Volume 26, Issue 2, Fall

Comparative Politics NewsletterThe Organized Section in Comparative Politics of the American Political Science Association

Editors: Matt Golder (mgolder@psu.edu), Sona N. Golder (sgolder@psu.edu)

Editorial Assistant: Christopher Boylan, Charles Crabtree, Yaoyao Dai

Editorial Board: Molly Ariotti, Xun Cao, Elizabeth C. Carlson, Kostanca Dhima, Amanda Fidalgo, Vineeta Yadav, Joseph Wright

Contents

Letter from the Editors by Matt Golder and Sona N. Golder . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2

I. Symposium: Populism in a Comparative Perspective

Daenerys Targaryen at IKEA: Left-wing Populism in Spain by Hans-Georg Betz . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4Multiple Traditions in Populism Research: Toward a Theoretical Synthesis by Bart Bonikowski and Noam Gidron . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7Populism in Eastern Europe by Lenka Bustikova . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15Profiles in Populism: Southeast Asia by William Case . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19Populism in Africa: Ethnicity, Solidarity, and the Potential for Inclusive Politics by Nic Cheeseman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25Populism and Authoritarian Survival in China: Conceptualization and Measurement by Yaoyao Dai and Zijie Shao . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31What Went Wrong? Leftwing Populist Democratic Promises and Autocratic Practices by Carlos de la Torre . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40Islam and Populism in the Middle East by Vedi R. Hadiz . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45Siren Songs: Reflections on Contemporary Populism in Europe’s Old Democracies by Elisabeth Ivarsflaten . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50The Performative Turn in the Comparative Study of Populism by Benjamin Moffitt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52How to Think – and How Not to Think – about Populism by Jan-Werner Müller . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58Two Generations of African Populism: Applying a Cumulative Conceptual Approach by Danielle Resnick . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .62Populism as Epithet and Identity: The Use and Misuse of a Contested Concept by Kenneth M. Roberts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69Populism in Latin America and Beyond: Concept, Causes, and Consequences by Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72Populism in India by Narendra Subramanian . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77The Surge of ‘Exclusionary’ Populism in Europe by Stijn van Kessel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81

II. Special Topic: Populism in the United States

Listening to Rural Populist Support for Right-Leaning Candidates in the United States by Katherine Cramer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86Populism and the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election in Comparative Perspective by Kirk Hawkins . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91Populism in the 2016 U.S. Election by Joseph Lowndes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97Populism, Nationalism, and U.S. Foreign Policy by David Smith . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101

III. Special Topic: Populism and Brexit

Brexit and Beyond: Euroscepticism in a Comparative Perspective by Catherine E. de Vries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107Brexit, Populism and the 2016 UK Referendum to Leave the EU by Matthew Goodwin and Oliver Heath . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113Taking Control: Before and After the British EU Referendum by Anand Menon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117Populism and the Brexit Vote by Stephanie Rickard . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120

IV. Other

Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 1

Letter from the Editorsby Matt Golder & Sona N. Golder

The Pennsylvania State University

Welcome to the Spring 2016 issue of the ComparativePolitics Newsletter. Our current issue includes a sympo-sium on Populism in Comparative Perspective, a specialissue on Populism in the United States, and a special is-sue on Populism and Brexit.

I. Symposium: Populism in Comparative Perspective

Our symposium has sixteen contributions dealing withvarious aspects of populism in comparative perspective.Four contributions focus on how populism is concep-tualized. Bart Bonikowski and Noam Gidron providea foundational introduction to the conceptualization ofpopulism. As they explain, there are three main tra-ditions in populism research: populism as a politicalstrategy, populism as a political ideology, and populismas a discursive style. Each of these traditions imply dif-ferent levels of analysis. Among other things, Bart andNoam advocate adopting a minimal definition of pop-ulism that treats populism as an attribute of politicalclaims rather than actors. Benjamin Moffitt also ad-dresses the conceptualization of populism. He focuses,though, on populism as a discursive style and, in par-ticular, on the ‘perfomance of populism.’ For him, pop-ulism is a political style based on an appeal to ‘the peo-ple’ versus ‘the elite’, bad manners, and the performanceof crisis, breakdown, or threat. A third contribution ex-amining the conceptualization of populism comes fromJan-Werner Müller, who argues that the central featureof populism is its anti-pluralism. Among other things,he observes that anti-elitism is not sufficient to identifypopulists. According to Jan-Werner, a key characteristicof populists is that they also claim to be the only onescapable of representing ‘the people.’ In his contribution,Kenneth Roberts focuses on populism as an ideology.He emphasizes that populism tends to attach itself to an‘anchoring’ ideology such as nationalism or socialism,and that it is these anchoring ideologies that define thespecific content of the elite-popular divide in populistappeals.

Many of our contributors focus on populism in vari-ous regions of the world. Elisabeth Ivarsflaten, Stijn vanKessel, Lenka Bustikova, and Hans-Georg Betz addressdifferent aspects of populism in Western and EasternEurope. Elisabeth reminds us that there is no perfect

correlation between populism and far right extremism.Stijn highlights how the refugee crisis, the economiccrisis, and terrorist attacks in Europe have created ahelpful environment for populist parties on the radicalright. Lenka focuses on Eastern Europe and argues thatthe success of populist parties on the right, in particularradicalized mainstream right parties, is a response tothe growing political power of minorities and the elitesthat are perceived to favor them. Hans-Georg addressesleft-wing populism in Europe through the lens of Pode-mos in Spain.

Carlos de la Torre and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasserexamine populism in Latin America. In his contribu-tion, Carlos looks at how left-wing populism in LatinAmerica and its promise of a more participatory, com-munal, and direct form of democracy has instead pro-duced competitive authoritarian regimes in countrieslike Bolivia, Ecuador, and Venezuela. Cristóbal, in con-trast, looks at the different ways that scholars have con-ceptualized populism in Latin America and how thiscan inform the study of populism in other regions ofthe world. He argues that populist sentiment arises asa result of political unresponsiveness and a failure ofdemocratic representation, and claims that many coun-tries are seeing the emergence of a populism versus anti-populism cleavage that rivals the traditional left-rightcleavage.

Populism has been widely studied in Europe andLatin America. In contrast, there is relatively little re-search on populism elsewhere in the world. The re-maining contributors to theNewsletter are all seeking toremedy this imbalance in our comparative knowledge ofpopulism. In their pieces, Nic Cheeseman and DanielleResnick examine populism in Africa. While Nic focuseson the apparent contradiction between ethnic and pop-ulist politics, Danielle discusses the differences betweenAfrica’s two waves of populism. She argues that Africa’sfirst wave of populism in the 1980s was particularly con-cerned with peasants in rural areas, but that its secondpost-2000s wave of populism has focused on the youngurban poor. In his contribution, Vedi Hadiz looks atpopulism in the Middle East by contrasting the for-tunes of populists in Egypt and Turkey. Among otherthings, he argues that populists in the Middle East haveemployed a religiously derived form of identity politics,in which the ummah (community of believers) stand infor ‘the people’ and are in conflict with secular nation-alist elites.

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 2

Our remaining contributions to the symposium ex-amine populism in Asia. Narendra Subramanian pro-vides a brief history of populism in late colonial andpost-colonial India. Many of our contributors distin-guish between the inclusive forms of populism thatpredominate in Latin America and the more exclusiveforms of populism that predominate in Europe. In hispiece on populism in Southeast Asia, William Case re-minds us that even inclusive populism can be perceivedas exclusive depending on where you sit. Using a com-parison of populism in Thailand, Indonesia, and thePhilippines, William examines the conditions underwhich the middle class and other elites feel threatenedby ‘inclusive’ populists and instigate an authoritarianbacklash. Yaoyao Dai and Zijie Shao discuss how Com-munist Party leaders in China have used populism as apolitical strategy to maintain support. To our knowl-edge, they provide the first attempt to measure pop-ulism in China using automated content analysis ofstate-controlled news reports from China Central Tele-vision’s (CCTV) Xinwen Lianbo (Daily News Program)and the annual work reports of China’s central govern-ment.

II. Special Topic: Populism in the United States

We have four contributions that examine populismin the United States. In her contribution, Kather-ine Cramer examines rural populist support for right-leaning candidates. She argues that populists like Don-ald Trump and Scott Walker have been able to mobilizelong-standing resentments among rural populationsagainst urban elites. Joseph Lowndes discusses the roleof racial populism in the 2016 presidential election cam-paign, while David Smith examines the implicationsof populism for U.S. foreign policy. In his contribu-tion, Kirk Hawkins encourages Americanist scholarswho have recently become interested in populism notto ignore the insights gleaned over many years from thestudy of populism in other regions of the world. Healso provides information about the level of populismadopted by the various candidates during the 2016 pres-idential election campaign, and places it in comparativeperspective. He finds, for example, that Bernie Sanderswas by far the most populist candidate in the U.S. pres-idential race, and that while Sanders’ level of populismwas similar to that seen in populist parties in Europe, itwas considerably lower than that demonstrated by pop-ulist presidential candidates in Latin America.

III. Special Topic: Populism and Brexit

We also have four contributions that examine pop-ulism in the context of the June 2016 Brexit referendumvote in the United Kingdom. Using EUpinions pollingdata, Catherine deVries presents evidence that the over-whelmingmajority of voters in the 27 EUmember stateswould have supported ‘Remain’ in a hypothetical refer-endum on EU membership. She also shows that thosepeople who would vote to ‘Leave’, including those whodid vote to ‘Leave’ in the UK, have significantly morepositive evaluations of national institutions and poli-cies than European institutions and policies. MatthewGoodwin and Oliver Heath link the geographic distri-bution of Leave voters with support for the populistUK Independence Party. Among other things, theyargue that the Brexit referendum vote allowed long-standing populist undercurrents in British politics tocome to the fore. In his contribution, Anand Menonsuggests that the populist forces that shaped the Brexitvote are unlikely to dissipate any time soon. Accordingto Anand, this will make renegotiating the UK’s rela-tionship with the EU extremely difficult, with economicand populist/political interests pulling in different di-rections. Finally, Stephanie Rickard highlights the rolethat grievances with economic globalization played inthe Brexit vote. She points out that the British govern-ment, unlike other governments, have never taken sig-nificant steps to compensate the losers from economicopenness and globalization.

As you can see, we have a fantastic group of schol-ars from across the world working on different aspectsof populism. We have enjoyed reading all of the con-tributions and we hope, and suspect, that you will too.Before closing, we’d like to thank our editorial assistants,Christopher Boylan, Charles Crabtree, and Yaoyao Dai,for their help at various stages in the production of thisissue of the Newsletter. If you would like to cite this, orany other, issue of the Comparative Politics Newsletter,we recommend using a variant of the following citation:

Golder, Matt and Sona Golder (eds.) 2016.“Symposium: Populism in ComparativePerspective.” CP: Newsletter of the Compar-ative Politics Organized Section of the Amer-ican Political Science Association 26(2): 1-130.

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 3

Finally, if you have ideas for possible symposia orspecial topics, or would like to publicize a dataset ofbroad appeal, please contact us. As always, you cancontact us through the Contact page of our webpageat http://comparativenewsletter.com/contact or simplyuse our Penn State email addresses: (sgolder@psu.edu,mgolder@psu.edu).

Matt and Sona

Daenerys Targaryen at IKEA: Left-wingPopulism in Spain

by Hans-Georg BetzUniversity of Zurich

Theparliamentary election of June 2016was expected tobe a decisive turning point in post-Franco Spanish pol-itics. Pre-election polls saw the newly formed alliancebetween Podemos and Izquierda Unida (IU) surpassingSpain’s traditional Socialist party (PSOE) to become thesecond largest political force behind the center-rightPartido Popular (PP). Given this constellation, PabloIglesias, Podemos’s charismatic leader, appeared to bein a favorable position to become Spain’s new primeminister. The election resulted in a fiasco for UnidosPodemos. Mobilizing one million fewer voters than inthe December 2015 legislative elections, Unidos Pode-mos ended up a disappointing third behind the twoma-jor parties — and this despite PSOE’s historically poorscore.1

The disastrous result renewed tensions over the fu-ture course of Podemos, which had already flared up inthe run-up to the election, provoked by the alliance withIU, a party of the traditional anti-capitalist left, domi-nated by the Communist Party. Substantial currentswithin Podemos, following Íñigo Errejón, the party’sleading theorist, opposed the alliance, particularly afterIU’s leader, Alberto Garzón, had charged that Pode-mos’s “populist strategy” championed by Errejón had“exhausted itself ” (García de Blas and Manetto, 2016).In Garzon’s view, Errejón’s populist vision had engen-dered a process of “ideological moderation” designedto appeal to as broad a constituency as possible. Onthis reading, Unidos Podemos’s disappointing showingin the election was a direct result of the programmaticvagueness and dilution engendered by Errejón’s pop-ulist strategy. Errejón and his partisans, in turn, blamed

the election result on the alliance with IU, which theydeemed in open contradiction with the original Pode-mos project. Whereas the latter sought to transcendthe traditional left-right cleavage and construct a broadsocial base for fundamental sociopolitical change, thealliance with IU effectively relegated Podemos to “theleft-wing margins of the political spectrum”, thus jeop-ardizing the very essence of the project (Calvajal, 2016).

In order to understand what is at stake, it is neces-sary to revisit the origins of Podemos, review the majorideas that informed its project, and examine its socialbase of support.

Podemos originated as a political experimentlaunched in 2014 by a small circle of intellectuals andsocial scientists, mostly from Complutense Universityin Madrid, inspired by the recent experience of LatinAmerican populism. Adopting key ideas from AntonioGramsci and Ernesto Laclau, they advanced a populistproject designed to take advantage of the window of op-portunity that had opened up three years earlierwith theMovimiento 15-M, a spontaneous grassrootsmovementof predominantly young people protesting against theZapatero (PSOE) government’s austerity policies (Beas,2011). The strategy was to appeal to the broad segmentsof the Spanish population that were suffering from theeconomic crisis and exhausted by the EU-imposed pol-itics of austerity, and mobilize them by articulating dis-parate popular grievances and claims directed against acommon enemy labelled la casta.

Errejón and Iglesias insisted right from the start thatthe central political goal behind Podemos was one thing— to take over power from Spain’s self-serving and cor-rupt elites in order to bring about a “post-neoliberaltransformation through the state” and make the institu-tions work for the benefit of ordinary people (Iglesias,2015, 15). The provocative cover of a collection of es-says on the popular TV series “Game of Thrones” thatanalyzed the narrative of the series from a social sci-ence perspective drove the point graphically home: Itfeatured a drawing of a relaxed Pablo Iglesias comfort-ably seated on the Iron Throne (Iglesias, 2014b). Inthe preface to the volume, Iglesias explained some ofthe lessons to be learned from the series for real-lifepolitics in current-day Spain. Arguably the most inter-esting observations were on the relationship betweenpower and legitimacy. According to Iglesias, Game of

1Pre-election polls had Unidos Podemos at about 25 percent of the vote; they won a bit more than 21 percent.

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 4

Thrones taught that in politics there was no space forlegitimacy “in the abstract, for a legitimacy that wasnot prepared to convert itself into alternative politicalpower, to compete for power.” Competing for power,in turn, necessitated having a “political project” that is“credible, plausible, and real” (Iglesias, 2014b, 7). Whatmade Podemos competive, Iglesias insisted, was that ithad an “idea,” or what Errejón would call a “hypothesis.”

