Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Why populism?

  • Published:
Theory and Society Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

It is a commonplace to observe that we have been living through an extraordinary pan-European and trans-Atlantic populist moment. But do the heterogeneous phenomena lumped under the rubric “populist” in fact belong together? Or is “populism” just a journalistic cliché and political epithet? In the first part of the article, I defend the use of “populism” as an analytic category and the characterization of the last few years as a “populist moment,” and I propose an account of populism as a discursive and stylistic repertoire. In the second part, I specify the structural trends and the conjunctural convergence of a series of crises that jointly explain the clustering in space and time that constitutes the populist moment. The question in my title is thus twofold: it is a question about populism as a term or concept and a question about populism as a phenomenon in the world. The article addresses both the conceptual and the explanatory question, limiting the scope of the explanatory argument to the pan-European and trans-Atlantic populist conjuncture of the last few years.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. The populist moment, of course, is not confined to Europe and the United States. Among others, Prime Minister Modi of India (Jaffrelot 2015; Schroeder 2017), President Duterte of the Philippines (McCargo 2016), and President Erdoğan of Turkey (Aytaç and Őniş 2014; Selçuk 2016) have been analyzed as populists. But populism is not globally synchronized: the wave of Latin American left populisms of the early twenty-first century—sustained by a global commodity boom—peaked well before the populist conjuncture of Europe and North America.

  2. For early doubts, see Worsley (1969, p. 219) and, a decade later, Canovan (1981, pp. 3–7). For representative recent statements expressing or addressing these doubts, see Panizza (2005, p. 1) and Moffitt and Tormey (2014, p. 382). For a recent critical analysis of several generations of populism research, concluding with a cautionary note about the futility and empirical inadequacy of any global or strongly generalizing account of populism, see Knöbl (2016). On the history of the category “populism,” see Houwen (2011) and Jäger (2016).

  3. For debates about the compatibility of populism and neoliberalism, see Roberts (1995) and Weyland (1999, 2003).

  4. On the tension between liberal and anti-liberal strands in contemporary European national populisms, see Brubaker (2017).

  5. See Mény and Surel (2000, pp. 185–214). On the ambiguity of “the people,” see also Canovan (1984, 2005), who argues that a fourth meaning of “people” (without the article) in Anglophone discourse—that of “human beings as such”—has colored the other meanings (2005, p. 2).

  6. The practice of speaking in the name of the people, to be sure, has older roots. On the early modern sources of the “populist theory of the state,” see Skinner (2009, pp. 332–340).

  7. Stavrakakis (2014, p. 567), quoting J. G. Feinberg. For critiques of liberal anti-populism from the left, see also Furedi (2005, 2016) and Rancière (2016).

  8. This does not mean that populism should be understood as “merely” discursive or stylistic. Any political practice, party, movement, figure, or regime that can be analyzed as populist also can (and must) be analyzed in terms of ideological commitments, substantive policies, organizational practices, bases of support, and so on. But what ties substantively different forms of populist politics together—what makes it possible to characterize them all as populist—is the discursive and stylistic repertoire on which they draw.

  9. These commonalities have been construed in various ways: in formal terms as a discursive logic; more informally as a set of characteristic discursive tropes or interpretive frameworks; or in terms of communicational, rhetorical, self-presentational, esthetic, or body-behavioral style. For the discursive logic approach, see Laclau (1977, 1980), and Stavrakakis (2004). For informal discursive, “ideational,” or ideological approaches, see Taguieff (1995), Canovan (2002), Mudde (2004), Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser (2017), and Stanley (2008) (the latter four follow Freeden’s (1998) account of nationalism in characterizing populism as a “thin” or “thin-centered” ideology). For approaches emphasizing communicational (including body-behavioral) style, see Kazin (1995), Knight (1998), Canovan (1999), Ostiguy (2009), Diehl (2011a, 2017), Moffitt and Tormey (2014); and—for the most sustained discussion of populism as a political style—Moffitt (2016). Moffitt and Tormey (2014) and Moffitt (2016) present definitions of populism as an ideology, a political logic, and a discourse as alternatives to their preferred definition of populism as a political style. But as their own discussion suggests, these four are not sharply distinct. I therefore prefer to speak of a single broad discursive and stylistic turn.

  10. Moffitt and Tormey also characterize populism (along with other political styles) as “repertoires of performance” (2014, p. 387; cf. Moffitt 2016, p. 38), but they focus on elaborating the notion of “political style” and do not analyze the notion of “repertoire.”

  11. Because Jansen was working in the tradition of contentious politics research, with its strong organizational and mobilizational focus (Tilly 2006), his article focuses on innovations in concrete mobilizing practices (see also Jansen 2011). I am interested here in discursive and stylistic practices, not in organizational and mobilizational practices per se, except insofar as these have (as they necessarily do) a discursive and stylistic aspect. That said, one could also fruitfully follow Jansen more directly and treat populism as an organizational and mobilizational repertoire. On more contemporary innovations in populist organizational practices, see Urbinati (2015).

  12. For a critique of the widespread identification of populism with right-wing (or extreme right) forms of xenophobic nationalism in the literature on European populism, see Stavrakakis et al. (2017b).

  13. The “family resemblance” metaphor has been more widely used in the discussion of literary and musical genres (Fishelov 1991) than in the discussion of repertoires per se. But genre and repertoire are themselves closely related terms.

  14. A Wittgensteinian “family resemblance” approach to defining populism has been proposed by Roberts (1995); for a critique, see Weyland (2001). Collier and Mahon (1993) note the similarities between family resemblance approaches and Weber’s ideal types.

