Populism in Perspective: Many Strategies, Not Populisms

Abstract

In the recent years, populism has become a dominant theme in world politics especially through the debates around the issues like Brexit or 2016 US elections. Despite a number of studies exploring the phenomenon, the literature on populism remains highly fragmented due to the lack of a conceptual framework to start the analysis with a tendency to generate too many populisms (e.g. authoritarian populism, neopopulism, third-world populism). This article starts with this puzzling development in the literature and aims to provide a framework that is applicable to the cases of populism via differentiating strategies of populism from its core features. The article argues that there is no need to invent new populisms in each and every case, but a need to map the concept by referring to the core features of populism and strategies available for the usage by populist politicians.