Contents

Series title
Title page
Copyright page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
1 Why Populism Matters
2 What Is Populism?
The Ideational Approach
The Strategic Approach
The Discursive–Performative Approach
Comparing the Three Approaches to Populism
Notes
3 Populism, Nationalism and Nativism
The Similarities and Differences between Populism and Nationalism
How Do the Populist Right and Left Use Nationalism Differently?
The Populist Right and Nationalism
The Populist Left and Nationalism
What Does a Non-National Populism Look Like?
Municipal and Provincial Populism
Regionalist Populism
International Populism
Transnational Populism
Conclusion
Notes
4 Populism and Socialism
What Socialism Shares with Populism
Left-Wing Populism in Practice
 Beyond Socialism? Class versus ‘the People’ in Left Populism
Conclusion
Notes
5 Populism and Liberalism
Populism versus Liberalism?
The Populist Right and the Weaponising of Liberalism
The Populist Left, Liberalism and Pluralism
Conclusion
Notes
6 Populism and Democracy
Liberal Democracy and Populism
Radical Democracy and Populism
Populism’s Potentiality
Conclusion
Notes
References
Index
End User License Agreement
Series title

Key Concepts in Political Theory

Charles Jones and Richard Vernon, Patriotism
Roger Griffin, Fascism
Peter J. Steinberger, Political Judgment
Fabian Wendt, Authority
Eric Mack, Libertarianism
Elizabeth Cohen and Cyril Ghosh, Citizenship
Peter Lamb, Socialism
Benjamin Moffitt, Populism
Populism
Benjamin Moffitt
polity
Copyright page
Copyright © Benjamin Moffitt 2020
The right of Benjamin Moffitt to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance
with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2020 by Polity Press
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Dedication
For Ash and Will
Acknowledgements
This book was written over the course of 2018 and 2019, in the Department
of Government at Uppsala University, Sweden, and in the National School
of Arts at the Australian Catholic University in Melbourne, Australia. I am
grateful for the generous support and opportunities provided by both
institutions, and am particularly thankful to my kind colleagues in both
places whose conversations and feedback have made this book much better.
At Uppsala, I wish to thank my colleagues in the political theory seminar –
Sofia Näsström, Anthoula Malkopoulou, Gina Gustavsson, Sverker
Gustavsson and Johan Wejryd – for helping me think through a number of
the arguments presented here. At my new institutional home, the Australian
Catholic University, my thanks go to Mark Chou, Rachel Busbridge, Naser
Ghobadzadeh, Noah Riseman and Michael Ondaatje, who gave me helpful
feedback and advice and made me feel at home so quickly after my return
to Australia. Outside these institutions, I am grateful to Jonathan Kuyper,
Simon Tormey, John Keane, Benjamin de Cleen, Yannis Stavrakakis, Pierre
Ostiguy and Francisco Panizza, whose conversations and correspondence
have all contributed to the thinking I develop in this book. I also benefitted
from feedback on papers and presentations that touched on some of the
issues contained here – all made at the ARENA Centre for European
Studies in Oslo (April 2018) and at the UK Political Studies Association’s
Populism Specialist Group Workshop in Bath (March 2018). Lastly, I am
grateful to all my colleagues in the world of populism studies whose work I
cite and engage with in this book: without their research, I wouldn’t have
anything to write about, agree strongly with, get mad about, or analyse in
depth here. Despite what it may look like to outsiders, the world of
populism studies is actually an intellectually diverse, heterogeneous, open
and friendly one, and I am very thankful for my colleagues’ generally open-
minded and good-natured approach to academia – it’s a real rarity.
I also wish to thank the two anonymous reviewers whose comments on the
initial proposal for this book made it much sharper and ensured that I did
not just slip into the all-too-common tendency to examine Eurocentric
conceptions and examples of populism; and even more so to the four
anonymous reviewers who reviewed the draft manuscript, providing
perhaps the most constructive, fair and useful comments I have received in
all my time of writing about populism. At Polity Press, many thanks to
George Owers for commissioning the book and for his sharp and astute
comments on the text, and to Julia Davies for her editorial assistance.
Thanks also to Manuela Tecusan, whose meticulous and keen-eyed copy-
editing improved the text immensely. The book is much better as a result of
all these people’s generosity and hard work.
This research was partially supported by the Australian Government
through the Australian Research Council’s Discovery Early Career
Researcher Award funding scheme (project DE190101127).
Elements of Chapter 5 first appeared in ‘Liberal Illiberalism? The
Reshaping of the Contemporary Populist Radical Right in Northern
Europe’, in Politics and Governance (Moffitt 2017b), published under a
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. I thank Cogitatio Press for
permission to have these elements republished in this book.
Finally, I dedicate this book to Ash and Will. Ash has patiently listened to
me drone on about populism for almost a decade now, and has asked the
tricky questions that have helped me clarify what I am talking about when
things sounded a little woolly; on the other hand, Will has distracted me
from finishing this book as best as he could. For both those things – and,
more importantly, for their love and support – I am eternally grateful!
Melbourne, June 2019
1
Why Populism Matters
If there is one concept that seems to have captured the flavour of global
politics in the twenty-first century, it is populism. Used to describe a wide
range of disruptive and prominent leaders (Donald Trump, Rodrigo Duterte,
Hugo Chávez), parties (Podemos, One Nation, Alternative für Deutschland
(Alternative for Germany)), movements (Occupy Wall Street, the
Indignados) and even events (Brexit), the term has become a popular catch-
all for diagnosing all that is exciting, worrying or dysfunctional in
contemporary democracies worldwide. Indeed, the Cambridge Dictionary
named populism its ‘Word of the Year’ for 2017, referring to its importance
as ‘a phenomenon that’s both truly local and truly global, as populations
and their leaders across the world wrestle with issues of immigration and
trade, resurgent nationalism, and economic discontent’ (Cambridge
Dictionary 2017).
Indeed, the term seems to link leaders, movements and parties that had
previously seemed to have nothing to do with one another: what on earth
does the right-wing Donald Trump have in common with the left-wing
Occupy Wall Street, beyond a general distaste for ‘the elite’? What policies
does the socialist Evo Morales in Bolivia share with the nativist Geert
Wilders in the Netherlands? In what world can we link a so-called ‘populist
uprising’ in the case of Brexit with the success of a foul-mouthed president
of the Philippines who advocates the extrajudicial killings of drug users?
To add to this confusion, after years of being something of a ‘four-letter
word’ that hardly any politicians would dare claim for themselves,
populism has begun to be openly celebrated as a label and used by political
actors as a self-descriptor. Steve Bannon, former White House chief
strategist under Trump and former executive chairman of Breitbart News,
proudly labelled the anti-elite movement he helped foment around Trump as
‘Jacksonian populism’ (see Rose 2017) and said that he is aiming to set up
‘the infrastructure, globally, for the global populist movement’ (see
Horowitz 2018). Alexander Gauland, the leader of Alternative für
Deutschland, has declared of his party that ‘[w]e are a populist movement
and proud of it’ (cited in Deloy 2017: 5). Giuseppe Conte, the Italian prime
minister, has stated of his MoVimento 5 Stelle (Five Star Movement) and
Lega government that, ‘if populism is the attitude of listening to people’s
needs, then we lay a claim to it’ (see ANSA 2018). Meanwhile, the Spanish
Podemos party openly views itself as populist, laying claim to a theoretical
project of left-wing populism (Errejón and Mouffe 2016). In a rather short
period of time, it seems that the term ‘populism’ has shed its scarlet letter
associations for politicians across the political spectrum and taken on
instead something of a positive hue for signalling a lack of complicity with
‘the elite’ and a sense of being in touch with ‘the people’.
The positive view is not shared by ‘the elite’, however: for many
mainstream politicians across the globe, populism has become the single
biggest threat to democracy in the contemporary political landscape. In
2010 the former president of the European Council, Herman Van Rompuy,
called populism ‘the greatest danger to the contemporary West’ (as quoted
in Jäger 2018), while the president of the European Commission, Jean-
Claude Juncker, has warned against ‘galloping populism’ on the continent
(see Ellyatt 2016). Tony Blair’s think tank, the Tony Blair Institute for
Global Change, argues that populists ‘pose a real threat to democracy itself’
(Eiermann, Mounk and Gultchin 2017). Even the pontiff, Pope Francis, has
spoken out about this phenomenon, stating that ‘[p]opulism is evil and ends
badly’ (in di Lorenzo 2017).
Accompanying the popular interest in populism has been a veritable
explosion of work on this topic in academic literature. While the concept
has enjoyed widespread usage and in-depth analysis in the literatures on
European and on Latin American politics as well as in political theory over
the past two decades or so, the twin 2016 populist shocks – Trump’s victory
and the outcome of the Brexit referendum – saw populism move from being
a relatively marginal topic in the discipline of political science to being one
of its hottest – and most hotly debated. This sudden escalation in
importance saw a vast number of researchers who worked on themes even
remotely related to populism suddenly become ‘experts’ on it and link it
with areas as diverse as those of fake news, the alt-right, ‘post-truth’
politics, anarchism, and fascism. For those who had worked on populism
for years, usually toiling away in the subfields of area studies, comparative
politics, party politics or political theory, this was quite a surprise.
The popularity of the term has been something of a double-edged sword,
however. While the expansion of the field is in many ways most welcome,
with new insights and methods being brought to bear on the topic from
fields including political psychology, political communications and media
studies, it is also true that populism ‘has become the buzzword of the year
mostly because it is very often poorly defined and wrongly used’ – not only
in popular discussions, but in academic discussions as well – as leading
scholar of populism Cas Mudde (2017b) put it in the Guardian . As a
consequence, newcomers to the topic may be understandably confused by
the plethora of bad definitions that plague the term: where does one even
begin, if you want to understand populism? Is it synonymous with racism?
Is it left wing or right wing? Is it the same as authoritarianism? Is it good or
bad for democracy? How are we supposed to make sense of this mess?
It is at this juncture that this book comes in. It aims to offer a concise
account of contemporary approaches to populism, mapping conceptual
debates about what populism ‘is’, delineating the different theoretical
traditions used to approach the concept, and presenting you with a clear
entry point and overview of what can otherwise be a sprawling – and at
times impenetrable – literature. Tracing the concept’s development from the
late nineteenth century in the US prairies to the definitional debates today
around whether it is an ideology, a strategy or a mode of discourse or
performance, this study makes clear that populism is a core concept for
understanding democratic politics across the globe. Beyond these
definitional concerns, the book also explores how populism relates to and
intersects with some of the concepts at the heart of political theory and,
more widely, at the heart of political debate today: nativism, nationalism,
socialism, liberalism and democracy.
What makes this study different from other introductory texts on the topic
of populism that have been released in recent years is that it offers the first
accessible introduction to populism as a concept in political theory . While
other texts have tended to lead through a focus on empirical data, theory a
secondary concern, here the key conceptual battles over the meaning and
normative content of populism remain primary, through focus on the
arguments of such influential thinkers as Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe,
Cas Mudde, Jan-Werner Müller and Margaret Canovan. The aim is to
demonstrate that debates about populism are never just about the cases at
hand (for example, whether Trump is a menace to democracy or not), but
rather that these debates and questions act as a prism through which key
assumptions and normative arguments about contemporary democracy itself
are played out in a rough-and-tumble style. In a time characterised by ‘the
global rise of populism’ (Moffitt 2016), it is important we get to terms with
what is truly at stake in these debates.
The focus on theory, however, does not mean that this book should be
avoided by anyone allergic to the (at times) dense and difficult lingua franca
of political theory. While theoretical texts in the field of populism studies
have tended to be dominated by those influenced by the work of Laclau and
Mouffe (Laclau 2005a; Laclau and Mouffe 1985; Mouffe 2018) – my own
work included (Moffitt 2016) – these texts can be understandably daunting
for newcomers, given that the theoretical concepts used in them have a
rather steep learning curve and often rely on a background in post-
structuralism, Marxist thought and psychoanalysis (among other areas). The
present book aims to translate such theory into language more easily
grasped by newcomers to the field, which hopefully has the effect of
rendering the theoretical and conceptual advancements made by the authors
mentioned and their interlocutors accessible and useful.
But never fear: this book is not just about what different scholars have
argued about when it comes to populism. It assumes that you are reading it
because you are probably interested in real-world political developments
that have been subsumed under the heading of ‘populism’ in recent years,
and hence it draws on evocative examples of populism across the globe,
primarily from the last two decades, to illustrate, flesh out, challenge and
make sense of the conceptual arguments at play. It should be noted that the
book’s primarily contemporary focus means that it does not attempt to read
populism back into history – say, by looking at the role of the demos in
ancient Athens – but rather chooses to concentrate its attention on what has
actually been called (or called itself) populist, given that this is presumably
what the reader is most interested in at this particular, ‘populist’ moment.
In order to work towards these outlined goals, the book is structured to
introduce you to the core definitional debates at play in the literature on
populism, before moving on to central normative and ideological debates
about populism’s relationship to other core concepts in political theory. It
proceeds as follows.
Chapter 2 , ‘What Is Populism?’, outlines the key approaches to populism
in the academic literature: the ideational approach, which views populism
as a distinct ideology or worldview; the strategic approach, which sees it as
an electoral strategy or mode of organisation; and the discursive–
performative approach, which sees it as a type of discourse or performance.
The chapter outlines the key authors associated with each of these
approaches and the key definitions and arguments they use, then considers
the strengths and weaknesses of each approach. It also traces the historical
roots of each approach, paying attention to its intellectual lineage, and takes
stock of what is theoretically and methodologically specific to each.
Arguing that all central approaches pivot on the distinction between ‘the
people’ and ‘the elite’, it nonetheless highlights the important
epistemological and normative differences that underlie each approach.
These differences have tended to remain underexplored in debates about the
various conceptual camps in the contemporary literature.
The following three chapters explore populism’s relationship to other key
‘isms’ at the core of debates in contemporary political theory: nationalism,
nativism, socialism and liberalism. Chapter 3 addresses the relationship
between populism, nationalism and nativism, which are commonly
conflated in the academic literature or treated as synonymous terms in
popular discussions. However, this chapter argues that populism and
nationalism, while both drawing on the key signifier ‘the people’, adopt
different characterisations of ‘the people’ and ultimately target different
enemies. To explore this situation, the chapter examines how right- and left-
wing populists draw on nationalism in distinct ways: it argues that left-wing
populists tend to use a civic form of nationalism, whereas right-wing
populists tend to use an ethnic one – or what might better be understood as
nativism. In making this argument, the chapter also examines cases of
populism that do not fit into the ‘national’ box – including municipal and
regional subtypes of populism at a subnational level (e.g. the cases of
Toronto’s mayor, Rob Ford, and of Lega Nord (Northern League) in Italy)
and international and transnational populism at a supranational level (e.g.
the cooperation between populists in Europe and Latin America, and the
transnational populist case of the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025) –
and shows that the association between nationalism and populism, or even
between populism and the national, is far from automatic.
Chapter 4 turns to the sometimes overlooked relationship between populism
and socialism. While nationalism and nativism have often taken precedence
when it comes to understanding populism (owing to their association with
the European populist radical right and with figures like Trump, who have
received the greatest amount of media attention devoted to the
phenomenon), socialism has an equally vexed and important relationship
with populism. Prominent populist figures on the left of the political
spectrum – for example Hugo Chávez, Evo Morales and Rafael Correa in
Latin America, Bernie Sanders in the United States, and parties such as
Syriza and Podemos in Europe or the Economic Freedom Fighters in South
Africa – have all advocated some form of ‘twenty-first-century socialism’
in their platforms. This chapter investigates the conceptual overlaps
between populism and socialism and examines how they are combined
empirically in these cases from across the globe. It also looks into why and
where populism and socialism go their separate ways, exploring the
tensions between populism’s ‘the people versus the elite’ division and the
more explicit class structure of socialism, and the differing status of ‘the
people’ under both political projects. Finally, it considers contemporary
arguments about embracing the strategy of ‘left populism’ as a way of
moving beyond socialism or social democracy advocated by the likes of
Mouffe (2018) and Laclau (2005a), and ponders over whether these
arguments hold water at a time when the left-wing populist moment seems
to be waning.
Chapter 5 examines the relationship between populism and liberalism.
Against widespread claims that populism is always illiberal, this chapter
argues that the reality is far more complex, as right-wing populists
increasingly reconfigure liberal tropes for their own purposes – for
example, they claim to oppose more open immigration policies or cultural
diversity in order to protect gender and sexual equality – and left-wing
populists in Europe and the Americas often maintain a commitment to
pluralism in their conception of ‘the people’. Exploring the ways in which
populists engage with, exploit and deploy various tenets of liberalism while
undermining others to a serious degree, the chapter shows that the binary
between populism and liberalism is far from impermeable and that
questions of liberalism, pluralism and heterogeneity raise important
questions about how we seek to define and identify cases of populism in the
contemporary political landscape.
The final chapter addresses perhaps the key question that still remains at the
core of popular and academic debates about populism: is populism,
ultimately, a good or a bad thing for democracy? The chapter shows that the
answer to this question really depends on what subtype of democracy one
favours: a liberal democrat will probably see populism as a threat to the
very functioning of democracy insofar as closing down the space for plural
understandings of ‘the people’ and the recognition of legitimate opposition
is concerned, while a radical democrat will see it as opening up a space for
the reconstitution of ‘the people’ in an otherwise moribund post-democratic
environment. Contrasting these positions, the chapter argues that both sides
also have a distinct view of the potentiality of populism, liberals seeing
populism as a precursor to authoritarianism, whereas for radical democrats
left-wing populism leads to a truly radical and plural political order. The
chapter examines the problems with these views – particularly the
increasing tendency to conflate the phenomena of authoritarianism and
populism on the liberal side and the worrying propensity to ignore the
problematic effects of positioning the leader as central to populism on the
radical side – and how these can lead to a selective interpretation of
populism’s democratic or anti-democratic credentials.
And so, by the end of this book, you should have a much better of idea of
what populism ‘is’ and what is at stake in debates over its meaning;
the key conceptual and normative drivers behind different schools of
thought on populism;
how populism interacts with other key isms in the contemporary political
landscape – especially nationalism, nativism, socialism and liberalism;
and
how different visions of democracy underlie whether populism is seen as
a threat or as a corrective to democratic politics.

Most importantly, you will see that, when it comes to populism, theory
cannot be neatly separated from practice. While we all know that famous
figures such as Donald Trump, Nigel Farage, Juan Perón, Hugo Chávez and
Rodrigo Duterte are often labelled ‘populists’, we cannot dig any deeper or
gain any insight into what this means without considering the theoretical
and conceptual debates behind the label. This is not merely an academic
question: how we label and understand political leaders, parties and
movements matters, because such labels can have significant effects on how
we judge the legitimacy and validity of their bearers’ political claims. For
example, whether a party is seen as ‘mainstream’ or ‘populist’ can have
important ramifications for its acceptability as a coalition partner by other
parties, while whether a leader is seen as ‘populist’ or not is often used as
shorthand for where that leader falls in terms of respect for the democratic
rules of the game. In short, there is a lot wrapped up in the seemingly
simple term ‘populism’.
There are also good practical reasons to pay attention to the concept of
populism. In a world beset by increased polarisation, the growth of anti-
elite sentiment, and the proliferation of fake news, echo chambers and
increasingly partisan media, populism is not going to go away any time
soon. Despite the wishful thinking of those who dream of ‘the death of
populism’ or those who aim to ‘defeat populism’ once and for all, it looks
like populism is here to stay; while the time of Donald Trump, Narendra
Modi and Marine Le Pen will eventually come up, the fact of the matter is
that new Trumps, new Modis and new Le Pens are likely to emerge in their
shadows. More so, the legacies of populism will linger: while a populist
actor can disappear from the political landscape, he or she can have
significant long-term cultural and institutional effects – effects of a kind
that, say, a post-Trump Republican Party (and US politics more generally)
will surely have to grapple with. In such circumstances, no matter where
you stand when it comes to populism – against it, for it, or on the fence
about it – the reality is that it matters; it is here and, rather than being a blip
on the political radar, has become a central part of contemporary political
life. Understanding the concept is thus of vital importance today. Hopefully
this book can help you in this key task.
2
What Is Populism?
If there is one cliché that rules above all others when it comes to the study
of populism, it is surely this: the idea that experts cannot, for the life of
them, agree on a definition for it. This allegedly insurmountable
contestation over the term, and the claims made about its
‘meaninglessness’, are often (in fact every few years or so) accompanied by
calls for it to be withdrawn or thrown on the trash heap of useless concepts.
The thinking goes, if specialists on the topic cannot come to an agreement
even on what the concept stands for, how on earth is it supposed to be of
any use to anyone else?
Like most clichés, this one is only half true. There is actually a fair degree
of agreement among academics: most specialists are of the view that
populism revolves around a central division between ‘the people’ and ‘the
elite’. In other words, there is considerable consensus about the core
features of populism. Some authors bring in additional criteria – such as
personalist leadership (Weyland 2017), the pronouncement of crisis (Moffitt
2015a; Rooduijn 2014), or the exclusion of dangerous ‘others’ (Albertazzi
and McDonnell 2008a) – but, at a minimum, these definitions tend to hinge
on the people–elite divide. Even more, there is significant consensus on
central cases of populism: while scholars often use different definitions of
populism, they tend to end up labelling pretty much the same leaders,
parties or movements as ‘populist’ (however, as we shall see later in this
chapter, there is significant dissension outside these central cases).
What academics do disagree on is the type of phenomenon that populism is.
That is, populism scholars do not agree as to whether populism is an
ideology, a strategy, a discourse or a mode of political performance. This is
nothing new: debates about what kind of phenomenon populism is have
been raging for over half a century now, as illustrated by the different
definitions put forward in Populism: Its Meanings and National
Characteristics (Ionescu and Gellner 1969), a seminal collection that drew
together the results of a 1967 conference held at the London School of
Economics, ‘To Define Populism’. The conference, needless to say, did not
achieve its goal. While some scholars have attempted to explain the
continuation of these definitional debates around populism as irrelevant or
as mere nitpicking – for example, Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser (2018:
1668) argue that, ‘[a]lthough each of these terms has its own specificities,
the differences between them are minor, and irrelevant to many research
questions’ – the present chapter claims the opposite. These debates matter
and have very important ramifications and consequences for studying
populism: the kind of phenomenon one thinks populism to be tends to
reflect very different ontological, epistemological and methodological
approaches to the subject. Such choices inform the kinds of political actors
one studies – parties, leaders, movements, citizens or followers; how one
studies them – through what they say, through what they do, through what
they write, or through something else; and whether one thinks that populism
is a binary or gradational concept – that is, is the line between populism and
non-populism black and white, or can we can account for some grey in
between? Even more, it reflects a central split between those who think that
populism is a property or an attribute of a political actor – such as an
ideology – and those who think that populism is something that political
actors ‘do’ – such as a discourse.
This chapter breaks down such differences by outlining the key approaches
put forward in the literature on populism – the ideational approach, typified
by the work of Mudde (2004, 2007, 2017a), Rovira Kaltwasser (Mudde and
Rovira Kaltwasser 2017), Hawkins (Hawkins and Rovira Kaltwasser 2017a,
2017b) and Müller (2016); the strategic approach, typified by the work of
Weyland (2001, 2017), Roberts (1995, 2003) and Jansen (2011); and the
discursive–performative approach, typified by the work of Laclau (2005a),
Mouffe (2018), Wodak (2015) and Ostiguy (2017) – and outlines their
theoretical and methodological differences. In doing so, it pays particular
attention to the intellectual lineage of each approach, tracing the
methodological influence of the work of Freeden (1996) and Sartori (1970)
for the ideational approach and of the work of Sartori (1970), Ragin (2000)
and Tilly (2008) for the strategic approach, and the theoretical influence of
the work of Laclau and Mouffe (1985) for the discursive–performative
approach. It also outlines the epistemological positions that underlie each of
these approaches and have tended to remain underexplored in contemporary
debates about different conceptual camps. While the chapter obviously does
not cover all definitions of populism – there is also a burgeoning body of
work in the political communications literature that views populism as a
mode of communication or expression (see Aalberg et al. 2017) in a way
slightly different from, yet akin to, that of the discursive–performative
approach – the ones discussed here represent the central tendencies in the
contemporary literature on the topic and should give you a good bearing on
where the conceptual debate currently stands.