  15. As Diehl (2011a, p. 31) notes, the claim to speak and act in the name of “the people” is extremely attenuated, if present at all, in the case of Silvio Berlusconi. Yet Berlusconi’s mode of political communication and embodied manner of representing himself (by virtue of his origins) as “one of the people” are classically populist. Diehl concludes that while Berlusconi is not only a populist, in that he also exemplifies an antipolitical stance and mood and practices a form of “politainment,” he is also populist.

  16. For critiques of putatively minimal definitions that characterize populism as a moralizing discourse that insists on the homogeneity of “the people,” see Katsambekis (2016, p. 391) and Stavrakakis et al. 2017b, p. 424).

  17. This is richly suggested but not quite made explicit in Taguieff (1995). On horizontal and vertical dimensions, see also Brubaker (2017), Biorcio (2003, pp. 72–73), and Jansen (2011, p. 84n.). Stavrakakis et al. (2017b) and De Cleen and Stavrakakis (2017), which I encountered as I was completing this article, make the case for a sharp conceptual distinction between populism and nationalism, the former articulated in the vertical dimension around the notion of people-as-underdog, the latter in the horizontal dimension around the notion of people-as-nation. Though I lack the space to pursue the argument here, I am skeptical of the effort to “purify” (Stavrakakis et al. 2017b, p. 424) populism by reducing it to the vertical dimension alone, just as I am skeptical of reducing nationalism to the horizontal dimension alone.

  18. The most striking contemporary instance of this downward focus of populism is that of Duterte in the Philippines; see, for example, Curato (2017).

  19. Knöbl (2016) justly criticizes presentist accounts that are oblivious to the long history of populism—and to the almost equally long history of scholarly attempts to come to grips with populism. On the historical mutations of populism, see Abromeit et al. (2015).

  20. Sharp rhetorical opposition to the stifling of political debate by consensus-oriented establishment parties was central, for example, to the rise of Pim Fortuyn in the Netherlands (who denounced the consensual pieties of what he called the “left church”) and Jörg Haider in Austria (who denounced the “power cartel” of the long-running Grand Coalition). Populist complaints about power cartels are not unfounded. For the classic analysis of the emergence of the “cartel party, in which colluding parties become agents of the state and employ the resources of the state … to ensure their own collective survival,” see Katz and Mair (1995).

  21. Laclau’s insistence on the simplifying, antagonistic logic at the heart of populism—and at the heart of politics (as opposed to administration)—has obvious affinities with Carl Schmitt’s (2007) understanding of the distinction between friend and enemy as the essence of “the political.”

  22. On “penal populism,” see Pratt (2007) and Roberts (2003).

  23. For a discussion of “majority rights” from the perspective of normative political theory, see Orgad (2015).

  24. On anti-party parties, see Tormey (2015, pp. 113–119). On personalistic leadership as a key aspect of populism, see Weyland (2001, pp. 12–14).

  25. Since taking office in late 2015, Poland’s Law and Justice Party government has been following Orbán’s model, especially with respect to the courts, media, and cultural institutions.

  26. I return to the theme of crisis below.

  27. This topic has been explored in the literature on media and political communication by Mazzoleni and Schulz (1999) and Pels (2003) and in the populism literature by Taguieff (1995), Knight (1998), Canovan (1999), Ostiguy (2009), Diehl (2011a, 2017), Wodak (2015), Moffitt and Tormey (2014), and Moffitt (2016).

  28. Ostiguy develops his argument with reference to Latin America and especially Argentina, but he argues persuasively that the high-low distinction travels well to other contexts. See also Ostiguy and Roberts (2016), which uses the high-low distinction to analyze Trump in comparative perspective.

  29. Not all populists employ a “low” style. Enoch Powell, for example, claimed to speak in the name of the people as he warned in apocalyptic terms about black immigration to Britain in the 1960s, but he had been a professor of ancient Greek before entering politics, and his speeches were delivered with refined diction and laced with classical allusions. Given the “family resemblance” definitional strategy adopted here, it is not surprising that the various elements of the populist repertoire are not always found together.

  30. Austrian Freedom Party candidate Norbert Hofer, who made opposition to Islam (which has “no place in Austria”) central to his campaign, far outpaced other candidates in the first round of the Austrian presidential election in April 2016. In the runoff, Green party candidate Alexander Van der Bellen won the barest of majorities, but the result was annulled because of irregularities. In the re-run of the second round, postponed until December 2016, Van der Bellen won by a more comfortable 54–46% margin (Wodak 2016). Although Emmanuel Macon decisively defeated Le Pen in the second round of the French election, winning two-thirds of the vote, the four leading candidates were running neck and neck in the run-up to the first round, and any matchup seemed possible in the second round, including a runoff between Le Pen and left populist Jean-Luc Mélenchon, which would have given Le Pen a good chance of victory. It should be emphasized, moreover, that François Fillon and Macron also waged populist campaigns. After a “fake work” scandal involving his wife landed him in legal troubles, the arch-conservative Fillon mobilized street protests against the judiciary, complaining of a “political assassination” and an “institutional coup d’état.” And Macron founded En Marche! as a movement, not a party (or as what Bordignon (2017) called an “anti-party party”), appealing directly to “the people” beyond divisions of left and right and promising to “re-found” the political system.

  31. I should emphasize that what I seek to explain is the pan-European and trans-Atlantic populist conjuncture of the last few years, not the emergence and consolidation of anti-immigrant (and, increasingly, anti-Muslim) populisms in western and northern Europe since the 1980s. My explanatory argument is thus narrower in temporal scope than most discussions of European populism. But I conceptualize my explanandum more broadly than most discussions: I include eastern and southern Europe (and the United States) as well as western and northern Europe, and I include left-wing and hybrid or hard-to-classify populisms, as well as the right-wing populisms on which the European literature has overwhelmingly focused—a focus sharply (and in my view correctly) criticized by Stavrakakis et al. (2017b).

