Politics & International Relations
Populism
Populism is a political approach that seeks to appeal to the interests and concerns of ordinary people, often by presenting an "us versus them" narrative and criticizing the elite. It often involves a charismatic leader who claims to represent the will of the people against a perceived corrupt or self-serving establishment. Populist movements can be found in various political ideologies and can have significant impacts on policy and governance.
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12 Key excerpts on "Populism"
- Vedi R. Hadiz(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
A contentious issue Much like ‘nationalism’, ‘Populism’ is sometimes considered an elusive concept; thus it has been variously associated with Right as well as Left tendencies of politics. It has been linked in the twentieth century to rural-based movements in the United States typified by icons like Huey Long, the mostly urban labour-based movements of Peronism in Argentina and Vargas in Brazil, and even the belli- gerently anti-communist Fascist regimes of Europe. In East and Southeast Asia 1 Also see the explication found in Mouffe (2005: 50–71). 21 The politics of Populism after the 1997/1998 economic crisis, such disparate recent leaders as Thaksin Shinawatra in Thailand, Mahathir Mohammad in Malaysia, Joseph Estrada in the Philippines and Junichi Koizumi in Japan had been tagged – rather sweepingly – with the ‘populist’ label (Mizuno and Phongpaichit 2009). Authors like Conniff (1999: 5) thus suggest that populists tend to draw from ‘existing sociopolitical models’ and can even recombine them ‘inconsistently’. Nevertheless, it should not follow that Populism is but a convenient term with which to associate crassly opportunistic politics designed to appeal to the ill-informed ‘masses’ or those premised on sheer demagoguery. Conniff, for example, has described Populism as ‘eclectic and flexible, designed to appeal to the largest number of voters at any given time’ (1999: 5). Populist politics also should not become simply synonymous with ‘political irrationality’, whereby ‘colourful and engaging politicians’ attract the masses ‘into their movements and hold their loyalty indefinitely, even after their deaths’ (Conniff 1999: 4). A potentially major problem emerges when this alleged political irrationality is then extended into the economic sphere, where Populism becomes indis- tinguishable from irresponsible policies that cause ‘inflation, indebtedness, and charges of malfeasance’ (Conniff 1999: 6).
No longer available |Learn moreIdentities and Politics During the Putin Presidency
The Foundations of Russia's Stability
- Ivo Mijnssen, Philipp Casula, Jeronim Perović, Philipp Casula, Jeronim Perović(Authors)
- 2009(Publication Date)
- Ibidem Press(Publisher)
In this conception, then, Populism is not a specific ideological content – for instance, a set of rhetorical appeals to “stop illegal immigration” or “withdraw from the EU” – or a certain type of movement, political party, or leader who is against the system, for example. 3 Instead, it speaks directly to the political di-mension of social relations. That is, if the political refers to the contestation and institution of various social relations, then the logic of Populism captures the practices through which society is divided into opposed camps in the endless struggle for hegemony (Laclau and Mouffe 1985; Glynos and Howarth 2007). A populist politics thus involves the construction of a collective agency or project – 2 In fact, the only theoretical discussion in Stoker’s book consists of a somewhat bizarre detour on William Riker, where he actually argues against Riker’s sceptical claims about populist democracy (in which the latter draws upon Arrow’s “impossibility theo-rem”), and ultimately in favour of the idea that populist ambitions are possible and achievable, if not desirable (Stoker 2006: 140ff.). 3 This is not to argue that rhetoric is not an important element of populist discourse; on the contrary, rhetoric is constitutive of all political practice. 34 DAVID HOWARTH e.g., “the people” – through the drawing of a political boundary between a we and a they within a social formation; and the latter presupposes a set of antago-nisms and the availability of indeterminate ideological elements (or floating signi-fiers) that can be articulated into a particular ideological formation. Thus, simplifying Laclau’s more formal and structural logic of Populism consists of five basic features. First, the articulators of a populist discourse ap-peal to a collective subject such as “the people” or “the community” as the privi-leged subject of interpellation.