This hypothesis was that politics is fundamentallyabout “the construction ofmeaning” through discourse;that language and discourse represent the “fundamen-tal battle ground” for contesting the dominant narrativeand constructing new collective political identities andnew majorities; and that this contestation has to be in-formed, not by theoretical dogmas, but by the concreteclaims and demands of ordinary people (Errejón, 2016).As a frequent guest on television and host of his own talkshow (La Tuerka) broadcast on regional television andover the internet, Iglesias understood the central im-portance of communication for political mobilization.His communicative skills andmedia presencemade himthe natural choice for party leader. Articulate and en-dowedwith an undeniable charisma, he became the faceof Podemos.

Errejón and Iglesias believed that the prolonged so-cioeconomic difficulties in Spain following the 2008financial collapse had provoked a profound crisis in thepost-Franco (1978-) political regime that was reflectedin “the failure of the ruling institutions — includingthe mainstream political parties — to preserve and re-new their legitimacy” (Iglesias, 2015, 10). As a result ofthis legitimacy crisis, they assumed, traditional politi-cal identities had started to break up and disintegrate,opening up opportunities for a left-wing populist dis-course no longer grounded in the established left-rightdichotomy but resting on a new dichotomy — above/lacasta vs. below/la gente—that they believed had the po-tential of becoming majoritarian (Errejón, 2014). Theyderived their optimistic reading of the Spanish situationfrom their experience with, and analysis of, left-wingpopulism in Latin America (particularly Venezuela),which, as Iglesias emphasized, “should serve as our fun-damental point of reference” (Iglesias, 2014a, 37).

Given its founders’ connections with the Chávezregime, Podemos was repeatedly charged with harbor-ing antidemocratic, perhaps even totalitarian, tenden-cies (Ruiz Soroa, 2015; Delibes, 2016). Against that, its

leaders maintained that Podemos was all about reclaim-ing democracy from the privileged minority, which hadappropriated it in the post-Franco era, and restoring itto the people. In short, Podemos was fighting for fun-damental political change in order to bring about truedemocracy in Spain.

Initially, Podemos proved highly successful. In the2014 European elections, the party received almosteight percent of the vote, which translated into five seatsin the European Parliament. This was followed by themunicipal elections later that year, where Podemos’ssupport of independent local citizen platforms was cru-cial for the election of progressivemayors inMadrid andBarcelona. Finally, in the national election of Decem-ber 2015, Podemos became Spain’s third-largest party,pollingmore than twenty percent of the vote. With noneof the major parties in a position to form the new gov-ernment, Podemos assumed a pivotal role in the newpolitical constellation. After the failure of a series ofnegotiations between the major parties aimed at form-ing a coalition government, a new election was calledfor June 2016, resulting in the bitter disappointment forUnidos Podemos.

There are a number of possible explanations for thefiasco. One has to do with Podemos’s social base. The“Podemos hypothesis” depended for its success on themobilization of a broad spectrum of the electorate. Inreality, as a number of studies have shown, Podemos’sappeal was largely limited to a younger, better educated,predominantly urban constituency who, in ideologicalterms, overwhelmingly placed themselves on the (far)left (Criada Olmos and Pinta Sierra, 2015; Fernández-Albertos, 2009). Podemos supporters distinguishedthemselves by their high level of disenchantment withthe political system and, in particular, the political class—a disenchantment informed particularly by their highsensitivity to (political) corruption (León, 2014). Inaddition, Podemos attracted a significantly larger pro-portion of men than women in every age group. Anumber of explanations for this gender gap have beenoffered, among them women’s greater risk aversion; thelower labor participation rate of women; and a leader-ship largely dominated by men (Orriols, 2015; Claveria,2016; Criada Olmos and Pinta Sierra, 2015, 239-240).

Secondly, the success of the “Podemos hypothesis”depended to a significant extent on the disintegration ofthe established partisan alignments in the wake of the fi-

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 5

nancial crisis and prolonged austerity. The resulting col-lapse of the post-1978 two-party system was supposedto make enough voters available for populist mobiliza-tion to secure Podemos amajority. This did not happen.If anything, the outcome of the June election shored upthe established system to the detriment of the new actors(Unidos Podemos and especially Ciudadanos). This washardly surprising given the progressive deterioration ofPodemos’s image among the electorate: Between late2014 and late 2015, the number of survey respondentswho said they would never vote for the party increasedfrom 42 to 52 percent (Lavezzolo et al., 2015).

Given its founders’ connections withthe Chávez regime, Podemos wasrepeatedly charged with harboringantidemocratic, perhaps eventotalitarian, tendencies. Against that,its leaders maintained that Podemoswas all about reclaiming democracyfrom the privileged minority…andrestoring it to the people. In short,Podemos was fighting forfundamental political change inorder to bring about true democracyin Spain.

A third reason was the alliance with IU. Not onlydid the alliance strain Iglesias’s credibility as a politi-cal leader, it also further reinforced the perception thatPodemos was a party of the radical left. Less than a yearbefore the June election, in a major interview, PabloIglesias had rejected the very idea of an alliance with theextreme left. These were old leftists who, he charged,were “sad, boring and bitter,” who took ordinary peo-ple for idiots addicted to trash television, who wereashamed of their own country and their own people,and who, in the final analysis, were partly responsible ifnothing ever changed in the country (Picazo, Delàs andIglesias, 2015).

Given these invectives, the alliance with IU wasnothing short of a strategic U-turn, which a significantnumber of both parties’ supporters found hard, if notimpossible, to swallow. Not surprisingly, some of themstayed home (Jurado and Orriols, 2016). At the sametime, the alliance threatened to relegate Podemos to the

leftwing margins of the political spectrum, thus jeopar-dizing its populist project. In response, the party lead-ership reinforced its efforts to make Podemos appealingto broader constituencies. Among other things, theyissued the party’s election program in the style of theIkea catalogue, which presented the party’s candidatesengaged in domestic activities (Iglesias, for instance,watering a plant). In order to appeal to female voters,they designed a campaign poster that featured portray-als of Unidos Podemos’s leading politicians equally di-vided by gender (four women, four men). Finally, toappeal to mainstream, particularly older, voters, who inthe past had been least disposed to vote for Podemos,the party’s leaders further moderated their discourse.Pablo Iglesias, towards the end of the election campaign,promoted himself as a social democratic politician andpatriot. None of these tactical maneuvers proved par-ticularly successful.

The fiasco of the June 2016 election appears to havemarked the end of Podemos’s populist strategy, at leastfor the immediate future. This, at least, would onlybe logical. The title of the collected volume on theGame of Thrones mentioned earlier was, after all, “Ga-nar o Morir” — “Win or Die”. In the short introduc-tion to the collection, Iglesias compares Podemos to theKhaleesi Daenerys Targaryen. After the June election,the Khaleesi will have to wait another day to assume theIron Throne.

References

Beas, Diego. 2011. “How Spain’s 15-M movement is redefin-ing politics.” The Guardian, October 15.

Calvajal, Álvaro. 2016. “Pablo Iglesias evita la autocrítica ycree quemuchos votantes le dejaron por ‘miedo’ a que gob-ernara.” El Mundo, July 1.

Claveria, Silvia. 2016. “¿Por qué las mujeres votan menos aPodemos?” Politikon, July 8.

Criada Olmos, Henar and Patricia Pinta Sierra. 2015. Cri-sis económica, clase social y voto a Podemos. In Desafec-ción política y gobernabilidad : El retro político, ed. LudolfoParamio. Madrid: Marcial Pons pp. 229–253.

Delibes, Alicia. 2016. “Podemos y el peligroso engaño de la‘democracia real’.” Expansión, March 20.

Errejón, Íñigo. 2014. “Qué es ‘Podemos’?” Le Monde diplo-matique español, July Number 225.

Errejón, Íñigo. 2016. “Podemos a mitad de camino.” ctxt.es,April 23.

Fernández-Albertos, José. 2009. Los votantes de Podemos: Del

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 6

partido de los indignados al partido de los excludos. Madrid:La Catarata.

García de Blas, Elsa and Francesco Manetto. 2016. “Garzóny Errejón chocan sobre el futuro y el proyecto de UnidosPodemos.” El Pais, July 3.

Iglesias, Pablo. 2014a. Disputar la democracia : Política paratiempos de crisis. Madrid: Ediciones Akal.

Iglesias, Pablo. 2014b. Ganar o morir: Lecciones políticas enJuego de Tronos. Madrid: Ediciones Akal.

Iglesias, Pablo. 2015. “Understanding Podemos.” New LeftReview 93:7–22.

Jurado, Ignacio and Lluis Orriols. 2016. “¿Qué ha pasado conUnidos Podemos?” eldiario.es, June 28.

Lavezzolo, Sebastián, Sandra León, Marta Romero and Al-berto Penadés. 2015. “Seis resultados del barómetro delCIS que no se leen en los titulares.” eldiario.es, November6.

León, Sandra. 2014. “Del cabreo ciudadano y el future dePodemos.” eldiario.es, November 17.

Orriols, Lluis. 2015. “El sexo de Podemos.” eldiario.es, Jan-uary 16.

Picazo, Sergi, María Delàs and Pablo Iglesias. 2015. “Que sequeden con la bandera roja y nos dejen en paz. Yo quieroganar.” Público, June 26.

Ruiz Soroa, José María. 2015. “El peligro de una sociedad sindivisiones.” El Pais, January 9.

Multiple Traditions in PopulismResearch:Toward a Theoretical Synthesis

by Bart Bonikowski & Noam GidronHarvard University

The Brexit referendum and the 2016 U.S. presidentialelection have attracted newfound public attention topopulist politics. Despite its recent salience, however,the phenomenon has a long history on both sides ofthe Atlantic. In Europe, populist parties on both theright and the left have been gaining strength since the1990s (March, 2007; Mudde, 2007), and populist ap-peals have been a staple of Democratic and Republicancandidates in theUnited States formuch of the 20th cen-tury (Bonikowski andGidron, 2016; Kazin, 1998). LatinAmerican politics, of course, is well known for its pop-ulist leaders (Hawkins, 2009; Roberts, 1995, 2006). In-deed, scholars have been studying populism for decades,typically relying on case studies of individual countriesor regions. This rich tradition has generated a wealth ofresearch findings, but less consensus on how populismshould be conceptualized and empirically analyzed.

The diversity of approaches to the study of populismis in part a result of the growing importance of compar-ative research on the topic. Theoretical orientations thatprove insightful in one region are often found wantingwhen applied to structurally disparate cases, leadingto the proliferation of definitional approaches and em-pirical strategies. The lack of a single shared researchframework is also a consequence of the amorphous na-ture of populism itself. The ideal of “the sovereignty ofthe people” (Jagers and Walgrave, 2007, 323) takes onmyriad forms and shares much in common with com-monplace democratic principles, which complicates aprecise bounding of the concept.

Nonetheless, amidst this multiplicity of theoreti-cal perspectives, there is some consensus concerninga minimal definition of populism, one that lends itselfto comparison even if it does not capture all aspects ofthe phenomenon. We can think of populism as a formof politics predicated on a moral distinction betweencorrupt elites and the virtuous people, with the latterviewed as the sole legitimate source of political power(Laclau, 1997; Mudde, 2007). Just who the elites arevaries across context, as do the boundaries of “the peo-ple”, but the binary structure of populist claims is largelyinvariant. In addition to itsmoral logic, populism’s anti-elite orientation often lends itself to a wholesale rejec-tion of intermediary institutions.

This core definition is relatively uncontroversial,but scholars differ in how they interpret, operational-ize, and elaborate on it. This conceptual variation canbe reduced to three dominant approaches, which viewpopulism as (i) a strategy of political mobilization, (ii)an ideology, and (iii) a form of political discourse. Al-though these distinctions are primarily theoretical, theyhave implications for how populism is measured in em-pirical research. In addition, there is a separate de-bate concerning the relationship between populism anddemocracy, with some scholars seeing the two as stand-ing in tension to one another, and others arguing thatthey are deeply interrelated. We are ambivalent aboutthe normative implications of populism, but we do takea position on its conceptualization: we make a case forthe analytical advantages of the most minimal, discur-sive definition of populism that treats the phenomenonas an attribute of political claims rather than actors. Weend with a series of unresolved research questions thata discursive approach to populism can help address. Itis our hope that this brief — and necessarily partial —

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 7

review will serve as useful starting point for further dis-cussion, in this volume and elsewhere.

I. Three Traditions in Populism Research

The literature broadly reflects threemain (non-mutuallyexclusive, as discussed below) approaches to the studyof populism: as a political strategy, as an ideology, andas a discursive style. These research traditions not onlyrely on distinct theoretical underpinnings, but they alsosuggest different levels of analysis for the study of pop-ulism.

Populism as a Political Strategy. Research on pop-ulism as a political strategy has been especially promi-nent among social scientists working on Latin America.From this perspective, what is unique in populist mobi-lization is the unmediated relationship between leadersand their supporters. As defined by Weyland (2001, 4),“populism is best defined as a political strategy throughwhich a personalistic leader seeks or exercises govern-ment power based on direct, unmediated, uninstitu-tionalized support from large numbers of mostly un-organized followers.” Levitsky and Roberts (2011, 6-7)similarly define populism as a “top-down political mo-bilization ofmass constituencies by personalistic leaderswho challenge established political or economic eliteson behalf of an ill-defined pueblo.”

Studies in this tradition focus primarily on thedeterminants of populist mobilization. For instance,Roberts (2006) argues that different combinations ofstrong or weak civil society and high or low institu-tionalization of partisan institutions give rise to distinctforms of populist mobilization (for instance, by partiesor unions). Other scholars point to the role of leadersin shaping populist mobilization: according to Pappas(2012, 2), for instance, populism becomes a potent po-litical force “when a certain political entrepreneur isable to polarize politics by creating a cleavage based onthe interaction between ‘the people’ versus some es-tablishment, thus forging a mass political movement.”In contrast, Barr (2009) notes several examples of non-charismatic populist leaders and concludes that populistleadership depends less on charisma than on actors’ self-proclaimed “outsider” position (see also Pappas, 2012).

Populism as a Political Ideology. A second approachto populism is less interested in the attributes of politi-cal leaders, and instead emphasizes the content of their

ideology. This tradition has dominated the literature onEuropean populism in the last decade. Mudde’s agenda-setting work has paved the way for many others, with itsdefinition of populism as,

“a thin-centered ideology that considers so-ciety to be ultimately separated into twohomogenous and antagonistic groups, ‘thepure people’ versus ‘the corrupt elite,’ andwhich argues that politics should be an ex-pression of the volonté générale (generalwill) of the people” (Mudde, 2004, 543).

Ideology here means an interconnected set of ideasthat derive meaning from their relationship to one an-other (Freeden, 1996, 2003). In the case of populism,these ideas revolve around the Manichean contrast be-tween the corrupt elite and the morally pure people(Stanley, 2008). By characterizing this ideology as“thin-centered,” scholars stress that populism is not acomplete worldview that offers consistent answers toa wide range of important political questions; instead,populism attaches itself to other full-fledged ideologiessuch as socialism or nationalism. There is some evi-dence that this conceptual approach “has recently wonground in the definitional debate” (Pauwels, 2011, 99).

The literature broadly reflects threemain …approaches to the study ofpopulism: as a political strategy, asan ideology, and as a discursivestyle. …these traditions lendthemselves to distinct analyticalstrategies that privilege differentlevels of analysis.