  32. A fuller, more fine-grained treatment would require attending not only to the structural and conjunctural but also to the “eventful” (Sewell 2005, pp. 100–123) temporal register: to the contingencies of time, place, and situated action. I limit myself to the structural and conjunctural registers here, not only because of space limitations, but also because I am interested in explaining a broad pan-European and trans-Atlantic moment, not a specific set of national (and subnational) outcomes.

  33. Chiaramonte and Emanuele (2015) find that both dimensions of electoral volatility have increased substantially in the last quarter century in Western Europe; volatility has been even higher in Eastern Europe. There is of course considerable variation among countries: in Western Europe, the collapse of traditional parties and the de-institutionalization of party systems has been most striking in Italy, Greece, the Netherlands, Spain, and (most recently) France.

  34. Individualization has been especially conspicuous in the last half century in the formerly “pillarized” societies of Austria, Belgium, and the Netherlands, though it is of course a much broader and longer-term process. While individualization does entail a kind of structural and cultural disembedding (especially in these formerly structurally and culturally highly segmented societies), it does not necessarily entail the kinds of atomization, anomie, social disorganization, and manipulability by demagogues that were emphasized by some early theorists of Latin American populism. On reflexive individualization as central to late modernity, see Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002.

  35. On the reciprocal dependence of Trump and the media, see Gitlin (2016).

  36. In a broader, more theoretical argument, Mouffe (2005, pp. 51–55) blames the hegemony of a purely liberal, consensual, depoliticized model of democracy for the growing strength of right-wing populism; see also Stavrakakis (2014).

  37. Although the growing complexity of structures of governance—and the increasingly complex interdependence of social, economic, and political life more generally—fosters populist demands for simplicity, transparency, and immediacy and breeds skepticism toward the claims of expertise, it also fosters technocratic claims for expanding the role of expert authority. On populism and technocracy as complementary critiques of party democracy in an age of short-term “electoralism,” complex governance structures, and pervasive mediatization, see Caramani (2017).

  38. For broad accounts, see Betz (1994) and Kitschelt and McGann (1995). On the politics of “home” and autochthony, see Duyvendak (2011) and Mepschen (2016). On nativism and populism, see Betz (2017).

  39. On the distinctive importance of the post-Maastricht process of accelerated Europeanization in fostering right-wing populism in France, see Berezin (2009). On the “over-constitutionalization” of the EU that elevated market freedoms to quasi-constitutional status, see Grimm (2015). Pre-Brexit flashpoints of populist Euroskepticism included the initial Danish rejection (and French near-rejection) of the Maastricht Treaty in 1992 and the French and Dutch rejection of the European Constitution in 2005. For a useful pre-Brexit review of the literature on Euroskepticism, see Vasilopoulou (2013).

  40. On cultural backlash, see Bornschier and Kriesi (2013) and Inglehart and Norris (2016). The importance of honor, recognition, and respect to Tea Party and Trump supporters has been stressed by Hochschild (2016). For an account of contemporary populism (with reference to support for Trump and Brexit in particular) as a “rent-restoration project,” emerging in response to the liberal “rent-destruction project” that sought to overcome the structural disadvantages based on race, gender, and nativity, see Jackson and Grusky, unpublished paper.

  41. On the “minority rights revolution” of recent decades, see Skrentny (2002).

  42. In northern and western Europe—and most strikingly in the Netherlands—emancipatory liberalism in the domain of gender and sexuality has figured in culturally protectionist populist politics in a very different way: a “civilizational” populism has embraced gender and sexual liberalism as central to the (post-) Christian West yet intrinsically incompatible with Islam. On the putatively liberal dimensions of this civilizational populism, see Brubaker (2017).

  43. In East Central Europe, the populist reaction against emancipatory liberalism has a different focus and target, since the region’s right wing populists, led by Viktor Orbán, understand emancipatory liberalism not only, or primarily, as an internal development, but as a foreign ideology imported from the west and imposed by “Brussels.” Emancipatory liberalism is seen by the region’s national populists as a kind of neocolonial “mission civilisatrice” that requires elaborate systems of rights for Roma, national minorities, and gender and sexual minorities. On EU enlargement and gay rights, see Mole (2016) and Slootmaeckers et al. (2016).

  44. Stavrakakis et al. (2017a) appreciate Moffitt’s emphasis on crisis as a construction, representation, and performance, while noting the earlier emphasis on this theme by Hay (1995) and—in connection with the study of populism—by Laclau (2005b). Yet in their account, crisis is not only construction, representation, and performance: they follow Laclau in seeking to theorize the relation between the objective and subjective moments of crisis, or, as Sum and Jessop (2015, p. 40) put it, the “dialect of semiosis and materiality.”

  45. On Podemos, see Kioupkiolis (2016); on Syriza, see Katsambekis (2016) and Stavrakakis and Siomos (2016). For the left populist reaction generally, see Stavrakakis (2014).

  46. For the variation by region and country within Europe in the effects of economic crisis on populist politics, see the volume edited by Kriesi and Pappas (2015), which however covers developments only through 2013.

  47. On working-class support for Europe’s right wing populist parties, see Rydgren (2013).

  48. See http://www.pewglobal.org/2016/08/02/number-of-refugees-to-europe-surges-to-record-1-3-million-in-2015/; http://www.pewglobal.org/2016/08/02/appendix-a-asylum-applications-1985-through-2015/. The approximately one million Syrians who have sought asylum in Europe in recent years is only one-fifth of the number of Syrians registered as refugees in Turkey, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, and Lebanon.