The Ideational Approach

The ideational approach to populism is, arguably, the most widely used
approach to populism in the contemporary academic literature. This
approach regards populism as an ideology, as a set of ideas or as a
worldview. There are certainly intuitive reasons for seeing populism in this
way: it naturally seems that, as a political phenomenon with a name ending
in -ism, populism should be set alongside other central political ‘isms’,
which often happen to be ideologies – such as liberalism, socialism,
anarchism and so on.
One can trace a fairly clear lineage of scholars who have seen populism as
an ideational phenomenon. Mudde (2017a: 27) notes that early studies of
the US People’s Party (Ferkiss 1957) and of the Russian Narodniks (Pipes
1960) focused on the party’s and movement’s ideational contents. Shils’
mid-twentieth-century work on McCarthyism, meanwhile, identified
populism as a ‘widespread phenomenon … [that] exists wherever there is
an ideology of popular resentment against the order imposed on society by
a long-established, differentiated ruling class which is believed to have a
monopoly of power, property, breeding and culture’ (Shils 1956: 100–1),
whereas MacRae (1969) explicitly argued that populism should be
conceptualised as an ideology. Canovan’s influential work on populism also
developed an ideological understanding of populism, her later work
referring to it as ‘the ideology of democracy’ (Canovan 2002: 25).
Today the most commonly cited definition of populism under this approach
is that of Mudde: ‘a thin-centered ideology that considers society to be
ultimately separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic camps, “the
pure people” versus “the corrupt elite”, and which argues that politics
should be an expression of the volonté générale (general will) of the
people’ (Mudde 2004: 543). Similar approaches to populism as a ‘thin-
centred’ ideology have been developed by Stanley (2008), Albertazzi and
McDonnell (2008a), and Rooduijn (2014) among others – and, even if they
do not precisely refer to it as ‘thin’, the implication is that populism does
not stand alone as an ideology but is rather always combined with other
ideologies. These definitions have been put to use most often to understand
populist parties in Europe (particularly in Western Europe), although they
have been taken up in recent studies of Latin American populism as well
(see Hawkins and Rovira Kaltwasser 2017a). This ideational understanding
of populism has also been used to measure populist attitudes among
populations (Akkerman, Mudde and Zaslove 2014; Hawkins, Rovira
Kaltwasser and Andreadis 2018). Müller has developed a similar definition
of the phenomenon: while he does not explicitly call populism an ideology,
his definition of it as ‘a way of perceiving the political world that sets a
morally pure and fully unified – but … ultimately fictional – people against
elites who are deemed corrupt or in some other way morally inferior’
(Müller 2016: 19–20) comes very close to Mudde’s definition. Both
highlight (a) the divide between ‘the people’ and ‘the elite’ and (b) the
homogeneity, unification and moral ‘purity’ of ‘the people’.
The work of two central authors informs the broader theoretical
assumptions that underlie the ideational approach to populism. The first
author is Michael Freeden, whose work is used to define what an ideology
is and how it operates. Against Marxian and Gramscian views of ideology
as a form of false consciousness, Freeden puts forward what he calls a
‘morphological’ approach to ideology. He sees ideologies as ‘distinctive
configurations of political concepts’ that ‘create specific conceptual
patterns from a pool of indeterminate and unlimited combinations’ (Freeden
1996: 4). The aim, when studying ideologies in this manner, is to determine
how such concepts are defined and arranged, and to uncover the
relationships between core and peripheral concepts. In his work, Freeden
distinguishes between ‘thin-centered’ ideologies and ‘thick’ ideologies: the
former have only ‘a restricted core attached to a narrower range of political
concepts’, and thus remain ‘limited in ideational ambitions and scope’
(Freeden 1998: 750), whereas the latter offer ‘a broad menu of solutions to
major socio-political issues’ (Freeden 2003: 96), forming a ‘wide-ranging
arrangement that attributes decontested meanings to a range of mutually
defining political concepts’ (Freeden 2003: 54).
Populism belongs, in the eyes of ideational scholars, in the family of thin-
centred ideologies such as nationalism, feminism and green politics
(Freeden 1996, 1998) rather than being a thick ideology alongside
liberalism and socialism. This characterisation of populism as particularly
‘thin’ or ‘thin-centred’ was first outlined by Mudde (2004) and Fieschi
(2004), then developed in greater depth by Stanley (2008). It has since been
more or less taken for granted by those who work within the ideational
tradition. 1 The appeal of such an approach, according to these scholars, is
that it allows one to understand populism’s ‘ability to cohabit with other,
more comprehensive, ideologies’ (Stanley 2008: 100), as well as how
‘populism almost always appears attached to other ideological elements,
which are crucial for the promotion of political projects that are appealing
to a broader public’ (Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser 2017: 6) – in other
words, how populism can associate with other thin-centred ideologies such
as nationalism, or how it can take left- or right-wing forms by combining
with thick ideologies such as socialism or conservativism. Under this
approach, it is hard to imagine what a ‘pure’ populism would look like, as it
needs to cohabit with other ideologies to make sense: in this respect, ‘the
people’ versus ‘the elite’ divide can be ‘filled in’ only with the content of
other ideologies, otherwise it remains essentially meaningless.
This approach has come under significant criticism (Aslanidis 2016a;
Moffitt 2016), none more important and damning than that of Freeden
(2017) himself. Freeden argues that populism is not an ideology at all, but
something even ‘thinner’, more akin to a discourse, style, or mode of
language. As he argues, populism is ‘simply ideologically too scrawny even
to be thin! […] A thin-centred ideology implies that there is potentially
more than the centre, but the populist core is all there is; it is not a potential
centre for something broader or more inclusive. It is emaciatedly thin rather
than thin-centred’ (Freeden 2017: 3). In this spirit, he argues that populism
has no internal cohesion; does not have the potential to become a ‘full’ or
‘thick’ ideology (unlike thin ideologies like feminism or ecologism); and
does not fit into any clear ideological ‘family’ of resemblances. Given these
attributes, he suggests that counting it in the category of ‘thin ideologies’ is
a mistake: in the end, populism ‘not only falls short of comprehensiveness
but short of nuanced specificity in what it does offer’ (Freeden 2017: 10),
by which he means that giving it the status of ideology, thick or thin, is
simply wrong.
The second major (though less explicit) methodological influence on the
development of the ideational approach to populism comes from Giovanni
Sartori, a scholar whose work on concept formation is seminal in the field
of political science (Sartori 1970, 1976). Sartori strongly made the case for
dichotomous 2 concepts – that is, either/or concepts – which he sees as
necessary to develop before moving on to distinguish degrees (concepts that
are a matter of more or less) or subtypes of a given notion. As a result, for
many proponents of this approach, populism is first and foremost a binary
concept: parties, leaders and movements either are populist or are not. To
speak of them as being ‘somewhat’ populist does not fit into their argument
– the idea is to be able to label political actors clearly as populist, not
necessarily to measure their populism in a ‘degreeist’ fashion (to use
Sartori’s own term). 3 They also follow Sartori in constructing what they
see as a classical and minimal definition of the concept: in restricting
themselves to populism’s essential core features, they are able to construct
useful taxonomies of subtypes of populism, as has been seen in the case of
divisions between exclusionary and inclusionary populism (Mudde and
Rovira Kaltwasser 2013), or between radical right-wing populism and left-
wing populism. Ideational scholars also claim that these kinds of minimal
definitions meet the ‘travelling problem’ (Sartori 1970: 1033), in which
such definitions are not only specific to one historical period or
geographical area, but can transcend and ‘travel’ such boundaries.
While this approach has been taken up by a number of theorists (see, for
example, Abts and Rummens 2007; Müller 2016; Rovira Kaltwasser 2014),
its impact has arguably been most strongly felt in the field of party politics
and comparative politics. There are several potential reasons for this.
Although ideational scholars claim that ‘there are many scholars who use an
ideational approach, even if they shy away from using the term ideology’
(Mudde 2017a: 28), including in this list those who see it is as a discourse,
style, language or communicative practice, many of the authors associated
with these latter approaches have actually been critical of the ideational
approach (Aslanidis 2016a; De Cleen, Glynos and Mondon 2018; Moffitt
2016; Stavrakakis and Jäger 2018). Perhaps the core issue here is
pinpointed by Mudde, who notes that the ideational approach is
‘empirically oriented, positivist, and aimed at developing mid-range
theoretical levels’ (Mudde 2017a: 40) – in other words, very much in line
with mainstream comparative politics – whereas many discourse- or
communication-oriented scholars (or political theorists, for that matter)
would likely bristle at being described as positivists. Indeed, as we shall
see, those who use the discursive–performative approach to populism are
for the most part firmly post- positivist, subscribing to a social
constructivist ontology.

The Strategic Approach

The second main approach to populism that can be identified in the
literature is the one that sees it as a strategy. Unlike those who use the
ideational approach, adherents of the strategic approach do not treat
populism as an inherent feature of some political actor, but rather as
something that is done : as Jansen puts it, populism is not a ‘thing’ or
‘object’ to be studied but ‘a mode of political practice’ (Jansen 2011: 75).
Exactly how these scholars define this mode of practice can vary – strategy,
mode of organisation and type of political mobilisation are all used – but
what unites them is this: they are primarily interested not in what populists
purport to believe (that is, in their ideology), or even in what they say or
how they act (that is, in their discourse or political style), but rather in ‘how
they pursue and sustain power’ (Weyland 2017: 50) and in ‘the principal
ways and means by which a political actor captures the government and
makes and enforces authoritative decisions’ (2017: 55). This orientation can
be detected in the core definitions used in this approach: Weyland (2001:
14) regards populism ‘as a political strategy through which a personalistic
leader seeks or exercises government power based on direct, unmediated,
uninstitutionalized support from large numbers of mostly unorganized
followers’, whereas Jansen sees populist mobilisation as ‘any sustained,
large-scale political project that mobilizes ordinarily marginalized social
sectors into publicly visible and contentious political action, while
articulating an anti-elite, nationalist rhetoric that valorizes ordinary people’
(Jansen 2011: 82). Similar definitions are put forward by Roberts (2003,
2015), Barr (2009) and Urbinati (2017).
The main adherents of this approach work almost exclusively on Latin
American cases of populism, and the few who use it in other regional
settings have remained focused on the global South, as has Resnick’s
(2014) work on populism in Africa or P. Kenny’s (2017) work on populist
mobilisation and patronage in India. Unlike Europe, which has been almost
exclusively dominated by populism on the right, Latin America has
witnessed populists of very different ideological or programmatic stripes
emerge over the twentieth century. This was particularly evident in the
sharp turn from the dominant ‘neopopulism’ of the 1990s, in which figures
like Alberto Fujimori and Carlos Menem combined neoliberalism with
populism, to the ‘pink tide’ of leftist populism of the twenty-first century, in
which figures like Hugo Chávez, Evo Morales and Rafael Correa combined
socialism with populism. Such shifts and enormous diversity in ideologies
have led to understandable reticence to apply an ideational reading to
populism.
Vital to the strategic approach to populism is the role of the leader. While
the ideational approach pays heed to the fact that populist ideas can be
espoused by a wide range of actors, according to the strategic approach
‘populism is a political strategy that revolves around an individual
politician. Specifically, populism rests on personalistic leadership’
(Weyland 2017: 56). This stress on the leader as the central actor in
populism can help to explain how populist leaders can switch several times
from one party affiliation to another, with few negative consequences for
their popular support. What is more, the importance of the leader’s appeal
can speak to populism’s ‘striking unpredictability, shiftiness, and
disorganization in the exercise of government power and in public policy-
making’ (2017: 60): often unencumbered by the straitjacket of ideological
consistency or by traditional party structures, populists have a tendency to
flip-flop on policies when this is politically expedient, or to make grand
policy statements with little follow-through.
Equally vital to the strategic approach is the idea that populist leaders rely
on unmediated, quasi-direct appeals to ‘the people’, in which they attempt
to bypass ‘regular’ intermediaries such as parties and clientelist networks.
Scholars using this approach have noted that the media have been key in
allowing ‘unmediated’ communication – particularly television and the
social media (Weyland 2017). Using such media, populist leaders are able
to appear to be ‘directly’ in touch with their followers and thus to
communicate with them with immediacy and in a multidirectional manner,
although empirical work has shown that, in reality, much of the
communication remains top-down (Waisbord and Amado 2017).
As with the ideational approach, one can identify the antecedents of the
strategic approach in the earlier literature on populism. In the volume edited
by Ionescu and Gellner (1969), Wiles argues that populism ‘is loosely
organized and ill-disciplined: a movement rather than a party’ and makes
note of the ‘great leaders in mystical contact with the masses’ (Wiles 1969:
169) – the two core features of this approach. Wiles draws up a long list of
alleged populists who used this definition, including the Levellers, the
Chartists, the Narodniks and Gandhi (1969: 178). From the same period, di
Tella’s (1965) and Smith’s (1969) work on Latin American populism
similarly stressed the role of strong leaders in forging multiclass alliances in
the name of ‘the people’.
Scholars working with this approach take their theoretical cues from several
sources. Jansen (2011, 2017) draws on the political sociology literature
around social movements and contentious politics (Tilly 2008) to develop
his notion of populism as a form of mobilisation. Earlier studies varied
between taking a Sartorian ‘classical’ angle on populism (Weyland 1996)
and seeing it as a radial, ‘family resemblances’-style concept (Roberts
1995), but more recently these authors have tended to move towards a
degreeist perspective. Weyland (2017: 65), for example, has argued that ‘a
cat is a cat and a dog a dog – but in politics, contextual complexity and
human ingenuity soften or even erase boundaries; there can be partial and
mixed types that fixed conceptual categories do not fully capture’. In view
of this, he advocates a turn to fuzzy-set approaches, which were put forward
by Ragin (2000), in order to take into account gradations of populism. Here
a fuzzy-set score of 1.0 would indicate a ‘full’ populist (who exclusively
uses the populist strategy), a score of 0 would indicate a complete non-
populist (who does not use the strategy), while scores in between would
indicate a partial populist (who uses populism alongside other political
strategies). Using this approach, Weyland (2017: 66) argues that ‘full’
populists include the likes of Alberto Fujimori, Hugo Chávez, Fernando
Collor de Mello, Rafael Correa, Silvio Berlusconi and Pim Fortuyn. These
figures, who all ‘enjoyed tremendous personal autonomy, founded their
own flimsy electoral vehicles, and were never constrained by them’, score
1.0 on populism in Weyland’s system – as opposed to leaders with well-
organised parties, for example Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva or Michelle
Bachelet, or leaders who put ‘ideological purity’ above popular support, as
did Jean-Marie Le Pen, whom Weyland scores at 0 (curiously, given Le
Pen’s centrality to the literature on Western European populism). In
between there are figures like Carlos Menem, Pablo Iglesias, Jörg Haider
and George Papandreou, who score 0.66 owing to their closer ties to parties,
and Evo Morales, who scores 0.33 owing to his links with autonomous
social movements.
This approach is criticised both for being too loose and for being too
restrictive. With regard to its being too loose, Hawkins has noted that these
definitions could equally be applied to ‘other organizations, such as
religious or labor-based parties and millenarian movements, [which] also
have charismatic leaders and/or low levels of institutionalization early in
their organizational life cycle and may seek to change the political system,
yet we do not necessarily consider them populist’ (Hawkins 2010a: 168).
As for the charge of overrestrictiveness, there are problems with translating
this approach into other regional contexts. This is something that Weyland
himself has acknowledged, noting that ‘the longstanding prevalence of
fairly well-organized, programme-oriented parties in much of Europe leaves
limited room for populist movements’ (Weyland 2017: 62). This is not,
however, a problem restricted to European parties but one shared by
advanced democracies across the world more generally; and it reveals the
undertones of modernisation theory that are present in this approach. If
populism can thrive only in a fairly un- or underinstitutionalised
environment, where its followers are not organised or socialised into
parties, then, by default, it will emerge only in fledgling democracies. But
this simply does not account for how much of the world experiences and
understands populism. Moreover, in many underinstitutionalised
environments populist forces are able to create informal institutions that
endure over time.

The Discursive–Performative Approach

The last approach to populism that remains to be discussed here is the
discursive–performative one. It is by far the most common approach among
political theorists, as opposed to empirical scholars; and this preference is
perhaps a reflection of its roots in the work of Ernesto Laclau, one of the
most influential political theorists of the late twentieth century.
A relatively wide swathe of populism theorists fall under this broad label.
Many see populism as a discourse that pits ‘the people’ against ‘the elite’.
How they understand what a discourse is differs somewhat. Some (e.g.
Panizza 2005; Stavrakakis and Katsambekis 2014) follow the Essex School
of discourse analysis, which is influenced by Laclau and Mouffe (1985),
combines poststructuralism and Gramscian theories of hegemony, and sees
discourses as attempts to fix meanings and identities in the struggle for
power. Others follow the critical discourse analysis approach inspired by
Wodak (Wodak and Meyer 2001; Wodak 2015) and Fairclough (2003),
which focuses on the linguistic dimensions and ideological effects of
discourse. 4 Others follow a more general definition of discourse (Hawkins
2010a). 5 Still others offer variations on the discursive approach, seeing
populism as a kind of discursive frame (Aslanidis 2016a) or as a form of
claim-making (Bonikowski and Gidron 2016b). What unites all these
approaches is a primary focus on populism as a particular type of language
that has significant effects on how politics (and political identity) is
structured and operates.
Other authors have gone further than the strictly linguistic–verbal discursive
level and have extended their definition so as to take in non-verbal or
performative aspects. Ostiguy’s (2017: 77) definition of populism as the
‘flaunting of the low’ in politics addresses these elements, noting:
high and low have to do with ways of relating to people; as such, they go
beyond ‘discourses’ as words. They certainly include issues of accent,
levels of language, body language, gestures, and ways of dressing. And
as a way of relating to people, they also encompass the way of making
decisions, in politics.
Similarly, I have argued that populism should be understood as a political
style – ‘the repertoires of embodied, symbolically mediated performance
made to audiences that are used to create and navigate the fields of power
that comprise the political’ (Moffitt 2016: 38) – comprised of an appeal to
‘the people’ versus ‘the elite’; ‘bad manners’; and the performance of crisis,
breakdown and threat.
While the ideational approach has been used mostly in examining populism
in Europe and the Americas and the strategic approach in the global South,
the discursive–performative approach arguably has the widest comparative
reach in terms of where it has been applied: it has no ‘natural’ regional
home and, as a result, has been put to use to contexts as distinct as Greece
(Stavrakakis and Katsambekis 2014), South Africa (Mbete 2015), the
United States (Bonikowski and Gidron 2016b), Argentina (Ostiguy 2009),
the Philippines (Curato 2017), and Australia (Moffitt 2017a). This speaks to
the ‘travelability’ of the definitions used by these analysts: unlike ideational
and strategic approaches, which have the tendency to universalise regional
subtypes of populism as representative of the phenomenon in toto , the
discursive–performative approach is able to take a truly global set of cases
into account. This has also meant that it has been less likely than other
approaches to make normative claims about populism being a ‘danger’ to
democracy: indeed, some of its adherents have even gone the opposite
direction and proposed populism as a cure for democracy’s current ills
(Mouffe 2018).
As noted, for many authors in this group, the guiding theoretical light is
Ernesto Laclau (1977, 2005a), who both in his own work and together with
his partner and co-author, Chantal Mouffe (Laclau and Mouffe 1985),
developed a theory of populism that sought to move beyond ‘mainly
sociologistic categories, which address the group, its constitutive roles and
its functional determinations, to the underlying logics that make these
categories possible’ (Laclau 2000: xi). What does this mean in less dense
language? In short, unlike commonplace notions of group identity used in
the populism literature that would tend, perhaps unwittingly, to presume
that groups like ‘the people’ and ‘the elite’ somehow preexist, or at least
have some clear sociological base, Laclau is explicitly interested in how
those groups are formed in the first place: for him, the very construction of
‘the people’ against ‘the elite’ is precisely what populism is all about.
Hence, while the alternative approaches might ask the question ‘who are the
people?’, perhaps focusing on the demographic characteristics of voters for
populist parties or of people who hold populist attitudes, the discursive–
performative approach would ask: ‘how are the people constructed?’. This
reflects the clearly social–constructivist ontology underlying this approach
– the idea being that political identities are not pre-given but must be
painstakingly constructed by political actors. The ‘performative’ dimension
of this approach is thus not only about performance in the theatrical sense,
which of course is important when it comes to populism, but also about the
power of performativity , as outlined by the likes of Austin (1975) and
Butler (1990): the idea that words and discourse do not just describe the
world but actually do things to it. In our case, for example, they constitute
political subjects such as ‘the people’ ad ‘the elite’.
The theoretical tools offered by Laclau and Mouffe include a vocabulary
developed from linguistics, psychoanalysis and poststructuralism around
empty and floating signifiers, antagonism, constitutive outsides, nodal
points, frontiers, chains of equivalence and hegemony among others – a
highly formal and at times difficult set of conceptual tools for outsiders to
grasp, which may explain why their work has remained most influential in
the world of theory rather than in comparative politics. Indeed, Mudde and
Rovira Kaltwasser (2012a: 7) have criticised Laclau’s work on populism for
being ‘extremely abstract’ and claimed that ‘it has serious problems when it
comes to analysing populism in more concrete terms’ (2012a: 6). Work
from the field of critical discourse analysis has also been influential here
(Fairclough 2003; Wodak 2015; Wodak and Meyer 2001) and is arguably
more ‘grounded’, offering a clearer methodological toolkit for examining
populism than Laclau and Mouffe’s approach. On the performative side of
things, authors have drawn on the work of Canovan (1981, 1984, 2005),
Knight (1998) and Bourdieu (1977) in developing an understanding of the
stylistic and sociocultural elements of populism, focusing on the scripts,
stages and habitus of various populists.
Given that, in the discursive–performative approach, populism is something
that is done rather than a property of political actors – ‘an attribute of the
message and not the speaker’ (Bonikowski and Gidron 2016a: 9) – authors
who operate within this framework also tend to view populism as a
gradational concept rather than as a binary one. This means that populism is
something that political actors can use more or less in terms of frequency
and intensity, rather than a category that is simply black or white. Relatedly,
it is probably fair to say that, while ideational scholars are most interested
in studying populists – that is, identifying, comparing and making sense of
actors whom they see as falling within the category – scholars in the
discursive–performative tradition tend to be more broadly interested in
populism as a general phenomenon, and thus they consider it as a more
widespread phenomenon than the other approaches might claim it to be.
It is worth noting that, while discursive–performative theorists of populism
tend to share a social–constructivist and practice-focused orientation, there
are also some significant differences between them. Essex School-aligned
scholars tend to share a commitment to Laclau and Mouffe’s overall
theoretical schema, according to which all politics is a struggle for
hegemony and ‘all objects are objects of discourse’ (Howarth and
Stavrakakis 2000: 3). But this schema has been criticised for its problematic
universal claims about the nature of politics, for its self-validating
theoretical structure (Arditi 2007; Beasley-Murray 2010; Robinson 2005),
and for the difficulties of using it in the empirical study of populism without
buying into this theoretical schema wholesale (Moffitt 2016). Critical
discourse analysis scholars, as well as those who use more performative
approaches to populism, tend to have a less strict and set ontology of how
politics in general ‘works’. Even more, Laclau’s position, and particularly
Mouffe’s, portray populism as a positive force for left-wing politics; but
theirs is not a normative vision shared by all those who work under this
definition.

Comparing the Three Approaches to

Populism
Drawing the three approaches together, how do they compare with one
another? Table 2.1 summarises the important differences between the three
central approaches to populism in the contemporary academic literature.
Table 2.1 Comparing Conceptual Approaches to Populism
Ideational Strategic Discursive–
Performativ
e
Is populism seen as a
Gradational
binary or gradational Binary Gradational
(fuzzy set)
concept?
Is populism seen as
an attribute or a Attribute Practice Practice
practice?
 Ideational Strategic Discursive–
Performativ
e
Laclau,
Mudde, Rovira Weyland,
Mouffe,
Key authors Kaltwasser, Hawkins, Roberts,
Wodak,
Canovan, Müller Jansen
Ostiguy
Latin
America;
Key regions studied Europe; Latin America Global
Africa and
Asia
As can be seen, there are significant and important differences between the
approaches, particularly (1) in terms of whether populism is conceived of
(a) as a binary or as a gradational concept and (b) as an attribute or as a
practice of political actors and (2) according to the regions on which
authors using such approaches tend to focus their analyses. Such differences
inform how these authors go about identifying populist actors and setting
out to measure and analyse populism in the best possible way; and they also
tend to lead us to how authors argue about the normative dimensions of
populism.
When it comes to individual cases of populism, there is a set of familiar
names that tend to be acknowledged in all approaches; for example, the
categorisation of Perón, Chávez, Berlusconi and Trump as populists is
unlikely to raise any protest from populism scholars. Dissension begins to
emerge on the binary–gradational hinge: as noted, for ideational scholars,
the question is whether a case is populist or is not, whereas strategic and
discursive–performative scholars regard any such case as a matter of
degree, some cases being more populist than others. Hence the latter tend to
have a wider view of what constitutes a populist case.
Yet there is disagreement even within the ideational approach, which tends
to envisage populism as a binary category. While, for example, Mudde’s
and Müller’s definitions are almost synonymous or equivalent, Müller is far
more stringent and consistent in policing the borders of his definition than
Mudde and his followers are. Thus Müller argues that one should not
categorise Bernie Sanders as a populist, as his position is one that does not
posit an anti-pluralist, monist and unified characterisation of ‘the people’
(Müller 2016: 93; 2019); Mudde’s co-authors, on the other hand – Hawkins
and Rovira Kaltwasser – claim that Sanders was the most populist figure in
the US 2016 presidential election and associated primaries (Hawkins and
Rovira Kaltwasser 2018), seemingly ignoring their own work with Mudde
(Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser 2017), which asserts that pluralism is the
opposite of populism. Müller (2016: 20) notes that, ‘[i]n addition to being
anti-elitist, populists are always antipluralist: populists claim that they, and
only they , represent the people’, whereas this anti-pluralist dimension
seems to be less stringently pursued in much of the work – either Mudde’s
own or Mudde-inspired – carried out under the ideational approach: Mudde
and Rovira Kaltwasser label ‘populist’ entities such as the Occupy Wall
Street movement or the Podemos and Syriza parties, none of which can
seriously be called anti-pluralist (see Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser 2017:
37). This tension around the relationship between populism and pluralism
when it comes to categorising individual cases will be revisited in chapter 5
.
Neither the strategic nor the discursive–performative approaches regard the
anti-pluralism or monism of ‘the people’ as a necessary condition of
populism; and this feature, together with their gradational approach, means
that they probably consider populist a wider array of cases than does the
ideational approach. The strategic approach, however, is limited by its
necessary focus on the leader: while ideational and discursive–performative
approaches would probably agree that the Tea Party was a populist
movement, the strategic approach would not be able to categorise it the
same way, owing to its disparate and somewhat ‘leaderless’ nature (or, more
accurately, owing to its having multiple expressive leaders).
In order to acknowledge the richness and variety of the cases that have been
seen or interpreted as populist across the globe, the present book sides with
the discursive–performative approach in this specific regard. This means
that populism is understood here (a) not as a strictly anti-pluralist
phenomenon and (b) as a phenomenon that can be expressed by, or take the
form of, leaders, movements and parties. While some readers may disagree
with the categorisation of some of the cases that will be discussed, this
approach allows me to test a wider assortment of cases against the
theoretical arguments made in this book instead of unduly limiting me to
one particular region or subtype of populism.
These differences between approaches also play out at the level of
normative and theoretical debates about the phenomenon under
investigation here. As noted, while there is undoubtedly a wide variety of
views from the authors who work under each approach, it is fair to say that
many of the most prominent anti-populist voices (such as Müller’s) adopt
an ideational approach to populism, whereas the most prominent pro-
populist voices (such as Mouffe’s) find a discursive–performative approach
more congenial. As we saw earlier, the strategic approach has certainly had
a great impact on the comparative literature on populism; yet it is not taken
up in the theoretical literature to a great extent. Hence you will find that the
bulk of the discussion in the following chapters revolves around the central
tensions between the ideational and the discursive–performative
approaches. This is particularly evident in chapter 6 , which deals with the
relationship between populism and democracy.
Outlining all these differences does not mean, however, that the approaches
have nothing in common. Significant overlaps between them exist: all, for
example, stress the divide between ‘the people’ and ‘the elite’; also, to
different degrees, all acknowledge the role of the populist leader (without
necessarily seeing them as essential). The strategic and discursive–
performative approaches both treat populism as a practice – something that
is done – and as a gradational phenomenon. These kinds of overlaps
indicate that the approaches presented here are not operating in different
universes: indeed, as noted earlier, there is a fair consensus among them
over central cases of populism, in other words they can speak to one
another successfully. And indeed they do: the authors associated with them
constantly build on and engage one another’s work, and some even combine
different approaches in their analyses (see e.g. Engesser, Fawzi and Larsson
2017; Resnick 2017; Urbinati 2014; van Kessel 2014).
What conclusions can we draw from a situation in which there is both
significant discord and significant agreement in the academic literature on
the question of what populism is? First, we can see that hackneyed
arguments about scholars of populism not agreeing on anything need to be
thrown out the door: they simply are not true. Second, the fact that there are
three distinct approaches to populism in the academic literature shows that
popular claims about there being no definition of populism are false. These
three approaches have clear intellectual lineages, different ontological
commitments, and a variety of methodologies associated with them, all
demonstrating a clear maturation of the field of populism scholarship by
comparison to what it was two decades ago. In such circumstances, those
who claim that populism is ‘meaningless’ or has no clear definition have
not done their homework: there is a rich conceptual literature on the topic.
Third, the fact that authors engage in debate about populism should be seen
as a sign, not of the concept’s lack of utility, but, arguably, of its importance
and vitality. If debate were a sign of uselessness, then other concepts that
are key to our understanding of politics – power, freedom, justice,
democracy – would be equally suspect, because there is long-standing
disagreement and debate about their meaning. No one would seriously
make the claim that we should erase these concepts from our vocabulary.
Why should populism be any different?
3
Populism, Nationalism and Nativism
Populism is not the same thing as nationalism.
This is not a statement that should really need to be made: one ism is
obviously not the same as another ism. If they were the same, we would not
need two separate words to describe the exact same phenomenon. But a
cursory glance at how the term ‘populism’ is used today tells us that this is
may not be so obvious after all: headlines have constantly confused
populism and nationalism in interpreting the success of figures like Donald
Trump, Rodrigo Duterte, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan or Narendra Modi. The
same goes for the academic literature, where both conceptual and empirical
work has often shown signs of having a difficult time working out where
populism ends and where nationalism begins, or has simply conflated the
two by making grand statements about the march of ‘national populism’
(Eatwell and Goodwin 2018) or of ‘populist nationalism’ (Snyder 2017).
While it is certainly true that nationalism and populism often make good
bedfellows – almost all prominent cases of populism in the contemporary
political landscape mix some form of nationalism into their appeals – there
are important reasons for keeping the two analytically separate. For one,
populism does not need nationalism in order to function; and nationalism
can certainly operate effectively without the help of populism. What is
more, the link between populism and nationalism ‘is an unstable construct,
a contingent, historically determined articulation’ (Stavrakakis 2005: 246)
rather than some kind of automatic association. Given the situation, this
chapter explores both the differences and the linkages between populism
and nationalism. Drawing on the discourse-theoretical work of De Cleen
and Stavrakakis (De Cleen 2017; De Cleen and Stavrakakis 2017) as well
as on the ideational approach of Mudde (2007), it shows that, while
populism and nationalism both use the core signifier of ‘the people’, they
actually adopt different logics, put forward distinct characterisations of ‘the
people’, and ultimately target different enemies. From there it also
examines how populists on different sides of the ideological spectrum
engage with nationalism; and it argues that left-wing populists tend to
operate with a civic form of nationalism, whereas right-wing populists tend
to adopt an ethnic form of nationalism – or what might better be understood
as nativism. Lastly, to illustrate the distinctions between populism and
nationalism, the chapter looks at the oft-ignored cases of populism that fall
firmly outside the national (and sometimes, nationalist ) box, examining
how populism can operate at a substate (municipal, provincial or regional)
level, or how it can transcend the national level altogether (in international
or transnational populism).