eBook - PDFLocating the Left in Difficult Times
Framing a Political Discourse for the Present
- Gordon Hak(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
The populist impulse is associated with the 2016 Bernie Sanders presi- dential campaign in the United States, the rise of Jeremy Corbyn to the CHAPTER 12 Populism © The Author(s) 2017 G. Hak, Locating the Left in Difficult Times, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-54343-7_12 158 G. HAK leadership of the British Labour Party, and the emergence of Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain. Populism is a complicated phenomenon. Closer inspection of populists and Populism, rightly understood, offers the opportunity for insights into the modern political landscape and the location of the left in it. Scholarly discussions of Populism necessarily begin with the acknowl- edgement that the term is slippery, used in many and often vague ways. 1 The modern usage comes from the late nineteenth century, when it was applied to political movements in the western and southern United States, but since then it has been applied to peasant movements in nineteenth-century Russia, twentieth-century urban uprisings in Latin America, and the politics of Mao, Reagan, and Hitler. In British history, the notion of nineteenth-century radical liberalism captures much of the populist impulse. So, too, does the democratic-republican tradition, a term applied to developments in the early nineteenth-century United States. However, nowadays Populism is the term with the greatest cur- rency. The problem begins when we try to define “Populism.” What does it refer to? Is it a description of a particular type of movement in a particular circumstance? Does it refer to the actions of a particular group or class? Does it refer to a constellation of political practices or ideas? Does it refer to a style of leadership? One influential, long-standing approach sees Populism as a response by the petty bourgeoisie, especially operators of family farms and small businesses, to capitalist modernization.
eBook - PDFThe Will of the People
Populism and Citizen Participation in Latin America
- Yanina Welp(Author)
- 2022(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter(Publisher)
There is a tension between a Rousseanian idea of the people as a general will that is more than the sum of its parts, and a notion of citizenship as a plurality of voices. In increasingly complex and fragmented societies, why do homogenising proposals like the ones led by populist leaders gain support in the 21st century? Before proceeding, I offer some definitions. To ask what Populism is at this point would be tedious, because the concept has been used and abused and, above all, extended to such an extent that it could become useless, a throwaway dis- qualification. But it is so present on the media agenda and in the discourse of political parties, as an attack for those of the status quo and as a claim of being “the people” for many new parties, that it is not possible to reflect on con- temporary democracy without discussing it. In its origins, the populist movement in the United States (the Populist Party emerged in the 1890s) was associated with the progressive movement as also happened in Switzerland (in the mid-19th century). These two movements did not seek to consolidate strong leaderships but contested the construction of in- creasingly mediated and vertical institutional structures in which the voice of the citizenry had limited effect and the concentration of power was scaling up. The https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110732412-006 main goal of these movements was to regain power for the people and for the local communities, where grassroots movements oriented towards extending po- litical and social rights, and a decentralised, horizontal, less rigid conception of democracy.
eBook - PDFSubversive Semantics in Political and Cultural Discourse
The Production of Popular Knowledge
- Gesa Mackenthun, Jörn Dosch, Gesa Mackenthun, Jörn Dosch(Authors)
- 2023(Publication Date)
- transcript Verlag(Publisher)
There are, however, significant commonalities. As a first approxima- tion, we might define Populisms as social mobilizations and movements of protest and resistance against the status quo in the name of the “peo- ple”, “the people’s will”, or the “common men”, and not of specific classes or groups, with a corresponding ideology featuring a number or char- acteristic elements: Populists fight against the elites, the institutions, and the mechanisms of organized interests and politics; they see them- selves as a grassroots movement voicing the sentiments of “just” indig- Hans-Jürgen Puhle: Populism, Populist Democracy, and the Shifting of Meanings 49 nation (an old topos) against what they consider to be the conspiracies of a corrupt “establishment” or “oligarchy” and its foreign allies, and an illegitimate usurpation of power that should belong to the people. One of their most important ideological features is the fiction of an imme- diate relationship between the people and its leaders with direct com- munication in two ways that does not need any intermediaries. Hence populists antagonize and try (if they can) to circumvent and weaken all kinds of “corps intermédiaires” with functions of control or accountabil- ity: parliaments, courts of justice, political parties, interest groups, and independent media. They are anti-liberal, and mostly anti-urban, anti- intellectual, and at least rhetorically against “Big Capital”, corporations, trusts, and the more (and often “better”) organized capitalist actors, but they are not outright anti-capitalist. Populist movements basically are movements of an underdog cul- ture: They see politics in moralistic, agonistic and dichotomousc terms and they cultivate all kinds of conspiracy narratives and myths. They po- larize, and their most favored political strategy is the politics of fear and hatred.