  49. https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/2154/umfrage/entwicklung-der-zu – und-fortzuege-in-deutschland-seit-1987/.

  50. This meant in practice that Germany decided to allow asylum applications to be filed by those arriving at the Austrian-German border via Hungary and the Western Balkan route, although it could have rejected such applications, since Austria and Hungary counted legally as safe states, and the “safe third country” principle allows states to deny entry to those seeking asylum if they are turned back to a state that is officially considered safe. (Greece, too, counted legally as a safe state. And as the state of first arrival in the EU for the overwhelming majority of those seeking asylum in Germany in 2015, it was theoretically obliged by the Dublin Regulations governing the EU’s putatively unified asylum procedure to process their asylum applications. But Greece’s meager asylum-adjudicating infrastructure had been overwhelmed well before the 2015 crisis, and EU states had not enforced the Dublin requirement vis-à-vis Greece since 2011.)

  51. For Orbán’s reference to “suicidal liberalism,” see http://budapestbeacon.com/public-policy/orban-hungarys-sovereignty-depends-on-receiving-eu-funds/27582.

  52. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/islam-has-no-place-in-thiscountry-says-slovakian-prime-minister-weeks-before-it-takes-over-eu-a7052506.html.

  53. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jun/16/nigel-farage-defends-ukip-breaking-point-poster-queue-of-migrants.

  54. http://www.cbsnews.com/news/face-the-nation-transcripts-october-11-2015-trump-carson/.

  55. https://missingmigrants.iom.int/mediterranean.

  56. For the numbers killed each year in terror attacks in Europe between 1970 and 2016, see the graphic at http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2017/03/terrorism-timeline.

  57. For casualties in the Northern Ireland and Basque conflicts, see Sánchez-Cuenca (2007, pp. 291–292).

  58. President Macron has pledged to lift the state of emergency, but the proposed new anti-terrorism legislation that would replace it would institutionalize a number of the security measures currently allowed under the state of emergency. See https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/07/will-frances-state-of-emergency-become-permanent/532848/.

  59. For the retrospective police analysis of the New Year’s Eve violence, see http://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/uebergriffe-in-koeln-frauen-wurden-opfer-von-silvester-gewalt-1.3072064.

  60. On the emergence of a new dimension of political competition in Europe defined by differing experiences with and stances toward globalization, see Kriesi et al. (2006) and Azmanova (2011).

  61. Although the Brexit campaign focused primarily on intra-European migration, it was shadowed by a concern with extra-European (and, notably, Muslim) migration as well, as suggested by the controversial poster of refugees mentioned above and by the argument that remaining in the EU would potentially expose the UK to massive immigration from Turkey.

  62. A few statistics for the United States can serve to convey the magnitude and abruptness of the shift. The share of the US population over age fourteen with a smartphone soared from a mere 11% at the end of 2008 to 75% at the end of 2014. The same period saw the explosive growth of social media. Regular Facebook users amounted to barely 10% of the US population in 2008, but just four years later they made up more than half the population (and of course a much higher fraction among younger people). Worldwide, Facebook had ten times as many users by the end of last year—nearly 2 billion—as it had in 2009. Twitter users increased more than six-fold in the US from 2010 to 2014, growing from 10 million to 63 million. More Americans under age fifty today regularly get news online than from television. On smartphone use, see https://www.comscore.com/Insights/Blog/US-Smartphone-Penetration-Surpassed-80-Percent-in-2016. Facebook figures for 2011 (160 million in United States), based on the company’s IPO, are from http://www.zdnet.com/article/facebooks-ipo-by-the-numbers/; figures for September 2008 are from http://www.adweek.com/digital/latest-data-on-us-facebook-age-and-gender-demographics/. For worldwide figures for Facebook, see https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly-active-facebook-users-worldwide/. Figures on Twitter use are from https://www.statista.com/statistics/274564/monthly-active-twitter-users-in-the-united-states/. On sources of news, see http://www.journalism.org/2016/07/07/pathways-to-news/.

  63. https://www.vvd.nl/nieuws/lees-hier-de-brief-van-mark/. Similarly, in an effort to reach out to voters sympathetic to the Alternative for Germany, Interior Minister Thomas de Mazière of the Christian Democratic Union—the senior partner in Germany’s grand coalition—published a guest contribution in the largest-circulation Sunday newspaper reviving the call for a German “Leitkultur” or “core culture” and specifying certain key modes of behavior that define that core culture: “We say our names. We shake hands as a greeting.... We are an open society. We show our face. We are not burka [Wir sind nicht Burka].” Bild am Sonntag, April 29, 2017.

  64. See Canovan (1999), who locates the recurrent vulnerability of democracy to populist challenge in the tension between what Oakeshott called the “politics of faith” and the “politics of skepticism.”

References

  • Abromeit, J., Chesterton, B. M., Marotta, G., & Norman, Y. (Eds.). (2015). Transformations of populism in Europe and the Americas: History and recent tendencies. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

    Google Scholar 

  • Aytaç, S. E., & Őniş, Z. (2014). Varieties of populism in a changing global context: the divergent paths of Erdoğan and Kirchnerismo. Comparative Politics, 47(1), 41–59.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Azmanova, A. (2011). After the left–right (dis)continuum: globalization and the remaking of Europe’s ideological geography. International Political Sociology, 5(4), 384–407. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-5687.2011.00141.x.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Beck, U., & Beck-Gernsheim, E. (2002). Individualization: institutionalized individualism and its social and political consequences. London; Thousand Oaks: SAGE.

