propagated and fortified in social performances. Despite durability, Garrido points out that disinterest and dissent limit propagations.

Chapter 4, “The people and the public: Cyber-demagoguery and populism as war,” by Jack Z. Bratich, also displaces the detached authority of etic accounts. Yet, Bratich is not interested in using populists’ experience as the counterpoint to detached observation. Rather, he seeks to disclose how power is exercised through etic accounts that aim to preserve the status quo. Bratich thereby situates the current interest in populism within a longer history of moral panics, arguing that populism should be viewed as a signifier (or symptom) in a cultural and political war to maintain a distinction between a well-behaved public and irrational rabble. Contemporary wars of restoration shore-up the public as preferred, cast as a futurepublic, while stigmatizing populism as contagious irrationality. What is new to the current episode of this long struggle is the position of technology companies as allies to the mass media and the government.

Across these distinct formulations, we see that despite populism’s multiple meanings, its essential coding as dangerous drives efforts to define, identify, explain, and even govern social phenomena labeled as populist. Distinctions such as thin and thick direct our attention in particular ways to observer concerns, such as whether so-called populist mobilizations promote or threaten democracy and social solidarity. Yet, we must be sensitive to the power of naming and the critical distinction between insider (emic) and outsider (etic) perspectives lest we become blind to our own contributions in contested wars of restoration.

References

Arditi, B. (2003). Populism, or, politics at the edges of democracy. Contemporary Politics, 9(1), 17–31.

Carroll, L. (1872/1934). Through the looking-glass. London: Macmillan and Co.

Dzur, A. W. (2012). Punishment, participatory democracy, & the jury. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Mudde, C. (2004). The populist zeitgeist. Government and Opposition, 39(3), 541–563.

Mudde, C. (2018, November 22). How populism became the concept that defines our age. The Guardian. Retrieved from www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/nov/22/populism-concept-defines-our-age

Nietzsche, F. (1887/1967). On the genealogy of morals [and] Ecce Homo. W. Kaufman & R. J. Hollingdale (Trans.), W. Kaufmann (Ed.). New York, NY: Vintage.

Van Krieken, R. (2019). Menno ter Braak on democracy, populism and fascism: Ressentiment and its vicissitudes. Theory, Culture & Society, 36(3), 87–103.

Chapter 2

Populism and citizenship

Toward a “thickening” of American populism

Matthew Dean Hindman

The 2016 U.S. primary elections featured two unorthodox candidates in celebrity billionaire Donald Trump and democratic socialist Bernie Sanders. Trump emerged from the crowded Republican field owing to his unique willingness to eschew “political correctness” and combat an allegedly corrupt political establishment. Sanders, a senator from Vermont, meanwhile, garnered more than 12 million votes and secured over 45 percent of pledged delegates to the Democratic National Convention by confronting “the billionaire class” and a “rigged economy.”

For all their personal, political, and ideological differences, the political commentariat bestowed upon the two men a common label: “populist.” Claiming that he would “Make America Great Again” by cracking down on “illegal immigrants” and “radical Islamic terrorism,” Trump mobilized a voting bloc that skewed male, white, and less-educated. Sanders, by contrast, rallied a base of millennial supporters, calling for a “political revolution” to redress the systemic inequalities that have undermined American democracy.

How did a campaign predicated on xenophobia, nationalism, and political incorrectness come to share a political designation with one espousing democratic socialism? Can “populism” serve as a useful analytical category if different populist leaders confront different adversaries, call for different policies, and mobilize dissimilar constituen...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Note on contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction to collection: problematizing populism
• PART I: Explaining populism
• PART II: Populism and pluralism
• PART III: Populism: conditions of possibility
• PART IV: Between “the people” and elites
• PART V: Issues and methodologies
• Conclusion: emerging issues and future directions
• Index