The Similarities and Differences between

Populism and Nationalism
Let us begin with a basic question: why are populism and nationalism so
often conflated? There are at least four good reasons why both pundits and
academics tend to confuse them. The first reason is simple: many of the
best-known cases of populism have also been cases of nationalism. Donald
Trump’s nationalist slogan ‘Make America great again’, for example, went
hand in hand with his populist calls to ‘drain the swamp’ in Washington,
and Juan Perón combined Argentine nationalism with populism to great
effect. While we know, of course, that political actors are rarely just one
thing – political leaders, movements and parties can be populist and
nationalist and left- or right-wing and so on, all at the same time – part of
the problem is that, when it comes to everyday talk about such entities, it is
not uncommon for one of these descriptors to gain primacy, subsuming the
specific nature of the others in the process. This way ‘populism’ often ends
up doing the heavy lifting, and nationalism ends up being rolled into it.
The second reason for the conflation between the two is that populism and
nationalism both draw on a similar vocabulary. They both tend to speak
about the same subject: ‘the people’ – or, in other languages, das Volk or
folket , for example. The meaning they assign to ‘the people’ might be quite
different – as we shall see, at a formal level populist conceptions often have
to do with the lack of power of ‘the people’, or the sense of its being an
‘underdog’, whereas nationalist conceptions tie it to membership of an
ethnic or cultural group. Nevertheless, the linguistic overlap between the
expressions used on the two sides can blur the boundaries between these
two meanings.
The third reason for confusing populism and nationalism is that we tend to
pay most attention to populists who operate at the national level . That is,
the populists who garner most media and academic attention tend to be not
those who work at a local or regional level, but rather those who have
achieved national representation. This makes sense, and not just in relation
to populism: national politicians are often the most visible political
representatives on the world stage, and their actions are often more
consequential than those of a town mayor or of a state or provincial
governor. This means that, even if populist figures on the national stage are
not explicitly or deliberately nationalist , they still tend to be using the
language of a nationally defined ‘people’; and this, again, makes room for
blurring the categories involved.
The fourth reason for the confusion comes from the academic literature on
populism itself: whether overtly or not, features of nationalism have been
assimilated into many scholarly definitions of populism. This is particularly
true of academic literature on European populism, where ‘populism is
habitually associated with xenophobic politics and parties of the extreme or
radical right (and therefore considered to be dangerous)’ (van Kessel 2015:
2). In this literature the ‘populist radical right’ has become something of an
ideal type in terms of theorising populism and, as a result, a lot of academic
work takes the exclusionary nativist or nationalist tendencies of the extreme
or radical right to be part and parcel of populism in toto (e.g. Boomgaarden
and Vliegenthart 2007; Jagers and Walgrave 2007; Taguieff 1995),
conveniently ignoring that left-wing populism, even within Europe, does
not have the tendency to exploit xenophobia to the degree that right-wing
populism does.
As one of the most influential texts in the field, Mudde’s (2007) seminal
work on the populist radical right casts a long shadow: many authors are
now using ‘populism’ as shorthand for this specific type or ‘family’ of
parties. However, such extensions rely on a fundamental misinterpretation
of Mudde’s ideational argument. Mudde goes to great lengths to note that
the populist radical right party family combines three core ideological
ingredients: nativism, authoritarianism and populism. But he makes clear
that populism is not the key feature to focus on here. As he notes, ‘given
that nativism, not populism, is the ultimate core feature of the ideology of
this party, radical right should be the primary term in the concept ’ (Mudde
2007: 26, emphasis mine). Regrettably, however, this has not stopped many
authors from using the terms ‘populism’, ‘radical right-wing populism’ and
‘populist radical right’ interchangeably, despite the fact that it matters
greatly which is the adjective and which is the noun in these phrases. As
Stavrakakis and colleagues note, this lack of care in the choice of
terminology (and, hence, of the concept used) means that
we often see ‘populism’ being used as synonymous to right-wing
populism or to the populist extreme right, or even to the extremist neo-
Nazi right, a reified association that ignores both the global diversity of
populist phenomena (which, in [contemporary] Latin America are
mostly located on the left) as well as the increasingly diversified picture
within Europe itself. (Stavrakakis et al. 2017: 421)
Given that, among regional literatures on populism, the European literature
is, arguably, both the largest and the most hegemonic, the situation
described by Stavrakakis and colleagues has knock-on effects on how
theorists and scholars across the globe tend to approach the topic of
populism.
So how can we avoid this situation? How can we theoretically distinguish
between nationalism and populism, given the understandable similarities,
overlaps and conflations between them? Perhaps the most promising
method for making sense of the difference between the two has been put
forward by De Cleen and Stavrakakis (De Cleen 2017; De Cleen and
Stavrakakis 2017), who use an Essex School-inspired approach to define
populism and nationalism as distinct discourses. The strength of this
approach, according to the authors themselves, is that, ‘instead of seeing
nationalism and populism as political projects that represent preexisting
socio-political categories, a discourse-theoretical framework understands
them as closely involved in the discursive construction of the categories
they claim to represent’ (De Cleen and Stavrakakis 2017: 305). In other
words, De Cleen and Stavrakakis are not interested in nationalism and
populism as ideologies or belief systems that hinge on already established
attitudes about ‘the people’ or ‘the nation’; rather they are interested in how
‘the people’ and ‘the nation’ are produced and constructed by populist and
nationalist discourses. In this context, they define nationalism as ‘a
discourse structured around the nodal point “nation”, envisaged as a limited
and sovereign community that exists through time and is tied to a certain
space, and that is constructed through an in/out opposition between the
nation and its out-groups’ (2017: 308). This definition can be compared to
that of populism, which the two scholars see as ‘a dichotomic discourse in
which “the people” are juxtaposed to “the elite” along the lines of a
down/up antagonism in which “the people” is discursively constructed as a
large powerless group through opposition to “the elite” conceived as a small
and illegitimately powerful group’ (2017: 310).
Using this approach, we can find at least four important differences between
populism and nationalism, according to how they answer the following
questions:
Who is represented? Nationalism seeks to represent ‘the nation’ (or ‘the
people’ as nation), while populism seeks to represent ‘the people’ (as a
disempowered ‘underdog’).
What subject position is offered to constituencies that might identify with
the discourse? Nationalism offers the position of citizen of ‘the nation’
to identify with, while populism offers the position of member of ‘the
people’ to identify with.
Who is the ‘other’ of this subject position? Nationalism’s others are
those who are not citizens, residents or ‘rightful’ members of ‘the
nation’, along with other nation-states; populism’s others are members of
‘the elite’.
How is the power relation structured between the subject position and its
other? Nationalism operates with a horizontal, in–out directionality
whereby the distinction between those who belong to ‘the nation’ and
those who do not is based on membership or identity constructed around
a shared sense of territory, time and space (e.g. the distinction between
Americans and non-Americans); populism operates with a vertical,
down–up directionality whereby the distinction between ‘the people’ and
‘the elite’ is about power, hierarchy, recognition and socioeconomic or
sociocultural position. (Adapted from De Cleen 2017: 343–7; De Cleen
and Stavrakakis 2017: 312; De Cleen et al. 2019: 4–7)

The usefulness of this approach is that it allows us to move beyond the

binary question whether a political actor is a populist or a nationalist and to
explore instead how populism and nationalism can be articulated together
in certain political projects. This kind of response is better adapted to the
empirical reality, since populists often use nationalism and vice versa (as
we have seen). But what is most useful about this approach is that, even
when we acknowledge that both discourses can be present simultaneously,
it gives us the conceptual tools that enable us to identify which one comes
first; in other words, we can determine whether nationalism or populism is
the central or primary discourse at play in specific situations.
This approach also coheres in several ways with how ideational scholars
view the relationship between populism and nationalism (see, for example,
Bonikowski et al. 2019). As discussed in the previous chapter, the
ideational approach argues that populism is a thin or thin-centred ideology
that revolves around the conception of the homogenous will of ‘the people’
and around anti-elitism. Given this thinness, populism requires additional
ideologies to provide content and ‘thicken’ it so as to give it meaning.
Nationalism is one of the ideologies that can provide this kind of content to
populism, thus enriching its conception of ‘the people’, its perception of
‘the elite’ and its characterisation of others with a more substantive
meaning. As Müller puts it,
Populism is not a doctrine; it is more like a frame. And all populists have
to fill the frame with content that will explain who ‘the real people’ are
and what they want. That content can take many different forms and can
draw on ideas from the left or the right […] Today’s right-wing populists
mostly draw on nationalist ideas. (Müller 2019: 36)
On an ideational reading, however, it would not make sense to try to discern
whether a political actor is ‘more’ nationalist or ‘more’ populist, as
populism is not believed to be able to operate without another ideology that
gives it content: populism on its own does not really exist for such scholars.

How Do the Populist Right and Left Use

Nationalism Differently?
Given that populism and nationalism can be and clearly are articulated
together in the same political project, the question we should then turn to is
what these articulations look like in practice. This can be usefully
approached by distinguishing how left- and right-wing populists use
nationalism differently. Mudde, Rovira Kaltwasser (Mudde and Rovira
Kaltwasser 2012b, 2013) and Filc (2015) hint at an answer to this question
in terms of their labelling the (primarily) right-wing populism of Europe as
‘exclusive’ and the (primarily) left-wing populism of Latin America as
‘inclusive’.

The Populist Right and Nationalism

Right-wing populists tend to define ‘the people’ as a national group: as De
Cleen notes, when they ‘claim to speak for the people-as-underdog, they
only refer to (what they consider to be) members of the nation and exclude
all others’ (De Cleen 2017: 349). Indeed, Müller goes so far as to argue
that, ‘today, all right-wing populists are nationalists’ (Müller 2019: 36). The
giveaway here with regard to right-wing populists’ conflation of the
nationalist and the populist construals of ‘the people’ is that ethnic or
cultural minority groups who presumably share with ‘the people’ the same
socioeconomic and sociocultural alienation – that is, have the same class
profile, are similarly removed from the halls of power and influence, and
are equally frustrated by the whims of ‘the elite’ (if not more) – are
distinctly not included among ‘the people’ and do not share this
characterisation. The sociocultural dimension of identity, with the questions
of membership it raises – here in the form of nationalism – overrides
broader socioeconomic concerns or explicit questions about power
imbalance when it comes to establishing who belongs to ‘the people’.
In consequence, Mudde (2007) notes that we need be clear that the populist
radical right is not just nationalist but, more specifically, it is nativist.
Although nationalism can have both ethnic and civic variants, the former
being about racial or cultural homogeneity, the latter revolving around
political involvement and shared citizenship, Mudde argues that including
both of these variants under the heading of nationalism does not allow us
‘to make a distinction between “moderate” nationalists, notably so-called
liberal nationalists, and the “radical” nationalists with whom we are
concerned’ (Mudde 2007: 17). The term ‘nativism’ makes clear the specific
nature of the latter; Mudde defines it as ‘an ideology, which holds that
states should be inhabited exclusively by members of the native group (“the
nation”) and that nonnative elements (persons and ideas) are fundamentally
threatening to the homogenous nation-state’ (2007: 19). The utility of the
term ‘nativism’ is that it is more specific than nationalism, yet broader than
other characterisations used for parties, for example racist (for nativism can
also be cultural or religious, as in the case of Modi’s Hindu-nationalist
Bharatiya Janata (Indian People’s) Party in India) or anti-immigrant (for,
more often than not, these are not just ‘single-issue’ parties but combine
several salient issues in their platforms). Overall, nativism should be seen,
according to Mudde, as ‘a combination of nationalism and xenophobia’
(2007: 22).
While the populist right’s conception of ‘the people’ is indeed nativist, it is
worth acknowledging that, when it comes to the level of nativism on display
in this category, one will find something of a spectrum. On one hand, there
are populists whose nativism is utterly explicit. A good example is Geert
Wilders, leader of the Partij voor de Vrijheid (Party for Freedom) in the
Netherlands, whose clear enemy is migrants, particularly those who follow
Islam. He specifically targets Moroccans as enemies of the Dutch people
and has been found guilty of hate speech against them. Or we can look at
the example of Pauline Hanson, leader of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation in
Australia, who in 1996 warned that Australia was ‘in danger of being
swamped by Asians’ (Hanson 1996: 3681) and, twenty years later, that
Australia was ‘in danger of being swamped by Muslims, who bear a culture
and ideology that is incompatible with our own’ (Hanson 2016: 937). Here
the primary enemy of ‘the people’ is an ethnic or cultural other, and the
nativism (with the xenophobia it carries) is clear: the existence of ethnic
others within the Dutch or the Australian polity is perceived as a distinct
threat to the identity or security of ‘the Dutch people’ or ‘the Australian
people’ (and, to add the populist twist, ‘the elite’ is responsible for allowing
these migrants into the country and advocating for multiculturalism). On the
other hand, there are the likes of Nigel Farage, former leader of the UK
Independence Party (UKIP) and the current leader of the Brexit Party, who,
although certainly no friend of ethnic minorities, tends to direct his nativism
primarily at Brussels and the European Union. A nativist perception of ‘the
people’ is undoubtedly a key element in his discourse, but his primary
discursive strategy is to stress sovereignty and control against a
transnational elite. Indeed, Farage’s discomfort with explicit ethnic
exclusivism – or at least his understanding of its limited electoral appeal in
a first-past-the-post system and in a distinctly multicultural country – was
clear when he argued, in 2018, that Tommy Robinson, a former English
Defence League leader, should not be allowed to join UKIP unless the party
wanted to face ‘total and utter marginalisation’, and then noted: ‘we did not
want anybody in the party that had taints with organisations we deemed to
be on the far right of British politics’ (as quoted in Hornall 2018). So, while
the populist right may be almost uniformly nativist, the discursive content
and centrality of that nativism differs across cases. Some right-wing
populists are more outwardly nativist than others.
If nativism is essential to the populist right, then what makes these nativists
any different from out-and-out racists or fascists, who also promote ethnic
nationalism, and in more virulent forms? There are at least two differences
that are important to note. One is that the populist radical right (obviously)
combines its brand of nativism with populism, playing on the ambiguity of
the signifier ‘the people’ to great effect: it sets ‘the people’ not only against
‘the elite’, but also against non-national ‘others’. As Judis (2016a) has
noted, the populist right punches both up and down, respectively at ‘the
elite’ and at minorities. But nationalists, racists and fascists do not
necessarily direct their attacks at ‘the elite’; sometimes they just target
minorities. Moreover, these groups do not, as a rule, claim to speak for ‘the
people’ or use this signifier in their discourse, and sometimes they talk
openly about race or ethnic groups; we have witnessed this in recent years
with the rise of the alt-right (Hawley 2017), which advocates white
nationalism or fascism in no uncertain terms. Relatedly, on a procedural
level, while those on the populist right tend not to be fans of liberal
democracy, they often are advocates of democracy in a majoritarian sense.
This is more than what can be said about fascists or about many ethnic
nationalists, who generally consider democracy to be a futile and weak
political regime and openly express derision at the populace (‘the people’),
describing it as stupid, crude and ill-informed.
The centrality of nativism to the populist right has led to some debate as to
whether the categorisation of these parties is actually correct: some claim
that so-called populist right-wing parties are nationalist more than populist
and that we should thus label them accordingly. Thus Rydgren, for example:
‘these parties are mainly defined by ethnic nationalism, and not a populist
ideology … it is misleading to label these parties “populist parties” – since
populism is not the most pertinent feature of this party family’ (Rydgren
2017: 486). Pappas (2016a) similarly argues that many of the usual suspects
of the populist right have been misclassified: in his view, parties such as the
Dutch Partij voor de Vrijheid (Party for Freedom), the French Front
National (National Front), now Rassemblement National (National Rally),
the Austrian Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs (Freedom Party of Austria), the
Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany), UKIP and all the
Scandinavian ‘populist’ right-wing parties are primarily nativist, not
populist. Such arguments line up in many ways with the ideational
argument made by Mudde about the importance of categorising these
groups as members of the populist radical right party family, rather than of
a broadly delineated radical right populism. They also fit in with the
discursive perspective offered by De Cleen and Stavrakakis, since the
formal criteria outlined by these two scholars align all these parties quite
clearly with nativism. This is not to say that such political actors cannot be
both nativist and populist – they clearly are; but it makes us realise the
importance of deciding which ideology or discourse is primary . For some
other ideational scholars, however, the question is moot: populism always
combines with other ideological content, so it does not matter which
element is primary. Even more, on an ideational reading the homogeneity of
‘the people’ fits naturally with nationalism, and this would make any kind
of separation between them difficult to grasp – something Mudde does not
really explain in his discussion of nativism and populism. Discursive–
performative scholars, on the other hand, would argue that one can and
should distinguish between the two at a formal level – the difference being
that discursive scholars do not insist on the homogeneity of ‘the people’ as
a characteristic of populism.

The Populist Left and Nationalism

What about the populist left? It is undeniable that nationalism has also been
used by many parties, figures and movements identified on the left as
populist: this has been the case both in Latin America, where Hugo Chávez,
Juan Perón, Evo Morales and Rafael Correa all drew on nationalism to
construct their populist regimes, and in Europe, where the projects of Syriza
and Podemos have distinctively nationalist overtones. However, it is
important to note about the form of nationalism used by the left that it has
not been an explicitly exclusive nationalism – or, to put it more simply, the
populist left is not made up of nativists. The identity of ‘the people’ that the
populist left claims to represent does not tend have the racial or ethnic 1
undertones that the populist right proffers; instead, the left’s construction of
a national ‘people’ is more likely to be about bringing together a diverse
group of ‘underdogs’ united in the frustrations of being kept out of political
and economic power by national or transnational elites. Indeed, its
nationalism tends to revolve around questions of national sovereignty and,
in many cases, around suspicions directed at transnational powers and at
projects such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade
Organisation or the European Union. Even more, as De Cleen notes, these
calls for sovereignty are often about economic sovereignty – not the
populist right’s usual clarion call about cultural threats or ‘national
security’: ‘on the left, the articulation of popular and national interests has
been most prominent in the resistance against neoliberal policies “imposed”
by supra-national or foreign elites (in collaboration with national elites) and
going against national sovereignty’ (De Cleen 2017: 354).
So the nationalism that the populist left draws upon is often a form of civic
nationalism, as opposed to the ethnic nationalism or nativism that
characterises its right-wing brethren. While national identity may be
important – or even central – to its political projects, this variety of it is not
based on ethnic or cultural homogeneity; rather it is premised on shared
citizenship and on political involvement within the state. This appears
clearly when we compare populisms on the two sides of the ideological
divide in contemporary France. Whereas Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement
National puts forward a version of ethnic nationalism that targets
multiculturalism and Muslims, Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise
(Unbowed France) enacts a form of civic nationalism through rallies full of
waving French flags and choirs that sing La Marseillaise; and he has a far
more pluralist and diverse notion of whom the national people includes.
This pluralist notion is perhaps reflected in the fact that Mélenchon, an
avowed secularist, was the candidate most popular among Muslim voters in
the first round of the 2017 presidential elections (Roy 2017). 2
The lack of exclusionary nationalism or nativism on the populist left – and
rather its embrace of civic nationalism – is also illustrated by some Latin
American populists’ recognition of multiple nations within the state. In
2008, under Rafael Correa, Ecuador voted in a new constitution that
recognised the country’s status as a plurinational state (Becker 2012), and
Bolivia under Evo Morales did the same thing the following year (Postero
2017). In Europe, meanwhile, Podemos has somewhat followed suit,
arguing for the need for a constitutional framework that recognises Spain as
a plurinational state, by way of diffusing the question of Catalonia’s
independence (Iglesias 2017).
This more ‘inclusive’ sense of nationalism practiced by left-wing populists
does not necessarily make it normatively desirable, however. For one, left-
wing populists do not always follow through on their appeals or promises in
this area: Correa’s and Morales’ plurinationalism was more rhetorical than
real, as in practice they ended up limiting indigenous rights and
criminalising protests in the face of promoting natural resource extraction in
their countries. For another, inclusion does not automatically equal
democracy, as de la Torre observes in his study of how the two most
paradigmatic cases of populism in Latin America, Chávez and Perón,
combined populism and nationalism:
even if populism in Latin American was inclusive, it was not democratic.
Despite their inclusionary rhetoric and policies of nation-building and
national popular empowerment, Perón and Chávez built autocratic
governments […] They fulfilled their promises to include the poor
politically, economically and culturally. Yet these processes of inclusion
led to autocratic regimes because the logic of populist confrontation
denied democratic spaces for opponents who were constructed as
enemies of the poor and the nation. (De la Torre 2017b: 386–7)
Here, ideational scholars would argue, one reaches a limit in terms of how
the more inclusive conception of ‘the nation’ offered by civic nationalism
can be accommodated within the anti-pluralist conception of ‘the people’
offered by populism.

What Does a Non-National Populism Look

Like?
We have thus far established that populism and nationalism are not one and
the same thing; nevertheless, we have also seen that populists often (a)
operate at the national level and (b) combine populism with nationalism on
both the left and the right sides of the political spectrum. However, this
does not give us the whole picture: there are also several examples of
populism that are non-national but nonetheless interact with nationalism
and nativism in interesting ways. While such cases may not garner the
popular or academic attention of national(ist) cases, a brief look at them can
give us an insight into how ‘the people’ can be constructed against ‘the
elite’ outside the familiar national context and without necessarily falling
into nationalist tropes. These cases can be found either below the national
level (in the form of municipal, provincial and regional populism) or above
the national level (in the form of international and transnational populism).

Municipal and Provincial Populism

‘Municipal populism’ refers to populism that operates at the metropolitan
level. Perhaps the most (in)famous example of municipal populism is that
of the late Rob Ford, who was the mayor of Toronto in Canada from 2010
to 2014. Ford gained a great deal of notoriety in 2013, when footage of him
smoking crack cocaine attracted international media attention. What was
less known about Ford outside Canada was his profile as a right-wing
populist (Silver, Taylor and Calderón-Figueroa 2019). However, what made
Ford different from right-wing populists who used nationalism as an
exclusionary tool was the fact that his populism did not tend to have explicit
racial or nativist overtones: as mayor of one of North America’s most
diverse cities, Ford had to rely on the votes of ethnic minorities who
identified as part of his ‘people’. Consequently Ford’s construction of ‘the
people’ versus ‘the elite’ translated these categories into equivalents that
suited his municipal context: ‘the people’ consisted of people who lived in
Toronto’s often ethnically diverse suburbs, whereas ‘the elite’ was made up
of urbanites who lived in the downtown core. Ford’s message of ‘ending the
war on the car’ was combined with the call to ‘stop the gravy train’ at City
Hall in order to paint those who lived downtown as out of touch with the
‘real’ lives of residents of the Greater Toronto Area (Filion 2011). Rob’s
older brother Doug was able to expand this populist message to a provincial
level when he was elected premier of Ontario in 2018. Campaigning for the
Progressive Conservative Party of Canada under the slogan For the People,
the elder Ford set the hard-working, tax-paying people of Ontario against
the elites, who he claimed ‘look down on the common folk, drinking
champagne with their pinkies in the air’ (in Kassam 2018). Yet again, this
message was not coded in the language of nationalism, nativism or race; it
was rather framed in the perception of ‘real’ people from outside the
Toronto bubble, people who ‘know better’ – unlike an out of touch Toronto-
based elite, supposedly addicted to public spending. Other examples of
municipal populism include the mayorships of Rodrigo Duterte in Davao
City and Joseph Estrada in Manila, both in the Philippines (see Garrido
2017).

Regionalist Populism
Regionalist populism operates above municipal or provincial populism, yet
below the well-covered level of national populism. The clearest and
possibly most successful example of regionalist populism is that of the
Italian Lega Nord (Northern League; LN). Before dropping ‘Nord’ and
rebranding, simply and successfully, as ‘Lega’, under the leadership of
Matteo Salvini, in the 2018 general election, this party described itself as
representing ‘the people’ of Padania, a region in northern Italy. Initially
formed in 1991 by drawing together a range of autonomist leagues,
organisations and movements in the region, it was able to frame skilfully
‘the problems of the north as a centre-periphery question within a “people”
v. “the elite” populist discourse’ (McDonnell 2006: 126). To the growing
economic disparity between the wealthy north and the poorer and less
developed south, the LN added an attitude of hostility towards elites and
institutions that were blamed for supporting and exacerbating this divide,
which left the deserving north – ‘the people’ – worse off and robbed it of its
sovereignty. In an inversion of the class markers of ‘the people’ and ‘the
elite’ that we’ve encountered in the example of the Ford brothers, where the
‘the people’ was portrayed as the salt of the earth and ‘the elite’ as snooty,
in LN’s discourse ‘the people’ – that is, the population of the north – was
actually seen as refined and industrious, whereas ‘the elite’ – the residents
of the south – appeared as lazy, corrupt, backward and unsophisticated.
While initially the party pushed for the secession of northern Italy, its
shifting electoral fortunes in the late 1990s saw it tone down these demands
and focus instead on federalism and devolution, with the aim that greater
autonomy be granted to the region. In short, while the LN’s regionalist
populism had clear overtones of nativism, as it imagined the native people
of Padania to be more hard-working, more well-mannered and generally of
a better character than those of the south, its attitude developed not in a
framework of nationalism, but rather in one of regionalism. This, however,
has changed. There are other examples of regionalist populism, such as the
Lega dei Ticinesi (Ticino League) in Switzerland (Albertazzi 2007), Plaid
Cymru (the Party of Wales) in Wales (Massetti 2018), and a number of
successionist parties and movements in Catalonia (Barrio, Barberà and
Rodríguez-Teruel 2018), but Albertazzi, Giovannini and Seddone (2018:
646) note that ‘the LN now stands out as the only Western “regionalist”
party to have turned to nationalism’. Under Salvini’s leadership, the Lega
focuses now on the more familiar ethno-nationalist concerns of the
European populist radical right: it has shifted from targeting Rome to
targeting Brussels and the European Union as the enemy of ‘the people’,
and has embraced a broadly nativist and anti-immigrant agenda.

International Populism
Above the national level, we witness phenomena that can be termed
‘international populism’ and ‘transnational populism’. ‘International
populism’ refers to instances where (national) populists cooperate or
coordinate on an international basis (De Cleen 2017; Moffitt 2017c). The
most prominent example in this category is the cooperation between
populist parties in the European Parliament under the Europe of Freedom
and Direct Democracy group and the Europe of Nations and Freedom
group; the former includes the Alternative für Deutschland, the MoVimento
5 Stelle (Five Star Movement), and UKIP, whereas the latter includes
Rassemblement National, Vlaams Belang (Flemish Interest), the
Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs, the Lega, and the Partij voor de Vrijheid.
Another example is the cooperation between leftist populist leaders in Latin
America to form the intergovernmental organisation the Bolivarian Alliance
for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA). What we see in each of these
situations is a (usually temporary) international alliance between populists
who share a common perception of ‘the elite’, but otherwise use a firmly
nation-based conception of ‘the people’. To illustrate: when the right-wing
populists in the European Parliament groups just mentioned join together to
set ‘the people’ against ‘the elite’ of Brussels and express their disgust with
the European Union, they are still individually aiming to represent
nationally bounded ‘peoples’. For example, Nigel Farage is not speaking
for ‘the people’ (or ‘the peoples’) of Europe, but rather seeking to represent
‘the people’ of the United Kingdom. The shared antipathy for Brussels is
thus not the feeling of a Europe-wide ‘people’ , but rather the feeling of
nationally sovereign ‘peoples’ who share a common enemy. Thus the links
between populists in situations of international populism revolve around
strategy and having strength in numbers: this is a marriage of convenience
rather than an attempt to construct a new, transnational ‘people’. In short,
the strategy of internationalism is always secondary to the lingering
nationalism of the individual populist articulations of ‘the people’. As De
Cleen notes, international populism can actually be seen as ‘a sort of meta -
populism’ where ‘a populist chain of equivalence between populisms is
constructed: different populisms with their specificities are brought together
through the opposition to common international, transnational or foreign
elites (and to similar national elites)’ (De Cleen 2017: 356).