Research on populism as an ideology often beginswith close readings of textual materials — such as par-tisan manifestos — in order to ascertain which politi-cal actors engage in populist appeals. Once parties orleaders have been classified as populist, scholars lookat their base of support, leadership style, political or-ganization, and performance once in power (see, forinstance, Akkerman, Mudde and Zaslove, 2014; Arter,2010; Kriesi, 2014; Kriesi and Pappas, 2015; Pankowski,2010). Since the close reading of partisan materials islabor intensive, research in this tradition has, at least

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 8

until recently, focused on within-case analysis or small-N comparisons.

Populism as a Discursive Style. Another body of liter-ature conceptualizes populism as a discursive style thatis predicated on the fundamental conflict between thecorrupt elite and the people (Hawkins (2009, 2010).1Rather than a set of core ideas embedded within con-stitutive texts, populism as discourse is better thoughtof as a rhetorical style used by political actors of diverseideological persuasions.

Although the ideological approach (or at least, itscommon applications) typically considers populism asa largely fixed attribute of political actors, the discursivetradition views populism as an attribute of the messageand not the speaker (Deegan-Krause and Haughton,2009; Jagers and Walgrave, 2007; Rooduijn and Akker-man, Forthcoming). This makes it possible for politicalactors to use different degrees of populism under dif-ferent circumstances. Of course, some political actorsmay be more populist than others, but this can onlybe established by examining the within-actor variationin discursive styles. This perspective, then, opens thepossibility for studying the contextual determinants ofpopulist discourse and their variation across historicalperiods and geographical regions.

It is more useful to think of populismnot as a constitutive ideology, butrather as a frame through whichother kinds of political claims, fromthose on the far left to those on thefar right, can be expressed.

In our own work, for instance, we have employedthe discursive approach to examine the conditions un-der which U.S. presidential candidates were more likelyto rely on populist discourse during the second half ofthe 20th century (Bonikowski and Gidron, 2016). Inline with historical research (Kazin, 1998), we foundthat the prevalence of populism fluctuated over time onboth sides of the ideological divide. Yet we also demon-strated that this variation was highly patterned: the de-gree to which candidates relied on populism dependedon their target audience, the stage of the campaign, andthe degree to which candidates were able to claim an

outsider position. These factors explained not only dif-ferences between candidates, but also between multiplecampaigns run by the same candidate.

Importantly, the three approaches outlined aboveare not mutually exclusive. For instance, Jansen(2011) weaves together the mobilization and discur-sive approaches to define populism as “any sustained,large-scale political project that mobilizes ordinarilymarginalized social sectors into publicly visible andcontentious political action, while articulating an anti-elite, nationalist rhetoric that valorizes ordinary peo-ple” (p. 82; see also Filc (2009)). Other works suggesta synthesis between the ideological and discursive per-spectives (Pauwels, 2011; Hawkins, 2009).

At the same time, however, the three approacheslend themselves to distinct analytical strategies thatprivilege different levels of analysis. If populism is anideology, then the appropriate place to observe it is inideological texts. If populism entails not only talk butalso a particular mode of mobilization, then analyses ofpopulism must place the relationship between politicalactors and their constituents within broader patternsof power relations. Finally, if populism is a mode ofdiscourse, then the starting point for analysis should bedistinct speech acts.

Given that methods and theory are often closelylinked, these analytical approaches also suggest differ-ent sets of research questions. Ideological approachestend to focus on party systems, examining the changingconfiguration of electoral coalitions, whereas mobiliza-tion scholars often focus on the ability of populism toappeal to otherwise excluded political constituencies.Studies of political discourse are well suited for the in-vestigation of micro-level mechanisms that account forwithin-actor heterogeneity in populist rhetoric.

Nonetheless, because the definition of populismemployed by the discursive approach is the simplestand least encumbered by multiple necessary conditions(such as ideological stability or a particularmobilizationstyle), we view it as the most suitable for comparativeresearch. Our position, which we elaborate below, doesnot imply that discourse is more important than ideol-ogy or political practice; rather, we argue that aminimaldiscursive definition offers the most precise and parsi-monious conceptualization of populism that can serve

1For a review, see Poblete (2015).

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 9

as a foundation for any study of populism, regardless ofgeographic focus or the ideological orientation of thepopulist claims in question.

II. The Case for an Analytically Thin Approach to Pop-ulism

In developing his definition of populism as a “thin-centered ideology,” Mudde (2004) argues for a minimalconceptual approach that involves as few necessary con-ditions as possible. This is indeed the intention behindthe “thin-centered” qualifier borrowed from Freeden(1996, 2003). In principle, viewing populism in thislight should lend itself to a wide range of research ques-tions. In practice, however, scholars who employ theideological definition often treat the phenomenon ashaving more coherence and stability than is warranted,by assuming that political actors either do or do notsubscribe to populist ideology. This problem is partlya matter of data availability, but also of the theoreticalimplications of the term “ideology.”

Thin-centered or not, ideologies are objects of belief,whetherwhole-hearted or tentative, and relatively stabledrivers of behavior. We claim, instead, that populismis something political actors use strategically when theconditions are appropriate. Therefore, it is more usefulto think of populism not as a constitutive ideology, butrather as a frame through which other kinds of politi-cal claims, from those on the far left to those on the farright, can be expressed. It is possible that some politi-cal actors use populism relatively frequently, but othersmay use it sparingly. Whether populism is stable orvariable within actors should be an empirical questionrather than an a priori assumption of populism research.

By treating populism as an attribute of specific polit-ical speech acts rather than political actors, it is possibleto systematically analyze the conditions that generateincentives for populist talk. To do so, it is importantto understand why populism is not used in specific cir-cumstances, particularly by actors who are otherwiselikely to view it as an attractive strategy. This approachalso elides the need for examining the sincerity of pop-ulist beliefs — what matters is that actors employ pop-ulism in some circumstances but not others.

What analytical leverage might we gain from a fo-cus on populism as a feature of political speech? Ourwork suggests that doing so can help illuminate the

mechanisms that shape the dynamics of populist con-tention. In our work on U.S. presidential elections, forinstance, we have shown that populism is primarily thelanguage of political challengers: both those who havehad shorter political careers and those who served inpositions removed from the center of political power(Bonikowski and Gidron, 2016). Moreover, populismfluctuates based on the target audience: challengers be-come less populist when they shift from their base to thegeneral electorate, whereas incumbents become morepopulist over time in reaction to the challengers.

Our research on legislative discourse in the Euro-pean Parliament (EP) further suggests that politicalactors’long-term aspirations shape their likelihood ofusing populist frames: European parliamentarians withambitions in national politics aremore likely to use pop-ulist language than thosewho intend to remain in the EPin the future (Bonikowski and Gidron, 2015). We alsoobserve a socialization effect (which may interact witha cohort effect), whereby longer-serving parliamentari-ans are less populist than more recent entrants into theEP. Finally, access to power plays a role here much as itdoes in our U.S. research: members of national partiesthat serve in national governments are less likely to relyon populist rhetoric than those whose parties are in op-position or are relegated to the periphery of the nationalpolitical arena. These findings point to the benefits ofmeasuring populism at the lowest level of analysis (i.e.,individual speeches) and aggregating up as necessary toa variety of higher-order units, such as electoral cam-paigns, politicians, parties, and geographical regions.

Importantly, we want to emphasize that by treat-ing populism as a feature of political rhetoric, we arenot suggesting that a discursive approach should dis-place the focus on party-level use of populism or onpopulist mobilization. The mobilization and ideologyapproaches have their unique advantages: the formeris holistic and theoretically rich and the latter is flexi-ble and lends itself to straightforward party classifica-tion. Instead, we want to argue that defining populismas a measurable aspect of political speech can serveas a foundation for these — and other — theoreticalperspectives, while avoiding unnecessary definitionaldisagreements. An ideological approach can still treatindividuals or parties as fundamentally populist if itfirst demonstrates that actors rely on populist discourseacross contexts (if it cannot do so, its conclusions wouldneed to be more modest). Similarly, a mobilization

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 10

approach can begin with populist talk, but then sup-plement this with other variables of interest, like theleadership style of a given party or the composition ofits support base. In other words, treating populism asdiscourse and measuring it at the level of speech actsshould not be viewed as the sole end of populism re-search, but rather as an important and necessary start-ing point for empirical analysis — and a definitionalcommon ground that can help bring into conversationdisparate research traditions.

III. Is Populism Necessarily Exclusionary?

Besides definitional difficulties, there is some ambiva-lence in the scholarly literature on the normative statusof populism in democratic politics. For some, populismis democracy’s inescapable shadow (Canovan, 2002;Arditi, 2007), which can serve as a barometer of populargrievances and restrain excessive power at the hands ofpolitical elites, but which can also threaten democracy’scentral institutions. For others, populism is a perver-sion of democracy that promises the empowerment ofthe people but instead delivers authoritarianism and so-cial exclusion.2 Although we remain agnostic on thesenormative questions, it is worthwhile considering howpopulist claims may demarcate symbolic boundaries(Lamont and Molnár, 2002), given the phenomenon’sfundamentally moral nature.

At its core, populism draws sharp distinctions be-tween social groups, portraying some as virtuous andothers as corrupt. Charges of moral failing against pow-erful actors, such as political power-holders or businessleaders, can have their own negative consequences, likethe erosion of public trust in intermediary representa-tive institutions, but they do not necessarily generateor perpetuate social inequalities. It is when this ini-tial moral classification is extended beyond a powerfulelite to other social groups that populism becomesmoredeeply exclusionary. Attacks on immigrants and racialand religious minorities have become the hallmarks ofright-wing populism. These marginalized groups arefrequently portrayed as responsible for the cultural andeconomic grievances experienced by segments of thevoting public (in Europe and the United States, typi-cally white, native-born, predominantly male voters),and elites are faulted for appeasing these groups’ inter-ests instead of those of the ‘true’ members of the na-tional community.

This type of populism is quite distinct from moreinclusive varieties of the phenomenon, such as effortsby Latin American political leaders to expand full po-litical membership to indigenous populations. Madrid(2008), for instance, notes that themost successful LatinAmerican populist movements are “inclusive, ethni-cally based parties that adopt classical populist elec-toral strategies,” such as an emphasis on redistributivepolicies. In this case, inclusive populism is associatedwith progressive ideology, but it would be a mistake todefinitively associate populist inclusion/exclusion withthe political left/right: organized labor, for instance,has a long history of ethnic stigmatization in defense of‘working people’ (Olzak, 1989) and charges of politicalcorruption from the right need not vilify immigrants.These differential outcomes are likely to be shaped bythe structure of party competition and coalition build-ing in specific cases. Thus, the degree to which populistclaims attack elites alone or extend their moral critiqueto marginalized social groups should be subject to care-ful empirical analysis that does not conflate populistpolitics with partisan ideology.

By focusing on the common featuresof [populism] across contexts —without ignoring the specificities ofits particular instantiations — socialscientists are in a position to makeimportant gains in identifyingmechanisms that have shaped therecent successes of radical politicson both sides of the politicalspectrum.

In thinking about the loci of exclusion, Filc’s (2009)work offers a useful starting point. In his research on Is-rael, Filc identifies three forms of populist boundaries:material, symbolic, and political. Material exclusionis related to the implications of specific social policies;symbolic exclusion is located in discourse itself; andpolitical exclusion has to do with the organization ofparty structures and access to political representation.This typology highlights the fact that exclusionary orinclusive populist appeals need not be accompaniedby exclusionary or inclusive policies and mobilizationstrategies; whether they do is a matter for empirical in-

2For an overview, see Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser (2012).

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 11

quiry.

IV. Directions for Future Research

The literature on populist politics is rich in empiricalfindings. Thanks to a growing theoretical consensus,it is also increasingly coherent in its ability to general-ize beyond specific cases. We know a lot, for instance,about the bases of support for, and political behaviorof, populist parties in Europe (Ivarsflaten, 2008) and inLatin America (Levitsky and Roberts, 2011). There isgrowing evidence for the centrality of anti-immigrantsentiment in fueling both the supply and demand sidesof populist politics in Western Europe and the UnitedStates (Oliver and Rahn, 2016; Rydgren, 2008). Effortsto expand political inclusion in Latin America (Madrid,2008) can teach us important lessons about the logicof populist appeals in other regions, given that thoseappeals depend on perceptions (however accurate) ofpolitical and economic marginalization. For all theseadvances, however, there are still many unansweredquestions that this literature can address.

Effects on mainstream parties. One important ques-tion for future research is whether and to what degreepopulism is contagious. Has the rise of fringe partiesthat rely on populist discourse led to the diffusion ofpopulism to the mainstream? Some research on thisquestion has focused on the diffusion of policy posi-tions, especially welfare chauvinism (i.e., support forwelfare benefits restricted to the native-born), betweenradical and mainstream parties (Schumacher and vanKersbergen, 2016). Yet populism may also diffuse sepa-rately from specific policy positions. Research on partyplatforms has observed little evidence of this processthus far (Rooduijn, de Lange and van der Brug, 2014),but party platforms are not the only form of commu-nication between elected representatives and their con-stituencies. Future research could examine social mediacontent, political speeches, and other forms of commu-nication that are particularly suitable to subtle changesin discursive strategies.

When populists gain power. Actors who rely on pop-ulist messages position themselves in opposition topower holders, but their ability to do so becomes moredifficult once they themselves gain access to power.Whether andhow electoral victories andmembership ingoverning coalitions alter actors’ reliance on populismis highly consequential, because it points to the long-

term effects of populism on the political system. Somescholars have suggested that radical-right parties thatgain power “will invariably be pressured to tone downthe radicalness of their agenda and political presenta-tion” (Heinisch, 2003, 101). Others have come to theopposite conclusion and argued that the persistence ofpopulist politics is likely to have negative implicationsfor the quality of liberal democracy (Pappas, 2012). Itis possible that the answer depends on the structure ofelectoral institutions in specific countries, but this hasnot yet been systematically established. A challenge forstudies that may demonstrate the dampening effect ofmainstream success on populist discourse is endogene-ity: it may be the case that access to power dampenspopulism, but it is also possible that signaling a willing-ness to tone down populist language may help actorsassume power in the first place. This suggests the neednot only for further theoretical development, but alsofor novel research designs that can help address theseempirical difficulties.

Effects of populism outside of politics. Most researchon populism is interested in explaining the increasedsupport for and electoral gains of parties that rely onpopulist claims. Yet, populism is likely to have lastingconsequences even when its proponents lose electionsor are excluded from governing coalitions. Populism’srepresentation of social groups in binary moral terms isoften reductive and essentialist, which has the potentialto reproduce widely held stereotypes and incite inter-group conflict. In particular, when exclusionary pop-ulism that vilifies marginalized populations gains trac-tion in dominant discourse, it risks normalizing racism,nativism, and xenophobia. Forms of talk and behav-ior that were previously relegated to private spaces canbecome legitimized in the public sphere, which can inturn influence the character of routine interactions be-tween members of dominant and marginalized groups.Reports of growing discrimination and violence againstEastern Europeans and Muslims after Brexit and of ris-ing Islamophobia as a result of Donald Trump’s nomi-nation provide some suggestive evidence for populism’ssocial consequences (Bayoumy, 2016; Khalleeli, 2016).Systematic research is needed, however, to determinewhether such incidents are part of a broader trend, andif so, whether they are a result of populism itself or of theexclusionary ideologies associated with its right-wingvarieties. Finally, populist discourse may have otherconsequences regardless of its ideological content; byreducing complex policy issues to moral dichotomies,

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 12

it risks impairing the quality of informed political de-bate and reducing the potential for meaningful policychange.