- Christopher Thornhill(Author)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
4 Populism as Misunderstood Democracy Populism and Democracy As stated in previous chapters the modern democratic state is currently afflicted by crisis in many parts of the globe. In many cases, such crisis is reflected in the rise of populist movements or parties that gain support by denouncing the form that democracy has assumed in their polities. The rise of Populism has interrupted, or at least added complexity to, the global turn towards constitutional democracy that was initiated in the 1980s. The spread of Populism means that the distinctions that once separated democratic from authoritarian states have become blurred, and many polities now possess both democratic and authoritarian elements. As discussed later, Populism is not categorically outside the family of democratic political movements. Yet, by most measures, populist gov- ernment leads to democratic deterioration, and it promotes authoritarian tendencies in democratic states. As a global phenomenon of first-order importance, the recent prolif- eration of Populism has attracted much analytical attention. There have been many theoretical attempts both to explain it, and to buttress dem- ocracy against the threats posed by it. Increasingly, two lines of analysis have become pronounced in current inquiries into Populism. These lines of analysis address both the causes of Populism and the relation between Populism and democratic decline. Despite differences in emphasis and method, these analyses contain a number of similar observations and arrive at convergent conclusions. Both lines of analysis indicate that liberal democracy depends on selective procedures for determining which social interests should be represented in legislation, which means that some social groups are less fully integrated in the political system than others.
eBook - ePubThe Global Rise of Populism
Performance, Political Style, and Representation
- Benjamin Moffitt(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Stanford University Press(Publisher)
As such, this chapter provides a map of contemporary debates around Populism to discern the key positions and arguments at play in defining the concept. This is particularly useful given that these debates often take part across different literatures, and can thus be difficult to follow. It is structured in two main parts. The first section provides a brief history of the development of the concept in the academic literature prior to the 1990s, tracing its etymological roots from the US Populist Party of the late nineteenth century through Populism’s conceptual ‘journeys’ across the twentieth century. The second section identifies the four central approaches in the contemporary literature—Populism as ideology; Populism as a strategy; Populism as discourse; and Populism as political logic—and outlines their key arguments. Importantly, it also critiques these approaches, pointing out both the strengths and challenges presented by their conceptualisations of Populism. This critique provides the foreground for the argument that is made in the next chapter—that we need to rethink Populism, and that Populism is best thought of as a political style.A Brief History of Debates around Populism (1860–1990)In trying to understand Populism, political thinkers have long been split about the nature of the phenomenon and how to approach it—is it a type of social movement, ideology or something else? A brief exploration of the term’s early development can help clarify why these blurry delineations have arisen. The intention here is not to provide a complete history of the term, as this has been done well elsewhere (Canovan 1981; Houwen 2011; Taggart 2000)—but rather to provide a historical context for current debates around the meaning of the concept.1In sketching his “brief biography” of the concept, Allcock (1971, 372) argued that until the mid-1950s, “‘Populism’ was merely a label to identify two separate historical phenomena,” and that “there [was] no wider significance attached to the word”. The first phenomenon that the term referred to was the agrarian movement that led to the formation of the People’s Party in the Southern and Midwestern United States in the 1890s. This party, originally formed to oppose the demonetisation of silver, adopted the nickname of ‘Populists’ early on, drawing from the Latin populus (‘the people’). The second phenomenon it referred to was the Russian narodnichestvo
eBook - PDF- Y. Meny, Y. Surel(Authors)
- 2001(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
