The Responses of Populism to Dahl's Democratic Dilemmas

Abstract

From Hugo Chávez in Venezuela to Geert Wilders in the Netherlands and Sarah Palin in the US, populist leaders claim to offer more power to ‘the people’. However, most scholars argue that populism is in fact a democratic pathology, because it seeks to build a political system devoid of the rule of law. While it is true that populism maintains an ambivalent relationship with liberal democracy, little attention has been paid to the legitimacy of the questions raised by populist forces. Drawing on the work of Robert Dahl, I argue that current manifestations of populism are offering specific responses to two dilemmas that do not have a clear democratic solution: the boundary problem (how to define the people?) and the limits of self‐government (how to control the controllers?). My article shows that populist forces are posing legitimate questions about the current state of democracy in Europe and the Americas, although their solutions tend to be more controversial than helpful.

The Ideational Approach to Populism

“…Although a growing number of Latin Americanists adhere to an ideational approach (Barros 2006;de la Torre and Arnson 2013;Hawkins 2010;Panizza 2005;Rovira Kaltwasser 2014), the traditional tendency has been to use one of three other definitions. The first is an economic one that sees populism as a set of shortsighted macroeconomic policies adopted for electoral purposes and that end up generating more harm than good (Dornbusch and Edwards 1991;Edwards 2010).…”

Spain: No Country for the Populist Radical Right?

“…In consequence, leftist populism can develop an inclusionary rhetoric by defining 'the pure people' as all those who are excluded and discriminated against, and framing 'the corrupt elite' as an oligarchy that, due to its alliance with foreign powers (e.g. the European Union and transnational business elites), is not qualified to represent and enact the popular will (Mudde & Rovira Kaltwasser 2013a;Rovira Kaltwasser 2014). Given that leftist populist forces are not necessarily interested in employing nativist language, they could easily avoid taking sides in the Spanish centre -periphery struggle, allowing them to develop an electoral platform that could South European Society and Politics 21 attract voters with different and even antagonistic ideas about the nation.…”

“…Before moving to the next section, it is important to emphasise that we are aware of the fact that there is an open academic debate about the differences between traditional extreme-right parties and PRR parties in Western Europe (Ignazi 2003;Rydgren 2007). Suffice it to say here that we follow the approach of Mudde (2007), who argues that the main discrepancy between these two types of rightist parties lies in their approach towards the existing political regime: whereas traditional extreme-right parties are openly anti-democratic, PRR parties are against certain elements of the liberal democratic regime but not necessarily against democracy per se (Rovira Kaltwasser 2014). Seen in this light, for instance, Golden Dawn in Greece and the British National Party in the United Kingdom (UK) should be categorised as examples of the traditional extreme right and not of the PRR.…”

Beyond populism and institutionalism: Anti‐populism and the management of austerity in Spain

“…Populist discourses are those in which the logic of equivalence predominates, a fact that implies the drawing of an internal frontier within society: all differences are stifled by the extension of a central antagonism that articulates them and gives them meaning. We have only to think here in terms of the widespread characterization of populism as a kind of discourse that dichotomizes society into two antagonistic groups, the people and the elite or regime, and which argues that politics should be the expression of the people (Kaltwasser, , p. 478). Conversely, in institutionalist constructions the logic of difference dominates, so that different social demands remain isolated, relating only vertically to the institutional system.…”