Populist attitudes and support for populist politics. Anumber of recent studies have sought to identify publicattitudes that favorably predispose voters toward pop-ulist politics. For instance, building on the work ofHawkins, Riding andMudde (2012), Akkerman,Muddeand Zaslove (2014) propose a scale for themeasurementof populism in attitudinal surveys that includes disposi-tions toward political elites, views about the rightful roleof the people in shaping political decisions, and tenden-cies toward binary moral thinking. Oliver and Rahn’s(2016) research on Trump supporters similarly cites theimportance of “people’s feelings towards the politicalprocess, experts and common wisdom, and attachmentto an American identity.” Other studies, however, arguethat political support for radical parties stems not fromabstract populist orientations, but from an assortmentof psychological dispositions (e.g., authoritarianism,strong in-group identity) and social attitudes (e.g., anti-immigrant sentiments, low levels of generalized trust)(Ivarsflaten, 2008; MacWilliams, 2016; Mols and Jetten,2016). This raises the theoretical question of whetherwe can meaningfully talk about “populist attitudes” orwhether populist politics activate (and perhaps exacer-bate) other preferences linked to the ideological posi-tions that are expressed in populist terms. This in turnfurther underlines the importance of analytically sep-arating populism as a mode of political claims-makingfrom political ideology. In light of the growing inter-est in the basis of support for radical candidates acrossWestern democracies, the status of populist attitudes isof central importance to populism research.

Populism scholarship, including the stellar work ofthe contributors to this issue of the Comparative PoliticsNewsletter, has matured over the past few years into anincreasingly cumulative body of knowledge that is lessoccupied with conceptual disagreements than with thegeneration of theoretically motivated empirical find-ings. We view this as a highly positive development. Itis our hope that by sketching out a broad overview ofthe field and proposing an integrative, minimal defini-tion of populism, we can further encourage discussionsacross disciplinary and subfield boundaries and regionalspecializations. It is becoming increasingly clear thatpopulism is an important feature of modern democra-cies, from Europe and the United States to Latin Amer-

ica and beyond. By focusing on the common featuresof the phenomenon across contexts — without ignoringthe specificities of its particular instantiations — socialscientists are in a position to make important gains inunderstanding the recent successes of radical politics onboth sides of the political spectrum.

References

Akkerman, Agnes, Cas Mudde and Andrej Zaslove. 2014.“How populist are the people? Measuring populist atti-tudes in voters.” Comparative Political Studies 47(9):1324–1353.

Arditi, Benjamin. 2007. Politics on the Edges of Liberalism:Difference, Populism, Revolution, Agitation. Edinburgh:Edinburgh University Press.

Arter, David. 2010. “The breakthrough of another West Eu-ropean populist radical right party? The case of the TrueFinns.” Government and Opposition 45(4):484–504.

Barr, Robert R. 2009. “Populists, outsiders and anti-establishment politics.” Party Politics 15(1):29–48.

Bayoumy, Yara. 2016. “Trump’s anti-Muslim rhetoric is fu-eling more Islamophobic incidents.” The Huffington Post,June 20.

Bonikowski, Bart and Noam Gidron. 2015. “Populism inlegislative discourse: Evidence from the European Parlia-ment.” Unpublished manuscript, Harvard University.

Bonikowski, Bart and Noam Gidron. 2016. “The populiststyle in American politics: Presidential campaign dis-course, 1952–1996.” Social Forces 94(4):1593–1621.

Canovan, Margaret. 2002. Taking politics to the people: Pop-ulism as the ideology of democracy. In Democracies andthe Populist Challenge, ed. Yves Meny and Yves Surel. NewYork: Palgrave pp. 25–44.

Deegan-Krause, Kevin and Tim Haughton. 2009. “Toward amore useful conceptualization of populism: Types and de-grees of populist appeals in the case of Slovakia.” Politics &Policy 37(4):821–841.

Filc, Dani. 2009. The Political Right in Israel: Different Facesof Jewish Populism. London: Routledge.

Freeden, Michael. 1996. Ideologies and Political Theory: AConceptual Approach. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Freeden, Michael. 2003. Ideology: A Short Introduction. Ox-ford: Oxford University Press.

Hawkins, Kirk A. 2009. “Is Chávez populist? Measuring pop-ulist discourse in comparative perspective.” ComparativePolitical Studies 42(8):1040–1067.

Hawkins, Kirk A. 2010. Venezuela’s Chavismo and Populismin Comparative Perspective. New York: Cambridge Uni-versity Press.

Hawkins, Kirk A., Scott Riding and Cas Mudde. 2012. “Mea-suring populist attitudes.” Working Paper Series on Polit-

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 13

ical Concepts, ECPR Committee on Concepts and Meth-ods.

Heinisch, Reinhard. 2003. “Success in opposition – failurein government: Explaining the performance of right-wingpopulist parties in public office.” West European Politics26(3):91–130.

Ivarsflaten, Elisabeth. 2008. “What unites right-wing pop-ulists in Western Europe? Re-examining grievance mo-bilization models in seven successful cases.” ComparativePolitical Studies 41(1):3–23.

Jagers, Jan and Stefaan Walgrave. 2007. “Populism as polit-ical communication style: An empirical study of politicalparties’ discourse in Belgium.” European Journal of Politi-cal Research 46(3):319–345.

Jansen, Robert S. 2011. “Populist mobilization: A newtheoretical approach to populism.” Sociological Theory29(2):75–96.

Kazin, Michael. 1998. The Populist Persuasion: An AmericanHistory. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Khalleeli, Homa. 2016. “‘A frenzy of hatred’: How to under-stand Brexit racism.” The Guardian, June 29.

Kriesi, Hanspeter. 2014. “The populist challenge.” West Euro-pean Politics 37(2):361–378.

Kriesi, Hanspeter and Takis S Pappas. 2015. European Pop-ulism in the Shadow of the Great Recession. Exeter: ECPRPress.

Laclau, Ernesto. 1997. Towards a theory of populism. In Pol-itics and Ideology in Marxist Thought: Capitalism, Fascism,Populism. London: New Left Books.

Lamont, Michèle and Virág Molnár. 2002. “The study ofboundaries in the social sciences.” Annual Review of Soci-ology 28:167–195.

Levitsky, Steven and Kenneth M. Roberts. 2011. The Resur-gence of the Latin American Left. Baltimore: JHU Press.

MacWilliams, Matthew C. 2016. “Who decides when theparty doesn’t? Authoritarian voters and the rise of Don-ald Trump.” PS: Political Science & Politics 49(4):716–721.

Madrid, Raúl L. 2008. “The rise of ethnopopulism in LatinAmerica.” World Politics 60(3):475–508.

March, Luke. 2007. “From vanguard of the proletariat to voxpopuli: Left-populism as a ‘shadow’ of contemporary so-cialism.” SAIS Review of International Affairs 27(1):63–77.

Mols, Frank and Jolanda Jetten. 2016. “Explaining the appealof populist right-wing parties in times of economic pros-perity.” Political Psychology 37(2):275—92.

Mudde, Cas. 2004. “The populist zeitgeist.” Government andOpposition 39(4):542–563.

Mudde, Cas. 2007. Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe.New York: Cambridge University Press.

Mudde, Cas andCristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser. 2012. Populismand (Liberal) Democracy: A Framework for Analysis. InPopulism in Europe and the Americas: Threat or Correctivefor Democracy?, ed. Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Rovira Kalt-wasser. New York: Oxford University Press pp. 1–26.

Oliver, J. Eric and Wendy M. Rahn. 2016. “Rise of theTrumpenvolk populism in the 2016 election.” The AN-NALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Sci-ence 667(1):189–206.

Olzak, Susan. 1989. “Labor unrest, immigration, and ethnicconflict in urban America, 1880-1914.” American Journalof Sociology 94(6):1303–1333.

Pankowski, Rafal. 2010. The Populist Radical Right in Poland:The Patriots. London: Routledge.

Pappas, Takis S. 2012. “Populism emergent: A frameworkfor analyzing its contexts, mechanics, and outcomes.” EUIWorking Papers, RSCAS 2012/01.

Pauwels, Teun. 2011. “Measuring populism: A quantitativetext analysis of party literature in Belgium.” Journal of Elec-tions, Public Opinion and Parties 21(1):97–119.

Poblete, Mario E. 2015. “How to assess populist discoursethrough three current approaches.” Journal of Political Ide-ologies 20(2):201–218.

Roberts, Kenneth M. 1995. “Neoliberalism and the transfor-mation of populism in Latin America: the Peruvian case.”World Politics 48(1):82–116.

Roberts, Kenneth M. 2006. “Populism, political conflict, andgrass-roots organization in Latin America.” ComparativePolitics pp. 127–148.

Rooduijn, Matthijs, Sarah L. de Lange and Wouter van derBrug. 2014. “A populist zeitgeist? Programmatic conta-gion by populist parties in Western Europe.” Party Politics20(4):563–575.

Rooduijn, Matthijs and Tjitske Akkerman. Forthcoming.“Flank attacks: Populism and left-right radicalism in west-ern Europe.” Party Politics .

Rydgren, Jens. 2008. “Immigration sceptics, xenophobesor racists? Radical right-wing voting in six West Eu-ropean countries.” European Journal of Political Research47(6):737–765.

Schumacher, Gijs and Kees van Kersbergen. 2016. “Domain-stream parties adapt to the welfare chauvinism of populistparties?” Party Politics 22(3):300–312.

Stanley, Ben. 2008. “The thin ideology of populism.” Journalof Political Ideologies 13(1):95–110.

Weyland, Kurt. 2001. “Clarifying a contested concept: Pop-ulism in the study of Latin American politics.” Compara-tive Politics 34(1):1–22.

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 14

Populism in Eastern Europeby Lenka BustikovaArizona State University

The politics of exclusion and contestation is closelylinked to populism, which is often defined as the ruleof the ‘pure many’ mobilized against the ‘corrupt few.’It is an ideology that pitches the people against the eliteand calls for greater congruence between the generalwill of the people and politics. Some have studied itas a ‘thin’ yet coherent ideology, a rhetoric, an ethos,an ‘empty signifier’, whereas others see it as a socialmovement and an expression of contentious politics.1Following the will of the many is sometimes antitheticalto democracy. Along these lines, some view populismas a disfigurement of democracy because it reifies thepopular will by suppressing democratic procedures andrestricting the plurality of opinion. Populism, on thiscount, “is a politics of exclusion” (Urbinati, 2014).

The standard bearers of populist appeals are radicalright parties that represent those who are most out-raged by ‘the betrayal of the people.’ As a result, radicalright mobilization that revolves around the exclusion ofminority groups, and not the economic destitute, rep-resents a populist revolt against a political system thatallows minorities to legitimately gain political powerand advance their causes. Polities differ in how far theyare willing to go to resolve the tension between ‘the peo-ple’ and ‘the other’ by curbing the pluralist dimensionof representative democracy. In most cases, niche rad-ical right parties endanger the ascent of minorities, butnot the system of representative democracy. That honorbelongs to large, mainstream parties, capable of thwart-ing electoral laws, institutions of oversight, independentcourts, and free media.

Radical right parties mobilize to keep minoritiesfrom advancing (Bustikova, 2014). The ire of radicalright voters is thus not directed at any minority, butspecifically at minorities (and their allies) that aspireto change the status quo through the political process.Radical right mobilization does not originate in thedemons of xenophobia (group hostility), but in pol-icy shifts that reflect political competition (Dancygier,2010). Since resources are finite and prestige originatesin hierarchy, any change in the status quo of minority-majority relations implies a status loss, which results ina grievance that can be politicized in the right hands.

Radical right parties are not interested in the annihila-tion of minorities, but rather in suppressing their de-sires to wield greater political power, influence policy,obtain governmental resources, and acquire positionsof prominence. In sum, radical right support is notfuelled by prejudice and xenophobia, but by dissatisfac-tion with ascending minority groups.

I. Sister from Another Mister: Populism in Western andEastern Europe

Populism in Eastern Europe is largely a revolt of the titu-lar group against the political parties and politicians that‘betrayed’ them by shifting the status quo in favor of mi-norities. Using Rovira Kaltwasser and Mudde’s (2013)typology, it most closely resembles “exclusionary pop-ulism…[which] focuses on the exclusion of non-nativegroups.” There are some subtle differences betweenthe ideal type of exclusionary populism, as outlined byRovira Kaltwasser and Mudde, and the populism on theground in Eastern Europe. Populism is exclusionary,but the anger of ‘the people’ is not targeted at minori-ties per se, but at their advances — that is, at the shiftin the balance of power between the majority and theminority. Second, populism in Eastern Europe is eco-nomically left-leaning, blurring the boundaries betweenexclusionary and inclusionary (economic) populism.Third, populist mobilization affects democratic consol-idation (Haughton and Deegan-Krause, 2015; Vachu-dova, 2008).

The contemporary radical right is also a relativelynew phenomenon in Eastern Europe, but has beensteadily gaining in prominence. Although many radicalright movements today embrace the legacy of the fas-cist movements from the inter-war period, their noveltylies in their adherence to the rules of electoral compe-tition and — at least on the surface — their rejectionof outright violence as a solution to internal politicalconflicts. Given the diversity in terms of ethnic het-erogeneity, economic performance, and cultural lega-cies across East European countries, it is not surprisingthat radical right parties reflect this heterogeneity. Insome countries, such as Slovakia, Romania, Ukraine,Bulgaria, Estonia, and Latvia, ethnicity and languagecreate cleavages that clearly structure radical right pol-itics. In more ethnically homogeneous countries, suchas Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Poland, the ethniccleavage is less pronounced and radical right politics

1For an overview, see Gidron and Bonikowski (2013).

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 15

are focused either on mobilizing against the Roma oron social and religious issues that map onto particularparty systems. Despite the new-fangled radical right inEastern Europe, the authoritarian legacy of the inter-war period is becoming an acceptable reference pointdue to the elevated sense that liberal democracy is notcompatible with a vision of societies ruled exclusivelyby titular majorities (Carter, Bernhard and Nordstrom,2016).

The radical right in Eastern Europe is similar to itsWestern European cousins in its emphasis on mobi-lization against minorities. Until 2015, however, thatmobilization was exclusively against minorities withelectoral rights who have been settled in Eastern Eu-rope for centuries. The million plus influx of refugeesinto Europe from Syria expanded the portfolio of mi-norities to rally against and, paradoxically, somewhat“Westernized” the Eastern European radical right in itsopposition to Islam and migrants with non-Europeanbackgrounds.2

Radical right support is not fuelledby prejudice and xenophobia, but bydissatisfaction with ascendingminority groups.

Older democracies are more resilient, having livedthrough cycles of political contestation and successfullyabsorbed (some) ascending minorities into the main-stream. The danger of contestation in post-communistdemocracies is that the parallel processes of buildingdemocratic institutions and the ascension of minori-ties to power might entice voters to take authoritarianshortcuts. Emboldened illiberal leaders can then usethe process of ‘shutting out’ minorities from access topower channels as smoke and mirrors to eliminate po-litical opponents from within the titular group.