What unites new populist forces in all these different contexts is that they mount a critique of the systems of politics, as revealed in prob- lems of legitimation, as being unrepresentative. The study of Populism has thus suffered from a rather fractured, demand-led literature. The conditions and problems of contemporary Europe mean that it is important and apposite to reconsider Populism in a distinctly European context. Putting these two statements together 66 Democracies and the Populist Challenge implies that it is vital that, whilst remaining sensitive to European par- ticularities, we must draw from the widest possible range of sources to identify features, causes and effects of Populism. I shall therefore attempt to draw out some features of Populism in its most general sense that can then be applied to Europe in particular. The features of Populism The holy grail of a definition of Populism is elusive. Attempts to locate it have foundered, leading commentators along one of three paths. The first is the most frequent, and amounts to the attempt to define pop- ulism according to the particular circumstances in which it occurs. This produces work that is strong on depth and on a particular manifesta- tion of Populism, but suffers in terms of conceptual development and general applicability. The literature on Populism produced in this way is, in effect, a vast array of contextual studies with some rather half- hearted nods to the idea of a general concept of Populism (Ionescu and Gellner 1969). The second path is to construct a taxonomy of various types of Populism (Canovan 1981). This abandons the idea of a general concept of Populism and instead focuses on a comprehensive but var- iegated consideration of Populism. The third path is to offer some sort of ideal-type and, in the process, to identify both the causes and effects of Populism (Taggart 2000). I maintain that Populism, as an ideal type, has six principal themes (see Taggart 2000).
eBook - PDFWhen Democracy Trumps Populism
European and Latin American Lessons for the United States
- Kurt Weyland, Raúl L. Madrid(Authors)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
Ultimately, scholars of all stripes agree that popu- lism stands in inherent tension with liberal democracy, especially its lib- eral side, centered on institutional guarantees of pluralistic debate and fair competition (see, e.g., de la Torre 2017b: 187, 193–195; Diamond 2017: 6–9; Grzymala-Busse 2017a; Madrid 2012: 178–183; Levitsky and Loxton 2013; Weyland 2013; and Levitsky and Ziblatt 2018). Regardless of the definition of Populism that authors embrace and inde- pendently of their normative framing of Populism as a transgressive or progressive approach to politics, they all see the divisive, confronta- tional strategy of populist movements and the ceaseless efforts of their leaders to concentrate power and weaken institutional constraints as an assault on liberal democracy. Some scholars celebrate this radical overhaul as an attempt to empower popular sectors, whereas many others deplore it as a power grab by personalistic leaders. Yet, despite these differences in interpretation, there is widespread consensus that the first victim of Populism is liberal, pluralist democracy. After all, Populism constitutes a powerful push for change, and therefore it inces- santly seeks to bend or break the constraints on determined change that liberal democracy imposes with its strict limitations on the exercise of political power. Before explaining the inherent risks that Populism poses to political liberalism, it is important to acknowledge, however, that Populism can Introduction: Donald Trump’s Populism 15 15 in principle benefit the inclusionary, participatory dimension of democ- racy. Essentially, populist leaders mobilize mass movements, and push to give them political voice and influence. This majoritarian impulse has had positive effects, especially in the early stages of democratic develop- ment, when suffrage used to be restricted.
- Kirk Hawkins, Levente Littvay(Authors)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
For a few examples focused on the populist radical right, see Betz (1994), Kitschelt (1997), or Mudde (2007). For a nice account emphasizing the role of institutions in the United Kingdom, see Carter (2005). 21 Contemporary US Populism in Comparative Perspective missing the fundamental question of why voters want a populist (Hawkins, Read, and Pauwels 2017; Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser 2017). After all, a voter who is a loser from cultural globalization could support a non-populist version of an anti-immigrant, conservative party, while a loser from economic globali- zation could support a party offering an expanded welfare state and trade controls without any populist rationale. Something about Populism itself is important for voters and politicians, important enough that they are drawn to it as a way of framing their issue positions. To explain what drives support for populists, comparativists using the idea- tional approach have proposed an individual-level, psychological theory about populist ideas and their activation among voters (Hawkins and Rovira Kaltwasser 2019). This ideational theory takes issue positions and institutions into account but embeds them in a larger story about where populist ideas come from and how they are activated and mobilized. The theory starts with the premise that voters for populist parties also have populist ideas in their heads; Populism is not just a feature of political elites. Because these ideas may not be expressed, the literature refers to them as populist attitudes (Hawkins, Rovira Kaltwasser, and Andreadis 2018). Comparativists have devised a number of survey inventories for gauging these attitudes. Responses to these inventories cohere sensibly and correlate with other indicators such as voting, but they also show that populist atti- tudes are widespread across many countries at similar levels (Akkerman, Zaslove, and Spruyt 2017; Spruyt, Keppens, and Van Droogenbroek 2016; S. Van Hauwaert and van Kessel 2018).