Transnational Populism
The last form of populism that seeks to move beyond the nationalism–
populism nexus is what I have elsewhere called ‘transnational populism’
(Moffitt 2017c). Transnational populism exits the ‘marriage of
convenience’ situation typical of international populism by attempting to
transcend the particular and separate characterisations of a nationally
bounded ‘people’ and to construct instead a transnational ‘people’ – a
characterisation of ‘the people’ that goes across national borders or is
spoken of at a level above that of the nation-state. Examples of this form of
populism are rare, but the most fully articulated example is that of DiEM25
– the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025, which was launched in 2016
by Yanis Varoufakis, the former finance minister of Greece (De Cleen et al.
2019). DiEM25 claims to speak for ‘the people’ of Europe and has an
explicit transnational mission. Varoufakis characterises DiEM25 as ‘a cross-
border pan-European movement’ that, rather than building up from the
nation-state level, instead ‘start[s] at the European level to try to find
consensus and then mov[es] downwards’ (Varoufakis 2016: 33). Aiming to
bring about the democratisation of the European political sphere, DiEM25
sets itself against ‘the elite’ of Europe – including among others ‘the
Brussels bureaucracy’, ‘the Troika’, ‘the powerful Eurogroup’, ‘bailed out
bankers’, ‘corporations’, ‘media moguls’ and ‘governments that fuel cruel
inequality’ (DiEM25 2016: 1). On the other side is ‘the people’ that
DiEM25 is seeking to bring together: ‘a transnational identity of our own
making: radical, anti-authoritarian, democratic Europeanism’ (Varoufakis et
al. 2016). There are also elements of this transnational populism in the
characterisation of ‘the people’ offered in the Occupy and Indignados
movements of the early 2010s (Aslanidis 2018). The key point here is that,
while these forms of populism almost always still acknowledge the
sovereignty of locally bounded ‘peoples’, they also make an unequivocal
attempt to go ‘beyond’ the national and to construct and represent ‘the
people’ beyond such borders.

Conclusion
Overall, this chapter has argued that nationalism and populism need not –
and should not – be confused or conflated with each other. As has been
shown, there are different forms of populism that avoid nationalism (and,
beyond them, forms of nationalism that strenuously avoid populism,
supporting instead ‘the elite’ as the saviour of the nation). Conflating the
two phenomena does us no favours; it leads to a situation where decidedly
non-populist (yet clearly nationalist) leaders such as the Russian President
Vladimir Putin or the Chinese President Xi Jinping somehow get thrown
together with the likes of Pablo Iglesias or Evo Morales (see e.g. Wallace-
Wells 2016) – a rather long stretch, which has little comparative or
conceptual clarity and forces populism to work as shorthand for a variety of
other isms and phenomena: nationalism, nativism, authoritarianism,
chauvinism, machismo and so on. At worst, it leads us down the track, to a
twisted application of Godwin’s law to political theory: the more we
confuse populism with nationalism and nativism, the closer we get to
making (erroneous) comparisons with Hitler.
This is not to say that populism and nationalism do not work well together:
they clearly do and, looking around the contemporary political landscape,
there is obviously much to be gained by playing on the language of ‘the
people’, with its connotations not only of an underdog (populism) and of a
group with distinct ethnic or national borders (nationalism), but also of a
sovereign subject that is ultimately the arbiter of its own political fate. Yet
the fact that populism and nationalism work effectively and efficiently
together does not mean that they are one and same thing: as the discussion
in this chapter has shown, approaching them as distinct phenomena allows
us to see that, despite their many similarities, the two diverge in terms of
whom or what they claim to represent, the subject position they offer, who
the ‘other’ of ‘the people’ or ‘the nation’ is, and how the primary power
relation underlying these phenomena is structured. This is useful not only
from a discursive–performative perspective but from an ideational one as
well, insofar as distinguishing between these phenomena at a formal level
can give us more insight into how the thin ideology of populism is
articulated with nationalism.

Notes
1 An important exception to this rule is Evo Morales, whose combination
of populist and ethnic appeals, directed primarily at indigenous and
Afro-Latino peoples, has led Madrid (2008) to refer to him as a case of
‘ethnopopulism’. Madrid stresses that these ethnic appeals are inclusive,
unlike the exclusive ones made by the populist right. Cheeseman and
Larmer (2015) have argued that ethnopopulism is also present in the
African context.
2 This is not to claim that left-wing populists embrace intersectionality
or particularity when it comes to political identities. Indeed, class-based
notions of ‘the people’ are often used to override differences within that
group, as for example in the persistent accusations against Bernie
Sanders that he actively ignored race issues (Arceneaux 2016). But these
sins of omission are clearly nothing like the active targeting of ethnic,
religious or cultural minorities that right-wing populists’ nativism relies
upon.
4
Populism and Socialism
While it is populism’s relationship to nationalism and nativism that tends to
garner the most attention in the era of Trump and Brexit, the other big story,
which sometimes gets overlooked, is that of the relationship between
populism and socialism. Indeed, one could argue that populism and
socialism have had a longer relationship than that of populism and nativism,
as socialist concerns drove the oft-cited earliest examples of populism, the
US People’s Party and the Russian Narodniks, as well as a number of cases
of ‘classical populism’ in Latin America in the 1940s and 1960s. More
recently, prominent populist figures on the left of the political spectrum
have advocated socialist projects, from the twenty-first-century socialism of
Hugo Chávez, Evo Morales and Rafael Correa in Latin America or the
democratic socialism of Bernie Sanders in the United States to Syriza’s and
Podemos’ reconfigurations of socialist tenets in Europe. Yet the relationship
between populism and socialism is marked by a certain tension. Although
they have several elements in common, and especially a strong distrust of
and antagonism towards ‘the elite’, they also diverge in several important
ways. This tension is most clear in socialism’s advocacy of a class-based
politics, with its appeals to the ‘working class’ – as opposed to populism’s
appeal to ‘the people’.
This chapter explores both the similarities and the divergences between the
two. It starts by looking at why and how socialism and populism have
proven to be a common pairing: it reviews their overlaps and examines how
the two have been combined in a number of contemporary examples of left
populism across the globe. It then moves on to consider where and how
populism and socialism go their separate ways. It examines the contrasts
between the different notions of ‘the people’ under socialism and populism,
arguing that the former sees the establishment of ‘the people’
unencumbered by class division as a goal , whereas the latter sees the
existence of ‘the people’ as a basic fact or datum of politics. Finally, the
chapter considers arguments put forward by the likes of Mouffe (2018) and
Laclau (2005a), who claim that left populism offers a way ‘beyond’ the
challenges presented by a declining project of social democracy (as they
view it). Here left populism is presented as having far more potential for
progressives than the allegedly essentialist and out-of-date discourse offered
by socialism. The chapter closes by assessing this claim critically,
especially in the light of the waning success of left populists in the
contemporary political landscape.

What Socialism Shares with Populism

Let us begin with the potential overlaps between populism and socialism:
what has made them work together quite well, in numerous empirical cases
throughout history – so much so that Laclau argued that ‘there is no
socialism without populism, and the highest forms of populism can only be
socialist’ (Laclau 1977: 196–7)? To consider this relationship, we have to
start with an understanding of socialism’s core features as an ideology.
According to Freeden, although socialism is obviously a broad church, it
has five core conceptual themes that extend across its different variants:
‘the constitutive nature of the human relationship, human welfare as a
desirable objective, human nature as active, equality, and history as the
arena of (ultimately) beneficial change’ (Freeden 1996: 425–6). We can
work through each of these in turn, considering how they play out when
combined or contrasted with populism.
First, the notion of the constitutive nature of the human relationship. As
opposed to liberalism, which tends to position the individual as the primary
unit of political analysis, socialism sees groups – and group identity – as
core to human existence. This idea is perhaps most strongly expressed in
Marx’s claim that ‘society does not consist of individuals; it expresses the
sum of connections and relationships in which individuals find themselves’
(Marx 1977: 89). Populism shares socialism’s holistic tendencies: it does
not tend to speak of individuals, but rather of two antagonistic groups
structuring the political field, ‘the people’ and ‘the elite’. Arguably, in their
most concentrated form, both socialism and populism contend that
members of the group should overcome the egoism of individualism, and
instead give themselves over to or make sacrifices on behalf of ‘the people’:
as Laclau asserted, ‘the advance towards socialism can only consist, in that
sense, in a long series of struggles through which socialism asserts its
popular identity and “the people” its socialist objectives’ (Laclau 1977:
197).
Second, we have the idea of human welfare as a desirable objective. For
socialists, the abolishment of poverty is a primary goal, and one not
restricted to removing or reducing exploitation from labour relations (and
power relations more generally), the idea being that such shifts would lead
to increasing happiness, welfare, education and the flourishing of
community more generally. In other words, the economic shifts associated
with socialism would also bring about beneficial ethical shifts within
society. While this position is, unsurprisingly, present in the programme of
many left populists – as a product of their ideological position on the left
more than by virtue of their populism – recent research has shown that
populism in government, across the ideological divide , also tends to bring
about a reduction in economic inequality (Ruth-Lovell, Doyle, and Hawkins
2019). Again, this is most pronounced on the populist left, but the trend also
holds for centrist and right-wing populists; Doyle for example argues:
‘[w]hat this data suggests is that the overall levels of inequality have been
reduced to a much greater extent under these populists than under other
types of governments’ (Doyle in Lewis, Clarke and Barr 2019). Curiously,
this research showed that populists did not tend to reduce inequality by the
‘usual’ socialist measures – taxes and welfare transfers – but more likely
via policies such as ‘minimum wage policies, maybe moves towards
formalization of the labour force, or limits on income generation of the very
wealthy’ (Ruth-Lovell et al. 2019: 5). Indeed, this plays out in Europe,
where a number of populist radical right parties have embraced ‘welfare
chauvinism’, whereby they support a strong social security safety net, but
only for native-born citizens (Keskinen, Norocel, and Jørgensen 2016).
Such policies tend to throw a spanner in the works in terms of making sense
of these political actors solely on the basis of the traditional left–right
ideological division, but they do nonetheless speak to the core notion of
human welfare as a desirable object (even if, in the case of right-wing
populism, it is, quite explicitly, welfare only for certain humans).
The third conceptual theme of socialism is its view of human nature as
active and productive, work or labour being seen as ‘natural’ or inherent to
the species. Marx argued that ‘work is a positive, creative activity’ (Marx
1977: 370), while Saint-Simon argued that ‘we regard society as the
ensemble and union of men engaged in useful work. We can conceive of no
other kind of society’ (Saint-Simon 1975: 158). Here we have a depiction
‘of social activity as a co-operative, productive, and creative venture in
which social harmony would be realized to the benefit of all’ (Freeden
1996: 421). While populism presumably does not have any general view of
the ‘nature’ of humans – it is too ideologically diverse to make such claims
– it does nonetheless tend to view ‘the people’ as an industrious and hard-
working group (and, on the flip side, ‘the elite’ as parasitic and corrupt).
Within this framework, in left-wing populism the parasitic elite is usually
portrayed as the economic elite – business owners, multinationals,
neoliberal governments or financiers – whereas in right-wing populism it is
usually depicted as an overtaxing (sometimes socialist) government,
associated cronies and those who benefit from their handouts. Even more, it
is worth noting that arguments to the effect that meaningful and secure
work is core to the well-being of ‘the people’ had particular salience in
recent left populist movements: a great deal of the momentum of the
Indignados and Occupy Wall Street movements came from a sense that
young people were locked out of a realm of financial and political security.
Fourth, there is socialism’s assertion of the equality of human beings. As
Freeden notes, this is both a historical construct and a desired goal. If we
take it as a historical construct, the implication is that humans were
originally (or are born) equal; if we take it as a desired goal, this equality
must be reattained through political struggle. Of course, the primary way in
which socialists advocate working towards it is through the redistribution of
wealth: as Marx’s slogan goes, ‘from each according to his ability, to each
according to his needs’ (Marx 1977: 569). This equality extends to the
realm of the political, as socialists fight for equal democratic participation
and decision-making in society at large. While populists seem to emphasise
this latter point, thus supporting a participatory political landscape where
equality reigns (they call for the return of power to ‘the people’, stress the
constituent power of the demos and, more concretely, advocate direct
democratic measures such as plebiscites and referenda), they obviously do
not see all humans as equal. Under populism, those outside ‘the people’ are
beneath contempt, be they members of ‘the elite’ or nefarious others,
targeted for denigration and abuse.
Finally, there is the idea of history as the arena of (ultimately) beneficial
change. Socialism takes a teleological view of history in which society
works through different stages of advancement towards the end goal of
social equality. Freeden notes that this view had three functions in socialist
thought: first, it ‘operated as a bridge notion, through which a future
ideological core could be delivered’; second, it ‘exonerated past and present
generations from the stigma of the failure to create a feasible alternative
society, by pointing to the oppressing forces which previous and
penultimate historical stages generated’; and third, ‘it held out the promise
of the future control by societies over their own fates, as they began to
make their histories in circumstances which were of their choosing’
(Freeden 1996: 435). While populism, too, has a vaguely teleological view
in which the triumph of ‘the people’ and its return to a rightful position of
power is the end goal, the ideological variants of populism present differing
perceptions of whether history is an arena of beneficial change or not.
While left-wing populists tend to be ‘forward-looking’ and driven, like the
socialists, by a positive view of the (potential) future, right-wing populists
tend to be backward-looking, driven by a nostalgia for ‘how things were’
(M. Kenny 2017) – something made abundantly clear in Nigel Farage’s
arguments for the Leave campaign in the debates leading up to Brexit, or in
Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again slogan. Here, Taggart notes,
populists look back upon an idealised ‘heartland’, which ‘is different from
ideal societies or utopias because it sees populists casting their imaginative
glances backwards in an attempt to construct what has been lost by the
present’ (Taggart 2000: 95).

Left-Wing Populism in Practice

If these are the conceptual overlaps between populism and socialism, what
do the two look like when combined in real life? That is, what empirical
cases of left-wing populism exist across the globe in the contemporary
political landscape, and how do they specifically combine populism and
socialism? 1 Arguably the ‘homeland’ of left-wing populism is Latin
America, where leaders who combine a socialist ideology with populism
have been able to reach high office and enjoy a great deal of political
success. As noted earlier, the most prominent examples of this avowedly
socialist form of populism are the governments of Evo Morales in Bolivia,
Rafael Correa in Ecuador and Hugo Chávez in Venezuela. These figures’ –
and their electoral vehicles’ – ideological platforms fit very well into the
socialist category, with their focus on decreasing poverty and on bringing
about higher employment and higher education rates, higher minimum
wages, and a strong raft of social programmes. Even more, these figures
have all made it clear that they identify as socialists: Morales described
capitalism as ‘the worst enemy of humanity’ (in Morales and Goodman
2009), Chávez declared that he wanted to ‘pulverize’ capitalism (cited in
Corrales 2012), and Correa’s party called for the creation of ‘a modern
socialist nation-state’ (Long 2015). These ideological programmes were
combined with a fiery populist discourse, which rallied against the
international neoliberal elite, claimed power in the name of ‘the people’,
and aimed for more political participation of unincorporated sectors of
society outside the liberal model. As Maya puts it, in the case of Chávez,
‘[p]opulism was reinforced by a socialist–statist ideology that sought to
build institutions of direct democracy as an alternative to liberal
representative democracy. These institutions were of a collectivist type, and
without political intermediations and lacking independence, crystallized
into the structure of a communal state’ (Maya 2018: 68).
The specific model advocated by these figures was that of ‘twenty-first-
century socialism’ – a form of socialism that, unlike the state-centred model
of ‘twentieth-century socialism’, as seen for example in the Soviet Union or
Cuba, would be far more decentralised and participatory. This was perhaps
best illustrated by the introduction of participatory democratic programmes
such as the Bolivarian Circles and Communal Councils in Venezuela, which
aimed to give citizens control over issues of community improvement,
economic development and municipal governance (Hawkins 2010b; on
critiques of the Circles, see de la Torre 2007). Even more, twenty-first-
century socialism broke with older forms of socialism by moving beyond
class issues and putting greater emphasis on questions related to indigenous
rights, the status of women, land rights and so on.
This being said, there is no automatic correlation between socialism and
populism in the region. Populism has also been combined with
neoliberalism to great effect, as seen in the neopopulist governments of
Alberto Fujimori in Peru, Carlos Menem in Argentina and Fernando Collor
de Mello in Brazil in the 1990s (Weyland 2003). What is more, socialism
does not need to come in populist form in Latin America. In an influential
2006 article published in Foreign Affairs , former Mexican Secretary of
Foreign Affairs Jorge Castañeda distinguished between what he called a
‘right left’ and a ‘wrong left’ in Latin America: the former, represented by
the likes of Lula in Brazil and Michelle Bachelet in Chile, was socialist or
social–democratic and was ‘modern, open-minded, reformist, and
internationalist’, while the latter, represented by the likes of Chávez in
Venezuela or Andrés Manuel López Obrador in Mexico, ‘born of the great
tradition of Latin American populism, is nationalist, strident, and close-
minded’ (Castañeda 2006: 29).
In the United Kingdom and in the United States, two advocates of socialist
policies who have received a great deal of media attention (and been given
the label ‘left-wing populists’ by a number of scholars and the media at
large) are Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders. Corbyn, the divisive leader
of the UK Labour Party since 2015, self-identifies as a ‘socialist’ or
‘democratic socialist’, and has called for the renationalisation of the
railways and public utilities and the introduction of rent controls and free
university tuition – among other policies. Using an ideational approach,
Watts and Bale argue that, while populism has been central to Corbyn’s
appeal to the electorate, it has been ever more effective as a way of
separating ‘true believers’ within the Parliamentary Labour Party from
apparent charlatans who do not really believe in socialism:
Just as populists rely upon a distinction between a people and elites,
Corbyn and his supporters found it difficult to resist – presuming for the
sake of argument that they even wanted to resist – such a binary frame.
Against the authenticity and virtuousness bestowed upon Labour’s
membership, hostile parliamentarians were recurrently cast in the role of
a collusive establishment determined to subvert the wishes of the
members, their support for Corbyn and their (and his) authentic
socialism. On occasion, this argument was combined with claims that the
Labour’s parliamentarians were diametrically opposed to Labour’s
people as part of an orchestrated conspiracy. In these moments, the
populist quality of Corbynism was at its most obvious. (Watts and Bale
2018: 105)
Here Corbyn’s supporters have been able to paint Corbyn as the socialist
rescuer of the Labour Party – ‘the supposedly reluctant leader and the
authentic outsider who would act as a corrective by restoring Labour to its
pre-lapsarian (pre-New Labour) state’ (Watts and Bale 2018: 111) in the
name of ‘the people’.
Meanwhile Sanders, who mounted a surprisingly strong challenge to
Hillary Clinton in the 2016 US Democratic Party presidential primaries
(and, at the time of writing, is one of the leading candidates for the 2020
primaries), has also declared himself a ‘democratic socialist’. Sanders’
definition of socialism is perhaps a little tamer than how Latin American or
European politicians more comfortable and familiar with the term define it:
Sanders has declared ‘I don’t believe government should own the means of
production’, ‘I believe in private companies’ and ‘I believe that most
Americans can pay lower taxes’ (Sanders 2015) and has built his definition
of democratic socialism around issues that might be more usually
associated with the label ‘social democrat’: single-payer healthcare, free
public tuition, campaign finance reform, paid parental leave and so forth.
He tends to cite Franklin Roosevelt rather than socialists like Eugene V.
Debs or Norman Thomas, making prominent left-wing thinkers such as
Frances Fox Piven and Noam Chomsky label him a New Deal Democrat
rather than a socialist (Elliott 2016). While there is some debate about
whether Sanders fits the populist bill at an ideational level (Müller 2018),
he does tick the box at a discourse–performative level, emerging in a recent
study as the candidate with the most populist (and most consistently
populist) discourse in the 2016 US presidential elections (Hawkins and
Rovira Kaltwasser 2018). His railing against ‘the political and economic
establishment’ on behalf of ‘ordinary Americans’ and ‘the people’ (Sanders
2016) demonstrates that populism can coexist not only with the ‘far’
reaches of the ideological spectrum but also with more familiar centre-left
positions, like that of social democracy.
What about Europe? March noted in 2007 that there had been ‘a definite
increase in populism among the left, either as a stylistic and tactical
measure, or, increasingly, as a core component of ideology’; and he pointed
to the examples of the Dutch Socialist Party, the Scottish Socialist Party and
the German Left Party as ‘parties [that] combine a democratic socialist
ideology with a strong populist discourse’. He noted that such parties were
not concerned with the all-too-familiar questions of ‘Marxist ideological
purity’ that tended to plague some of the socialist parties but ‘present[ed]
themselves as the vox populi, not just the vanguard of the proletariat, which
may cause them to toy with non-traditional identity concerns’ (March 2007:
67). Over a decade later, the European populist left is no longer a minor
phenomenon: it has become more pronounced, attracted a great deal of
international media attention and garnered increased electoral success. The
Syriza government in Greece, led by Alexis Tsipras, the emergence of
Podemos, led by Pablo Iglesias in Spain, and La France Insoumise
(Unbowed France), headed by Jean-Luc Mélenchon in France have all put
left-wing populism on the map, in a continent that otherwise has recently
viewed populism as an almost exclusively right-wing form of politics
(Stavrakakis et al. 2017).
In many regards, the programmes of these parties can also be seen as
examples of twenty-first-century socialism, combining as they do core
socialist demands for equality with a more participatory and pluralistic bent.
This is clear even if we go back as far as 2004, when Synaspismos – the
Coalition of the Left, of Movements and Ecology, the largest party in the
coalition that would become Syriza – put forward its view of a socialist
transition at its conference that year:
Our alternative proposal favors major fronts of struggle to address social
problems, new relations of the political with the social and the
movements, new values of solidarity, equality and justice, a new project
for environmental protection and development, the expansion of
traditional and new democratic and civil rights, new perceptions of full
respect for diversity against all forms of discrimination. [Our alternative]
encompasses bold demands, structural reforms and profound in-depth
changes questioning neoliberal capitalism, paving the road to socialist
transition. (Quoted in Katsambekis 2016: 394)
This pluralistic and participatory view of socialism was clear eight years
later, when Syriza claimed in its 2012 electoral declaration that ‘a socialism
with freedom, a fully blossoming democracy where all citizens participate
in decision making is the strategic aim’ (quoted in Katsambekis 2016: 398).
These parties’ participatory verve is also clear in how some of them have
embraced digital platforms as a way to engage with members and
supporters: Podemos has employed online voting platforms for the selection
of its executive committee and of its members of the European Parliament;
has used Reddit to create its own site, Plaza Podemos, as a virtual space for
online conversation with members; and has experimented with participatory
platforms such as Loomio, an online decision-making platform, to gauge
the opinions of its members (Frediani 2014; Moffitt 2019). Meanwhile, La
France Insoumise ‘clearly differs from traditional left parties in its
embracing of digital democracy and its doing away with traditional
bureaucratic structures. The formation has used the political software
NationBuilder to gather supporters and has developed its own dedicated
platform to make decisions on policies and strategy’ (Gerbaudo 2019: 12).
What is worth noting is that these European populist left-wing parties have
set themselves as direct competitors of the traditional socialist or social–
democratic parties in each of their countries, and those are seen to be in
thrall to an outdated conception of how politics operates or to have sold out
their principles in the face of an increasingly globalised and neoliberal
political and economic landscape. For example, Podemos paints the Partido
Socialista Obrero Español (Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party; PSOE) as part
of la casta and makes a clear attempt to refuse the language of class politics
(see Errejón and Mouffe 2016: 117–23), while Mélenchon, a former
member of the Socialist Party, has declared traditional socialism ‘dead’ (in
Yarnoz 2017) and refused to cooperate with the Socialist Party to form a
‘united left’ in the 2017 French Presidential Elections, which saw Marine
Le Pen move to the second round of voting.
Finally, socialist forms of populism have made their mark beyond the
Americas and Europe. In South Africa, the Economic Freedom Fighters
(EFF), led by Julius Malema, is the third-largest party in the country and
arguably the most traditionally socialist of the current left-wing populist
crop. Its constitution makes this explicit, stating that ‘[t]he EFF takes
socialism as the theoretical basis guiding its thinking and development of its
political line and in this respect identifies itself as a MARXIST , LENINIST , and
FANONIAN organisation’ (cited in Shivambu 2014: 77), while its Founding
Manifesto notes that it is ‘a radical, leftist, anti-capitalist and anti-
imperialist movement’ and that it ‘will be the vanguard of community and
workers’ struggle and will always be on the side of the people’ (cited in
Shivambu 2014: 77). This orientation is also reflected in EFF’s policies,
which include the expropriation of land without compensation (to be
redistributed equally); the nationalisation of banks and mines; free universal
healthcare and education; and an extensive project of building government
capacity. These policies are combined with an avowedly populist style
(Mbete 2015), as a part of which EFF members dress in parliament in the
uniform of workers – miners’ overalls for male EFF members, domestic
workers’ uniforms for female EFF members; and a party MP noted that
‘[w]e are sending a message to say that the Parliament for the people is not
a Parliament for the elite. So the workers at home, when they see us dressed
like this, they will know they are represented’ (Maxon, in Makinana and
Underhill 2014).