In the post-communist context, democratizationhas often interfered with the process of minority ac-commodation. It empowered the titular group to searchfor its expression of national identity but, at the same

time, it emboldened the titular group to exploit the ban-ner of the ‘people’s will’ to curb the plurality of voicesthat minorities can use to advance their causes. Giventhe relationship between policy shifts and radical rightmobilization, it is not surprising that a backlash oftenensues after referenda or following the adoption of lawsand policies that pertain to ethnic, sexual, and religiousminorities.3

II. The Anatomy of the Radical Right in Eastern Europe

The radical right in Eastern Europe has three uniquecharacteristics that distinguish it from its older,WesternEuropean cousins: (1) left-leaning party positions onthe economy; (2) linkages between identity and democ-ratization, which leads to the association of minoritypolicies with democratization; and (3) the coexistenceof radical right parties with radicalizedmainstreampar-ties.

First, notwithstanding their label, East Europeanradical right parties are left leaning on the economywhen compared to other parties in their respective po-litical system (Bustikova and Kitschelt, 2009). Theirpolicy platforms stand for protections against marketvolatility, more social spending, and greater state con-trol over the economy, along with less foreign involve-ment and ownership. Despite their overwhelming left-leaning economic stance, it does not follow that theparties have a clear socioeconomic profile at the micro-level that links poverty to radical right voting (Tucker,2002). There are two reasons why individual economicand sociodemographic profiles with the (mild) excep-tion of gender, do not map on to the economic policyplatforms of radical right parties in Eastern Europe.The first reason is the diffuse nature of economic riskthat obscures the links between voting, income levels,and occupational profiles. The second reason is be-cause economic grievances are tied to identity issues,such as concerns about the loss of national sovereigntyand the perceived unfairness of the economic system,which undermines the legitimacy of wealth acquired bythe winners of the economic transformation. The per-ceptions of unfairness generate grievances that trumpobjective indicators of wealth.

2Eastern Europe was home to refugees from Bosnia and Herzegovina who were of Muslim faith. Yet rallying against refugees from theformer Yugoslavia was never comparable to the mass demonstrations in the summer of 2015 against Islam that swept Eastern Europe andmobilized both mainstream and fringe parties against settlement policies for migrants. As one mainstream Slovak politician noted: “Theywould not have been happy here since we have no mosques for them.”

3Economic crises can be a double-edged sword for populist mobilization. In Eastern Europe, the crisis of 2008 has increased citizenparticipation but also the growth of a ‘good’and ‘bad’civil society. See, for example, Guasti (2016).

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 16

Democratization in Eastern Europe has empoweredminorities and politicized the protection of minorityrights (Kelley, 2010). In some instances, the backlashagainst diversity and inclusiveness was immediate, andreflected the growing pains of post-authoritarian poli-ties. In other cases, nationalism emerged in the subse-quent era of normal politics. After being preoccupiedwith the establishment of basic electoral institutions,resentment towards opportunities that the new liberaldemocratic order opened up for minorities resultedin the counter-mobilization of the radical right (Pop-Eleches, 2010). The distinctiveness of Eastern Europe’sdevelopment therefore stems, in part at least, from itsconcurrent transitions: the economic transformation,the democratic transition, and the redefinition of boththe state and ethnic boundaries.

The primary targets of radical right parties andgroups are empowered minorities but, in some moreimportant ways, also political parties as well as domes-tic and international organizations that are associatedwith the promotion of minority rights and minorityaccommodation. The process of democratization andpolitical transformation, as is well known, frees ethnicand social minorities to pursue their demands, but alsounleashes the mobilization capacity of actors who wishto pursue hostile acts against minorities.

Dissatisfaction with policies undertaken during theprocess of democratization, especially the expansion ofethnic and social minority rights (by politicians thatare viewed as unaccountable), is increasingly linkedto anti-democratic attitudes in the East (Minkenberg,2015). Although corrupt political practices are cer-tainly present in Western Europe at the highest levels,they are not associated with calls that question the corerules of democratic governance (Warner, 2007). In theEast, responsiveness to the demands of minorities anddemocracy are bundled together, such that the back-lash against establishment politicians and parties feedsoff the intensity and depth of a deeper identity-basedcleavage. Given the relatively higher levels of aggregatexenophobia in the East, attempts to modify ethnic re-lations, which are wrapped in populist calls for a moredirect relationships between voters and leaders, can beinterpreted as covert calls to revisit inclusive democracyas a form of political representation. The ability of newliberal democracies to survive hinges on their ability tocontain this backlash against the expansion of minorityrights.

Nationalism and sour attitudes towards liberaldemocracy have three interconnected sources in East-ern Europe. The first is the European Union, which isassociated with rights for ethnic, social, and sexual mi-norities, along with restrictions on national sovereignty(O’Dwyer, 2012; Levitz and Pop-Eleches, 2010). Op-position to these principles of liberal democracy inEurope conveniently provides a pathway to increasingsovereignty in domestic affairs. Second, opposition toliberal democracy is often disguised as opposition todiversity, and goes hand in hand with advocating forfurther restrictions on civic life. Third, since the demo-cratic and economic transitions occurred simultane-ously, voters associate the introduction of free marketswith democratization. The corrupt nexus of politicsand economics, which was born and raised in this dualtransition, has cast a dark shadow over democratic in-stitutions that have often failed to establish adequateregulatory and oversight institutions to curb politicalcorruption (Grzymala-Busse, 2007).

Paradoxically, the historical legaciesof authoritarian, fascist interwarregimes are more relevant aftertwenty-five years of democraticconsolidation than they were in1989.

The third aspect of radical right mobilization thatdistinguishes the East from the West is the presenceof radicalized mainstream parties. These parties aretypically left leaning on the economy and advocategreater state involvement in the economy, but mighthave even originated in anti-communist movementsprior to the fall of the Berlin Wall. The most promi-nent examples are Fidesz in Hungary, the Law and Jus-tice Party in Poland (PiS), and in Slovakia both ma-jor past and present social democratic prime ministersMeciar (HZDS) and Fico (SMER) (Deegan-Krause andHaughton, 2009). Although many Western Europeanmainstream parties embrace tough policies on immi-gration and home-grown terrorist networks, EasternEuropeanmainstream parties are, comparatively speak-ing, much more comfortable with their radical rightcousins. Therefore, radical right parties operate in amuch more permissive environment where they are of-ten incorporated into governing coalitions.

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 17

III. The Economic Leftism of the Radical ‘Right’

In the East, the boundaries between the radicalized rightand the radical right are remarkably blurry. It is becom-ing increasingly difficult to determine whether promi-nent mainstream parties, such as Fidesz led by Vik-tor Orban in Hungary, PiS unofficially led by JaroslawKaczynski in Poland, and Smer led by Robert Fico inSlovakia can still be classified as not radical. On thesurface, radical right parties in the East are a rare phe-nomenon and, on average, they are less electorally suc-cessful than theirWestern counterparts. Theirweaknesscan perhaps be attributed to the presence of radicalizedmainstream parties that siphon away their electoral po-tential. Therefore, whether mainstream parties coop-erate with radical right parties or distances themselvesfrom the ideological extremes (or even support the pros-ecution of the extremes) has had a mixed effect on theelectoral fortunes of radical right parties (Pytlas, 2016;Pirro, 2015; Meguid, 2008).

Higher aggregate levels of self-reported xenophobiain the East contribute to the permissiveness of radicalright rhetoric and to the authoritarian tendencies ofmany postcommunist democracies. Given their pres-ence in governing coalitions, radical right parties in theEast indicate a deficiency in liberal democratic consoli-dation. Paradoxically, the historical legacies of author-itarian, fascist interwar regimes are more relevant aftertwenty-five years of democratic consolidation than theywere in 1989, since some politicians are now looking fornew ways to organize political systems. Glorification ofthe interwar regimes ultimately benefits both the radi-cal right and the radicalized mainstream right, for theyclaim to be the political successors of these undemo-cratic, nationalist movements that are associated withstate independence, territorial re-unification, and self-rule (Hechter, 2013).

Voters and politicians have begun to contemplatepossible substitutes because Eastern Europe is expe-riencing democratic fatigue, low levels of trust in de-liberative institutions, and dissatisfaction with demo-cratic governance. Unlike in 1989, when democracywas the only game in town, at least in Central-EasternEurope, there is no agreement on what an alternativeform of governance might look this time around. Lib-eral democracy, with its appeal to inclusiveness, has itsopponents. Since the communist parties that precededthe democratic experiment have largely been discred-

ited as well, some voters and parties are looking to thedistant past of the interwar period and reviving nation-alistic heroes with dubious democratic credentials.

This helps to explain the resurgence of t-shirts of-fered for sale of the Polish interwar authoritarian states-man, Pilsudski, who unified Poland (and protected mi-norities), or the controversial interwar leader of theUkrainian Nationalists, Stepan Bandera, and the simi-larly controversial leader of the Romanian Iron Guard,Corneliu Codreanu. A newly elected member of theSlovak parliament, Marian Kotleba, occasionally wearssymbols of the Hlinka guard, associated with the clero-fascist (and short-lived) Slovak state during WWII. Thethird largest political party in Hungary, Jobbik, usessymbols similar to those of the authoritarian and anti-semitic WWII Arrow Cross Party.

IV. Conclusions

The narrative that rejects communism (which dimin-ished national sovereignty) and criticizes liberal democ-racy (which has increased the power of ethnic and so-cial minorities at the expense of the titular national-ity) is compelling because fascism is both an alternativeto democracy and antagonistic towards communism.Countries with a nationalist legacy of communist ruleare in a unique position to relate to populist legacieseither via mainstream or extreme political mobiliza-tion that evokes interwar authoritarianism. If there is areversal in liberal democratic governance in Eastern Eu-rope, it will most likely not be initiated by a small radicalright party, but by a large radicalized mainstream party.Whether the presence of a radical right party will facili-tate such a turn by introducing new issues and ideas intothe mainstream, or will alleviate pressure on the demo-cratic system by offering an alternative electoral chan-nel for discontent, needs to be explored further. Mostof the research on Eastern Europe has treated post-1989radical right parties as a Western equivalent of patho-logical normalcy, but if radical right parties contributeto the dismantlement of democratic governance by un-dermining constitutional checks and balances, such anapproach would prove imprudent.

References

Bustikova, Lenka. 2014. “Revenge of the radical right.” Com-parative Political Studies 47(12):1738–1765.

Bustikova, Lenka and Herbert Kitschelt. 2009. “The radical

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 18

right in post-communist Europe. Comparative perspec-tives on legacies and party competition.” Communist andPost-Communist Studies 42(4):459–483.

Carter, Jeff, Michael H. Bernhard and Timothy Nordstrom.2016. “Communist legacies and democratic survival in acomparative perspective liability or advantage.” East Euro-pean Politics & Societies 30(4):830–854.

Dancygier, Rafaela M. 2010. Immigration and conflict in Eu-rope. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Deegan-Krause, Kevin and Tim Haughton. 2009. “Toward amore useful conceptualization of populism: Types and de-grees of populist appeals in the case of Slovakia.” Politics &Policy 37(4):821–841.

Gidron, Noam and Bart Bonikowski. 2013. “Varieties of pop-ulism: Literature review and research agenda.” WorkingPaper Series 13-0004, Weatherhead Center for Interna-tional Affairs, Harvard University.

Grzymala-Busse, Anna. 2007. Rebuilding Leviathan: PartyCompetition and State Exploitation in Post-CommunistDemocracies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Guasti, Petra. 2016. “Development of citizen participation inCentral and Eastern Europe after the EU enlargement andeconomic crises.” Communist and Post-Communist Studies49(3):219–231.

Haughton, Tim and Kevin Deegan-Krause. 2015. “Hurricaneseason systems of instability in Central and East Europeanparty politics.” East European Politics & Societies 29(1):61–80.

Hechter, Michael. 2013. Alien Rule. Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press.

Kelley, Judith G. 2010. Ethnic Politics in Europe: The Powerof Norms and Incentives. Princeton: Princeton UniversityPress.

Levitz, Philip andGrigore Pop-Eleches. 2010. “Why no back-sliding? The European Union’s impact on democracy andgovernance before and after accession.” Comparative Polit-ical Studies 43(4):457–485.

Meguid, Bonnie. 2008. Party Competition Between Unequals.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Minkenberg, Michael. 2015. Transforming the Transforma-tion?: The East European Radical Right in the Political Pro-cess. Abingdon: Routledge.

Mudde, Cas and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser. 2013. “Exclu-sionary vs. inclusionary populism: Comparing contempo-rary Europe and Latin America.” Government and Opposi-tion 48(2):147–174.

O’Dwyer, Conor. 2012. “Does the EU help or hinder gay-rights movements in post-communist Europe? The case ofPoland.” East European Politics 28(4):332–352.

Pirro, Andrea. 2015. The Populist Radical Right in Centraland Eastern Europe: Ideology, Impact, and Electoral Per-formance. Abingdon: Routledge.

Pop-Eleches, Grigore. 2010. “Throwing out the bums: Protestvoting and unorthodox parties after communism.” World

Politics 62(2):221–260.Pytlas, Bartek. 2016. Radical Right Parties in Central and

Eastern Europe: Mainstream Party Competition and Elec-toral Fortune. Abingdon: Routledge.

Tucker, Joshua A. 2002. “The first decade of post-communistelections and voting: What have we studied, and how havewe studied it?” Annual Review of Political Science 5:271–304.

Urbinati, Nadia. 2014. Democracy Disfigured. Cambridge:Harvard University Press.

Vachudova, Milada A. 2008. “Tempered by the EU? Politi-cal parties and party systems before and after accession.”Journal of European Public Policy 15(6):861–879.

Warner, Carolyn M. 2007. The Best System Money Can Buy.Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Profiles in Populism: Southeast Asiaby William Case

City University of Hong Kong

Populism has made a comeback, both as a real-worldstrategy of political mobilization and a mode of politi-cal analysis. And it thrives today in the regions whereit was most practiced and studied before, Europe andSouth America. In vexed socioeconomic conditions,leaders have emerged in these regionswho arouse ‘virtu-ous’ masses against ‘corrupt’ elites. Further, they selectfrom ‘varieties’ of populism through which to identifyfollowers and map strategies.

Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser (2013) characterizethese varieties of populism as exclusive or inclusive:leaders either challenge elites by promoting ‘native’con-stituencies over ‘alien’ minorities or they try more col-lectively to activate and uplift social forces. By way ofexplanation, Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser invoke lev-els of development. In rich Europe, populist leaders is-sue exclusivist appeals, defending hard-earned welfaregains against ‘interlopers’. In poorer South America,leaders are inclusionary, proposing new programs thatembrace all comers.

Gidron and Bonikowski (2013) also conceptual-ize populism in dyadic terms of ‘moral boundaries’between ‘us and them’. And they broadly agree withthe distinctions made by Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser(2013) that populism can be practiced and analyzedalong exclusive and inclusive lines. But in breaking

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 19

fresh analytical ground, they push beyond explanationfor populism’s varieties to examine its implications fordemocracy. And on this count too, they detect differ-ent modes. Most crucially, when exclusivist in form,populism may undermine the constitutional protec-tions that are built-in for social minorities. But it canalso open avenues for political participation by once ig-nored, sullen, and inert majorities.