  • Berezin, M. (2009). Illiberal politics in neoliberal times: Culture, security and populism in the new Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Betz, H.-G. (1994). Radical right-wing populism in Western Europe. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Betz, H.-G. (2017). Nativism across time and space. Swiss Political Science Review. https://doi.org/10.1111/spsr.12260.

  • Biorcio, R. (2003). The Lega Nord and the Italian media system. In G. Mazzoleni, J. Stewart, & B. Horsfield (Eds.), The media and neo-populism: A contemporary comparative analysis (pp. 71–94). Westport: Praeger.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bordignon, F. (2017). In and out: Emmanuel Macron’s anti-populist populism. http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/europpblog/2017/04/28/macron-anti-populist-populism/. Accessed 26 July 2017.

  • Bornschier, S., & Kriesi, H. (2013). The populist right, the working class, and the changing basis of class politics. In J. Rydgren (Ed.), Class politics and the radical right (pp. 10–30). Abingdon: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Brubaker, R. (2011). Economic crisis, nationalism, and politicized ethnicity. In C. Calhoun & G. Derluguian (Eds.), The deepening crisis: Governance challenges after neoliberalism (pp. 93–108). New York: Social Science Research Council and New York University Press.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Brubaker, R. (2017). Between nationalism and civilizationism: the European populist moment in comparative perspective. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 40(8), 1191–1226.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Calhoun, C. (1988). Populist politics, communications media and large scale societal integration. Sociological Theory, 6(2), 219–241. https://doi.org/10.2307/202117.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Canovan, M. (1981). Populism (1st ed.). New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

    Google Scholar 

  • Canovan, M. (1984). “People”, politicians and populism. Government and Opposition, 19(3), 31–327. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1477-7053.1984.tb01048.x.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Canovan, M. (1999). Trust the people! Populism and the two faces of democracy. Political Studies, 47(1), 2–16. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9248.00184.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Canovan, M. (2002). Taking politics to the people: Populism as the ideology of democracy. In Y. Mény & Y. Surel (Eds.), Democracies and the populist challenge (pp. 25–44). London: Palgrave Macmillan.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Canovan, M. (2005). The people. Cambridge: Polity.

    Google Scholar 

  • Caramani, D. (2017). Will vs. reason: the populist and technocratic forms of political representation and their critique to party government. American Political Science Review, 111(01), 54–67. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055416000538.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Chiaramonte, A., & Emanuele, V. (2015). Party system volatility, regeneration and de-institutionalization in Western Europe (1945–2015). Party Politics, 23(4), 376–388. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354068815601330.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Coleman, G. (2016). On truth and lies in a pragmatic, Performative sense (with my respects to Nietzsche) or why reality needs a better PR department. Medium. https://medium.com/@BiellaColeman/on-truth-and-lies-in-a-pragmatic-performative-sense-with-my-respects-to-nietzsche-or-why-reality-5c8400bd9ac2.

  • Collier, D., & Mahon, J. E. (1993). Conceptual “stretching” revisited: adapting categories in comparative analysis. The American Political Science Review, 87(4), 845–855. https://doi.org/10.2307/2938818.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Curato, N. (2017). Politics of anxiety, politics of hope: Penal populism and Duterte’s rise to power. Journal of Current Southeast Asian Affairs, 35(3), 91–109.

    Google Scholar 

  • De Cleen, B., & Stavrakakis, Y. (2017). Distinctions and articulations: a discourse theoretical framework for the study of populism and nationalism. Javnost—The Public. https://doi.org/10.1080/13183222.2017.1330083.

  • Diehl, P. (2011a). Populismus, Antipolitik, Politainment. Berliner Debatte Initial, 22(1), 27–39.

    Google Scholar 

  • Diehl, P. (2011b). Die Komplexität des Populismus : ein Plädoyer für ein mehrdimensionales und graduelles Konzept. Totalitarismus und Demokratie, 8(2), 273–291.

    Google Scholar 

  • Diehl, P. (2017). The body in populism. In R. Heinisch, C. Holtz-Bacha, & O. Mazzoleni (Eds.), Political populism: A handbook. Baden-Baden: Nomos.

    Google Scholar 

  • Duyvendak, J. W. (2011). The politics of home. London: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230305076.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Esser, F. (2013). Mediatization as a challenge: Media logic versus political logic. In H. Kriesi (Ed.), Democracy in the age of globalization and mediatization (pp. 155–176). London: Palgrave Macmillan.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Fishelov, D. (1991). Genre theory and family resemblance—revisited. Poetics, 20(2), 123–138.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Freeden, M. (1998). Is nationalism a distinct ideology? Political Studies, 46(4), 748–765. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9248.00165.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Furedi, F. (2005). From Europe to America: The populist moment has arrived. Spiked. http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/from_europe_to_america_the_populist_moment_has_arrived/810.

  • Furedi, F. (2016). Populism: a defence. Spiked. http://www.spiked-online.com/spiked-review/article/populism-a-defence/19042.

  • Gitlin, T. (2016). The media rapture of Donald Trump. The American Prospect. http://prospect.org/article/media-rapture-donald-trump. Accessed 15 Aug 2017.

  • Goerres, A., Spies, D. C., & Kumlin, S. (2017). The Electoral Supporter Base of the Alternative for Germany (SSRN scholarly paper no. Id 2942745). Rochester: Social Science Research Network. https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=2942745.

  • Grimm, D. (2015). The democratic costs of constitutionalisation: the European case. European Law Journal, 21(4), 460–473. https://doi.org/10.1111/eulj.12139.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Guiraudon, V. (2003). Before the EU border: Remote control of the “Huddled Masses.”. In C. A. Groenendijk, E. Guild, & P. E. Minderhoud (Eds.), In search of Europe’s borders (pp. 191–214). The Hague: Kluwer Law International.