Beyond Socialism? Class versus ‘the

People’ in Left Populism
As we can see, there is little doubt that socialism and populism can be
combined in a project of left-wing populism and that examples of this kind
of combination can be found across the globe. Indeed, one can plausibly
claim that populism and socialism are in some ways a natural fit: their
struggles on behalf of ‘the people’ and against the vested interests of the
(economic) establishment can work hand in hand. In this regard, left-wing
populism and socialism share similar goals; Schamis claims for instance
that, in the context of Latin America, the shared ‘essential progressive
concerns of populism and socialism are as alive as ever. Decades after the
end of military rule, longstanding goals such as a welfare state, social
justice and political inclusion, substantive equality and dignity for working
people, and rights for disadvantaged groups remain unfulfilled and continue
to spark mobilization’ (Schamis 2006: 32–3). As March notes, this
compatibility has led
several writers [to] argue that socialism is intrinsically populist. Even in
the early 20th century, the struggle for electoral relevance led socialist
parties to broaden the class struggle to the ‘people’, rather than simply
confine it to the proletariat (a minority force in most democracies) […]
Because a Marxist sees the interests of the proletariat as universal, it is a
small step to elide the distinction between proletariat and people and to
struggle for all-national interests in the national–liberation struggle.
(March 2007: 65)
Yet this elision still marks an unavoidable tension between populism and
socialism: the question is that of the class character of ‘the people’ under
socialism, when confronted with a more universal characterisation of ‘the
people’ under populism. It is this tension that the present section of the
chapter turns to: where – and why – do populism and socialism go their
separate ways?
In many ways, left-wing populism has portrayed itself as an alternative to
‘traditional’ left-wing class politics. In the Latin American context, the
labour-heavy task of building strong social–democratic or socialist parties
or organisations from the bottom up has been an enormous struggle,
especially given the large size of the informal sector and the weakness of
the unions. In the circumstances, populism’s broader appeal to ‘the people’
(outside a purely class-based identity) and its heavily top-down strategy
have at times made it more suitable for mobilisation on the left. Yet for
these reasons the early Latin American experience of populism was met
with a large degree of cynicism, and even disdain, from traditional leftists –
particularly those employing structuralist understandings of politics. While
the widespread assumption on the left was that Latin America would
eventually follow the global North by becoming industrialised and creating
a working class, this clashed with populism’s modus operandi: ‘[t]he type
of deep revolutionary transformation required by Marxism–Leninism was
inimical to the supposedly halfhearted reforms undertaken by classical
Latin American populists, which retained capitalism while engaging in
import-substituting industrialization’ (Hawkins and Rovira Kaltwasser
2017a: 516). ‘The people’ at stake here were not sufficiently mobilised in
the ‘correct’ way, at least not from a Leninist point of view: such parties
and organisations should have been presenting themselves as the vanguard
of the working classes, which would then cotton on and follow their lead by
developing class consciousness rather than being brought together under the
charms of a charismatic strong leader who spoke in the name of ‘the
people’. Even more, in the era of import-substitution industrialisation,
populism was often based on class cooperation , pitting industrial labour
and business against rural landowners – anathema to those on the left who
sought to raise class consciousness and set the working class and the
owners of capital against each other – and often had a deliberately and
openly anti-revolutionary goal (see Waisman 1987). As a result there was,
historically, a significant gap between the socialist left and populism in
Latin America.
In the European context, left-wing populism has been presented as the
alternative to struggling socialist and social–democratic parties stuck in the
past, while in the case of Sanders in the United States and Corbyn in the
United Kingdom it has been portrayed as a way for centre-left parties to
transform themselves and throw off the shackles of third-wayism or
liberalism. Blaming social democrats for capitulating to the right by
embracing globalisation and several tenets of neoliberalism, left-wing
populists present their project in the name of ‘the people’ and as the only
viable way forward. This position is clearly expressed by Mouffe, one of
the key contemporary theorists of left-wing populism, who argues that ‘the
models we currently have don’t work. When we think about what models
there are on the left, we have either the social liberalism of the “centre-left”
parties, which essentially follow the liberal model, or a wide range of
“extreme left” groups that have no strategy for winning power’ (Mouffe, in
Errejón and Mouffe 2016: 32). Portrayed as being stuck between centrist
neoliberals in leftist clothing on one side and, on the other, ever-splintering
leftist groupuscules or movements that refuse to engage in the practicalities
of how to win office, the left-wing populist project is presented as the
strategy to embrace by those who wish to reinvigorate progressive politics.
Indeed, such is the perceived bankruptcy of the traditional left that Podemos
has made clear it that it does not want to be associated with this notion at
all. Íñigo Errejón, who was, at the time, deputy leader of the party, decried
the insular debates around the label: ‘[a]t a certain point, part of the left
decided they had to fight for the truth of the word “left”: “we’re the true
left”. But from the beginning, we said “you can keep it, we hand it over to
you. We’re interested in constructing a people, not in constructing the left”’
(Errejón, in Errejón and Mouffe 2016: 120).
In many ways, the question of ‘socialism or populism’ reflects the heated
debates on the left in the latter half of the 1980s around the publication of
Laclau and Mouffe’s (1985) influential Hegemony and Socialist Strategy .
This book postulated that, in the face of the emergence of the ‘new social
movements’ based on gender, sexual, ecological and peace demands, there
was a need to move ‘beyond’ the class essentialism of socialism and
towards a more pluralistic notion of democracy. The idea here was that it
was no longer acceptable, desirable or realistic to maintain the commitment
to class as the primary locus of struggle (or the primary identity under
which to mobilise citizens); one had rather to link the various emerging
struggles together in one fight against inequality and capitalism. As Mouffe
put it, reflecting on the book’s themes over three decades later,
Our main standpoint was that we had to reformulate the ‘socialist
project’ in terms of a radicalisation of democracy. That enabled us to
break simultaneously both with the Jacobin tradition and with economic
determinism; because you cannot speak about the radicalisation of
democracy without recognising that there are different form of
subordination that might give rise to a variety of antagonisms, and that
all these struggles cannot be viewed simply as the expression of
capitalist exploitation. (Mouffe, in Errejón and Mouffe 2016: 20)
Both Laclau (2005a) and Mouffe in her later work (Mouffe 2018) argued
that populism was the political form best positioned to express this
reformulation of the socialist project, given that (a) it moved the language
of left-wing struggle beyond class essentialism; (b) it articulated a political
subject – ‘the people’ – that, as a signifier, was vague and ‘empty’ enough
to be able to include these different struggles without making any one of
them primary; (c) it opened the opportunity to draw new frontiers in the
political landscape by discursively expressing struggles carried out in the
name of ‘the people’ versus ‘the elite’ that did not have to be forced into a
strict and rigid left–right ideological binary; and (d) its discourse concerned
itself primarily with democracy.
In the eyes of Laclau and Mouffe, then, the tension that marks the two
senses of ‘the people’ conveyed by socialism and populism is somewhat
resolved by the move to left-wing populism. In his exploration of the role of
populism in the socialist imaginary, Olson notes that ‘[a] specter haunts
socialism—the specter of the people’ (Olson 2017: 661). He argues:
Socialists have tended to set aside universalist or undifferentiated
conceptions of the people in favor of a politics of class. Yet the people
do not disappear from view, primarily because of socialism’s populist
commitments. The result is an awkward set of identifications between
the iconic socialist collective subject, the proletariat, and ‘the people’
more broadly construed. (Olson 2017: 661)
Yet, in the eyes of those who advocate a left-wing populist project today,
reinscribing these class struggles within the project of left-wing populism
ostensibly avoids this awkwardness: they see left-wing populism as a tent
big enough to host both senses of ‘the people’.
Moreover, Mouffe argues that, if we look at the current political landscape
across the globe, it is clear that the language of populism has more political
purchase and empirical appeal than the usual language of socialism: even
though many of the populist formations on the left after the global financial
crisis have ostensibly occurred in response to economic inequality,
it is through the language of democracy that many citizens can articulate
their protests. It is no doubt significant that the main targets of the
‘movements of the squares’ were the shortcomings of the political
system and of the democratic institutions and that they did not call for
‘socialism’ but for a ‘real democracy’. (Mouffe 2018: 41)
Indeed, the calls of the Indignados for Democracia real ya! (‘Real
democracy now!’) illustrate this tendency, as does the ambiguity of Occupy
Wall Street’s ‘We are the 99 percent’ – which conflated economic and
political justice into a majoritarian slogan. The situation is further reflected
in the empirical research devoted to the left-wing populist ‘movements of
the squares’. Aslanidis’ (2016b) fieldwork in Thessaloniki on the Greek
Indignados – particularly his interviews with several Maoist, Trotyskist and
Stalinist activists who had played a central role in the organisation of the
protests and occupations – revealed the following:
Realizing the huge potential for building a massive political front against
the mainstream parties, these radicals soon, however, came to understand
that the usual Marxist jargon did not fit the discursive landscape of the
squares and would unavoidably alienate the antipolitical crowds. Similar
to what Calhoun (2013) testifies on Occupy Wall Street, they realized
that their traditional socialist diagnostic tropes would not make any
inroads. The average citizen in the Assembly was disenchanted by the
political system to the point of hostility against partisan affiliations and
suspicion against other types of politically charged institutions, such as
trade unions or workers’ initiatives […] most radical leftwing
organizations decided from day one to conceal the presence of their
cadres and tone down their rhetoric […] As one interviewee conceded,
 ‘Most organizations tried to keep pace with the movement; we didn’t
speak of a socialist revolution or anything like that.’ Inclusive labels in
populist style, invoking the People rather than nation, religion, or class,
would prove more productive in inciting sympathy from potential
adherents while keeping the unity of the movement intact, especially if
coupled with a strategy of focusing on the enemy rather than on the
features and tactics of the movement itself. (Aslanidis 2016b: 314–15)
In short, at this particular historical juncture, the baggage associated with
socialist class-based conceptions of ‘the people’ seems to be too heavy to
shake off – so much so that even avowed Marxists understand this. The
discursive productivity of ‘the people’ – characterised by its indeterminacy,
openness and ‘emptiness’ – in its populist sense is seen as able to carry a
series of demands (articulated around a core sense of democracy) that
stricter class-based conceptions of ‘the people’ arguably cannot at this time.
Yet this strategy clearly has its limitations. One cannot help but feel that
Mouffe’s call for a left-wing populist project is a few years too late. The
European ‘left populist’ moment seems to be on the wane: Podemos has
suffered a slide in several recent elections; Syriza abandoned many of its
socialist goals, particularly after the capitulation to the Troika in the
aftermath of the 2015 Greek bailout referendum, and lost government to its
right-wing rival, New Democracy, in 2019; and La France Insoumise
remains rather marginal in France. If one looks to Latin America, the
picture is even worse. The left-wing populist version of twenty-first-century
socialism has completely curdled: Chávez’s populism has given way to
Maduro’s outright authoritarianism, creating a humanitarian crisis in which
almost four million refugees and migrants have fled the country at the time
of writing – a number that the joint special representative of the UN
Refugee and Migration Agencies has called ‘unparalleled in the modern
history of the region’ (UN News 2019); Rafael Correa’s successor and
former vice president, Lenin Moreno, has actively sought to rollback
Correa’s socialist agenda and has moved in a far less populist – and,
arguably, less authoritarian – direction (de la Torre 2018); and Evo Morales,
the last of the three central ‘pink tide’ populist leaders left standing, has
shown himself to be no friend of democracy when it does not go his way,
having overturned a referendum result that would have stopped him from
running for president again – and thus from seeking to remain president
indefinitely (Faguet 2018). In each of these Latin American cases, many of
the worst suspicions that critics of populism have voiced have been
confirmed, which means that, far from being the inspirations they may
initially have been to the international left, 2 they stand now as cautionary
tales of where populism in power can in principle lead.
Beyond this, class does seem to be back on the table to some degree in
several places, perhaps reflecting the fact that left-wing populism has not
been as effective as might be assumed. The setting where this is most
obvious is the United States, where talk of ‘democratic socialism’, the
Green New Deal popularised by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the rise of new
periodicals such as Jacobin and Current Affairs , and the re-emergence of
the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) has seen socialism, not
populism, become the catchword for progressive politics, particularly
among youths – a particularly interesting turn of events, given the United
States’ post-McCarthy era aversion for any talk of socialism. One can also
see strands of this renaissance of class politics in the United Kingdom,
where Momentum’s role in the election of Jeremy Corbyn to the leadership
of the Labour Party, along with a perceived leftward shift in the party’s
policies, can be read through the lens of class, and hence socialism, rather
than through the lens of populism.

Conclusion
Notwithstanding these developments in the United States and in the United
Kingdom, a wider question that lingers over this entire discussion is how
much the broader decline of class politics has been a precondition, or at the
very least a conducive precursor of the fusion of populism and socialism
that emerged in the form of twenty-first-century socialism. Indeed, it seems
that all the familiar elements of the narrative about the death of class
politics – neoliberalism, partial deindustrialisation, the decline of trade
unions, the shrinking of the ‘working class’ – have, paradoxically, paved
the way for those figures, parties and movements that were able to
reconfigure or extend socioeconomic characterisations of ‘the people’ in
novel ways. In this state of affairs, as the orthodox left is about to disappear
from many places and the remaining leftists despair of the prospects of the
‘working class’ and old-school socialism, it is perhaps no great surprise that
populism has been embraced as a potential saviour – even if only as a last
resort, and in places where old socialists attempt to hitch their wagons to
populist leaders and movements. Indeed, some have interpreted in these
terms the rise not just of left-wing populism but of populism at large,
arguing that the decline of class identity and the deflation of social
democracy have set some voters ‘free’, so to speak, from their class
identities and have seen them embrace populist leaders from across the
ideological spectrum (for a discussion of this thesis, see Hawkins, Read and
Pauwels 2017).
Whether this hypothesis holds water or not is an open question; and it
remains to be seen whether the decoupling of ‘the people’ from a class-
based identity is a permanent state of affairs or merely a trial separation. In
any case, this chapter has aimed to show that, despite the fact that currently
populism and its relationship to nationalism capture almost all the attention
available in the field, the relationship between populism and socialism is
equally important and worthy of exploration, given its historical relevance
and its centrality to current debates about the future direction of left-wing
politics. Moreover, the chapter has sought to show that this relationship is
not a concern just for Latin America, as is sometimes erroneously assumed,
but rather that socialist forms of populism have been articulated in Europe
and Africa in the shape of new political parties, and perhaps even in the
United States and in the United Kingdom, in the potential leadership of
ostensibly mainstream parties such as those of Bernie Sanders and Jeremy
Corbyn. Given the centrality of populism at our current political moment, it
is likely that arguments about how the left seeks to characterise ‘the people’
against ‘the elite’ – and whether they should be doing this at the cost of
abandoning some aspects of class politics – will continue to be a pressing
concern for progressive politics. As this chapter has shown, however, the
slippage and ambiguities between different senses of ‘the people’ across
socialism and populism mean that there are no easy answers awaiting the
left on this important question – and, as the ‘left populist’ moment of the
early twenty-first century seems to be in its final stages, the question may
be more urgent than ever.

Notes
1 Populism can be combined with socialism whether one uses an
ideational, a strategic or a discursive–performative approach. On the
ideational reading, socialism acts as the thick ideology that gives content
to the thin ideology of populism, thus providing substance to its
conception of ‘the people’ and ‘the elite’ in socioeconomic terms. On the
strategic reading, socialist leaders can use the populist strategy as a mode
of capturing government. On the discursive–performative reading,
socialist parties, leaders or movements can use populist discourse or
style to frame their political platforms and arguments. Concerning the
cases discussed in this chapter, however, there would be some
disagreement among the different approaches: on a strict reading, some
ideational scholars would reject the cases of Sanders and Corbyn (and
perhaps even those of Podemos and Syriza) on the grounds of their
pluralist perception of ‘the people’, whereas this would not be a problem
for strategic and discursive–performative approaches, given that anti-
pluralism is not part of how they define populism.
2 Morales’ Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) has particularly been cited
as an inspiration for Podemos (see Errejón and Mouffe 2016: 80–93;
Seguín 2015), the former party secretary Íñigo Errejón writing his PhD
thesis on the party.
5
Populism and Liberalism
One of the key narratives that have developed around populism in recent
decades is that it is a threat to liberal democracy. But what happens when,
instead of taking that narrative at face value, we break the term ‘liberal
democracy’ down into its constitutive components – liberalism and
democracy? On the one hand, while there is a fair degree of debate about
the democratic credentials of populism – something we will get to in the
next chapter – there is actually a significant amount of consensus about its
liberal credentials: academics and pundits alike generally agree that
populism is a profoundly illiberal phenomenon. Yet does this claim hold up
empirically? Is populism actually synonymous with ‘illiberal democracy’,
as Pappas (2016b) argues? Is it an ‘illiberal democratic response to
undemocratic liberalism’, as argued by the likes of Mudde (2004) and
Mounk (2018)? It is these types of questions that the present chapter takes
up.
In contrast to scholars who argue that populism is always illiberal, this
chapter contends that the reality is actually more complex. On the one hand,
there are right-wing populists increasingly reconfiguring liberal tropes for
their own purposes, claiming to be brave defenders of free speech,
justifying limiting immigration from certain countries in order to protect
gender and sexual equality, or even clearly self-identifying as liberals. On
the other, there are left-wing populists who often extend their conception of
‘the people’ to include various minority groups, which on the face of things
seems to be in line with pluralism and liberalism. To add to this confusion,
ostensibly liberal ‘mainstream’ politicians have become increasingly adept
at adopting the policies, discourse and style of populists in recent years,
particularly on the right, which means that there is an increasingly blurry
line between what is illiberal and liberal and what is mainstream and
populist at the current historical conjuncture. At stake here, the chapter
argues, is what version of liberalism we are talking about: is it a liberalism
that values diversity (a Lockean liberalism), autonomy (a Kantian
liberalism) or self-expression (a Millian liberalism) as the primary value
that justifies liberal rights?
To examine how these distinctions play out when it comes to the
relationship between populism and liberalism, the chapter first considers
what the theoretical and empirical literatures on populism have to say about
how these phenomena interact. It then examines the differences between
how the populist right and the populist left use and invoke liberal tropes,
and how these differences relate to the subtypes of liberalism just
mentioned. It argues that, while some figures on the populist right may
claim to hold liberal values, this is often a shallow commitment that is
ultimately used for targeting minorities in a deeply illiberal fashion. On the
flip side, the chapter argues that the populist left demonstrates a slightly
deeper commitment to (some) aspects of liberalism in how it discursively
constructs ‘the people’. However, the chapter then goes on to show that
right-wing and left-wing populists are united in their illiberalism when it
comes to their views on institutions and procedures, and ultimately to their
views on multiple conceptions of ‘the good’ in society. In doing so, the
chapter complicates simple readings of populism as the ‘opposite’ of
liberalism and introduces a more nuanced reading of their relationship.

Populism versus Liberalism?

Why is it that populism is generally seen as a threat to liberalism? There are
several factors that account for such views – for example populism’s
tendency to construct ‘the people’ and ‘the elite’ as singular actors; its
opposition to independent institutions such as courts or a free fourth estate;
its lack of respect for individual rights; its antagonistic and combative style;
and its targeting of minorities. Such tendencies clearly come into conflict
with liberalism’s commitment to pluralism, openness and protection of
individual liberty. This chapter considers liberalism in its ideological sense
– that is, as a distinct political project – as opposed to its historical or
philosophical sense. In this it follows, again, the lead of Freeden, who
claims that liberalism is ‘an ideology that contains seven political concepts
that interact at its core: liberty, rationality, individuality, progress,
sociability, the general interest, and limited and accountable power’
(Freeden 2015: 15).
On the basis of the threats listed above, several prominent scholars have
opposed populism to liberalism. On the one hand, Müller (2014: 484) sees
populism as ‘a profoundly illiberal and, in the end, directly undemocratic
understanding of representative democracy’ – that is, a phenomenon that is
opposed to both liberalism and democracy. On the other, there are those
who argue that populism can be potentially democratic, but agree that it is
illiberal – Mudde (2004: 561) has claimed that populism is ‘one form of
what Fareed Zakaria has recently popularized as “illiberal democracy”,
while Krastev argues that populism represents ‘the major political trend in
our world today: the rise of democratic illiberalism’ (Krastev 2007a: 104),
noting that ‘populism is antiliberal but it is not antidemocratic’ (Krastev
2007b: 60).
Pappas goes one step further than these authors. He does not just make note
of populism’s illiberal credentials; he also argues that we should actually
define populism on this basis, claiming that populism is, at its core,
‘democratic illiberalism’. This minimal definition, Pappas claims, is useful
insofar as it ‘points directly to populism’s “negative pole”, namely, political
liberalism […] populism, in short, may be democratic, but it is not liberal’
(Pappas 2014: 3). Drawing on the work of Riker (1982) and Rawls (2005),
Pappas contends that populism and liberalism differ along three core lines.
First, populism is characterised by a single cleavage between ‘the people’
and ‘the elite’, whereas liberalism acknowledges multiple cleavages
throughout society. Second, populism uses an adversarial style of politics,
whereas liberalism seeks moderation through an ‘overlapping consensus’
between various interests that coexist in society. Third, populism is
majoritarian: it considers only the view of the majority – ‘the people’ – to
be legitimate, whereas as liberalism’s constitutionalism tends to seek
protection for and give voice to minorities against majorities. Helpfully,
Pappas (2016b) also notes that his definition of populism as ‘democratic
illiberalism’ allows us to distinguish it not only from (democratic)
liberalism, but also from non-democratic illiberalism or autarchy. This
clarification is useful because it demonstrates that we should not throw the
baby out with the bathwater and claim that populism is both illiberal and
anti-democratic: as soon as non-democratic means enter the scene, we are
talking not about populism but about something else – autarchy or
authoritarianism.
Yet, revealing and clear as Pappas’ typology of populism, liberalism and
autarchy is, he readily admits that there are empirical cases that do not fit
neatly into a single category. As he notes,
some cases, to be sure, will be mixed bags, and therefore their inclusion
in analysis, or exclusion from it, will be assumed by how one defines
‘democracy’ or ‘illiberalism’. Should we, for instance, classify
Hungary’s Jobbik as a populist (i.e., illiberal but still democratic) party,
or is it to be relegated to the category of nondemocratic parties, which
fall outside our research concerns? Another example: Is the strong anti-
immigration discourse of the Danish Progress Party a clear enough
indication of ‘illiberalism’ (so that we can classify this party as populist),
or is it reckoned simply as a set of ultra-conservative ideas, and policy
proposals, of an otherwise perfectly liberal party? (Pappas 2016b)
This is becoming an increasingly difficult question to answer. In a context
in which populists are becoming part of the mainstream – and hence often
softening their ‘rougher’ edges and learning at least to pay lip service to
liberal values – while mainstream parties increasingly crib from the populist
playbook, thus sometimes putting their liberal credentials into question,
working out who is really a liberal is sometimes hard to discern. If one talks
like a liberal, does that make one a liberal? If one’s platform is somewhat
liberal, is one a liberal? Can any of these things get a populist actor a get-
out-of-the-populist-category free card?

The Populist Right and the Weaponising of

Liberalism
The clearest examples of these ‘mixed bag’ cases that blur the lines
between populism and liberalism come from Northern Europe. Here there
are several examples of right-wing populist parties and figures who have
reconfigured the traditional liberal defences of minority groups such as
homosexuals and women in their own populist image, these groups being
characterised as part of ‘the people’ that requires protection – not just from
‘the elite’ but also from dangerous others who want to attack them. Such
actors have learnt to use the language of liberalism when it comes to
defending free speech, secularism and individual freedom, thus
‘display[ing] a more “civic” and liberal democratic face’ (Pels 2011: 27)
than older populist radical right parties. Here we have seen the populist
right position itself as the true defender of liberty and ‘Enlightenment
values’, in opposition to an elite that supposedly cares only about political
correctness and cultural relativism.
The trailblazer in this regard was the Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn. An
outspoken, openly homosexual sociology professor, Fortuyn combined an
anti-Islam, anti-migration and Eurosceptic platform – hallmarks of what we
have come to expect from the populist radical right – with a strongly social–
liberal position on gender, sexuality, drug legalisation and euthanasia.
Fortuyn was able to combine these positions by claiming that the hard-
fought liberal rights and permissiveness of Dutch culture were going to be
reversed if further immigration (brought about by the multicultural ‘elite’)
continued from Muslim-majority countries. However, he deflected claims
of racism or xenophobia brought against him by proclaiming his social
liberalness; he typically responded to one critic: ‘I have nothing against
Moroccans. I’ve been to bed with so many of them!’ (in Pels 2003: 42).
Fortuyn was assassinated nine days before the 2002 Dutch general election,
and his party, the Lijst Pim Fortuyn (Pim Fortuyn List), went on to become
the second-biggest party in the Dutch parliament that year. The party has
since disbanded, but Fortuyn’s legacy still lives on; in fact it has quite a
strong presence in the Netherlands to this day.
Indeed, the combination of liberalism with populism in terms of issues
around sexuality is also evident in the discourse of Geert Wilders, the Dutch
populist for whom Fortuyn arguably paved the way. Wilders has strived to
paint himself as an ally of the LGBTQ community by arguing that his role
is to fight for ‘the freedom that gay people should have – to kiss each other,
to marry, to have children – [which] is exactly what Islam is fighting
against’ (in Lester Feder 2016) and by speaking at the ‘Wake Up’ LGBT
US Republican National Convention event in 2016 alongside Milo
Yiannopoulos. Similar defences of the LGBTQ community against the
apparent threat of Islam are also evident in Denmark, where the Dansk
Folkeparti (Danish People’s Party) has claimed that, ‘in recent decades,
homosexuals have come under pressure from intolerant Islamic groups’ and
has promised to ‘work determinedly against oppression and discrimination
against homosexuals’, encouraging the police to ‘take targeted action
against specific groups that may exhibit despicable intolerance against
homosexuals’ (Dansk Folkeparti 2009).
These populists have also positioned themselves as liberal defenders of
gender equality, setting up a binary between their ‘enlightened’ values and
the apparent sexism and misogyny of immigrants. As Mudde and Rovira
Kaltwasser (2015: 29) argue, ‘gender issues have become almost
exclusively tied to the overarching issue of immigration or, better,
integration’ in the case of the populist radical right in Northern Europe.
These defences have generally developed along three main lines. The first
is the need to defend the relatively high levels of gender equality achieved
in Northern Europe from the threat raised by the influx of immigrants,
whose presence would supposedly dilute or threaten the liberal status quo:
as Wilders puts it, the process of ‘Islamisation’ in the Netherlands ‘flushes
decades of women’s emancipation through the toilet’ (quoted in Mudde and
Kaltwasser 2015: 29). The second line is the need to protect native-born
women from the supposedly misogynistic practices of immigrants: for
example, in 2010 the Sverigedemokraterna (Sweden Democrats) party
released a report entitled ‘Time to Speak out about Rape!’ in which it
claimed that Sweden was undergoing a ‘rape wave’ that was due to the high
levels of immigrants allowed into the country – and therefore the key way
to reduce sexual assault was to limit immigration (Sverigedemokraterna
2010). The third line is the attempt to target misogynistic cultural practices
in immigrant communities, thus ‘freeing’ immigrant women from their
‘cultural prisons’. An example here is the Norwegian Fremskrittspartiet
(Progress Party), which proposed a ban on wearing the headscarf in schools
and the burkini in society at large, on the grounds that Norwegians should
not ‘tolerate that girls of such a young age are systematically indoctrinated
to accept that women are subordinate and can be suppressed as adults’ (in
Akkerman and Hagelund 2007: 209). Across each of these defences, an
allegedly cultural–relativist ‘elite’ is seen as abetting the destruction of
gender equality by both allowing increasing immigration levels from
illiberal cultures and encouraging multiculturalism as a state policy.
Another key tactic used by the populist radical right with the intention of
presenting itself as liberal is the claim to be a defender of freedom of
speech and expression against an ‘elite’ whose members are portrayed as
being in thrall to political correctness. Some public figures in this category
have actually experienced the reality of restrictions on free speech: several
populist right-wing European leaders had hate speech charges filed against
them, and Geert Wilders was found guilty of incitement to racial
discrimination in 2016, when he called for ‘fewer Moroccans’ in the
Netherlands. Wilders depicted this court battle as ‘the trial against the
freedom of speech’ and framed it in populist language by stating that it was
led ‘against a politician who says what the politically correct elite does not
want to hear’ (Wilders 2016). Such hate speech laws, according to Wilders,
made the Netherlands ‘a dictatorship’; and, like his forebear Fortuyn,
Wilders called for the laws to be abolished (van Noorloos 2014: 252). The
‘defender of free speech’ framing is not exclusive to Northern Europe:
Nigel Farage has called freedom of speech one of ‘the absolute
fundamentals of free western society’ (West Sussex Times 2013) and has
rallied against media regulations and against censorship of social media
platforms in the name of freedom of speech (Farage 2018). It should also be
noted that those on the (non-populist) far right and on the alt-right have
used similar posturing, as Tommy Robinson and Richard Spencer
positioned themselves as free speech champions or as martyrs for the free
speech cause in recent years (Hoffman-Kuroda 2017).
Another liberal theme that has been invoked by the populist radical right of
late is that of secularism – although, as Brubaker points out, it is a rather
particular form of secularism: ‘today, secularist rhetoric in Northern and
Western Europe is directed against Muslim immigrants and their
descendants, whose religiosity is seen as threatening despite the fact that
Islam has little institutional power, political influence, or cultural authority
in the wider society’ (Brubaker 2017: 1201). The particularity of this
secularism is clear if we compare the way in which Christianity is seen as a
benign cultural force rather than a religious one, whereas Islam is seen as a
dangerous all-encompassing religion at odds with an otherwise ‘secular’
society. These parties are thus advocates of what Brubaker (2016) called
‘Christian secularism’, whereby Christianity – if not the church, then the
broader Christian tradition – ‘is redefined as the matrix of liberalism,
secularity, gender equality, and gay rights’. This tendency can be found in
the curious rise of the descriptor of ‘Judeo-Christian culture’ in the
discourse of the Western European populist radical right, where this
phenomenon is framed as conjoined with the triumph of liberalism. For
example, the Dansk Folkeparti argues that ‘Judeo-Christian culture
managed to create the freedom and tolerance that is the foundation for
democracy’ against ‘fundamentalist religions – especially Islam’ (Dansk
Folkeparti 2009), while in the Netherlands Wilders defends Judeo-Christian
values against the ‘totalitarianism’ of Islam, which is seen not as a religion
but rather as a ‘totalitarian ideology’. Even Pim Fortuyn, whose sexuality
would seemingly put him at odds with the conservative sexual mores of the
Christian church, defended ‘Judeo-Christian humanism’ against Islam
(Kluveld 2016).
Finally, liberal themes of individual freedom and liberty are sometimes
invoked by populists of a radical right slant in an attempt to prove their
liberal credentials. Here again, the Dutch cases lead the way. Thus the Lijst
Pim Fortuyn put forward policies that aimed to legalise drug use,
prostitution and euthanasia and the Partij voor de Vrijheid (Party for
Freedom) entertains ‘relatively libertarian views on a number of ethical
issues’, including ‘the right to abortion, embryo selection and euthanasia’
(Vossen 2016: 55). A combination of libertarianism and populism on the
right can also be detected in the anti-government libertarianism of the US
Tea Party movement; in the policy proposals and discourse of Ron Paul –
the US Tea Party-aligned Republican candidate in the 2008 and 2012
primary elections – and of his son, Senator Rand Paul; in aspects of Nigel
Farage’s discourse; and in the approach of the Canadian populist Preston
Manning.
So then: is right-wing populism compatible with liberalism? To some
extent, yes. If we squint and take at face value these parties’ and figures’
discourse around LGBTQ rights, gender equality, secularism and freedom,
it seems that right-wing populism can be combined with liberalism quite
effectively. Populism’s invocations of ‘the people’ against ‘the elite’ can be
coherently combined with defences of minority groups and of freedom of
expression at a discursive and rhetorical level. However, if we take
seriously the policy platforms of radical right-wing populists, it becomes
quite clear that their commitment to liberalism is far from consistent. Rather
than unequivocally defending liberal values, these parties tend to pick and
choose the most appropriate and useful aspects of liberalism and refashion
them for ends that are ultimately illiberal. This is very clear when it comes
to their defence of gender equality and LGBTQ rights: such defence serves
only as a cover to demonise Islam. As Akkerman has noted, radical right-
wing populist parties tend to have a Janus-faced approach to gender issues:
‘principles like gender equality and freedom of choice are emphasized in
the immigration and integration domain, while almost all the parties are
conservative when they address issues related to the family … [this]
suggests that their commitment to liberalism is merely instrumental to an
anti-Islam agenda’ (Akkerman 2015: 56). The same goes for their defence
of free speech, which tends to depend on who is actually doing the
speaking. It is rare to see radical right-wing populists invoking the
Voltairean principle ‘I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the
death your right to say it’ in confrontations with their ideological enemies;
in fact Wilders repeatedly called for the Koran to be banned – a strange
position for a self-proclaimed free speech advocate to take. Indeed, apart
from the case of Pim Fortuyn, whose commitment to liberalism was more
coherent than that of many of his populist radical right fellow travellers, the
lukewarm approach to individual freedoms and the convenient recourse to
‘Christian secularism’ indicate that these parties’ allegiance to several core
components of liberalism identified by Freeden (2015) – particularly to
liberty, rationality and progress – is weak.
Can the populist right be even partly identified with the liberal tradition,
then? To some extent, it all depends on the kind of liberalism we are talking
about. Gustavsson (2015) has convincingly argued that we should not see
liberalism as a monolithic school of thought but rather as one with distinct
subtypes or tendencies. The main three that she finds to be in play in
contemporary European politics are Reformation liberalism, Enlightenment
liberalism and romantic liberalism. Reformation liberalism follows Locke
by valuing diversity as the primary liberal value; Enlightenment liberalism
follows Kant by valuing autonomy as the primary liberal value; and
romantic liberalism follows Mill by valuing self-expression as the primary
liberal value. Moreover, each of these strains has a different central goal:
Reformation liberalism seeks tolerance; Enlightenment liberalism seeks
self-reflection; romantic liberalism seeks self-disclosure at any price.
It is clear that radical right-wing populists do not draw at all from
Reformation liberalism: they have a strong aversion for diversity and
toleration, which they regard as values and goals of ‘the elite’ – an elite that
wishes to foist multiculturalism and cultural relativism on a natively
defined ‘people’ against its wishes. And it is clear that radical right-wing
populists do not really draw much from Enlightenment liberalism either,
despite the fact that some of them invoke the Enlightenment, ‘Judeo-
Christian values’, and ‘western civilisation’, since generally their arguments
are not about commitment to Enlightenment’s values of reason or autonomy
and since – to put it mildly – self-reflection is not a goal normally
associated with the populist radical right. But the form of liberalism that the
populist right tends to invoke occasionally is that of ‘romantic liberalism’ –
a mode of ‘hard’ liberalism that places the ability to ‘say whatever you like’
and to express your ‘true self’ above all. The common allegations of the
populist radical right – for example about not being able to say ‘Merry
Christmas’ in the United States any more as a result of political correctness
and over-tolerance of non-Christian cultures on the part of ‘the elite’ – or
the culture wars in the Netherlands over the racist character of Zwarte Piet
(Black Peter), which features in Christmas celebrations, speak to this, as do
the debates about the right to depict Muhammed visually that have been
used by a number of populist radical right figures.
Given, however, that the populist radical right’s commitment to liberalism
seems to be rhetorical rather than programmatic – that is, its representatives
occasionally talk like liberals but do not actually put forward ideological
positions that reflect liberalism – we should not place them in the liberal
family. I have suggested elsewhere that we should perhaps see them as
examples of ‘“liberal illiberalism” in which illiberal attacks on particular
Others associated with “the elite” […] are couched in a liberal discourse’
(Moffitt 2017b: 113). This paradoxical term reflects the fact that a selective
use of liberalism that makes it serve illiberal ends should not force us to
accept the populist right’s self-presentation: by making ‘illiberalism’ the
noun of the phrase and ‘liberal’ the descriptor, we can still acknowledge
that exclusion is, ultimately, the logic that operates on the populist radical
right.
The question is this, then: if their policy platforms are essentially illiberal,
why do radical right-wing populists even bother to use liberalism at all, as a
discursive strategy? One reason is that such parties do not operate in a
vacuum; the cultural, linguistic and ideological contexts in which these
parties are anchored do matter. In Northern Europe, at the very least,
pluralism and liberal social values are relatively ‘mainstreamed’; hence it is
unsurprising that political actors draw on the resources that are familiar and
available to them in this context. As Halikiopoulou, Mock and Vasilopoulou
(2013) argue, these kinds of parties move within a ‘civic zeitgeist’
characterised by a ‘current towards tolerance, diversity and rights’ (2013:
109); and ‘voters are more likely to support a radical right party if they
perceive it as “normal” or “legitimate”, which at least in part means
democratic, effective and in line with baseline national values’ (2013: 111).
Even when a platform is not particularly ‘in line’ with these national values,
it is strategically wise at least to keep up appearances and couch it in
adequate language. This ties in with such parties’ increasing attempts to
make themselves look more acceptable and to move closer to the
mainstream. The biological racism of their older iterations is not electorally
successful – or even ‘acceptable’ on the fringes of mainstream party politics
in Northern and Western Europe. As a result, these parties have had to
streamline their message, learn to sell it in more sophisticated ways, and
adopt both a language and positions that can bring them closer to electoral
success (see Akkerman, de Lange, and Rooduijn 2016).
Beyond this, the strategic use of liberal discourse gives the populist radical
right an apparently ‘honourable’ and ‘rational’ way to frame its
Islamophobia. As noted, the appeal to ‘Enlightenment values’ and the
cribbing of the discourse of liberalism are options likely to be far more
attractive or acceptable to audiences in these contexts than outright
xenophobia. This development has gone hand in hand with the embrace of
philosemitism, associated with a number of figures on the populist right
(Brubaker 2017: 1202). In sharp contrast to their anti-Semitic forebears,
many such figures see Jews now as part of the ‘enlightened western’
civilisation that must be defended against Islam. Indeed, Trump’s moving
the US embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem speaks to this, as does
Wilders’ (2010) portrayal of Jerusalem as the ‘frontier’ of the West against
Islam: ‘if Jerusalem falls into the hands of the Muslims, Athens and Rome
will be next’. The argument here is that ‘[w]estern culture is essentially
liberal, and liberal values can only be defended against Islam by way of a
cultural war. As Islam is essentially an anti-liberal religion, in this view, it
should be rejected wholesale’ (Akkerman 2005: 348). This draws a clear
line between those who profess to be in favour of liberal values – populists
and ‘the people’ – and those accused of being opposed to them – Muslims
and ‘the elite’; and the latter is portrayed as abetting and looking favourably
upon the Islamisation of Western civilisation. In 2017 Wilders argued that
‘almost all politicians of the established parties are promoting Islamization’
and that ‘the establishment, the elite such as universities, churches, unions,
the media, politicians put our enforced freedoms at stake’ (in PVV Fractie
Noord-Brabant 2017).