These insights into the breadth of constituencies andthe consequences for democracy enrich our discussionof populism. But perhaps we can make still more ad-vances. First, Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser have kepttheir notion of populism spare, purposely streamlin-ing it so that it might travel farther, in particular, fromEurope to South America. Hence, in their framework,the tensions inherent to populism are reduced to thearousal of masses against elites. One aim of this essayis to revisit a classic and more demanding concept ofpopulism, and show that despite its heavier freight itremains far-reaching. Indeed, it finds application in‘faraway’ Southeast Asia, beyond the ken of most main-stream analysts.

Second, in adopting a more classic interpretation,this essay sheds light on Mudde and Rovira Kalt-wasser’s debate over exclusion, as well as Gidron andBonikowski’s concerns with participation. In SoutheastAsia, the populism to which ambitious leaders resort,while animating the poor, eschews any overt exclusionof other societal segments. Even so, in gaining traction,it comes to be perceived as exclusivist by the middleclass, fearful of threats to its hard-won new status andresentful over redistributive taxes. And as the populistleader so amasses followers that they swell into electoralmajorities, their heightened participation exacerbatesthe middle class’s anxieties. At this juncture, then, wetake another analytical step, examining the impact ofperceived exclusion and heightened participation ondemocracy’s stability. Simply put, to the extent thatpopulism alienates establishment elites and alarms themiddle class, the risk increases that these forces willcounter with authoritarian backlash.

I. Classic Populism

Populist strategies are deployed by leaders who, in con-testing elections, pursue a ‘narrow’ ascendancy in highoffice. Pulsing with ambitions, they break with theestablishment elites with whom they had cooperated,

declaring themselves as ‘outsiders’. Then, in a contextof yawing inequalities and hardship, perpetuated byskewed development and corruption, they appeal tothe poor through redistributive schemes. Accordingly,populism, classically conceived, is hallmarked by con-figurations of elite-level divisions and trans-class coali-tions.

Next, as the leader amasses followers, he or she of-ten inspires them with ringing charisma. In addition,the leader may bundle mobilizing appeals in what Linzonce described as a ‘mentality’. Where this occurs, theloyalties of followers grow emotively charged. And yet,the leader’smentalities remain capped, stopping short ofany transformative challenges to the political economiesand sociocultural hierarchies upon which robust elitestatuses and minimalist democracy are founded. Theleader’s appeals are anti-establishment in tone, but neveranti-system. They do not reach climax in shrill personasor stringent and intricate ideologies. After all, existinghierarchical binaries and electoral arenas serve well,preserving the leader’s standing and lifting him or herto office.

To be sure, the populist leader, in seeking insurancefor fresh and narrow ascendancy, is wont to commit ex-ecutive abuses, truncating civil liberties, andmanipulat-ing electoral procedures. But this leader is not the one tofinish democracy off. Rather, this is instigated by estab-lishment elites from whom the leader has defected. Inthe leader’s drive for narrow ascendancy, the standingsand interests of these elites are so shaken that they strikeback, whether by nimbly wielding judicial institutionsor bluntly mounting military coups. And in sheetingcriticisms about the corruption of the populist leader inoffice, they reach down into society to enlist the supportof a timorous middle class, now abandoning any earlierdemocratizing commitments. In this way, the extent towhich populism is seen to grow exclusionary is revealed.So too in these conditions is democracy’s frailty.

Thus, in Southeast Asia at least, it is where populismis avoided that democracy survives. We should comple-ment our analysis of populism, then, by canvassing thehistorical and societal terrain in which it fails to takeroot. In contemporary European and South Americanmilieus, wherein both full-throttle liberalism and egali-tarian leftism aremissing, an assumption has taken holdthat is only in the interstices that populism can thrive.Let us turn to Southeast Asia, then, whose more com-

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 20

plex record offers a useful foil.

II. Southeast Asia’s Analytical Green Fields

Southeast Asia, though off the beaten track, offers atrove of different regime types and hence, broad scopefor comparative analysis. But in this essay, focusing onthe formation, impact, and negation of populism, anal-ysis is limited to the country cases that have the mostdemocratic experience—Thailand, the Philippines, andIndonesia. Further, with these countries ranked by theWorld Bank as middle- or lower-middle-income, wecan control for the development levels that Mudde andRovira Kaltwasser contend are pivotal for the exclusiveor inclusive patterns that populism attains.

In setting development levels aside, Southeast Asia’svaried and storied patterns of ethnic identification cometo the fore. Briefly, where ethnic fractionalization ismoderate, as in Thailand or the Philippines, leaders canbroadly mobilize the poor, boosting themselves intohigh office. But in doing this, they alienate establish-ment elites and the middle class, risking an authoritar-ian backlash. However, where ethnic fractionalizationis extensive, as in Indonesia, appeals to the poor dissi-pate amid amosaic of more compelling social identities.In these conditions, ambitious leaders who adopt pop-ulist strategies are thwarted, leaving establishment elitesundisturbed and the new democracy on beam.

III. ‘Classic’ Populism and Democratic Breakdown: Thai-land and the Philippines

Thailand is deeply integrated into global productionchains and export-oriented agribusiness. Thus, withinSoutheast Asia, it has acquired the region’s most exten-sive bases of manufacturing and commercial farming.In these conditions, industrial and agricultural workershave made material advances, yet suffer grave inequali-ties. And in the country’s comparative absence of ethnicidentification, registering in a modest fractionalizationscore of 0.431 (Fearon, 2003), workers gain an affiliationas ‘the poor’, rendering them highly attuned to populistappeals over redistributive schemes.

Thaksin Shinawatra, a third-generation scion of aprominent Sino-Chinese business family and a majorbeneficiary of concessions over government procure-ment, had sought to leverage his assets for political ad-vancement, attaining ministerial positions during the

1990s. But in seeking to catalyze his ascent, he drewupon his corporate resources and mastery of consumersurvey techniques tomore fully discovermass-level sen-timents. Duly informed, he unveiled a new politicalparty, Thai Rak Thai (Thai Loves Thai), then famouslypledged cheap public health care, village developmentschemes, and debt forgiveness for farmers. Over time,he also learned to embellish his appeals with charisma,delighting audiences through a resonant use of local di-alects and humor. Thaksin was thus brought handily topower in an election in 2001. And he was reelected in2005 and 2006. During campaign events, one regularlyheard from workers and farmers a refrain that “this isthe first government ever to do something for us” (per-sonal attendance, campaign rallies 2005, 2006).

Where ethnic fractionalization ismoderate, as in Thailand or thePhilippines, leaders can broadlymobilize the poor, boostingthemselves into high office. But indoing this, they alienateestablishment elites and the middleclass, risking an authoritarianbacklash. However, where ethnicfractionalization is extensive, as inIndonesia, appeals to the poordissipate amid a mosaic of morecompelling social identities.

However, as Thaksin adopted populist strategies,he drew further away from establishment elites in themilitary, the royalist Privy Council, the Interior Min-istry, old money conglomerates, and rival political par-ties. Further, in his valorization of the poor, in tandemwith his sustained self-enrichment while in office, healarmed the middle class, who increasingly perceivedhis policies as exclusivist. Indeed, in realizing that ThaiRak Thai could not be beaten in competitive elections,they abandoned their earlier democratic commitmentsfor what was branded ‘new politics’, a plan by which toreplace majority rule with military appointments to thelegislature and regulatory agencies. In these circum-stances, the generals obliged by mounting an author-itarian backlash, ousting Thaksin via a coup in 2006,then his successor, his sister, Yingluck, through anothercoup in 2014.

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 21

Within the Southeast Asian setting, Thailand mostfully embodies a demanding notion of populism, de-noted by a specific set of originating economic condi-tions, an ambitious, breakaway, and charismatic na-tional leader, redistributive programs through whichto anchor a trans-class coalition, and heightened com-petition that fractures elite-level relations. In addition,Thailand’s record helps to resolve questions over the ex-clusivist quality of populism, at least where the level ofdevelopment is sufficient to produce a new, but uncon-fidentmiddle class. And it exhibits the pressures on newdemocracies, their elections elevating a populist leaderbut then triggering an authoritarian backlash.

These patterns of populism are echoed in the Philip-pines. Though the country possesses far less industrythan Thailand does, it is classified still as lower-middleincome. And its unique historical legacies, civil soci-ety traditions, and cross-national migration ensure thatpopular awareness of, and resentments over, social in-equalities remain keen. Moreover, these sentimentsare comparatively unhindered by ethnic identification,indicated in the Philippines by a low fractionalizationscore of 0.161. In these conditions, the poor, partic-ularly in urban Manila, have grown available for pop-ulist mobilization. In polling conducted during the late1990s, the qualities that voters most sought were thatcandidates for office be ‘pro-poor’ and ‘approachable’(Social Weather Stations, 1997). And during the late1990s, just as Thaksin was plotting his rise, so too didJoseph Estrada, contesting the presidency in 1998.

Estrada is a onetime film star, warmly recalled forhis persona of rough, but big-hearted, street corner jus-tice. He is a breakaway from the country’s establishmentelites, a ‘black sheep’, and a drop out from the country’scredentialing college system. In campaigning for thepresidential election, he cast himself as an ‘enemy of therich’. He invoked his nickname, ‘Erap’, an anagram of‘pare’, Tagalog for friend, in fashioning a slogan of ‘Erapfor the poor’. Indeed, Estrada’s “standard movie rolemimicked his own life— someone from the edges of theelite who prefers the company of the poor” (Rocamora,2009, 46). Estrada easily won the plurality needed to layclaim to the presidency in 1998.

Accordingly, Estrada forged a trans-class coalition.And he began to strain elite-level relations. But oncein office, he lacked the personal discipline and policyvision that Thaksin had shown. His political vehicle,

Struggle for Filipino Masses (LAMPP), lacked organi-zational capacity. His redistributive schemes remainedvacuous and short-lived. For example, he set up thePresidential Action Center, issuing packages of rice andsardines from the backdoor of Malacanang Palace, hisofficial residence. But as supplicants were trampledin the rush to claim staples, this ad hoc program waspromptly closed. Another weak plank involved extraservices for the country’s “one hundred” poorest towns.But amid a vast archipelago in which 76 million peopleresided at the time, this program also was too haphaz-ardly undertaken to in any way redress poverty.

Thus, from the perspective of establishment elites,housed in major business conglomerates, vast land-holdings, the Catholic Church, top bureaucratic posts,and the security forces, Estrada posed no resolute chal-lenge to their prerogatives. Nor did he threaten the lifechances of the middle class. Yet he aroused the poorenough, while neglecting any technocratic policy mak-ing, that the elites from whom he had broken scornedhim. And as his personal corruption worsened, whilethe poor gathered along Manila’s thoroughfares and inits malls, the middle class grew resentful. Thus, througha dubious SupremeCourt ruling, instigated by establish-ment elites, sanctioned by the military, and applaudedby the middle class, Estrada was forced from office andjailed for plunder. He was promptly succeeded by thevice president, Gloria Arroyo, more in the mould of es-tablishment elites.

This episode of populism in the Philippines is lesscomplete than inThailand. Originating conditions wereweaker, leaving the poor less primed for mobilization,especially in rural areas where old patterns of repres-sive agriculture and bossism persist. And Estrada, inhis personal indiscipline, failed to craft any meaningfulredistributive schemes. Accordingly, Estrada’s behav-iors were seen as less threatening than embarrassingby establishment elites. Similarly, his policies were per-ceived as less exclusionary than bumbling by themiddleclass. Thus, after Estrada was ousted from the presi-dency and jailed, establishment elites were content toleave a rough democratic framework in place, avoidingany more withering authoritarian backlash. Even so,nascent patterns of trans-class coalescence, elite-levelfractiousness, and democratic strains encourage ouranalysis of Estrada’s tenure through a demanding no-tion of populism. And we may soon have reason to doso again. A newly elected president, Rodrigo Duterte,

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 22

hailing from a rising provincial clan, mobilized impov-erished voters by railing against corrupt elites and druglords. But though he pursues rough street-level justice,we await his articulation of redistributive schemes andmentalities.

IV. ‘Thwarted’ Populism and Democratic Persistence: In-donesia

Recently, populist syndromes have been detected in In-donesia too. With its social inequalities approachingthe levels ofThailand and the Philippines, a former gen-eral, Prabowo Subianto, contesting the presidency in2014, adopted a classic populist mien and repertoire ofstrategies. Yet amid Indonesia’s very high level of ethnicfractionalization, to the point of mosaicized fragmen-tation, registering a score of 0.766, Prabowo’s populistappeals lost force.

Acutely ambitious, Prabowo began to plot his nar-row ascendancy a decade before Indonesia’s presiden-tial election in 2014. His personal and family profilemarked him as “the epitome of an elite politician” (Mi-etzner, 2015, 2). He hailed from an aristocratic lineage,traceable, he claimed, to the Javanese warrior-prince,Diponegoro. He had married into the Suharto familyclan and had operated as a top general during the NewOrder. And he had enlarged his family wealth afterwardby dealing in the country’s metal resources. However,Prabowo also felt a ‘strong sense of rejection’ by es-tablishment elites, blaming them in particular for hisdismissal from the military at the time of Suharto’s fallin 1998. Thus, in Mietzner’s (2015, 20) words, “a deepwound in his pride [fed] his ambition for a comebackand revenge against those who had wronged him.”

In assuming the strident posture of an ‘outsider’,Prabowo fueled elite-level suspicions. His aim was toforge a trans-class coalition, appealing expressly to “therural poor and low-income workers” (Mietzner, 2015,2-3). In doing this, Prabowo drew lessons from ThaksinShinawatra, whom he “admired”, and Hugo Chávez inVenezuela, an ex-general with whom he was “fasci-nated” (Mietzner, 2015, 18). He plowed vast fundinginto a political party, the Greater Indonesia Movement(Gerindra). He worked up a mentality, arousing na-tionalist resentments against foreign investors.

And yet, despite the vast campaign resources that

Prabowo was able to muster and the redistribution thathe proposed, he stumbled in his bid for the presidency.At the mass level, his virulently populist appeals oftenfell on deaf ears, with exit polling showing that by amar-gin of ten percent, Prabowo drew less support from therural poor than did his rival, Joko Widodo. But accord-ingly, sections of the middle class, which were given lesscause to be wary, were drawn to Prabowo’s charisma,organizational talents, and archly heroic mentality. Wesee, then, in Prabowo’s loss, the distractions in Indone-sia from populism’s logic. Notwithstanding grave in-equalities, a terrain of intensely localized ethnic identi-ties rebuts a narrative of supremely overarching leader-ship and base material redistribution.

But in proclaiming the continuing salience in In-donesia of populism, some analysts argue that Widodo,winner of the presidential election, is a populist too, butof a new kind, a humbly-born and widely embracing‘man of the people.’ Yet this is to so strip the concept ofanalytical assets that it losesmuch of the punch that onlyin its classic form can it convey. To be sure,Widodo can-vassed health care cards for the poor. But he also scaledback popular fuel subsidies, then laid great stress onport development and fisheries, suggesting less prioriti-zation of any redistribution than technocratic decision-making. He insisted too that in his “polite” approach tocampaigning and policy formulation, “of course, I haveno anti-rich sentiments” (Mietzner, 2015, 26), evokingan aversion to elite-level divisions and middle-class ex-clusion.