eBook - PDF- Wojciech Sadurski(Author)
- 2022(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
The former is strong, alive and vigorous, the latter weak, deca- dent and diminishing.” 49 These words of Shawn Rosenberg, professor of political science and psychology and social behavior at University of California, Irvine, may sound too harsh. After all, political appeals to democracy, human rights, and liberalism are also often emotional. But it seems plausible that of all the ideologies (in a broad sense of the word) on the table today, Populism is at the forefront in dismissing rationality, 46 Sándor Radnóti, “A Sacred Symbol in a Secular Country: The Holy Crown,” in Gábor Attila Tóth (ed.), Constitution for a Disunited Nation: On Hungary’s 2011 Fundamental Law (Budapest: CEU Press, 2012), pp, 85–109 at 95, footnote omitted. 47 Ibid., p. 105. 48 Ibid., p. 107. 49 Shawn W. Rosenberg, “Democracy Devouring Itself: The Rise of the Incompetent Citizen and the Appeal of Right Wing Populism,” UC Irvine Previously Published Works (2019), www.escholarship.org/uc/item/8806z01m. verifiable truths, and empirically falsifiable knowledge. (We shall see many examples of this in Chapter 5.) And just as there is strong supply of irrationality and sheer falsehoods in politics (cyberspace is full of them), there is also a lot of demand for it, and populist politicians build their strategies on the people as they are rather than as they should be. Populist anti-modernist supply responds to the demand for a return to a world of known certainties, established hierarchies of authority (as much in the state as in a family), and traditional faiths. Populist voters are much more negative about social causes related to modernism that they view as contrary to the traditional outlook they endorse.
eBook - PDFTwenty-First Century Populism
The Spectre of Western European Democracy
- D. Albertazzi, D. McDonnell, D. Albertazzi, D. McDonnell(Authors)
- 2007(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
In this scenario, democracy is only respected insofar as someone − perhaps working in a political rating agency − verifies the legality, morality and effectiveness of (real or presumed) government action and informs the citi- zens, who then must judge accordingly at election time. The rhetoric surrounding the new democratic model is powerful and is clearly in tune with neoliberal orthodoxy. Authorized to abandon citizens to their destinies and to dismantle that costly and redundant linkage between rulers and ruled that was the old-style party, western political elites have enthusiastically embraced the new model. This is not least because it is consistent with the precepts of neoliberalism which demand less state involvement and that the partisan element of politics be reduced to a mini- mum. In conclusion, therefore, should we really be so surprised not only that public scepticism about politics has grown, but that large sections of 46 Twent y-First Centur y Populism the electorate (often the most vulnerable), bereft of the integration, protec- tion and guiding inf luence provided by the parties, have fallen under the spell of populists, even if only to show their displeasure and disquiet? The fact that phenomena such as the redefinition of the democratic para- digm, the transformation of the parties, the slow retreat from welfare provi- sion and the success of Populism have all occurred contemporaneously leaves little room for doubt that they are interlinked. Democracy nowadays treats citizens with indifference, as mere consumers of its offers of leader- ship. Meanwhile, the inf luence of economic and financial powers and organized corporations has grown, particularly when they have autono- mous access to the media, or even possess their own media channels. It is well known that, on both quantitative and qualitative levels, turnout is conditioned by the degree of political competence and the specific con- texts voters find themselves in.
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