  • Hay, C. (1995). Rethinking crisis: narratives of the new right and constructions of crisis. Rethinking Marxism, 8(2), 60–76. https://doi.org/10.1080/08935699508685442.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hochschild, A. R. (2016). Strangers in their own land: Anger and mourning on the American right. New York: New Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Houwen, T. (2011). The non-European roots of the concept of populism. Sussex European Institute: Working paper no. 120. https://www.sussex.ac.uk/webteam/gateway/file.php?name=sei-working-paper-no-120.pdf&site=266.

  • Inglehart, R. F., & Norris, P. (2016). Trump, Brexit, and the rise of Populism: Economic have-nots and cultural backlash. HKS Working Paper No. RWP16–026. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2818659.

  • Innerarity, D. (2010). The transformation of politics: Governing in the age of complex societies. Brussels: Peter Lang.

    Google Scholar 

  • Jaffrelot, C. (2015). Narendra Modi and the power of television in Gujarat. Television & New Media, 16(4), 346–353.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Jäger, A. (2016). The semantic drift: images of populism in post-war American historiography and their relevance for (European) political science. POPULISMUS Working Papers No. 3. http://www.populismus.gr/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/WP3-jaeger-final-upload.pdf. Accessed 24 Dec 2016.

  • Jansen, R. S. (2011). Populist mobilization: a new theoretical approach to populism. Sociological Theory, 29(2), 75–96. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9558.2011.01388.x.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Jansen, R. S. (2016). Situated political innovation: explaining the historical emergence of new modes of political practice. Theory and Society, 45(4), 319–360. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-016-9272-0.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Joppke, C. (2017). Erst die Moral, dann das Fressen. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, June 6.

  • Judis, J. B. (2016). The populist explosion: How the great recession transformed American and European politics. New York: Columbia Global Reports.

    Google Scholar 

  • Katsambekis, G. (2014). “Populism” against democracy or Europe against itself? ΧΡΟΝΟΣ online magazine, (17). http://www.chronosmag.eu/index.php/g-katsambekis-populism-against-democracy-or-europe-against-itself.html. Accessed 22 Aug 2017.

  • Katsambekis, G. (2016). Radical left populism in contemporary Greece: Syriza’s trajectory from Minoritarian opposition to power. Constellations, 23(3), 391–403. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8675.12234.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Katsambekis, G., & Stavrakakis, Y. (2013). Populism, anti-populism and European democracy: a view from the South. openDemocracy. http://www.opendemocracy.net/can-europe-make-it/giorgos-katsambekis-yannis-stavrakakis/populism-anti-populism-and-european-democr. Accessed 18 Aug 2017.

  • Katz, R. S., & Mair, P. (1995). Changing models of party organization and party democracy: the emergence of the cartel party. Party. Politics, 1(1), 5–28.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kazin, M. (1995). The populist persuasion: An American history. New York: Basic Books.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kioupkiolis, A. (2016). Podemos: the ambiguous promises of left-wing populism in contemporary Spain. Journal of Political Ideologies, 21(2), 99–120. https://doi.org/10.1080/13569317.2016.1150136.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kitschelt, H., & McGann, A. J. (1995). The radical right in Western Europe: A comparative analysis. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Knight, A. (1998). Populism and neo-populism in Latin America, especially Mexico. Journal of Latin American Studies, 30(2), 223–248.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Knöbl, W. (2016). Über alte und neue Gespenster: historisch-systematische Anmerkungen zum “Populismus.”. Mittelweg, 36(6), 8–35.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kriesi, H. (2014). The populist challenge. West European Politics, 37(2), 361–378. https://doi.org/10.1080/01402382.2014.887879.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kriesi, H., & Pappas, T. S. (Eds.). (2015). European populism in the shadow of the great recession. Colchester: ECPR Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kriesi, H., Grande, E., Lachat, R., Dolezal, M., Bornschier, S., & Frey, T. (2006). Globalization and the transformation of the national political space: six European countries compared. European Journal of Political Research, 45(6), 921–956. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-6765.2006.00644.x.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Laclau, E. (1977). Towards a theory of populism. In Politics and ideology in Marxist theory: Capitalism, fascism, populism (pp. 143–198). London: NLB.

  • Laclau, E. (1980). Populist rupture and discourse. Screen. Education, 34, 87–93.

    Google Scholar 

  • Laclau, E. (2005a). Populism: What’s in a name? In F. Panizza (Ed.), Populism and the mirror of democracy (pp. 32–49). London: Verso.

    Google Scholar 

  • Laclau, E. (2005b). On populist reason. London: Verso.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lasch, C. (1996). The revolt of the elites and the betrayal of democracy. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mair, P. (2002). Populist democracy vs party democracy. In Y. Mény & Y. Surel (Eds.), Democracies and the populist challenge (pp. 81–98). London: Palgrave Macmillan.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Mair, P. (2011). Bini Smaghi vs. the Parties: Representative government and institutional constraints (Working Paper). http://cadmus.eui.eu//handle/1814/16354. Accessed 26 Sept 2017.

  • Mazzoleni, G., & Schulz, W. (1999). “Mediatization” of politics: a challenge for democracy? Political Communication, 16(3), 247–261. https://doi.org/10.1080/105846099198613.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • McCargo, D. (2016). Duterte’s mediated populism. Contemporary Southeast Asia: A Journal of International and Strategic Affairs, 38(2), 185–190.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mény, Y., & Surel, Y. (2000). Par le peuple, pour le peuple: le populisme et les démocraties. Paris: Fayard.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mepschen, P. (2016). Everyday autochthony: Difference, discontent and the politics of home in Amsterdam (PhD thesis). University of Amsterdam.