Widodo’s victory over Prabowo, then, signifies hispragmatism, centrism, and calming demeanor morethan any incisive and authentic populist mobilization.In these circumstances, Widodo’s holding high office isviewed as unthreatening by establishment elites, leavingan authoritarian backlash unfueled by any searing elite-level alienation or middle-class alarm. Hence, two yearson, Widodo’s presidency is more secure than when hewas first elected. And Indonesia’s democracy, since itsinauguration nearly two decades ago, has been less oftendegraded than those in Thailand and the Philippines.1

V. Conclusions

The main aims of this essay have been to revisit a de-manding notion of populism, then demonstrate in theunderstudied region of Southeast Asia that it can illumi-

1See Freedom House (2016).

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 23

nate exclusion, participation, and democratic stability— the concerns ofMudde and Rovira Kaltwasser (2013)and Gidron and Bonikowski (2013). It canvassed thecountries in Southeast Asia with the most democraticexperience, Thailand, the Philippines, and Indonesia.In each case, ambitious, breakaway elites appeared, de-fecting from other establishment elites in the hopes ofwinning through elections a narrow ascendancy. Fur-ther, these cases are roiled by grave social inequalities,tempting leaders to arouse the poor through redistribu-tive appeals.

But thereafter, trajectories diverged, evoking South-east Asia’s diversity in political outcomes and its oppor-tunities for controlled comparison. In Thailand, wefound heightened participation by the poor and per-ceptions of exclusion among the middle class, prompt-ing alienated establishment elites to break democracydown. In the Philippines, we found heightened partic-ipation by the poor, but weaker perceptions of middle-class exclusion, dissuading elites from mounting anyfull authoritarian backlash. What best accounts forthese differences? A pivotal, but unquantifiable factorcomes to the fore: the determined or insouciant styles ofpopulist leadership that respectively horrify or simplyirritate establishment elites. Thaksin and Estrada showsimilarities in their leadership. They can thus be exam-ined together through high-powered populist lenses.But in doing this, we detect the differences in their seri-ousness of purpose and on-the-job performance, lead-ing to the death of democracy in Thailand, but merelyto its disabling in the Philippines.

Thailand and the Philippines thus differ in degree.But their trajectories differ in kind from Indonesia. Aswe have seen, Indonesia also featured an ambitious,breakaway leader in Prabowo. But though he modeledhis populist strategies upon those of Thaksin, forminga party and even a nationalist mentality, he and his ve-hicle fell short of the presidency and any parliamentarymajority. Establishment elites, evidently unthreatened,and the middle class, mostly ambivalent, acquiesced,then, in Widodo assuming and retaining high office,therein leaving the country’s democracy no worse off.

What best accounts for this difference in democ-racy’s persistence, with Thailand and the Philippines onone side and Indonesia on the other? In the Indone-sia case, forceful populist leadership mattered less, forPrabowo was as highly-motivated and as resourced as

Thaksin was. And he was far more driven and richly-endowed than Estrada. Thus, in explaining Prabowo’sdefeat, another factor looms large — social structure.Indonesia, with its bristling ethnic fractionalization, isless receptive to electrifying populist appeals than re-assuring nice-guy idioms. In Southeast Asia, then, weobserve populism’s varieties, denoted by the extent towhich they exclude, heighten participation, and destabi-lize democracy. But to better elucidate these dynamics,a classic and demanding notion of populism seems tohelp.

References

Fearon, James D. 2003. “Ethnic and cultural diversity bycountry.” Journal of Economic Growth 8(2):195–222.

Freedom House. 2016. “Freedom in the world 2016, anxiousdictators, wavering democracies: Global freedom underPressure.” Overview Essay.

Gidron, Noam and Bart Bonikowski. 2013. “Varieties of pop-ulism: Literature review and research agenda.” WorkingPaper Series 13-0004, Weatherhead Center for Interna-tional Affairs, Harvard University.

Mietzner, Marcus. 2015. Reinventing Asian Populism:Jokowi’s Rice, Democracy, and Political Contestation in In-donesia. Honolulu: East-West Center.

Mudde, Cas and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser. 2013. “Exclu-sionary vs. inclusionary populism: Comparing contempo-rary Europe and Latin America.” Government and Opposi-tion 48(2):147–174.

Rocamora, Joel. 2009. Estrada and populist temptation in thePhilippines. In Populism in Asia, ed. Kosuke Mizuno andPasuk Phongpaichit. Singapore: NUS Press pp. 41–65.

Social Weather Stations. 1997. National Survey. SWB 97-17/18.

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 24

Populism in Africa: Ethnicity, Solidarity,and the Potential for Inclusive Politics

by Nic CheesemanUniversity of Oxford

You cannot escape Donald Trump, even in Africa. At apublic talk in Nairobi one of the speakers, Godwin Mu-runga, was asked whether African universities shouldrun more courses on American and European politics.1He responded by arguing that this would be a goodthing for both African students and the discipline ofpolitical science more generally. After pointing out thatthe distinctive research focus and experience ofAfrican-ists means that they have a comparative advantage in anumber of areas, Dr. Murunga drew warm applauseand more than a few knowing laughs by suggesting thatacademics from the continent should be dispatched tothe United States to help their colleagues understandthe political strategy and appeal of the Republican pres-idential candidate.

This is just one example of a growing tendencyfor media commentators, academics, and even come-dians to draw analogies between Trump and Africanleaders over the past twelve months, a political memethat reached its apogee in October 2015 when a com-edy sketch by Trevor Noah, the South African presen-ter of the Daily Show, depicted Trump as the “perfectAfrican president”.2 In the clips that followed, whichhave been widely circulated on the Internet, Noah jux-taposed some of Trump’s quips on the campaign trailwith footage of African dictators, including Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe and Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi.

The comments of Dr. Murunga and Trevor Noahwere light hearted, but speak to a set of widely held as-sumptions aboutAfrican politics, namely that it featuresmore than its fair share of populist rabble-rousers. Inrecent years, this sentiment has also found expressionin the form of a number of well-received academic anal-yses. Carbone (2008, 77) has carefully documented theway in which the Ugandan President, Yoweri Musev-eni, uses “antipolitics as a legitimizing strategy”, whileIsmail (2015) has documented the rise of “populismin Southern Africa’s dominant party states.” Similarly,

Resnick (2010) has written insightfully about the rise ofpopulist leaders capable of mobilizing a mass supportbase in urban areas in Kenya and Zambia. In all of thesecases, leaders have sought to rally support by deployingclassic populist tropes: the reification of the commonman, the demonization of elites and expertise, and theclaim to be one with the people.

However, in line with the findings of Gidron andBonikowski (2013), the populist label has been incon-sistently applied and researchers have not always beencareful to explain precisely what is populist about agiven leader. As in other parts of the world, the termhas often been applied to left-leaning leaders who ad-vocate more radical solutions to the challenges facingtheir countries, but has also been used by other authorsto describe a very different dynamic of rural conser-vatism. At the same time, in the media, blogs, and moregeneral treatments of the continent, there has also beena noticeable tendency to deploy populism as a catch-allconcept in which it effectively becomes a rather emptyway of describing leaders and policies with any kind ofpopular appeal.

Over the last decade a number ofAfrican leaders have proved able tosustain a diverse support base thatincludes both ethnic and populistconstituencies.

Partly as a result, populism inAfrica has received in-sufficient theoretical and empirical interrogation. Mostnotably, there is a serious question about whether gen-uine populist strategies are compatible with a politicalcontext in which a great deal of electoral mobilizationoccurs along ethnic lines.3 Significantly, recent researchon this topic has identified a number of “ethnopopulist”parties that draw on the “ethnic” appeal of party lead-ers within their own communities, especially in ruralareas, in addition to a broader populist message thatis usually most effective in cosmopolitan urban con-stituencies (Cheeseman and Larmer, 2015, 23). The

1Dr. Godwin Murunga is a Senior Research Fellow at Nairobi University; the talk was a launch event for my book, Democracy in Africa,at the British Institute in Eastern Africa on 24 August 2016.

2Episode 2,681 of the Daily Show aired on 1 October 2015 in the wake of the Oregon College shooting. It can be viewed at: goo.gl/HBnkBY (accessed 29 August 2016).

3“Ethnic” is used here as a shorthand for a range of ethnic, linguistic, and regional identities that are politically salient in Africa, theprecise form of which varies across the continent.

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 25

fate of these parties is telling, because the tension be-tween these two very different types of appeal tends toundermine the viability of their campaign, preventingleaders from achieving electoral success on the basis ofthe kind of cross-ethnic “inclusionary populism” foundin Latin America (Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser, 2013).

II. Populism in the Africanist Literature

It would not be surprising if populism was rampant inAfrica, given the context within which political lead-ers operate. Although there is significant variation interms of the structure and dynamics of the continent’spolitical systems, parties tend to be weak, election cam-paigns often have limited programmatic content, andthe capacity to communicate messages via television islimited to urban areas. As a result, political aspirantscontinue to rely heavily on delivering highly targetedmessages through face-to-face meetings to get the voteout. It is for this reason that recent research has foundthat campaign rallies are more important in Africa thananywhere else in the world (Paget, 2016). Under suchconditions, populist forms of political communicationand organization, which do not rely on the existenceof strong state or party structures, are likely to thrive.However, efforts to describe the kind of populism thathas emerged in Africa have not always been fully suc-cessful.

In part, this is because the literature has vari-ously understood populism through all three of the ap-proaches identified by Gidron and Bonikowski (2013,14) – as an ideology, as a discursive style, and as a formof political mobilization – without always recogniz-ing that which framework one embraces significantlyshapes both the classification of political leaders andthe understanding of their strategies. As a result, therehas been a tendency for different scholars to talk pastone another.

Some of this conceptual confusion is revealed bythe academic response to the work of Idahosa (2004).Given the lack of research on this topic, Idahosa’s at-tempt to conceptualise populism as a political ideologyin order to demonstrate that a populist outlook unitesthe thought of writers and leaders such as Franz Fanon,Amilcar Cabral, and Julius Nyerere, represented a sig-nificant contribution to the field. However, in order tomake this case, Idahosa relied on a definition of pop-ulism that has proved to be highly controversial. Draw-

ing inspiration from African and Russian literature andexamples, he conceptualized populism as “an eman-cipatory ideology based upon a specific conception ofproduction relations”, giving it a distinctly socialist out-look (Idahosa, 2004, 15). Idahosa also relied heavilyon a distinction between nationalism and populism, inwhich nationalists paper over class differences whereaspopulists support “the peasant masses.” Other scholarsproved to be less persuaded by this framing. For in-stance, Blaser (2007, 1) argues that Idahosa’s analysisneglects the fact that “populism is not only the domainof the left”, and that his “distinction between nation-alism and populism falters on the eclecticism of dailypolitical discourse and policy making.”

Despite Idahoso’s best efforts, the tendency of theliterature to treat African politics as if it were an ideol-ogy free zone, combined with the focus of recent workon the personalization of politics, meant that few re-searchers followed his example and analysed Africanpopulism as a system of political thought. Instead, re-cent scholarship has primarily focused on populism asa discursive style and as a political strategy. Indeed,Africanists have tended to overlook the distinction be-tween these two approaches, and for good reason. In acontinent in which leaders mainly communicate withvoters through rallies and personal networks, discur-sive style is a political strategy. Thus, although Car-bone (2008, 3) concludes that “neither Museveni norhis regime are fully-fledged examples of ‘anti-politicalneo-populism’”, he notes a populist dimension in thepresident’s “ever more plebiscitarian and ‘pro-people’discourse.” Similarly, Resnick (2010, 24) identifies anumber of populist practices in recent presidential cam-paigns in Kenya, South Africa and Zimbabwe, findingthat “[Michael] Sata, [Raila] Odinga, and [Jacob] Zumaall utilized populist strategies that involved the fusionof charisma with policy promises oriented towards thepriorities of the growing urban poor” (see also Resnick(2014)).

Resnick’s focus on the urban poor is significant, be-cause a number of recent publications on populism haveconcentrated on the more densely populated states ofSouthernAfrica, where growing inequality and a historyof urbanization have given rise to a more radicalisedpopulation that can be more easily reached and orga-nized. In this vein, Larmer and Fraser (2007) documentthe rise to political prominence of Zambia’s MichaelSata, who used a populist strategy to go from being a

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 26

political also-ran to the country’s fifth president in thespace of little more than a decade. To achieve this re-markable transformation, Sata carefully targeted his ap-peals to communities in towns and cities that, by virtueof the country’s history of mining, trade union activism,and urban poverty, were particularly responsive to hisargument that the state could and should play a role intransforming the condition of the masses.

Larmer and Fraser’s analysis is particularly impor-tant because it explicitly makes the case that populismis often both a political strategy and a discursive style,and provides a strong argument as to why the two areinherently linked. More specifically, they argue thatSata’s populist political policies were able to rally disaf-fected and disenfranchisedZambians to his side becausethey were given credibility by his intense and rabblerousing speaking style (Larmer and Fraser, 2007, 613).By launching into vociferous attacks on his opponentsand ending his routines by tearing up a cabbage – cho-sen to symbolize the then-president Levy Mwanawasa,who Sata nicknamed “the cabbage” after he suffered astroke – the opposition leader demonstrated that he wasa man of action capable of overthrowing the status quo(Larmer and Fraser, 2007, 629-630). In this way, hisdiscursive style was critical to the success of his populistmessage and strategy.

In order to bridge the likely gapbetween ethnic and populistconstituencies, leaders must be ableto “articulate shared narratives ofexclusion in order to integratediverse constituencies into a unitedcampaign.”

While the recent focus on urban populism has gen-erated many valuable insights, it has also led to the rel-ative neglect of rural populism. This is unfortunate,because the wider literature tells us that some of theearliest forms of populism emerged in rural settings,and variants of rural populism are alive and well inAfrica. In Ghana, for example, President J. J. Rawlings– nicknamed Junior Jesus as a result of his charismaand popularity among his supporters – utilised a pop-ulist discursive style to great effect in some of the mostrural parts of the country. Similarly, Maloka (1996)

has argued that the concept of populism can be prof-itably used to illuminate struggles over political powerin rural South Africa. The neglect of rural populismin much comparative work overlooks this reality, andhas led Africanists away from engaging with two criticalquestions: How does populism relate to ethnic politics,and is Afro-populism really just ethno-nationalism indisguise?

II. Inclusive and Exclusive Populism in Africa

With a small number of important exceptions, Africanelections witness high levels of ethnic political mobi-lization. Although recent research has found that anumber of others factors shape voting behaviour, suchas evaluations of the economic performance of the in-cumbent, most studies conclude that ethnicity remainsthe most powerful determinant of electoral behaviour(Eifert, Miguel and Posner, 2010; Cheeseman, 2016).This is significant, because at first glance ethnic andpopulist forms of mobilization appear to be incompat-ible. Promising to defend the interests of the commonman implies a form of solidarity rooted in class or eco-nomic status that does not fit well with ethnic politicsand its emphasis on sectional divisions. While populismhas the potential to be relatively inclusive, with leaderspledging to improve the position of the disenfranchisedwhatever their ethnic or racial identity (Mudde andRovira Kaltwasser, 2013), the logic of ethnic politicsis inherently exclusionary. Indeed, the notion that in-dividuals should vote for a candidate of their ethnicity,who in turn is expected to deliver benefits back to theirown community, effectively casts members of other eth-nic groups as outsiders and rivals.