The Populist Left, Liberalism and Pluralism

What about the populist left? While it is quite clear that liberalism is used
only selectively – and ultimately to illiberal ends – by the populist radical
right, to some extent it is more difficult to make a case for the populist left,
whose commitment to some of the core elements of liberalism seems, on
the face of it, more genuine, certain liberal values being reflected not only
in left-wing populists’ discourse (e.g. their pluralist and sometimes
heterogenous conception of ‘the people’), but also in their party platforms,
which often address the concerns of a pluralist ‘people’ in an arguably more
substantive manner than do the platforms of the populist right.
This appears most clearly when the question of diversity and pluralism is at
stake. While a significant number of scholars have made the claim that
populism is opposed to pluralism on the grounds that it puts forth a
characterisation of ‘the people’ as a homogenous entity, this simply does
not line up empirically with the experience we have of several parties,
actors and movements that have been broadly identified as left-wing
populists. For example, as mentioned in Chapter 2 , Mudde’s influential
definition depicts populism as ‘a thin-centered ideology that considers
society to be ultimately separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic
camps, “the pure people” versus “the corrupt elite”’ (Mudde 2004: 543,
emphases mine), while Müller similarly claims that populism ‘sets a
morally pure and fully unified […] people against elites who are deemed
corrupt’ (Müller 2016: 19–20, emphasis mine) and notes that ‘populists are
always antipluralist’ (2016: 20). Yet several prominent left-wing populists
of recent years have put forward characterisations of ‘the people’ that
cannot seriously be considered either ‘pure’ or ‘homogenous’. 1
Let us take, for example, the most well-known populist left parties to
emerge in Europe in the recent decade: Syriza in Greece and Podemos in
Spain. Both ‘embrace the project of a politically integrated and solidary
Europe, they defend immigrants and socially marginalized sectors, they
press a strong social rights agenda, they target not only political but also
economic and social elites and they claim to fight for popular sovereignty,
social justice and democratization’ (Kioupkiolis 2016: 100). Jean-Luc
Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise (Unbowed France) puts forward a
similarly progressive agenda, in which the party’s ideological platform
addresses issues of racism, the rights of people with different abilities, the
legalisation of individuals sans papiers , LGBTQ rights and gender
equality: hardly the programme of a ‘non-pluralist’ party with a
‘homogenous’ view of ‘the people’. Meanwhile, as noted in Chapter 3 , in
Latin America, Rafael Correa and Evo Morales ushered in new
constitutions that declared their respective countries, Ecuador and Bolivia,
to be plurinational states, literally recognising different national ‘peoples’
(plural) within the state. This is obviously not a ‘pure’ or ‘homogenous’
notion of ‘the people’, but rather one that legally and politically recognises
differences within the polity – although it must be acknowledged that, when
faced with the tension between recognising these different peoples in
practice, in the form of according them indigenous rights, and the lure of
the financial gains of widespread resource extraction, the latter certainly
won out.
This pluralism is evident in the familiar leaders and parties of the populist
left, but perhaps more so in the left-wing populist ‘movements of the
squares’ of the early 2010s, such as Occupy Wall Street and the Indignados
movements, which directly set ‘the people’ in the form of ‘the 99%’, or la
gente , against ‘the elite’ in the form of ‘the 1%’, or la casta (Gerbaudo
2017). These perceptions of ‘the people’ were not homogenous but rather
quite attuned to the intersectional nature of the identities that made up the
movements. As Aslanidis notes, both the Spanish and the Greek Indignados
‘highlighted the inclusiveness of the movement, portraying themselves as
originating from every section of society’ (Aslanidis 2016b: 311); indeed,
in the case of Occupy Wall Street, this inclusiveness extended practically to
the form of the movement’s famed consensus decision-making model,
which gave literally anyone who wanted to contribute a chance to speak and
be heard (often to the detriment of making decisions or getting things done).
While left-wing populists may still see the divide between ‘the people’ and
‘the elite’ as the primary cleavage in society, their ‘people’ is far from
uniform: as Watkins puts it in her overview of these movements, parties and
leaders, it is still ‘more or less informed by intersectional identity
consciousness, depending on national context’ (Watkins 2016: 28).
The more liberal credentials of left-wing populists are also clearer than
those of right-wing populists in their approach to issues around gender and
sexuality, at least in the European context. Podemos’ national party
platform, for example, argues for the need for a secretary of state for gender
equality, puts forward measures related to housing alternatives for victims
of domestic violence, and promises legislation against the discrimination of
people on the basis of sexuality as well as for the protection of the rights of
intersex and transgender people (Podemos 2019). Syriza, meanwhile,
brought about legislative changes that officially recognised same-sex
partnerships in 2015 (Petsinis 2016), and laws in 2017 that enable citizens
to determine their gender identity officially – no small feat in a country in
which the Greek Orthodox Church remains very powerful; and the
government minister for culture, Nikos Xydakis, clearly framed such
changes in liberal terms: ‘[t]his is about human and civil rights […] It is
about humanity, solidarity and dignity. There are times when politicians
have to be more progressive than society and I am delighted that Greece
will now be among the most liberal EU countries on this issue’ (quoted in
Smith 2017).
Meanwhile in Latin America the constitutions ushered in by Chávez,
Morales and Correa all protected gender and sexual rights to a degree
unprecedented in the region, Bolivia recognising sexual and reproductive
rights as constitutional rights and the Ecuadorian constitution specifically
ruling against discrimination on the basis of gender or sexuality (de la Torre
2017c: 22). Even more, Morales’ Movimiento al Socialismo (Movement for
Socialism; MAS) ushered in gender parity laws that granted women half of
the positions on candidate lists (Htun and Ossa 2013), while Morales’ MAS
and Chávez’s Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela (United Socialist Party
of Venezuela) had better representation of women in parliament than any
other parties, leading Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser (2015: 35) to argue that
‘that South American populists tend to advance gender equality in their
country’. However, in terms of outcomes, the actual evidence on the ground
is, at best, mixed: while laws and policies may have changed, traditional
views of the family continued to inform policymaking, and LGBTQ rights
either stalled or were never actually practically recognised (de la Torre
2017c). The overall picture of gender and sexuality in left-wing Latin
American populism is thus that such groups are discursively part of ‘the
people’ but that no concrete rights necessarily follow from this, which
raises the question of how liberal or pluralist the Latin American populist
left actually is in practice.
At a discursive level, an important reason why left-wing populism, unlike
its radical right-wing counterpart, is at least able to put forward a more
heterogenous characterisation of ‘the people’ is that its anti-elite focus is
often primarily directed towards socioeconomic concerns rather than on
identity-based sociocultural concerns (March 2007). While the populist
right has to dig in its heels in the identity wars when targeting immigrants –
an attack on a group, made on an ethnic or sociocultural basis, is
presumably going to necessitate the identification of ‘the people’ on a
similar basis, whether that is explicit or not – left-wing populists arguably
have more room to manoeuvre, as their characterisation of ‘the people’ can
be less about sociocultural or identity-based concerns and rather more about
wider material concerns, thus opening itself up to a more pluralistic and
diverse interpretation.
However, if we return to the different approaches outlined in Chapter 2 , the
question of left-wing populism and how it characterises ‘the people’
triggers some tricky questions about how we go about identifying cases of
populism. For some ideational scholars, any sign of a pluralist conception
of ‘the people’ automatically precludes the case in question from being
considered populist – even if they otherwise rail against ‘the elite’. Müller
argues that ‘[o]ne might not agree with their policy proposals, but neither
America’s Bernie Sanders supporters and democratic socialists, nor
Britain’s followers of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, are anti-pluralists.
They may advocate “for the many, not the few”, but they are hardly
operating with a notion of the pure people’ (Müller 2018). One would
assume that Podemos and the movements of the squares would equally be
thrown out of the populist category on this reading, on account of their
‘non-pure’ conception of ‘the people’. This does not mean there is no such
thing as left-wing populism in the eyes of ideational scholars – as Müller
(2018) notes, ‘[t]his is not to suggest that an inherently anti-liberal
populism cannot be found anywhere on the left: Venezuela’s disastrous
“socialism for the twenty-first century” is an obvious example’ – but it does
reveal rifts or inconsistencies in such approaches. For example, Mudde and
Rovira Kaltwasser (2017, 2018), despite agreeing with Müller that
populism is anti-pluralist (indeed, they claim that pluralism is one of
populism’s ‘opposites’), identify parties such as Podemos and Syriza and
movements such as Occupy Wall Street and the Indignados as cases of
populism, noting that the latter ‘tried to develop a definition of “the people”
that was inclusive to most marginalized minorities – including ethnic,
religious and sexual’ (Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser 2017: 48). Under a
strict reading of the ideational approach, a liberal or a pluralist populism
should not really be theoretically possible. In practice, however, it seems
that even for some ideational scholars there are shades of grey when it
comes to categorising cases.
So, in the face of such cases, why do scholars continually insist on
populism’s being an anti-pluralist phenomenon? The easy answer is that
many scholars in Europe and North America simply associate populism
with the populist radical right (see Stavrakakis et al. 2017). There are
understandable reasons for this association – for example, the populist
radical right has been more successful in terms of being elected and agenda-
setting in recent decades than the populist left; the media pay far more
attention to the populist right than to the populist left; and the insular and
Eurocentric nature of mainstream populism studies tends to pay only
passing and episodic attention to areas where the populist left has been
more successful, such as Latin America; 2 yet their existence does not
excuse intellectual slipperiness. The more complex answer is that a lot
actually hinges on what one means by ‘pluralist’ or ‘heterogenous’: if we
are talking about the make-up of ‘the people’ on a racial, ethnic, gender or
sexual identity basis, then the populist left is certainly more pluralist and
more in favour of heterogeneity than its right-wing counterpart (without
dismissing, of course, the fact that its perception of ‘the people’ always
involves the exclusion of ‘elites’, conservatives, big business and so on).
This is part of the reason why Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser (2013) argue
that there is a difference between the ‘inclusionary’ populism of the
populist left in Latin American and the ‘exclusionary’ populism of the
populist right in Europe. However, if we understand pluralism and
heterogeneity as a matter of accepting multiple accounts of the good in
society, or in terms of pluralism of ideas and political ideologies, we are on
much shakier ground claiming that left-wing populists have a hold on some
of the tenets of liberalism.
This is particularly evident in how left-wing populists deal with challenges
to their authority and vision when it comes to issues of free speech, the
media and the independence of institutions often considered vital to the
functioning of liberal democracy. On the media side of things, Waisbord has
demonstrated that Latin American populists of the left have practised
‘media statism’, whereby figures such as Chávez and Correa aimed to
strengthen ‘the media power of the President’ and exercised ‘tighter control
of the press through legislation and judicial decisions’ (Waisbord 2012:
508). Practically this saw the shutting down (or expropriation) of private
media companies that were critical of populist government; the offer of tax
breaks or import permits to government-friendly media outlets; the
introduction of vaguely worded laws about the media’s responsibilities
concerning ‘the maintenance of public order’ (so worded on purpose, as it
seems); and the frequent use of libel laws by Correa. Indeed, Correa is no
friend of journalists; he calls them ‘mafiosos , journalistic pornography,
human wretchedness, savage beasts, and idiots who publish trash’ (as
quoted in Conaghan and de la Torre 2008: 278). Overall, in Latin America,
Populism’s anti-liberalism on press issues is anchored in the conviction
that the state is necessarily a force of good that does not require strong
and effective checks and balances. Populist media policies, as well as its
conception of journalism, are embedded in the conviction that the state is
inherently a positive force of transformation, and therefore, that
accountability mechanisms (including a critical press) are not necessary.
(Waisbord 2012: 14–15)
Similarly, several left-wing populists have shown that they are no friends of
independent institutions, which are usually seen as diluting the voice of ‘the
people’. Correa, Chávez and Morales all stacked the courts with loyalists
(de la Torre 2013, 2017a), which means that, far from being non-partisan
bodies that should rule fairly on legal issues, these courts became
politicised tools of the ruling left-wing populist powers, helping to push
through constitutional change in favour of the incumbents. Unlike strictly
authoritarian takeovers of the courts, however, the decline of the
independence of the judiciary in Ecuador, Venezuela and Bolivia was a
result of ‘informal de facto procedures […] which allow the government to
point to its preservation of formal democratic institutions even as it subverts
them from within’ (Taylor 2014: 256). More recently, the Syriza
government in Greece was also accused of tampering with the courts: the
judiciary’s highest body in the country, the Greek Union of Judges and
Prosecutors, accused the government of ‘systematically attempting to
manipulate and fully control justice … so that it operates as a government
mechanism’ (see Hope 2017). Latin American populists have also targeted
non-governmental organisations, Chávez, Correa and Morales all having
tightened their monitory powers on NGOs. This move allowed them to
sanction or close down NGOs that deviated from the activities listed in their
statutes or interfered with, or undermined, public order (de la Torre 2017a).
This vague wording gives leaders a great deal of power and discretion in
how they interpret such ‘interferences’ or in how they decide what counts
as one.
All this points to what Weyland (2013: 19) has called the ‘discriminatory
legalism’ of the populist left in Latin America – its ‘discretionary use of the
law for political purposes’, which can be summarised by the maxim: ‘For
my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law!’ (2013: 23). Chávez is
undoubtably the model in the region: the threats to independent media, the
stacking of courts, and the delegitimisation of opposition voices and forces
have been emulated by others as a successful script to be followed, de la
Torre (2017a) speaking of a diffusion effect of the Bolivarian model.
Important to note here is that the novelty and appealing nature of this model
is that it has an ‘attractive face’ (Weyland 2013: 19): it is not outrightly
authoritarian, but rather ‘rooted in democratic traditions, not in fascist or
communist attacks against democracy’ (de la Torre 2017a: 1283). As de la
Torre notes, ‘Bolivarianism was conceived and perceived as an alternative
to the participatory and legitimacy deficits of liberal democracies and to the
inequalities produced by neoliberal policies’ (de la Torre 2017a: 1283), and
as a result this discriminatory legalism can often be explained away or
ignored on the basis of the ‘progressive rhetoric’ (Weyland 2013: 19) and
participatory models offered by left-wing populists. When the appeal or
efficacy of this model wears off – as it did in the case of Venezuela under
Maduro – the more brutal anti-pluralist and anti-liberal underpinnings are
clearly revealed. You can talk about a pluralist ‘people’ all you want; but, if
you are cracking down on NGOs, stacking the judiciary and muzzling the
press, this is distinctly illiberal. Here we see an important fault line between
the left-wing populism of Latin America and that of Western Europe: the
former is arguably far more illiberal than the latter.
With this taken on board, can the populist left be identified with any form of
liberalism, even if it only revolves around the characterisation of ‘the
people’? The first thing that should be noted is that, unlike the populist
right, the populist left very rarely claims the label of ‘liberal’ for itself. Left-
wing populist actors often associate this term instead with those on the
centre-left and centre-right who are seen to have compromised their values
and to have aligned themselves with neoliberalism and globalisation. If
there is any liberal tendency that the populist left draws on, it is – to return
to Gustavsson’s (2015) division between subtypes of liberalism (see p. 80 in
this chapter) – a ‘Reformation liberalism’. This, as opposed to
Enlightenment or romantic forms of liberalism, is one that has a
commitment to diversity and invokes tolerance as its ultimate goal. And,
while we may not go as far as to see populists as ‘tolerant’ – there’s little of
the liberal ‘live and let live’ philosophy in any ideological strain of
populism – the populist left’s embrace of diversity in its perception of ‘the
people’ is, at the very least, important to acknowledge.

Conclusion
Overall, while the populism versus liberalism binary might work neatly at a
conceptual level, this chapter has shown that the reality is much more
complex: radical right-wing populists increasingly mimic the language of
liberalism in their targeting of others and ‘the elite’, or even call themselves
‘liberals’, while left-wing populists tend to offer a more plural and
heterogenous conception of ‘the people’, one that can sometimes translate
into progressive policies in favour of the oft-ignored and underprivileged in
society (but sometimes it can go the other way, as seen in the divide
between left-wing populism in Latin America and Western Europe). In
short, populism is not necessarily the ‘opposite’ of liberalism, but can be
combined with it in different ways, to differing degrees of commitment and
of success.
In this regard, it is helpful to break these commitments down. The populist
radical right’s commitment to liberalism seems to operate merely at a
discursive level: arguments about free speech, gender equality and the
rights of sexual minorities are put to use to articulate a ‘liberal illiberalism’
that ultimately seeks to exclude others. These arguments tend to exploit a
‘romantic’ liberalism that values self-expression above all – hence the
constant harping about how, in the ‘good old days’, we were able to ‘say
what we want’ and how such rights have now been curtailed, owing to
increased immigration and elite collusion with minorities. The populist
left’s engagement with liberal values also operates at a discursive level,
with a more pluralistic and heterogenous conception of ‘the people’, but can
sometimes extend to a programmatic level, some left-wing populists
defending the rights of persecuted minorities within their party platforms
(although, as we have seen, this does not always produce concrete action).
A question that lingers here, however, is how much this commitment to
pluralism and diversity is a reflection of leftism rather than of populism.
This all circles back to the question of whether one sees populism primarily
as an ideology or as a discourse. If populism is a discourse, then there is
little problem with seeing it as compatible with pluralism: if left-wing
populists construct ‘the people’ as a diverse and heterogenous group, then
we can rightly say that they are pluralists, because the discourse – what
they say, how they speak, how they construct different identities within
their systems of meaning – is what matters. If we see populism as an
ideology, however – something that is more deep-seated, existing either as a
clearly articulated programme of beliefs or as a set of attitudes – we are on
shakier ground for considering left-wing populism’s liberal or pluralist
credentials, given the way in which left-wing populists in Latin America
have clearly undercut basic liberal conditions of what is considered
necessary for a liberal democracy to function properly.
None of this is to say that populists of either ideological stripe are full-
blown liberals. Instead, what the discussion in this chapter has aimed to
reveal is that claiming that populism and liberalism are mutually exclusive
is problematic. Not all populists are entirely anti-liberal, as we have seen –
or, to put it another way, some populists are ‘more liberal’ than others. This
can take the form of a differentiated view of ‘the people’, or of the adoption
of certain tropes of liberal discourse. This being said, there are populists
who are entirely opposed to liberalism, and are not even interested in
paying lip service to it. The most egregious example is Hungary’s Viktor
Orbán, who has explicitly stated his desire to turn Hungary into an ‘illiberal
democracy’. Elsewhere, the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte seems to take
great delight in flounting the rules of liberalism, while Thailand’s Thaksin
Shinawatra claimed to his supporters that ‘the bundle of liberal democracy
– rule of law, freedom of criticism, human rights, oversight by
parliamentary opposition, checks and balances on the executive – had done
little for them in the past’ (Phongpaichit and Baker 2009: 239), and asked
them to dump the system. We should not even entertain the idea that these
figures are in any way – institutionally, discursively, symbolically or
otherwise – aligned with any of the principles of liberalism, as they have
made clear time and time again. Nonetheless, the line between populism
and liberalism is arguably becoming less clear. As Freeden has written,
‘there can be substantial morphological overlap between the concepts and
vocabulary of populism and liberalism’ (Freeden 2008: 26), and we seem to
be witnessing how the ramifications of this overlap play out empirically
today. Hence we should be wary of seeing the line between liberalism and
populism as too clear-cut and instead take notice of how, why and when
they intersect in the contemporary political landscape.

Notes
1 This is a case that probably cannot be made even against the entirety of
the populist right: as Lucardie has written, ‘[c]ertainly liberal populists
like the Dutch Pim Fortuyn but also Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia
distinguish different classes within the people’ (Lucardie 2009: 321).
2 For a discussion of the ‘Atlantic bias’ of the literature on populism, see
Moffitt (2015b).
6
Populism and Democracy
Let’s face it. Talk about populism almost always comes down to this
question: is populism, ultimately, a good or a bad thing for democracy? The
fact that this question is so often raised – and so bitterly contested – is quite
revealing. It tell us that we are not dealing with something that can be easily
dismissed as a net positive or negative – it is not as if we were talking, say,
about fascism here (clearly not good for democracy), but we do not seem to
be talking about something like deliberation or increased political
participation either (clearly a good thing for democracy). Yet, although
partisans on each side of the populism–anti-populism divide put forward
strong arguments about its democratic or anti-democratic credentials, a fair
degree of confusion and ambivalence still marks the phenomenon in this
regard.
Why is this? The present chapter argues that how one goes about answering
the million-dollar question actually depends on the subtype of democracy
one favours: if it is liberal, then one will surely see populism as a threat to
checks and balances and to the protection of minorities, whereas if it is
radical, one will probably see populism as opening a space for the re-
constitution of ‘the people’ and the shaking up of a moribund post-
democratic political landscape. 1 To demonstrate this, the chapter outlines
and interrogates these central positions in the contemporary debate on
populism’s relationship to democracy. On the liberal side, it draws on the
work of scholars such as Müller (2016), Rummens (2017), Urbinati (2019)
and Mounk (2018) – almost all of whom come from the ideational camp –
to explain why such thinkers believe that populism is a threat, not just to
liberal democracy but to democracy in general , and what in their view
should be done to counter its effects. On the radical democratic side, it
draws on the influential work of Laclau (2005a), Mouffe (2018) and their
followers – almost all of whom belong to the discursive–performative camp
– to show why these thinkers believe that a strategy of left-wing populism is
the way forward in these ‘post-political’ times, what they see as its radically
democratic features, and how they construct this argument as a critique of
liberalism. 2
Contrasting and assessing these positions, the chapter argues that both sides
have distinct views on the potentiality of populism as well: liberals see
populism as a precursor to authoritarianism, whereas for radical democrats
left-wing populism announces the opening of a truly radical and plural
political order. The chapter considers the problems with these views – on
the liberal side, the increasing tendency to conflate the phenomena of
authoritarianism and populism and, on the radical side, the worrying
propensity to overlook the problems with the centrality of the populist
leader – and how this can sometimes lead to a selective interpretation of
populism’s democratic or anti-democratic credentials.

