The Constitutive Ambiguity of Populism

Riding the Populist Web: Contextualizing the Five Star Movement (M5S) in Italy

“…Grillo's rhetoric is infused with the populist thematic of the real people fighting against an entrenched and corrupt elite. This recurrent antielitist refrain is employed to highlight the purported virtues of the people as the source of political legitimacy (Meny & Surel, 2002). Also, the "us" versus "them" thematic of populist ideology and rhetoric is forever present.…”

Populism – Changes over Time and Space

“…In the second, research has focused on charting the ideology of populist parties (Canovan 1981, Mudde 2000, Taggart 2000, Ignazi 2003, Mudde 2007, Davies & Jackson 2008. In the third, the emphasis has been on doing case studies in the countries in which populist parties have been successful (Mény & Surel 2002, Rydgren 2002, Rydgren & Widfeldt 2004. From a Nordic viewpoint, the research has highlighted a problem that was discussed as early as 1981 in the study Populism och missnöjespartier i Norden (Populism and Protest Parties in the Nordic Countries), carried out by myself and my research colleague Tomas Peterson.…”

“…With regard to (a lack of) democracy, there is an inbuilt ethnic national dimension in the populist appeal that relates to the struggle between the people and the powers that be and, within that, concerning how social welfare should be distributed. In the former case, people with an ethnic background other than that of the national majority population are not included in popular democracy, and in the latter case social welfare is only regarded as being available to the majority population (ethno-national welfare chauvinism) (Kitschelt 1997, Taggart 2000, Mény & Surel 2002, Kiiskinen et al 2007). In the analysis of populist parties, ethnicity-based nationalism is central, in that the experience of Danishness, Norwegianness, Swedishness or Finnishness forms the basis on which refugee and immigrant issues are used as organizing principles for these parties' social critique of other political issues.…”

“…The political landscape has changed (Mény & Surel 2002). Populism has returned both as an empirical reality and as an important research topic.…”

Populism in Search of its Model

“…Many social scientists are convinced that the popularity of populism is indicative of a concept that lacks a precise definition and is not grounded in any rigorous theorizing. They see its popularity as a sign of conceptual promiscuousness, that it is now a cliché, and that any written or oral presentation on populism should begin with the proverbial assertion that the concept has been poorly or inappropriately defined (Mény and Surel 2002). As Ernesto Laclau (1977, pp.…”