  • Moffitt, B. (2016). The global rise of populism: Performance, political style, and representation. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Moffitt, B., & Tormey, S. (2014). Rethinking populism: politics, mediatisation and political style. Political Studies, 62(2), 381–397. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9248.12032.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Mole, R. C. M. (2016). Nationalism and homophobia in central and Eastern Europe. In K. Slootmaeckers, H. Touquet, & P. Vermeersch (Eds.), The EU enlargement and gay politics: The impact of eastern enlargement on rights, activism and prejudice (pp. 99–121). London: Palgrave Macmillan.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mouffe, C. (2005). The “end of politics” and the challenge of right-wing populism. In F. Panizza (Ed.), Populism and the mirror of democracy (pp. 50–71). London: Verso.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mudde, C. (2004). The populist zeitgeist. Government and Opposition, 39(4), 542–563. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1477-7053.2004.00135.x.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Mudde, C., & Rovira Kaltwasser, C. (Eds.). (2012a). Populism in Europe and the Americas: Threat or corrective for democracy? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mudde, C., & Rovira Kaltwasser, C. (2012b). Populism and (liberal) democracy: A framework for analysis. In C. Mudde & C. Rovira Kaltwasser (Eds.), Populism in Europe and the Americas: Threat or corrective for democracy? (pp. 1–26). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Mudde, C., & Rovira Kaltwasser, C. (2017). Populism: A very short introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Müller, J.-W. (2016). What is populism? Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Offe, C. (2016). Europe entrapped. Cambridge: Polity.

    Google Scholar 

  • Orgad, L. (2015). The cultural defense of nations: A liberal theory of majority rights. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Ostiguy, P. (2009). The high and the low in politics: A two-dimensional political space for comparative analysis and electoral studies. Kellogg Institute. http://www3.nd.edu/~kellogg/publications/workingpapers/WPS/360.pdf. Accessed 29 June 2017.

  • Ostiguy, P., & Roberts, K. M. (2016). Putting trump in comparative perspective: populism and the politicization of the sociocultural law. Brown Journal of World Affairs, 23(1), 25–50.

    Google Scholar 

  • Panizza, F. (Ed.). (2005). Populism as an internal periphery of democratic politics. In Populism and the mirror of democracy (pp. 72–93). London: Verso.

  • Pels, D. (2003). Aesthetic representation and political style: Re-balancing identity and difference in media democracy. In J. Corner & D. Pels (Eds.), Media and the restyling of politics: Consumerism, celebrity and cynicism (pp. 41–66). London: SAGE Publications Ltd. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781446216804.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Persily, N. (2017). Can democracy survive the internet? Journal of Democracy, 28(2), 63–76.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Pratt, J. (2007). Penal Populism. Abingdon: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Probst, L. (2002). Die Erzeugung “vorwärtsgerichteter Unruhe”. Überlegungen zum Charisma von Jörg Haider. Vorgänge, 41(4), 39.

    Google Scholar 

  • Rancière, J. (2016). The populism that is not to be found. In A. Badiou et al, What is a people? (pp. 101–105). New York: Columbia University Press.

  • Roberts, K. M. (1995). Neoliberalism and the transformation of populism in Latin America: the Peruvian case. World Politics, 48(1), 82–116.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Roberts, J. V. (Ed.). (2003). Penal populism and public opinion: Lessons from five countries. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Rydgren, J. (Ed.). (2013). Class politics and the radical right. Abingdon: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Rydgren, J., & Van der Meiden, S. (2016). Sweden, now a country like all the others? The radical right and the end of Swedish Exceptionalism. Working Paper, Department of Sociology, Stockholm University.

  • Sánchez-Cuenca, I. (2007). The dynamics of nationalist terrorism: ETA and the IRA. Terrorism and Political Violence, 19(3), 289–306. https://doi.org/10.1080/09546550701246981.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Sartori, G. (1970). Concept Misformation in comparative politics. The American Political Science Review, 64(4), 1033–1053. https://doi.org/10.2307/1958356.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Saurette, P., & Gunster, S. (2011). Ears wide shut: epistemological populism, Argutainment and Canadian conservative talk radio. Canadian Journal of Political Science, 44(1), 195–218. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0008423910001095.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Schmitt, C. (2007). The concept of the political (expanded edition). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Schroeder, R. (2017). Populism online: Digital media and the rise of right wing politics. In Social theory after the internet: Media, technology and globalization. London: UCL Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Selçuk, O. (2016). Strong presidents and weak institutions: populism in Turkey, Venezuela and Ecuador. Southeast European and Black Sea Studies, 16(4), 571–589. https://doi.org/10.1080/14683857.2016.1242893.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Sewell, W. H. (1996). Historical events as transformations of structures: inventing revolution at the bastille. Theory and Society, 25(6), 841–881.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Sewell, W. H. (2005). Logics of history: Social theory and social transformation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Skinner, Q. (2009). A genealogy of the modern state. Proceedings of the British Academy, 162, 325–370.

    Google Scholar 

  • Skrentny, J. D. (2002). The minority rights revolution. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Accessed 25 Mar 2016.

  • Slootmaeckers, K., Touquet, H., & Vermeersch, P. (2016). Introduction: EU enlargement and LGBT rights—Beyond symbolism? In K. Slootmaeckers, H. Touquet, & P. Vermeersch (Eds.), The EU enlargement and gay politics: The impact of eastern enlargement on rights, activism and prejudice (pp. 1–16). London: Palgrave Macmillan.