Liberal Democracy and Populism

We already know from the previous chapter why liberals see populism as a
threat to the principles of liberalism. But what do they hold against
populism in terms of its being a threat to liberal democracy ? At their root,
many of the concerns remain the same, but they have different ends – that
is, liberal democrats argue that the characteristics of populism that threaten
liberalism also threaten democracy. The main two threats in this regard are
its characterisation of ‘the people’ and its treatment of opposition. Let us
look at them one by one.
Liberal theorists argue that the central problem with populism when it
comes to democracy is its homogenous view of ‘the people’. For example,
Rummens contends that the issue is that ‘populism believes the will of the
people is singular, that it can be captured and represented directly by the
populist party and that it can be imposed on society as a whole even at the
expense of the individual freedom of parts of the citizenry’ (Rummens
2017: 561), while Müller notes that this ‘idea of the single, homogenous,
authentic people is a fantasy; as the philosopher Jürgen Habermas once put
it, “the people” can only appear in the plural’ (Müller 2016: 3–4). In the
eyes of liberal democrats, the problem here is not just one for liberalism (in
terms of the homogeneity of ‘the people’ violating the liberty and freedoms
of individuals) but one for democracy itself , in that democracy rests on the
assumption that there is no one ‘true’ voice of ‘the people’ waiting to be
found and expressed by any political representative, but that multiple and
opposing views exist within a polity. Democracy, in this view, is able to
take account of the plural peoples , as Müller’s invocation of Habermas
above puts it, whereas populism can only ever account for a singular ‘the
people’, which is opposed to ‘the elite’ and associated others. As Urbinati
lays out, populism raises a problem for democracy in this regard, in that ‘it
is impatient with the tension between pluralism of social interests and unity
of the polity’, offering ‘a representation of the people as one […] by
merging interests existing within society into a unified meaning that stands
for the whole’ (Urbinati 2017: 573). Here populism performs a synecdochic
function, ‘the people’ – a part of the polity – coming to stand for all
legitimate identities and views within the whole of the polity. In this regard,
populism’s promise to return power to ‘the people’ – as a kind of
majoritarian ‘back-to-basics’ version of democracy – should not be trusted:
Rummens argues that the idea of ‘populism as “pure democracy” does not
represent a constitutive pillar of liberal democracy, but rather an ideology
deeply at odds with its core values and procedures’ (Rummens 2017: 561).
The second central problem that liberals have with populism when it comes
to democracy is its treatment of opponents, namely that it tends to ‘refuse to
recognize any opposition as legitimate’ (Müller 2016: 3). This of course
stems from populism’s view that the voice of ‘the people’ is the only
legitimate voice in a democracy: if opponents express dissenting opinions,
those are not valid or acceptable, as only populists have access to the ‘true’
voice of ‘the people’. In liberals’ eyes, populists are engaged in a
Schmittian form of politics that functions as an endgame between friends
and enemies – one in which enemies are to be destroyed. Drawing on
Mouffe’s (2000) work on the tensions that characterise liberal democracy,
Rummens notes that one of the key strengths of liberal democracy is that it
allows us to move from this base form of antagonistic relationship – the
feeling of mutual enmity and conflict between political opponents that
drives them to want to destroy each other – to an agonistic relationship,
where such opponents, while they might completely disagree on most
substantive issues, at least recognise each other’s legitimacy within the
liberal democratic system and share a commitment to that system’s basic
values. In such circumstances,
 the tendency of populists to delegitimize their opponents is
underappreciated as both a defining trait of populism and […] a core
aspect of the threat populism poses to democracy. It is precisely this
delegitimization which explains the authoritarian tendencies of populism
and which explains why populist politicians can easily develop into
autocratic leaders. (Rummens 2017: 562)
Indeed, one does not have to look far to find examples of this kind of
delegitimisation at play. The Venezuelan experience under Chávez and then
Maduro, the Hungarian experience under Orbán, and the Turkish experience
under Erdoğan demonstrate that populists do have a clear drive to
delegitimise their opponents, often seeking to censor them or to draw away
their funding, or using the law, the courts or the media to curtail their voice
in a significant way.
Given that staunch liberal democrats see populism as a threat not only to
liberalism but also to democracy, they tend to reject a popular narrative that
has risen around populism in recent years. According to this narrative,
populism is a form of ‘illiberal democracy’, that is, a democracy without
rights, which appeared in response to an increasing ‘undemocratic
liberalism’, that is, an offer of rights without democracy (Mounk 2018;
Mudde 2015). For Müller, the term ‘illiberal democracy’ should not be
rejected on the grounds of being contradictory; he points to historical
examples such as that of European Christian Democrats, who were both
democratic and proudly illiberal, and thus fit the bill perfectly – because,
philosophically, liberalism was associated with individualism, materialism
and atheism, which they regarded as evils of capitalism that clashed with
their Christian values. He argues that the label should be rejected, however,
in the case of populists, as their illiberalism is not of the same ilk – it is not
a philosophical illiberalism, which could still combine with democracy, but
rather an institutional illiberalism, which cannot – given that it rides rough-
shot over courts, free media, the rights of minorities, the rights of the
opposition and so forth. These institutional protections, Müller believes, are
vital to the basic functioning of any democratic society, liberal or otherwise;
a polity in which, for example, the opportunities to formulate dissenting
opinions are seriously curtailed is a problem not just for liberalism, but for
democracy more generally. As he argues, ‘[w]e have to distinguish illiberal
societies from places where freedom of speech and assembly, media
pluralism, and the protection of minorities are under attack. These political
rights are not just about liberalism (or the rule of law); they are constitutive
of democracy as such’ (Müller 2016: 55).
So, if populism is a threat to democracy, what do liberal authors think that
we should do about it? There are opposing views in the political theory
literature on this question. On the one hand, liberals like Müller argue that
populists often do have a legitimate bone to pick, albeit one oft-expressed in
a worrying way, and thus, as long as populists remain within the bounds of
the law, opponents and the media have an obligation to engage and deal
with them as legitimate opponents (Müller 2016: 84). Even more, Müller
warns against the all-too-common strategy of pathologising populist
supporters – for example by promoting the idea that those who support
populists are xenophobic ‘modernisation losers’, 3 or by reproducing the
Clintonian analysis of populist supporters as ‘deplorables’; and he notes
that ‘[h]ere seemingly enlightened liberals seem to be repeating the very
exclusionary gesture of their illustrious nineteenth-century predecessors
who were wary of extending the franchise because the masses were “too
emotional” to exercise the vote responsibly’ (2016: 17). This, for Müller, is
a strategy that no doubt has the potential to feed into feelings of exclusion
and powerlessness – which, ironically, is likely to add more fuel to the
populist fire.
On the other hand, liberals like Rummens put forward a far more severe
argument about how to deal with populism: they invoke a version of the
militant democracy approach associated with Lowenstein (1937). Enemies
of liberal democracy – which Rummens thinks populists are – must have
their freedoms and rights curtailed, if democratic regimes are to be
protected in the long run. In this view, populist parties are essentially in the
same family as extremists, authoritarians and anti-democrats, since
Rummens argues that ‘populist parties should, as much as possible, not be
allowed to participate in government’ (Rummens 2017: 564). Even more,
he recommends the strategy of putting a cordon sanitaire around populists –
that is, the idea that other parties should ignore, oppose and refuse to
cooperate with them. This strategy was relatively successful against the
Vlaams Blok–Vlaams Belang (Flemish Block–Flemish Interest) in Belgium
(see Pauwels 2011) but failed in Sweden, where the use of the cordon
sanitaire against the Sverigedemokraterna (Sweden Democrats) seemed
only to feed the party’s anti-elite and populist credentials, as the party
received 17.5 per cent of the vote – its best result ever – in 2017.
Elsewhere, other liberals offer suggestions about the need ‘to unite citizens
around a common conception of their nation; to give them real hope for the
economic future; and to make them more resistant to the lies and hate they
encounter on social media each every day’ (Mounk 2018: 194) or ideas
such as wide-ranging structural reform around the acceleration of economic
growth, achieving full employment, and undergoing an ambiguous ‘cultural
shift’ (Galston 2018) to counter populism. All this sounds good from a
liberal–democratic perspective but fails to account for the fact that populists
have done rather well in countries that arguably already fulfil many of these
criteria, for example in Scandinavia, Switzerland, the Netherlands and New
Zealand, which shows that such strategies may not be too effective in
safeguarding liberal democracies against the perceived threat of populism.

Radical Democracy and Populism

If liberal democrats see populism as one of the biggest threats facing
democracy today, radical democrats arguably see it – at least in its left-wing
form – as the panacea to the multitude of problems that democracy is
currently facing. Against an increasingly closed political system, where
power is concentrated in the hands of a few and political courage seems to
be severely lacking, populism is regarded as having the ability to shake up
the status quo and renew democracy in the name of ‘the people’. The most
prominent authors associated with this view are the post-Marxist thinkers
Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, who over the past three decades have
built a case for populism as the way to bring about a truly radical
democracy. Given that Laclau is a key author and a major influence within
the discursive–performative tradition of understanding populism, it is
unsurprising that many sympathisers of left-wing populism can be located
within this theoretical approach.
Laclau and Mouffe’s case for populism relies on the premise that ‘the
construction of a “people” is the sine qua non of democratic functioning’
(Laclau 2005a: 169): in essence, the idea here is that, if there is not a
‘people’, there is no democracy. And, given that populism is perhaps the
form of politics that most explicitly concerns itself with the construction of
‘the people’, for such thinkers populism represents the pathway to a truly
radical democracy. Unlike forms of politics that construct their appeal
around political identities such as class, race, gender or sexuality, populism
constructs it around ‘the people’, which is a remarkably open and flexible
signifier, able to take in a wide array of identities or political demands; and
this explains why populism is an attractive prospect to radical democrats.
So, while appeals launched in the name of ‘the working class’, for example,
are necessarily limited to a particular socioeconomic stratum, appeals
launched in the name of ‘the people’ can ostensibly be addressed to anyone.
The flexibility, openness and indeterminacy of ‘the people’ as a signifier
thus function as its strength, as any number of political demands, struggles,
identities and appeals can be inscribed or read into it: basically, ‘the people’
can mean whatever you want it to mean.
If the construction of ‘the people’ is indeed the sine qua non of democracy,
how does this construction actually take place under populism? In his book
On Populist Reason , Laclau (2005a) puts forward an argument to this
effect. First he contends that the minimal unit of politico-social analysis is
not an identity (such as ‘I am a Marxist’), but rather a demand. A demand
can be something as mundane as a request, addressed to the local council,
for better bus routes in the area; or it could be as grand as a request that the
national government close the borders to immigrants, or introduce universal
basic income. As Laclau lays it out, in any political system, when a demand
is unsatisfied or remains unanswered and then encounters other unsatisfied
demands, all of them start to be linked together in an ‘equivalential chain’.
They share (a) the equivalence of being unsatisfied and (b) an antagonistic
relationship with the same enemy, namely ‘the system’, ‘the establishment’
or ‘the elite’ that refuses to accept or deal with the demands. A barrier thus
begins to form between those who make these demands and those who
frustrate them. From this point on, the equivalential chain, still relatively
loose, among the former – the group with unsatisfied demands – finds
identity and expression as ‘the people’, through the representation and
leadership of a populist figure, movement or party that is able to tap into
this frustration and to ask for changes to be made to the system (or even for
the system as a whole to be changed) in the name of ‘the people’. For
Laclau, all politics that relies on drawing clear lines between ‘the people’
and others is populist: ‘[i]f populism consists in postulating a radical
alternative within the communitarian space, a choice in the crossroads on
which the future of a given society hinges, does not populism become
synonymous with politics? The answer can only be affirmative’ (Laclau
2005b: 47).
This advocation of populism as a radically democratic form of politics is
framed in the context of a critique of liberalism. Radical democrats argue
that, unlike liberals, who allegedly nourish a naïve, utopian aim to
overcome political differences through consensus, populists clearly
understand that any political project is, at core, based on a division between
competing groups. According to them, liberals want just to ‘overcome’ or
‘move beyond’ ideological debate – which, in their eyes, means shutting it
down – whereas populists take these divisions seriously, thereby
reinvigorating politics. Populism, then, is not some anti-political project, as
is sometimes assumed, but is rather über-political: both the fact that it draws
a clear line between ‘the people’ and ‘the elite’ and its politicisation of the
frontier between the two are pure politics for radical democrats. For such
authors, these frontiers cannot be wished away or erased through hopes of
compromise and deliberation: radical democrats acknowledge instead ‘the
primary reality of strife in social life’ and ‘the integrative role that conflict
plays in modern democracy’ (Mouffe 2000: 113), and believe that
‘democratic politics must have a partisan character’ (Mouffe 2005b: 6).
These are views with which populists obviously concur.
Indeed, some radical democrats go so far as to blame liberals for the rise of
right-wing populism, which they attempt to counter through their
advocation of left-wing populism. For Mouffe, liberalism’s embrace of
technocracy, its fetishising of ‘rational’ and ‘sensible’ politics, and its
celebration of consensus have led to a ‘“post-political” situation [that] was
the origin of a process of disaffection with democratic institutions’ (Mouffe
2018: 4). Specifically, Mouffe takes aim at the shift of many social–
democratic parties towards the centre-right by way of emulating the Third
Way model of Tony Blair’s New Labour in the 1990s, and argues that they
ceded the ground to right-wing populists, insofar as the latter were the only
remaining voices against neoliberal globalisation in the electoral sphere.
Internalising Thatcher’s ‘there is no alternative’ (TINA) slogan, ‘social–
democratic parties have accepted the diktats of financial capitalism and the
limits they imposed to states’ interventions and their redistributive policies’
(Mouffe 2018: 17), thus reducing the real choice among substantive policy
issues offered to voters at the ballot box.
The other characteristic of populism that radical democrats admire is its
engagement with emotions and passions. While dominant models of liberal
and deliberative democracy look for a ‘rational’ and somewhat
dispassionate view of politics, in the eyes of radical democrats, one of
populism’s strengths is that it does not try to deny the core – perhaps even
primary – role of emotions in politics. Mouffe has argued that ‘right-wing
populist parties are often the only ones that attempt to mobilise passions
and create collective forms of identification’ (Mouffe 2005a: 55) and that
dominant (liberal) approaches to understanding populism miss the point, as
they use a ‘rationalistic theoretical framework […] inspired by […] an
economic or moral framework, which prevents them from realising the
ineradicability of antagonism, as well as the central role played by passions,
in the formation of collective political identities’ (Mouffe 2005a: 69).
Laclau meanwhile devoted a significant amount of space of On Populist
Reason to thinking through the role of affect in populism; more specifically,
he drew on psychoanalytical theory to consider how jouissance operates in
this sphere. For radical democrats, the task of politics is not to put
emotions, passions and affect to the side and debate policies ‘rationally’, on
their merits, but rather to acknowledge that such phenomena are at the very
heart of how political identities are constructed and operate; and populists
do this very well, as they draw heavily (and openly) on strong feelings of
love, excitement, and hope as well as on hate, disgust, revulsion and fear in
constructing their appeal to ‘the people’ and in managing the libidinal
relationship between populist leaders and their followers.
Overall, radical democrats argue that liberal democracy, as it currently
operates, is severely off balance. The underlying idea, premised on what has
been called the ‘two-strand model’ of liberal democracy (Abts and
Rummens 2007; Canovan 2004) or ‘the democratic paradox’ (Mouffe
2000), is that liberal democracy relies on the tension between its liberal
pillar and its democratic pillar. The liberal pillar emphasises the rights of
the individual and finds the ultimate authority of the state in the law,
whereas the democratic pillar emphasises participation and locates authority
within the sovereignty of ‘the people’. In ideal circumstances, these two
pillars should keep each other in check, the liberal pillar safeguarding
human rights and protecting minorities from the whims of the majority,
while the democratic pillar allows for the expression of the popular will and
for the possibility to reform constitutional matters. For radical democrats,
though, this balance has been severely upset: liberal democracy has swung
too far towards the liberal side and away from its democratic pillar. As
Mouffe argues,
the agonistic tension between the liberal and the democratic principles,
which is constitutive of liberal democracy, has been eliminated. With the
demise of the democratic values of equality and popular sovereignty, the
agnostic spaces where different projects of society could confront each
other have disappeared and their citizens have been deprived of the
possibility of exercising their democratic rights. To be sure, ‘democracy’
is still spoken of, but it has been reduced to its liberal component and it
only signifies the presence of free elections and the defence of human
rights. (Mouffe 2018: 16)
In such a situation, radical democrats argue that citizens have good reasons
to feel that areas of legitimate democratic disagreement have been taken out
of the realm of democratic politics, partly or entirely in favour of
technocratic decision-making – for example, economic vision is left to
central banks; trade policy is determined by business and government elites
at a transnational level; climate change mitigation is ignored despite public
attitudes in favour of it – while liberal institutions have gone far beyond
their original, more limited remits. For radical democrats, left-wing
populism offers a definitive break with this situation by repoliticising the
terrain on which politics takes place and by offering a political project that
firmly puts ‘the people’ back at the centre of political life.
It should be noted that, despite the heady academic language often used by
radical democrats, this is not just ‘high theory’ with no connection to the
real world of populist politics. Radical democratic thinkers have been
seriously influential in the world of left-wing populism; thus Laclau visited
Bolivia, Ecuador and Venezuela at the invitation of Morales, Correa and
Chávez (Precious 2009) and acted as an informal advisor to both Néstor and
Cristina Fernández de Kirchner in Argentina before his death in 2014 (Judis
2016b). Perhaps the clearest link between radical democratic theory and
left-wing populist politics can been seen in Spain, around Podemos: the
intellectuals who formed the party openly based their strategy on the
theories of Laclau and Mouffe (see Chazel and Fernández Vázquez 2019),
while Mouffe went so far as to release a book that consists of her own
conversations with Íñigo Errejón, the party’s political secretary at the time,
in which the two discuss the links between Laclau and Mouffe’s theoretical
work on populism and the political strategies put in place by Podemos
(Errejón and Mouffe 2016).

Populism’s Potentiality
As can be seen, liberal and radical democrats have very different ideas not
only as to how democracy should operate, but also as to whether populism
is a curse or a cure for the ailing contemporary liberal democracy. On one
side, liberal democrats point the finger at populists on the grounds that they
ignore or threaten the ‘liberal’ part of the liberal–democratic equation by
promoting majoritarianism, persecuting minorities and treating their
opponents as illegitimate; on the other side, radical democrats blame
liberals for ignoring the ‘democratic’ part of the liberal–democratic
equation and think that populism offers a way forward by reconstructing
popular identities around democratic demands in the name of ‘the people’.
Each side also proposes a distinct argument about the potentiality or
directionality of populism. Liberals tend to see populism as leading
inexorably towards forms of authoritarianism on both sides of the
ideological spectrum (whether in competitive or outright forms), 4 whereas
for radical democrats left-wing populism represents the opening of a radical
and plural political order. Populism’s supposed drift towards either of these
outcomes has important consequences for the way in which the authors who
assume it treat the cases they focus on; and it also reveals some of the
challenges that face each approach.
The presumed ‘authoritarian drift’ of populism is clearly evidenced in the
work of many prominent authors in the field. Mounk claims that populism
is ‘a prelude to autocratic rule […] it is easy for illiberal rulers to make the
transition from populism to dictatorship’ (Mounk 2018: 35), while Müller
argues that, when populists govern, ‘they will engage in occupying the
state, mass clientelism and corruption, and the suppression of anything like
a critical civil society’ (Müller 2016: 102). Urbinati, meanwhile, contends
that, while populism as a movement may fit in with democratic values (say,
in the form of the movements of the squares on the left, or the Tea Party on
the right), populism in power represents ‘an authoritarian rendering of how
democracy should be implemented’ (Urbinati 2019: 120). Elsewhere, a
number of liberal authors have even conflated or combined populism and
authoritarianism, referring to ‘populist authoritarianism’ (Inglehart and
Norris 2017; Tang 2016) or ‘authoritarian populism’ (Chacko and
Jayasuriya 2017; Mounk 2018; Norris and Inglehart 2019).
There are some areas of pressing concern here. While not disregarding the
important fact that a number of cases of populism have indeed gone down
the authoritarian path – as noted earlier, this has happened on the left (see
the examples of Chávez and Maduro in Venezuela) as well as on the right
(see the examples of Orbán in Hungary and Erdogan in Turkey) – it is
worth asking what is gained by running the phenomena together at a
conceptual level. Except in the work of Norris and Inglehart, who at least
use the description ‘authoritarian populism’ to measure parties on two
dimensions – authoritarian–liberal and populist–pluralist – this terminology
is unhelpful, confusing and conceptually murky: it ends up muddying the
waters. Moreover, the conflation of the two separate phenomena of
populism and authoritarianism is normatively loaded; this is clear from the
way in which the media and think tanks have picked up the terms and use
them to partisan ends (for example, since 2016 the Swedish neoliberal think
tank Timbro has published the Timbro Authoritarian Populism Index,
claiming that Podemos, Syriza, MoVimento 5 Stelle (5 Star Movement), die
Linke (the Left), La France Insoumise (France Unbowed) and the
Vänsterpartiet (Swedish Left Party) are all authoritarian parties – a claim
that seems to be based on the ideological leanings of the think tank far more
than on any serious conceptual or empirical analysis).
We also need to be wary of assumptions about the uniformity of this
directionality. As noted, while there is ample evidence of cases in which
populism has veered towards authoritarianism, this is by no means a
universal phenomenon, nor is populism’s ‘slide’ into authoritarianism
guaranteed when populists gain high office. Of those on the populist left
who have held power, it is ludicrous to claim that the likes of Tsipras have
‘made the transition from populism to dictatorship’ – in the words of
Mounk. 5 Similarly, on the populist right no one would seriously call the
governments of the Swiss People’s Party in Switzerland or Berlusconi’s
various prime-ministerships in Italy great victories for liberal democracy;
nevertheless, it is rather over the top to argue that these countries have
found themselves under ‘autocratic rule’.
Finally, it is important to note that sometimes populists are dealing with
political opponents who are authoritarian and that in those circumstances
populism can provide a challenge to corrupt and closed political systems.
One can think here of the Shinawatras and their supporters’ agitation
against the royal-aligned military junta in Thailand, of the role of
Solidarność (Solidarity) in bringing down the repressive Polish communist
government in the late 1980s, or of the Partido de la Revolución
Democrática (Party of the Democratic Revolution), which helped to shift
Mexico away from authoritarian rule. In this regard, populists can have can
have a ‘corrective’ effect insofar as they counter corruption or criminal
practices and actually contribute to bringing about democratisation,
although it should be noted that this experience pertains mainly to
autocratic and competitive authoritarian regimes rather than to liberal–
democratic ones (see Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser 2017: 86–92).
Radical democrats, on the other hand, can also be accused of conflating
terms and of occasionally engaging in conceptual sleights of hand; more
specifically, these regard whether they are talking about populism or about
what they see as a normatively desirable political regime – radical
democracy. This is most clearly illustrated by Laclau’s statement that
‘radical democracy is always populist’ (Laclau 2005a: 259): we are never
quite told whether the equivalence runs the other way too – whether
populism always is radically democratic. Moreover, there are times when
Laclau not only slips between radical democracy and populism, but more
broadly equates populism with hegemony and politics in general (Arditi
2010), so that it becomes unclear whether populism is one form of
(democratic) politics among others or a structuring feature of politics itself.
When it comes to populism’s democratic potential and its ability to open the
political order for radical democracy to emerge, the real sticking point for
radical democrats is the role of the leader. In their view, the leader is of
paramount importance in constructing ‘the people’; as Laclau (2005a: 100)
notes, ‘the symbolic unification of the group around an individuality – and
here I agree with Freud – is inherent to the formation of a “people”’. The
leader is the actor who draws together the unsatisfied demands of numerous
groups and helps them to form a collective identity as ‘the people’. Radical
democrats are ‘constructivists’ in every sense of the term; they believe that,
without a leader who undertakes his or her representative role, movements
remain unfocused, nebulous and ineffectual and demands remain
unconnected. Indeed, Mouffe (2013: 125) goes so far as to claim that a
‘pluralist democratic society cannot exist without representation’, thus
demonstrating the centrality of leaders in the radical democratic imaginary.
For radical democrats, no leader means no representation; no representation
means no ‘people’; and no ‘people’ means no radical democracy.
There is a lot riding on the leader’s shoulders in this formulation. While
populist leaders can indeed act as an important voice for disparate groups
with unsatisfied demands addressed to the system or to ‘the elite’ and can
thereby construct the identity of ‘the people’ by drawing these demands
together, it is worth asking whether this is not too much responsibility and
power for a single individual to shoulder, especially in a participatory and
pluralistic democracy. In an interview with the Argentinian newspaper La
Nación , Laclau was asked about the key role of the leader in his theory of
populism and whether it made superhuman demands of him or her. Laclau
brushed off the question, answering: ‘Of course it imposes a superhuman
role on the leader. But the leader’s humanity is, here as always, a limit on
what he or she can do’ (Laclau in Sehinkman 2014).
More worryingly, the concentration of power and responsibility in the hands
of one individual opens the door to claims of infallibility and
unchallengeability from that individual – after all, if she is the voice of ‘the
people’, who are you, the opponent, to question ‘the people’? As Arditi
(2007: 83) warns, when leaders start seeing themselves this way, ‘the
danger of an authoritarian streak enters the scene’ – a point that critics of
populism have made time and time again. This is something that Mouffe
(2018) has acknowledged, rightly noting that ‘[t]he role of the leader in the
populist strategy has always been a subject of criticism and it is the reason
why those movements are often accused of being authoritarian’. She goes
on to note, however, that strong leadership does not equal authoritarianism;
we can think of strong leaders like Nelson Mandela or Martin Luther King,
and no one in their right mind would accuse them of being authoritarian.
Instead, she argues, ‘[e]verything depends on the kind of relation that is
established between the leader and the people’. In right-wing populism, she
claims, ‘it is a very authoritarian relation where everything comes from the
top’, whereas in left-wing populism the leader functions as a primus inter
pares (first among equals) and constructs ‘a different kind of relation, less
vertical, between the leader and the people’ (Mouffe 2018: 70). This looks
like a rather generous reading of how left-wing populism tends to operate in
reality. It is telling that the term Mouffe chooses here is not ‘horizontal’ (or
even ‘rather horizontal’, which would arguably be far more in keeping with
the idea of ‘first among equals’) – but rather ‘less vertical’. The concern
this raises is that radical democrats are side-stepping the clearly worrying
trends that have marked their favoured cases of left-wing populism –
Podemos, Syriza, the Movimiento al Socialismo (Movement for Socialism,
i.e. Evo Morales’ party in Bolivia) – in which promises of horizontalism
and participation have given way to a far more centralised, personalised and
vertical mode of decision-making, and that they remain relatively silent on
other cases of left-wing populism that well and truly crossed the line into
authoritarianism and corruption. 6
Above all, the question that lingers here is what happens to the populist
leader once radical democracy has been attained: is he part of a vanguard
that should step back into the crowd, as democracy is now adequately plural
and radical? Should her grip on authority become less weak? Does the
Lefortian ‘empty place of power’ need to become empty once more? And,
more broadly, does populism represent the opening of an interregnum
between post-politics and radical democracy, or does it embody radical
democracy itself? Of course, this kind of questioning may be forcing,
unfairly, a goal-oriented and strictly linear logic on radical democrats’
theorising. Laclau and Mouffe have made it clear that radical democracy
can never be ‘fully’ realised: that would represent a closure of questioning
the political order. But Mouffe’s (2018: 79–85) talk of ‘the populist
moment’ does little to clear up this confusion; it gives the impression that
this is a moment with a distinct before and after. The question is: what
comes next?

