What is populism? Who is the populist?

Abstract

Both “populism” and “populist” have long been considered ill-defined terms, and therefore are regularly misapplied in both scholarly and popular discourses.1 This definitional difficulty is exacerbated by the Babelian confusion of voices on populism, where the term’s meaning differs within and between global regions (e.g. Latin America versus Western Europe); time periods (e.g. 1930s versus the present), and classifications (e.g. left/ right, authoritarian/libertarian, pluralist/antipluralist, as well as strains that muddy these distinctions such as homonationalism, xenophobic feminism and multicultural neonationalism). While useful efforts have been made to navigate the vast and heterogeneous conceptual terrain of populism,2 they rarely engage with each other. The result is a dizzying proliferation of different definitions unaccompanied by an understanding as to how they might speak to each other. And this conceptual fragmentation reinforces, and is reinforced by, diverging assessments of populism which tend to cast it as either “good” or “bad” for democracy (e.g. Dzur and Hendriks 2018; Müller 2015).

The Populist Discourse on Representation in Lithuania

“…While populism is 'thin-centred', it attaches itself to political actors of various ideologies (Mudde and Kaltwasser, 2018) and its manifestations are very diverse. Populism is highly dependent on the context, on the relevant grievances (Mudde and Kaltwasser 2013;Gherghina et al 2013), and on the particular (economic, sovereignty, security) crises in the country (Gagnon et al 2018). European populism is a rather recent phenomenon primarily characterized by radical right-wing politics.…”

Democratic political regime in development context of online network communities

“…Populism is more objectively viewed not as a special ideology, but as a discursive frame supported by virtual communities -a ready-made template, an interpretation scheme that allows Internet users to more easily perceive complex information in a dense stream of news [18]. Populist leaders have a wide range of topics that they affect in Internet communications, hence some studies [19] highlight the authoritarian, libertarian, anti-pluralist, xenophobic, electoral and nostalgic type of populism.…”

Tensiones entre democracia y populismo: una aproximación desde la opinión pública

“…De manera general, el populismo ha sido objeto de indagación por parte de científicos sociales de diversas geografías (Taguieff, 1997;Savarino, 2006;Gidron y Bonikowski, 2013;Gagnon et al, 2018). Si bien es cierto que no se encuentra en la literatura un consenso académico alrededor de lo que significa, a menudo los investigadores se aproximan a este fenómeno a partir de categorías conceptuales o de casos empíricos.…”