    Google Scholar 

  • Stanley, B. (2008). The thin ideology of populism. Journal of Political Ideologies, 13(1), 95–110. https://doi.org/10.1080/13569310701822289.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Stavrakakis, Y. (2004). Antinomies of formalism: Laclau’s theory of populism and the lessons from religious populism in Greece. Journal of Political Ideologies, 9(3), 253–267. https://doi.org/10.1080/1356931042000263519.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Stavrakakis, Y. (2014). The return of “the people”: Populism and anti-populism in the shadow of the European crisis. Constellations, 21(4), 505–517. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8675.12127.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Stavrakakis, Y., & Siomos, T. (2016). Syriza’s populism: testing and extending an Essex school perspective. Presented at the ECPR general conference, Charles University, Prague. https://ecpr.eu/Events/PaperDetails.aspx?PaperID=31315&EventID=95.

  • Stavrakakis, Y., Katsambekis, G., Kioupkiolis, A., Nikisianis, N., & Siomos, T. (2017a). Populism, anti-populism and crisis. Contemporary Political Theory. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-017-0142-y.

  • Stavrakakis, Y., Katsambekis, G., Nikisianis, N., Kioupkiolis, A., & Siomos, T. (2017b). Extreme right-wing populism in Europe: revisiting a reified association. Critical Discourse Studies, 14(4), 420–439. https://doi.org/10.1080/17405904.2017.1309325.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Sum, N.-L., & Jessop, B. (2015). Sense- and meaning-making in the critique of political economy. In B. Jessop, B. Young, & C. Scherrer (Eds.), Financial cultures and crisis dynamics (pp. 27–43). New York: Routledge.

  • Swidler, A. (1986). Culture in action: symbols and strategies. American Sociological Review, 51(2), 273–286. https://doi.org/10.2307/2095521.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Taggart, P. (2004). Populism and representative politics in contemporary Europe. Journal of Political Ideologies, 9(3), 269–288. https://doi.org/10.1080/1356931042000263528.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Taguieff, P.-A. (1995). Political science confronts populism: From a conceptual mirage to a real problem. Telos, 103, 9–43. https://doi.org/10.3817/0395103009.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Tamás, G. M. (2017). The mystery of “populism” finally unveiled. openDemocracy. https://www.opendemocracy.net/wfd/can-europe-make-it/g-m-tam-s/mystery-of-populism-finally-unveiled.

  • Tilly, C. (2006). Regimes and repertories. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Tormey, S. (2015). The end of representative politics. Malden: Polity Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Urbinati, N. (2015). A revolt against intermediary bodies. Constellations, 22(4), 477–486. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8675.12188.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Vasilopoulou, S. (2013). Continuity and change in the study of Euroscepticism: plus ça change? JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies, 51(1), 153–168. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-5965.2012.02306.x.

    Google Scholar 

  • Vossen, K. (2016). The power of populism: Geert wilders and the party for freedom in the Netherlands. Abingdon: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Weyland, K. (1999). Neoliberal populism in Latin America and Eastern Europe. Comparative Politics, 31(4), 379–401. https://doi.org/10.2307/422236.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Weyland, K. (2001). Clarifying a contested concept: populism in the study of Latin American politics. Comparative Politics, 34(1), 1–22. https://doi.org/10.2307/422412.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Weyland, K. (2003). Neopopulism and neoliberalism in Latin America: how much affinity? Third World Quarterly, 24(6), 1095–1115.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Wittgenstein, L. (1958). Philosophical investigations (2nd ed.). Oxford: Blackwell.

    Google Scholar 

  • Wodak, R. (2015). The politics of fear: What right-wing populist discourses mean. Los Angeles: SAGE.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Wodak, R. (2016). “Green against blue”—Reflections on the 2016 Austrian presidential election. TruLies Europe. http://trulies-europe.de/?p=505.

  • Worsley, P. (1969). The concept of populism. In G. Ionescu & E. Gellner (Eds.), Populism: Its meanings and national characteristics (pp. 212–221). London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

    Google Scholar 

  • Zaiotti, R. (2016). Externalizing migration management: Europe, North America and the spread of “remote control” practices. Abingdon: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Zolberg, A. R. (1999). Matters of state: Theorizing immigration policy. In C. Hirschman, J. DeWind, & P. Kasinitz (Eds.), The handbook of international migration: The American experience (pp. 71–93). New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgments

This article was conceived and written at the Wissenschaftskolleg of Berlin, where I enjoyed the great privilege of a residential fellowship and benefited from many collegial discussions. Earlier versions were presented at the Wissenschaftskolleg itself, at the Institute of History of Humboldt University in Berlin, and at the conference on “Populism and Citizenship” organized by the Center for Citizenship, Social Pluralism and Religious Diversity in Potsdam; I thank participants in these events for their comments. A short version of the second part of the article appeared as “Populism’s Perfect Storm” in the Boston Review, July 11, 2017. I am especially grateful to Rob Jansen, Jaeeun Kim, Mary O’Sullivan, and Matías Fernández for close critical readings and very helpful comments; Matías also provided exceptionally able research assistance. I thank Susan Osman for helping me think through the argument and for comments on successive drafts. I would also like to thank Hans-Georg Betz, Paula Diehl, Mathias Koenig, Lena Lavinas, Mara Loveman, Claus Offe, Gianna Pomata, and Peter Vermeersch for helpful comments and challenging questions.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology, University of California Los Angeles, 264 Haines Hall, 375 Portola Plaza, Los Angeles, CA, 90095-1551, USA

    Rogers Brubaker

Authors
  1. Rogers Brubaker
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Rogers Brubaker.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Brubaker, R. Why populism?. Theor Soc 46, 357–385 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-017-9301-7

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-017-9301-7

Keywords

Search

Navigation