Conclusion
In 1998 Urbinati wrote that ‘the debate over the meaning of populism turns
out to be a debate over the interpretation of democracy’ (Urbinati 1998:
116); and, today, more than two decades later, this insight may be truer than
ever. As this chapter has shown, the battle between liberal and radical views
of democracy produces very different diagnoses, liberal democrats seeing
populism as democracy’s foe and radical democrats seeing it as
democracy’s potential saviour. As populists continue to perform well at the
ballot box, as they win positions of power or form coalitions, and as we find
ourselves living through an era characterised by what Mudde (2004) has
called ‘the populist zeitgeist’, these arguments are not merely theoretical;
they have important practical ramifications on how political parties, the
media and various organisations approach and deal with populists and on
how activists and social movements choose to appropriate or reject the
populist style. Should populists be rejected at all costs? Is populism what
one needs if one is to take power? Is left-wing populism the only antidote to
right-wing populism? These kinds of questions are not going to go away
any time soon, nor can they be resolved easily.
Yet we cannot just leave theory behind and aim to study populism at a
purely empirical level, so as to ‘come to a non-normative position on the
relationship between populism and democracy’ (Mudde and Rovira
Kaltwasser 2012a: 16). Theory, as I have attempted to show throughout this
book, clearly has a significant bearing on how we perceive populism, what
we consider to be illustrations of it, and how we think that democracy
functions best. Paulina Ochoa Espejo makes an important point about the
problems of trying to ‘escape’ theory in the study of populism: she argues
that ‘scholars who study the phenomenon empirically and claim to eschew
normative judgments […] unwittingly introduce such judgments by virtue
of accepting the distinction between democracy and populism’ (Ochoa
Espejo 2015: 60); this distinction automatically makes populism external to
democracy, thus setting it up to fail the democratic test. Radical democrats,
on the other hand, tend to go the other way, collapsing populism together
with radical democracy – recall Laclau’s (2005a: 259) claim that ‘radical
democracy is always populist’ – and thus not really allowing us to question
its democratic credentials, as it becomes synonymous with their favoured
normative vision of democracy. Clearly we have run into a problem:
populism is either completely ‘outside’ or completely ‘inside’ democracy.
Yet neither of these positions tends to line up with the metaphors that have
been used elsewhere to characterise populism’s relationship with
democracy in the political theory literature – as its ‘shadow’ (Canovan
1999), its ‘mirror’ (Panizza 2005), and its ‘spectre’ (Albertazzi and
McDonnell 2008b; Arditi 2004). These kinds of metaphors suggest that
democracy and populism are intertwined – that is, they are not completely
external to each other, yet they are also not one and the same thing. Arditi’s
(2007) suggestion that we should see populism as an ‘internal periphery of
democracy’ is perhaps most useful in guiding us through this seemingly
paradoxical relationship. Arditi explains that a
periphery, internal or not, is a hazy territory that indicates the outermost
limit of an inside and the beginning of the outside of a system, a grey
area where the distinction between inside and outside is an effect of
polemic. Populism can remain within the bounds of democracy, but also
reach the point where they enter into conflict and go their own separate
ways. (Arditi 2007: 87)
Hovering on this boundary, populism offers a set of democratic tendencies –
its ability to make politics more accessible and ‘popular’; its capacity to
encompass otherwise excluded, disenchanted or disenfranchised identities
within its construction of ‘the people’; its disruptive talent for revealing
corruption, collusion or disfunction in democratic systems – alongside a set
of worrying anti-democratic tendencies – its denial of complexity; its
tendency towards extreme personalisation; its poor treatment of the
opposition; and, in right-wing forms, its targeting of others associated with
‘the elite’ (Moffitt 2016). What is perhaps most confusing is that these
tendencies can often be in play at the very same time, working in tension,
one set against the other, as they push and pull the boundary of democracy:
it is not uncommon, for example, for a populist to expand democratically
the viable conception of ‘the people’ in a polity and at the very same time to
strengthen her own political power in democratically unsavoury ways.
Determining the moment when populism does ‘cross the line and become[s]
an underside of democracy is a matter of political judgement and cannot be
settled by conceptual fiat’ (Arditi 2007: 87); and this is perhaps the greatest
difficulty. In such a situation it is not our task to seek a final answer as to
whether populism is democratic or not; we should rather try to recognise
the ambiguities and paradoxes built into this phenomenon and to use our
political judgement honestly, unflinchingly and fairly.
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Index
abortion, 79
accountability, 73 , 89
agonism, 97 , 104
Akkerman, Tjitske, 79
Albertazzi, Daniele, 13 , 46
Alternative für Deutschland, 1 , 2 , 40 , 46
alt-right, 3 , 39 , 78
anarchism, 3
antagonism, 34 , 50 , 52 , 64 –5 , 73 , 74 , 97 , 101 –2 , 103
anti-elitism, 2 , 9 , 18 , 26 –7 , 36 , 86 , 100
anti-Semitism, 82
Arditi, Benjamin, 110 , 113
Argentina, 22 , 31 , 57 , 105
Aslanidis, Paris, 66 –7 , 85
Athenian democracy, 5
Austin, J. L., 23
Australia, 22 , 38
Austria, 40
authoritarianism, 3 , 8 , 33 , 49 , 67 , 74 , 95 , 106 –8 , 110 –11
autonomy, 72 , 80 –1
Bachelet, Michelle, 20 , 57
Bale, Tim, 57 –8
Bannon, Steve, 2
Barr, Robert R., 18
Belgium, 46 , 100
Berlusconi, Silvio, 20 , 25 , 84 , 108
Bharatiya Janata Party, 37
binary concepts, 11 , 16 , 25 –7
Blair, Tony, 2 , 103
Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA), 46
Bolivarian Circles, 56
Bolivia, 1 , 42 , 56 , 67 , 84 , 86 , 89 –90 , 105
Bourdieu, Pierre, 24
Brazil, 57
Brexit, 1 , 3 , 55
Brexit Party, 38
Britain see United Kingdom
Brubaker, Rogers, 78
Butler, Judith, 23
Canada, 6 , 44
Canovan, Margaret, 4 , 13 , 14 , 24
capitalism, 56 , 61 , 63 , 64 –5 , 98 , 103
Castañeda, Jorge, 57
Catalonia, 42 , 46
censorship, 78 , 98
Chartists, 19
chauvinism, 49
Chávez, Hugo, 1 , 6 , 8 , 18 , 20 , 25 , 40 , 43 , 50 , 56 , 57 , 67 , 86 , 89 –90
, 98 , 105 , 107
checks and balances, 89 , 93 , 94
Cheeseman, Nic, 41
Chile, 57
China, 48
Chomsky, Noam, 58
Christian Democrats, 98
Christian secularism, 78 , 80
Christianity, 78 , 80 –1 , 98
citizenship, 35 , 37 , 41
civic nationalism, 6 , 31 , 37 , 41 –3
class consciousness, 63
climate change, 105
Clinton, Hillary, 58 , 99
Collor de Mello, Fernando, 20 , 57
Communal Councils, 56
comparative politics, 3 , 16 –17 , 24
consensus, 74 , 85 , 102 –3
conservatism, 15 , 74 , 79
Conte, Giuseppe, 2
Corbyn, Jeremy, 55 , 57 –8 , 63 , 68 , 69 , 87 , 107
core concepts, 14
Correa, Rafael, 6 , 18 , 20 , 40 , 42 , 50 , 56 , 67 , 84 , 86 , 89 –90 , 105
corruption, 13 , 45 , 83 –4 , 106 , 108 , 111 , 113
courts, 73 , 89 –90 , 98
crisis narratives, 10 , 22
critical discourse analysis, 21 , 24 , 25
Cuba, 56
cultural relativism, 75 , 77 , 80
Current Affairs , 68
Dansk Folkeparti, 76 , 78
Davao City, 44 –5
De Cleen, Benjamin, 31 , 34 –5 , 36 –7 , 40 , 41 , 47
de la Torre, Carlos, 42 –3 , 90
Debs, Eugene V., 58
degreeism see gradational concepts
delegitimisation, 90 , 97 –8 , 106
demands, 101 –2 , 109
democracy, 2 –5 , 7 –8 , 23 , 39 , 42 –3 , 47 –8 , 52 , 56 , 59 –60 , 64 –6 , 71
, 73 –4 , 84 , 94 –114
Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM25), 6 , 47 –8
democratic paradox, 104
Democratic Party, 58
democratic socialism, 50 , 57 –9 , 68 , 87
Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), 68
democratisation, 48 , 84
demos , 5 , 54
Denmark, 74 , 76 , 78
di Tella, Torcuato S., 19
dichotomous concepts see binary concepts
digital democracy, 60
direct democracy, 54 , 56
discourse, 21 –2 , 24 –5 , 34 –5 , 55 , 58 , 78 , 79 , 81 –3 , 86 , 92
discriminatory legalism, 90
discursive–performative approaches, 5 , 11 –12 , 21 –9 , 31 , 34 –5 , 40 , 49
, 55 , 58 , 92 , 95 , 100 –1
diversity, 7 , 72 , 80 , 83 , 91 , 92
domestic violence, 85
Doyle, David, 52 –3
drugs, 1 , 75 , 79
Dutch Socialist Party, 59
Duterte, Rodrigo, 1 , 8 , 30 , 44 –5 , 93
echo chambers, 9
economic elites, 53 , 84
Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), 7 , 61
economic inequality, 45 , 52 –3 , 64 –5 , 66
economic sovereignty, 41
Ecuador, 42 , 56 , 67 , 84 , 86 , 89 –90 , 105
education, 52 , 56 , 57 , 58 , 61
emotion, 103 –4
employment, 53 , 56 , 100 ; see also labour relations
English Defence League, 38
Enlightenment liberalism, 80 –1
Enlightenment values, 75 , 80 –1 , 82
environment, 14 , 59 , 68 , 105
equality, 7 , 54 , 59 , 62 , 71 , 104
Erdoğan, Tecep Tayyip, 30 , 98 , 107
Errejón, Íñigo, 64 , 105
Essex School, 21 , 24 –5 , 34
Estrada, Joseph, 45
ethnic nationalism, 6 , 31 , 37 –40 , 42
ethnopopulism, 41
Europe of Freedom and Direct Democracy group, 46 –7
Europe of Nations and Freedom group, 46 –7
European Parliament, 46 –7 , 60
European Union, 38 , 41 , 46 –7
Euroscepticism, 75
euthanasia, 75 , 79
exclusionary populism, 16 , 33 , 36 –7 , 81 , 88 , 92 , 99
exploitation, 52 , 65
Fairclough, Norman, 21
fake news, 3 , 9
Farage, Nigel, 8 , 38 –9 , 47 , 55 , 77 –8 , 79
fascism, 3 , 39 , 94
feminism, 14 , 15
Fieschi, Catherine, 14
Filc, Dani, 36
Ford, Doug, 44
Ford, Rob, 6 , 44
Fortuyn, Pim, 20 , 75 –6 , 77 , 78 , 80 , 84
France, 40 , 42 , 59 , 60 , 67 , 84 , 107
France Insoumise, La, 42 , 59 , 60 , 67 , 84 , 107
Francis, Pope, 2
free speech, 75 , 77 –8 , 79 , 80 , 81 , 88 , 92 , 98 ; see also self-expression
Freeden, Michael, 12 , 14 –15 , 51 , 54 , 73 , 80 , 93
Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs, 40 , 46
Fremskrittspartiet, 77
Freud, Sigmund, 109
Front National see Rassemblement National
Fujimori, Alberto, 18 , 20 , 57
fuzzy-set approaches, 20
Gandhi, Mahatma, 19
Gauland, Alexander, 2
gender equality, 7 , 56 , 71 , 76 –7 , 79 , 84 , 85 –6 , 92
German Left Party, 59 , 107
Germany, 2 , 40 , 59 , 107
Giovannini, Arianna, 46
globalisation, 60 , 63 , 91 , 103
Godwin’s law, 49
gradational concepts, 11 , 16 , 19 , 24 , 25 –7 , 28
Gramsci, Antonio, 14 , 21
Greece, 22 , 59 –60 , 66 –7 , 84 –6 , 89 –90 , 107
Green New Deal, 68
green politics, 14 , 68
group identity, 23 , 52
Guardian , 3
Gustavsson, Gina, 80 , 91
Habermas, Jürgen, 96
Haider, Jörg, 20
Halikiopoulou, Daphne, 82
Hanson, Pauline, 38
hate speech, 38 , 77
Hawkins, Kirk A., 11 , 20 , 21 , 26
healthcare, 58 , 61
hegemony, 21 , 24 , 25 , 109
Hindu nationalism, 37
history, as arena of change, 54 –5
homogeneity (of the people), 13 –14 , 36 , 40 , 83 –5 , 96
homosexuality, 75 –6 , 78 , 79 , 84 , 85 –6
human nature, 53
human relationship, 52
human welfare, 52 –3
Hungary, 74 , 93 , 98 , 107
ideational approaches, 5 , 11 –17 , 25 –9 , 31 , 35 –6 , 40 , 49 , 55 , 57 –8 ,
87 , 92 , 95
Iglesias, Pablo, 20 , 48 , 59
illiberal democracy, 71 , 73 –4 , 93 , 98
illiberalism, 71 –4 , 79 , 81 , 90 –1 , 92 , 93 , 98
immigration, 1 , 7 , 37 –8 , 71 , 74 , 75 –7 , 84 , 86 , 92
inclusionary populism, 16 , 36 , 42 –3 , 85 , 88
India, 18 , 37
indigenous rights, 42 , 56 , 84
Indignados movement, 1 , 48 , 53 , 66 –7 , 85 , 87
individualism, 52 , 73 , 75 , 79 , 80 , 96 , 98 , 104
industrialisation, 63
Inglehart, Ronald, 107
institutional illiberalism, 98
International Monetary Fund, 41
international populism, 6 , 31 , 46 –7
intersectionality, 42 , 85
intersex people, 85
Islam, 38 , 42 , 75 –7 , 78 , 79 –80 , 81 , 82 –3
Israel, 82
Italy, 2 , 6 , 45 –6 , 107 , 108
Jacobin , 68
Jansen, Robert S., 12 , 17 –18 , 19
Jerusalem, 82
Jobbik, 74
jouissance , 103
journalism see media
Judaism, 78 , 80 , 82
Judeo-Christian culture, 78 , 80
judiciary see courts
Judis, John, 39
Juncker, Jean-Claude, 2
Kant, Immanuel, 72 , 80
Kenny, Paul D., 18
King, Martin Luther, 110
Kirchner, Néstor, 105
Kirchner, Cristina Fernández de, 105
Knight, Alan, 24
Krastev, Ivan, 73
Labour Party, 57 –8 , 68 , 103
labour relations, 52 , 53 ; see also employment
Laclau, Ernesto, 4 , 7 , 12 , 21 , 23 –5 , 51 , 52 , 64 –5 , 95 , 100 –2 , 103 ,
105 , 109 –10 , 111 , 112
land redistribution, 61
land rights, 56
language, 21 –2
Larmer, Miles, 41
Le Pen, Jean-Marie, 20
Le Pen, Marine, 9 , 42 , 60
leaders, 10 , 17 –19 , 27 , 28 , 63 , 95 , 109 –11
left-wing politics, 1 –3 , 6 –7 , 15 , 16 , 18 , 25 , 31 , 33 , 36 , 40 –3 , 46 , 50
–72 , 83 –92 , 95 , 100 –3 , 105 –8 , 110 –11
Lega dei Ticinesi, 46
Lega Nord, 6 , 45 –6
Leninism, 61 , 63
Levellers, 19
liberal democracy, 7 –8 , 39 , 56 , 71 , 90 , 94 –100 , 102 –6 , 111 –12
liberalism, 4 , 7 , 14 , 52 , 63 , 71 –93 , 95 , 96 , 102 –3
libertarianism, 79
liberty, 73 , 75 , 79 , 80
Lijst Pim Fortuyn, 76 , 79
linguistics, 21 , 23
Locke, John, 72 , 80
Loomio, 60
López Obrador, Andrés Manuel, 57
Lowenstein, Karl, 99
Lucardie, Paul, 84
Lula da Silva, Luiz Inácio, 20 , 57
McCarthyism, 13 , 68
McDonnell, Duncan, 13
machismo, 49
MacRae, Donald, 13
Madrid, Raul L., 41
Maduro, Nicolás, 67 , 90 , 98 , 107
majoritarianism, 39 , 74 , 97 , 106
Malema, Julius, 61
Mandela, Nelson, 110
Manila, 45
Manning, Preston, 79
Maoism, 66
March, Luke, 59 , 62
Marx, Karl, 52 , 53 , 54
Marxism, 4 , 14 , 59 , 61 , 62 , 63 , 67
Maya, Margarita López, 56
media, 9 , 19 , 44 , 59 , 73 , 78 , 88 –9 , 90 , 98 –9
Mélenchon, Jean-Luc, 42 , 59 , 60 , 84
Menem, Carlos, 18 , 20 , 57
Mexico, 57 , 108
militant democracy, 99
Mill, J. S., 72 , 80
minimum wage policies, 53 , 56
minority groups, 37 , 39 , 44 , 62 , 72 , 73 –4 , 75 , 79 , 87 , 92 , 94 , 98 ,
104 , 106
misogyny, 76 –7
mobilisation, 17 , 18 , 19 , 62
Mock, Steven, 82
modernisation theory, 20 –1
Modi, Narendra, 9 , 30 , 37
Momentum, 68
Morales, Evo, 1 , 6 , 18 , 20 , 40 –2 , 48 , 50 , 56 , 67 –8 , 84 , 86 , 89 –90 ,
105
Moreno, Lenin, 67
Morocco, 38 , 75 –6
Mouffe, Chantal, 4 , 7 , 12 , 21 , 23 –5 , 28 , 51 , 63 –7 , 95 , 97 , 100 –1 ,
103 –5 , 109 –11
Mounk, Yascha, 71 , 95 , 106 , 107
movements of the squares, 66 –7 , 85 , 87 , 106 , 107 ; see also Indignados
movement; Occupy Wall Street movement
MoVimento 5 Stelle, 2 , 46 , 107
Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS), 68 , 86 , 110
Mudde, Cas, 3 , 4 , 11 –14 , 16 , 17 , 24 , 26 –7 , 31 , 33 , 36 –8 , 40 , 71 ,
73 , 76 , 83 , 86 –8 , 108 , 112
Muhammad, Prophet, 81
Müller, Jan-Werner, 4 , 12 , 13 –14 , 26 –8 , 36 , 37 , 73 , 83 –4 , 87 , 95 , 96
, 98 –9 , 106 , 108
multiculturalism, 38 , 42 , 77 , 80
municipal populism, 6 , 31 , 44 –5
Narodniks, 13 , 19 , 50
national sovereignty, 41
nationalisation, 57 , 61
nationalism, 1 , 4 , 6 , 15 , 18 , 30 –49
NationBuilder software, 60
nativism, 1 , 4 , 6 , 31 , 33 , 37 –40 , 43 –6 , 49
neoliberalism, 18 , 41 , 53 , 56 , 57 , 60 , 63 –4 , 69 , 90 , 91 , 103
neopopulism, 18 , 57
Netherlands, 1 , 38 , 40 , 59 , 75 –6 , 77 , 78 –9 , 81 , 100
New Democracy (Greece), 67
New Labour, 103
New Zealand, 100
non-governmental organisations (NGOs), 90
non-verbal communication, 22
Norris, Pippa, 107
Norway, 77
nostalgia, 55 , 92
Ocasio-Cortez, Alexandria, 68
Occupy Wall Street movement, 1 , 27 , 48 , 53 , 66 , 85 , 87
Ochoa Espejo, Paulina, 112
Olson, Kevin, 65
One Nation, 1 , 38
Ontario, 44
Orbán, Viktor, 93 , 98 , 107
Ostiguy, Pierre, 12 , 22
othering, 10 , 35 , 38 , 39 , 49 , 81
Padania, 45 –6
Papandreou, George, 20
Pappas, Takis S., 40 , 71 , 73 –4
Partido de la Revolución Democrática, 108
Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE), 60
Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela, 86
Partij voor de Vrijheid, 38 , 40 , 46 , 79
Paul, Rand, 79
Paul, Ron, 79
People’s Party, 13 , 50
performance, 22 , 23
performativity, 23 , 24
peripheral concepts, 14
Perón, Juan, 8 , 25 , 31 , 40 , 43
Peru, 57
Philippines, 1 , 22 , 44 –5 , 93
philosemitism, 82
philosophical illiberalism, 98
Piven, Frances Fox, 58
Plaid Cymru, 46
Plaza Podemos, 60
pluralism, 7 , 26 –7 , 42 , 55 , 59 –60 , 64 , 72 , 73 , 81 , 83 –92 , 96 , 108 ,
109
plurinationalism, 42 , 84
Podemos, 1 , 2 , 7 , 27 , 41 , 42 , 50 , 55 , 59 , 60 , 64 , 67 , 84 –5 , 87 , 105 ,
107 , 110
Poland, 108
political correctness, 75 , 77 –8 , 81
political opposition, 8 , 90 , 93 , 96 , 97 –9 , 106 , 108 , 113
political participation, 54 , 56 , 59 –60 , 90 , 94 , 104 , 109 , 110 –11
political styles, 22 , 74
political theory, 3 –6 , 112 –13
Populism: Its Meanings and National Characteristics (Ionescu and
Gellner), 11 , 19
positivism, 17
post-democracy, 8 , 94
post-positivism, 17
poststructuralism, 4 , 21 , 23
post-truth, 3
potentiality, 8 , 95 , 105 –11
poverty, 52 –3 , 56
power, 13 , 17 –18 , 21 , 32 , 34 –5 , 41 , 49 , 54 , 73 , 97 , 100 , 109 –11
press see media
progress, 54 –5 , 73 , 80
Progress Party (Denmark), 74
Progressive Conservative Party of Canada, 44
prostitution, 79
provincial populism, 31 , 44 –5
psychoanalysis, 4 , 23 , 103
Putin, Vladimir, 48
racism, 3 , 37 , 38 –9 , 75 –6 , 81 , 82 , 84 ; see also xenophobia
radical democracy, 8 , 94 –5 , 100 –6 , 108 –12
radical right, 6 , 16 , 32 –3 , 36 –40 , 46 , 53 , 75 –83 , 88 , 91 –2
Ragin, Charles, 12 , 20
rape, 77
Rassemblement National, 40 , 42 , 46
rationality, 73 , 80 , 103
Rawls, John, 73
Reddit, 60
redistribution, 52 –3 , 54 , 103
Reformation liberalism, 80 , 91
regionalist populism, 6 , 31 , 45 –6
representative democracy, 56 , 73
Republican Party, 9 , 76 , 79
Resnick, Danielle, 18
revolution, 63
right-wing politics, 1 , 3 , 6 –7 , 15 –16 , 18 , 31 –3 , 36 –40 , 44 , 46 –7 , 52
–3 , 55 , 71 –2 , 75 –83 , 88 , 91 –2 , 102 –3 , 106 –8 , 110 , 113
Riker, William H., 73
Roberts, Kenneth M., 12 , 18
Robinson, Tommy, 38 , 78
romantic liberalism, 80 , 81 , 92
Rooduijn, Matthijs, 13
Roosevelt, Franklin, 58
Rovira Kaltwasser, Cristóbal, 11 , 24 , 26 –7 , 36 , 76 , 86 , 87 , 88 , 108
Rummens, Stefan, 95 , 96 , 97 , 99 –100 , 108
Russia, 13 , 48 , 50 ; see also Soviet Union
Rydgren, Jens, 39
Saint-Simon, Henri de, 53
Salvini, Matteo, 45 –6
Sanders, Bernie, 6 , 26 , 42 , 50 , 55 , 58 –9 , 63 , 69 , 87 , 107
Sartori, Giovanni, 12 , 15 –16 , 19
Schamis, Hector E., 62
Schmitt, Carl, 97
Scotland, 59
Scottish Socialist Party, 59
secularism, 42 , 75 , 78 , 79 , 80
Seddone, Antonella, 46
self-expression, 72 , 80 , 81 , 92 ; see also free speech
self-reflection, 80 , 81
sexual assault, 77
sexuality 7 , 71 , 75 –6 , 78 , 79 , 84 , 85 –6 , 92
Shils, Edward, 13
Shinawatra, Thaksin, 93 , 108
Smith, Peter H., 19
social class, 7 , 50 –1 , 56 , 60 , 61 –9 , 101
social constructivism, 17 , 23 , 24 , 109
social democracy, 7 , 51 , 57 , 58 , 59 , 63 , 103
social media, 19 , 78 , 100
socialism, 4 , 6 –7 , 14 , 15 , 18 , 50 –70
Socialist Party (France), 60
Solidarność, 108
South Africa, 7 , 22 , 61
sovereignty, 38 , 41 , 45 , 49 , 104
Soviet Union, 56 ; see also Russia
Spain, 2 , 42 , 46 , 59 , 60 , 84 –5 , 105 , 107
Spencer, Richard, 78
Stalinism, 66
Stanley, Ben, 13 , 14
Stavrakakis, Yannis, 31 , 33 –5 , 40
strategic approaches, 5 , 11 –12 , 17 –21 , 25 –9 , 55 , 111
structuralism, 62 –3
supporters, pathologisation of, 99
Sverigedemokraterna, 77 , 100
Sweden, 77 , 100 , 107
Swiss People’s Party, 108
Switzerland, 46 , 100 , 108
Synaspismos, 59 –60
Syriza, 7 , 27 , 41 , 50 , 55 , 59 –60 , 67 , 84 –6 , 87 , 89 –90 , 107 , 110
Taggart, Paul, 55
taxation, 52 –3 , 58
Tea Party movement, 27 , 79 , 106
Team Populism, 16
technocracy, 103 , 105
television, 19
Thailand, 93 , 108
Thatcher, Margaret, 103
thick ideologies, 14 –15 , 36 , 55
thin-centred ideologies, 13 –15 , 35 –6 , 55 , 83
Third Way model, 103
Thomas, Norman, 58
Tilly, Charles, 12
Timbro Authoritarian Populism Index, 107
‘To Define Populism’ conference, 11
tolerance, 80 , 81 , 91
Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, 2
Toronto, 6 , 44
trade, 1 , 105
trade unions, 62 , 66 , 69
transgender people, 85
transnational elites, 38 , 41
transnational institutions, 38 , 41 , 46
transnational populism, 6 , 31 , 47 –8
travelability (of definitions), 16 , 22 –3
Trotskyism, 66
Trump, Donald, 1 , 3 , 8 , 9 , 25 , 30 , 31 , 55 , 82
Tsipras, Alexis, 59 , 107
Turkey, 30 , 98 , 107
twentieth-century socialism, 56
twenty-first-century socialism, 7 , 50 , 56 , 59 –60 , 67 –9 , 87
two-strand model, 104
UK Independence Party (UKIP), 38 –9 , 40 , 46
undocumented migrants, 84
United Kingdom, 1 , 3 , 38 –40 , 46 , 47 , 55 , 57 –9 , 63 , 68 , 69 , 77 –8 ,
87 , 103
United Nations, 67
United States, 2 , 3 , 4 , 6 , 9 , 13 , 22 , 26 , 31 , 50 , 55 , 58 –9 , 63 , 68 , 69
, 79 , 81 , 82 , 87
unmediated communication, 19
Urbinati, Nadia, 18 , 95 , 96 , 106 , 111
Van Rompuy, Herman, 2
Vänsterpartiet, 107
Varoufakis, Yanis, 47 –8
Vasilopoulou, Sofia, 82
Venezuela, 56 , 57 , 67 , 86 , 87 , 89 –90 , 98 , 105 , 107
Vlaams Belang, 46 , 100
Waisbord, Silvio, 88 –9
Wales, 46
Watkins, Susan, 85
Watts, Jake, 57 –8
wealth redistribution, 52 –3 , 54 , 103
welfare state, 53 , 62
Weyland, Kurt, 12 , 17 –18 , 19 –20 , 90
Wilders, Geert, 1 , 38 , 76 , 77 , 78 , 80 , 82 –3
Wiles, Peter, 19
Wodak, Ruth, 12 , 21
women’s rights see gender equality
working class, 50 , 63 , 69 , 101
World Trade Organisation, 41
xenophobia, 32 –3 , 37 –8 , 75 –6 , 82 , 99 ; see also racism
Xi Jinping, 48
Xydakis, Nikos, 85 –6
Yiannopoulos, Milo, 76
Zakaria, Fareed, 73
Zwarte Piet, 81
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