Yet despite this apparent inconsistency, over the lastdecade a number of African leaders have proved able tosustain a diverse support base that includes both ethnicand populist constituencies. This raises the question ofhow candidates can reconcile these two different typesof appeal. One way to answer this question is to con-ceptualize African populism as a discursive style withno ideological content. Understood in this way, thereis no real clash between populist and ethnic strategiesbecause populism is little more than a rhetorical devicethat leaders use to rally their supporters around a rangeof different messages, which can be ethnic, religious,programmatic, nationalist, and so on. In other words,one could argue that there is no tension between eth-nic politics and populism because populism is simply

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 27

a way of delivering a message; it is not the message it-self. However, this answer is ultimately unsatisfactorybecause in at least some cases populism has clearly beenmore than just a discursive style.

To return to the example of Michael Sata, whileit was his firebrand performances on the stump thatcaught the eye of many analysts, “King Cobra” also de-veloped a powerful explanation of the country’s eco-nomic woes that rested on the claim that an out of touchgovernment had colluded with Chinese and other for-eign “infesters” to betray the interests of the commonman (Larmer and Fraser, 2007, 627-629). Like manypopulists, Sata suggested that economic salvation wasjust a short step away, and could be achieved by transfer-ring control of the state back into the hands of ordinaryZambians, represented by their most loyal of servants– Sata himself. Thus, although Sata’s political platformwas at times inconsistent and incoherent, his thinkingdemonstrates clear evidence of the kind of thin populistideology described by Gidron and Bonikowski (2013,5-6).

Moreover, there is good evidence that these poli-cies resonated with a significant portion of Sata’s sup-port base. Research by Cheeseman, Ford and Simutanyi(2014) found that Zambians who held political beliefsand attitudes commonly associated with a leftist pop-ulist position – rejection of elites, support for high lev-els of state intervention – were significantly more likelyto support Michael Sata than those that did not. Bycultivating the appeal of his Patriotic Front (PF) partyamong these voters, Sata was able to consistently ex-pand his support base across ethnic lines in urban areas.At the same time, he was able to grow his popularity insome rural areas through “ethnic” appeals to the Bembacommunity with which he identified (Cheeseman andHinfelaar, 2010).4 Taken together, these two trends en-abled Sata to increase his share of the vote from just 3%in 2001 to 42% in 2011, which proved to be sufficient tosecure the presidency, unseating a formerly dominantruling party in the process. In the case of countries suchas Zambia, then, we cannot simply dismiss or sidestepthe apparent tensions between ethnic and populist po-litical strategies.

In order to explain the conditions under which itis feasible for political leaders to deploy ethnopopulist

strategies, Cheeseman and Larmer (2015) conducteda pairwise comparison of Zambia and Kenya. The lat-ter case was selected on the basis that scholars such asResnick have identified Kenya’s main opposition leader,Raila Odinga, as one of the new generation of effectivepopulist mobilizers. In both countries, we identified aclear tension between the messages leveraged by polit-ical leaders in urban and rural areas. To take the mostobvious example, in Zambia, Michael Sata pledged toreduce the cost of food for urbanworkers, which implic-itly threatened to undermine the revenue received byagricultural producers among his rural Bemba supportbase. At the same time, his pledge to promote the inter-ests of the Bemba community implied that members ofother ethnic groups might lose out if he secured power.So how was Sata able to rally support across these verydifferent constituencies without his campaign being un-dermined by the inherent contradictions at the heart ofthis “ethnopopulist” approach?

One possible answer to this question is that poor in-formation networks in Africa mean that leaders can saydifferent – and often incompatible – things to differentgroups without being punished. In other words, ethnicappeals about favouritism and local issues can be tar-geted at rural voters, while populist appeals can be tar-geted at urban voters, with neither group being aware ofwhat is being said to the other. Thismay be true in someinstances, but it doesn’t appear to apply in the Zambiancase. Instead, there is strong evidence that Sata was ableto appeal to various constituencies at the same time be-cause, despite their different economic interests, theyshared many of the same political beliefs (Cheeseman,Ford and Simutanyi, 2014). In other words, Sata didnot simply mobilize in a “populist” way in urban areasand an “ethnic” way in rural locales (though there wascertainly an element of this); rather, he articulated a setof grievances that resonated with both constituencies.

Although well documented, the Zambian experi-ence is relatively rare in Africa. On the whole, populistappeals have not been so ethnically inclusive, or so effec-tive. The case of Kenya demonstrates this tendency well.In the run up to 2007, Raila Odinga struggled to find acommon message to rally his ethnically diverse supportbase. Forming a “pentagon” of leaders from each part ofthe country to back his candidacy proved to be an effec-tive way of broadening the reach of his campaign, but, in

4Sata was a member of the Bisa community, and so not a Bemba, but he spoke Bemba and sought to identify himself with, and mobilizethrough, this more numerous ethno-linguistic group.

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 28

effect, Odinga’s candidacy depended on the ability of re-gional “Big Men” to deliver their communities. In otherwords, despite his populist rhetoric, Odinga attracted across-ethnic support base by harnessing diverse ethnicidentities, rather than overcoming them. This raises animportant question: how can the variation in outcomesbetween Kenya and Zambia be explained?

The literature on populism in other parts of theworld has already suggested some potential answersto this puzzle. Most notably, Madrid (2008, 479) hassought to explain the “rise of ethnopopulism in LatinAmerica” by arguing that ethnically based appeals canbe successfully married to populist ones when ethnicidentification is not “unidimensional” and ethnic po-larization is relatively low. For example, Madrid sug-gests that the electoral strategy of Evo Morales suc-ceeded because the mobilization of self-identified in-digenous peoples did not clash with more class-basedappeals to the poor in Bolivia’s multidimensional po-litical space. However, although Madrid’s work is illu-minating, such explanations are of little help in Africawhere the salience of communal identities is profoundand ethnicity is often the overriding political cleavage.

Instead, Cheeseman and Larmer (2015, 22) suggestthat the two main factors that shape the feasibility ofsuccessfully adopting an inclusive form of ethnopop-ulism are “variation in the reach of the urban politicaleconomy and the extent to which ethnic identities havehistorically been politicized.” More specifically, Cheese-man and Larmer argue that in order to bridge the likelygap between ethnic and populist constituencies, leadersmust be able to “articulate shared narratives of exclusionin order to integrate diverse constituencies into a unitedcampaign.” This is most likely to be possible “whereurban areas have comparatively high economic and po-litical significance, such that patterns of rural–urban–rural migration and urban–rural remittances bridge thedivide between urban and rural voters and increase thewillingness of rural communities to support populistparties” (Cheeseman and Larmer, 2015, 23).

The contrasting fortunes of ethnopopulist leadersin Kenya and Zambia demonstrate this point well. InZambia, high levels of urbanization and industrializa-tion have underpinned a history of urban radicalism,

while President Kenneth Kaunda’s one-party state at-tempted – though not always successfully – to manageethnicity out of politics. The cumulative effect of therepeated circulation of people and ideas between urbanand rural locations, the centrality of the urban economyto wider developments, and the lower political salienceof ethnic cleavages, ensured that populist appeals res-onated beyond the cities. On this interpretation, it wasthe shared interests of rural Bemba and urban voters,who both stood to gain from improvements in the payand conditions for urban workers as a result of the sig-nificance of urban remittances to rural livelihoods, thatunderpinned their common support for populist posi-tions. As a result, Sata was able to run a more inclusivecampaign in which voters from a range of ethnic groupswere attracted to his political platform,5 overcoming –if only for a short time – the country’s ethno-linguisticdivisions.

By contrast, in the Kenyan case the high salience ofethnicity and comparatively low level of urbanizationlimited the reach and efficacy of ethnically neutral pop-ulist appeals. Faced with such a context, Odinga hadlittle option but to mobilize support by co-opting re-gional leaders, which had the side effect of emphasizingthe importance of ethnically constituted patron-clientrelations, exacerbating inter-communal tensions. Inturn, this contributed to the outbreak of ethnic violencefollowing a particularly heated election campaign thatculminated in the electoral commission announcing adisputed result. In this way, the “fate of the PF and theODM reveals not only the constraints under which op-position leaders operate, but also the danger posed byforms of ethnopopulism that rely more heavily on eth-nic, rather than populist, foundations” (Cheeseman andLarmer, 2015, 23).

This finding represents an important challenge tothe notion that populism is rife, and effective, in Africa.Such a claim may be true if we confine ourselves tospeaking about populism solely as a discursive style, butit is misleading if it is taken to imply the existence of apopulist ideology, or the effective deployment of pop-ulist strategies of electoral mobilization. Of course, notall African states feature ‘ethnic politics’, and there are anumber of countries that are more ethnically homoge-nous and in which ethnicity has played a less impor-

5In 2009, citizens from a number of different ethnic communities were found to have no bias against Sata, even when they did notshare his background and had the option of backing co-ethnic leaders. The one exception was the Tonga community (Cheeseman, Fordand Simutanyi, 2014, 358).

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 29

tant role in structuring political competition, such asBotswana and Zimbabwe. However, when it comes tothe salience of ethnicity, most African states are closerto Kenya than they are to Zambia, and there are fewcountries in which leaders can hope to win elections onthe basis of urban votes alone. As a result, an inclusivepopulist appeal in urban areas is rarely enough for aleader to secure national power. In turn, this constrainsthe potential for pure populist strategies to be successfuland pushes aspiring candidates towards ethnopopulism.

III. The Future for Populism in Africa

If we are right that populism thrives in the context oflarger urban populations, and closer ties between ruraland urban areas, then the next twenty years are likelyto see the rise of an increasing number of leaders in themold of Michael Sata. According to UN Habitat (2014),Africa is one of the fastest urbanizing regions in theworld. By 2035, around 50% of the people on the conti-nent will live in urban areas, while the number of urbandwellers on the continent is likely to increase from 400million to 1.26 billion by 2050 (United Nations, 2014,9). A recent report by the consultancy group OxfordAnalytica (2016) suggests that this is likely to changethe political geography of the continent, giving rise toextended metropolitan areas, growing urban corridors,and in some cases urban ‘mega-regions.’Already, theaverage distance between urban centers with popula-tions of more than 10,000 people in West Africa hasdecreased from 111 km in 1950 to just 33 km in 2000.Thus, in the future, more Africans will be living in ur-ban areas, and the gap between those urban areas, andbetween them and the rural hinterland, is going to de-crease (2016, 1).

These demographic trends will place increasingstrain on urban infrastructure. Much of the analysisof urbanization has focused on capital cities such asLagos and Nairobi, but around 75% of the urban pop-ulation increase will be absorbed by small and inter-mediate sized cities (Oxford Analytica, 2016, 1). Thismeans that a considerable portion of the challenge ofaccommodating new urban residents will be born byareas that typically lack the finance and human capitalto respond. Without urgent action, it is almost certainthat the growth of towns and cities will result in theemergence of new slums (United Nations, 2014, 17-18).Taken together, these developments are likely to im-prove the prospects for the gestation and transmission

of populist ideas.

However, as in the past, other trends will compli-cate this story. It is unclear whether the overall politicalsalience of ethnicity on the continent is rising or falling,but recent research has demonstrated the propensityfor election campaigns to focus attention away fromoverarching sentiments such as class and nationalismand towards narrow sectional interests such as ethnicity(Eifert, Miguel and Posner, 2010). Along with contin-uing tensions between “indigenes” and “settlers” overthe local distribution of political rights and economicresources (Geschiere, 2009), this suggests that ethniccleavages are likely to play a major role in the strugglefor power for the foreseeable future. Given this, thechances are that future political leaders will continueto face the challenge of how to reconcile populist andethnic constituencies. We therefore need to develop abetter understanding of the dynamics and possibilitiesof ethnopopulism in the African context.

References

Blaser, Thomas. 2007. “Populism: A cure for Africa’s prob-lems?” H-Net Online.

Carbone, Giovanni M. 2008. Museveni’s political trajectory.In No-Party Democracy?: Ugandan Politics in ComparativePerspective, ed. Giovanni M Carbone. Boulder: .

Cheeseman, Nic. 2016. Democracy in Africa: Successes, Fail-ures, and the Struggle for Political Reform. NewYork: Cam-bridge University Press.

Cheeseman, Nic and Marja Hinfelaar. 2010. “Parties, plat-forms, and political mobilization: The Zambian presiden-tial election of 2008.” African Affairs 109(434):51–76.

Cheeseman, Nic and Miles Larmer. 2015. “Ethnopopulismin Africa: Oppositionmobilization in diverse and unequalsocieties.” Democratization 22(1):22–50.

Cheeseman, Nic, Robert Ford and Neo Simutanyi. 2014. Isthere a ‘populist threat’ in Zambia? In Zambia: BuildingProsperity from Resource Wealth, ed. Christopher Adam,Paul Collier and Michael Gondwe. Oxford: Oxford Uni-versity Press pp. 493–512.

Eifert, Benn, Edward Miguel and Daniel N. Posner. 2010.“Political competition and ethnic identification in Africa.”American Journal of Political Science 54(2):494–510.

Geschiere, Peter. 2009. The Perils of Belonging: Autochthony,Citizenship, and Exclusion in Africa and Europe. Chicago:University of Chicago Press.

Gidron, Noam and Bart Bonikowski. 2013. “Varieties of pop-ulism: Literature review and research agenda.” WorkingPaper Series 13-0004, Weatherhead Center for Interna-tional Affairs, Harvard University.

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 30

Idahosa, Paul L.E. 2004. The Populist Dimension to AfricanPolitical Thought: Critical Essays in Reconstruction and Re-trieval. Trenton: Africa World Press.

Ismail, Zenobia. 2015. “The rise of populism in SouthernAfrica’s dominant-party states.” OXPOL, March 9.

Larmer, Miles and Alastair Fraser. 2007. “Of cabbages andking cobra: Populist politics and Zambia’s 2006 election.”African Affairs 106(425):611–637.

Madrid, Raúl L. 2008. “The rise of ethnopopulism in LatinAmerica.” World Politics 60(3):475–508.

Maloka, Tshidiso. 1996. “Populism and the politics of chief-taincy and nation-building in the new South Africa.” Jour-nal of Contemporary African Studies 14(2):173–196.

Mudde, Cas and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser. 2013. “Exclu-sionary vs. inclusionary populism: Comparing contempo-rary Europe and Latin America.” Government and Opposi-tion 48(2):147–174.

Oxford Analytica. 2016. “African cities will struggle to man-age rapid growth.” Oxford Analytica .

Paget, Dan. 2016. “Rally supporters, canvas swing voters:Segmented targeting in Tanzania.” Working Paper .

Resnick, Danielle. 2010. Populist Strategies in AfricanDemoc-racies. United Nations University, World Institute for De-velopment Economics Research.

Resnick, Danielle. 2014. Urban Poverty and Party Populismin African Democracies. New York: Cambridge UniversityPress.

United Nations. 2014. World Urbanization Prospects. NewYork: United Nations.

Populism and Authoritarian Survival inChina: Concept and Measurement

by Yaoyao DaiThe Pennsylvania State University

and Zijie ShaoPeking University, Beijing

“Democracy is the government of the people, by thepeople, for the people.” In 1863, Abraham Lincolngave this famous quote in his Gettysburg Address.Eighty years later, Mao Tse-Tung developed the leader-ship method for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)known as the ‘Mass Line’ (‘群众路线’). The leadershipshould be “for the masses, relying on the masses, from

the masses, and to the masses,” and the party shouldserve “the people whole-heartedly and never for a mo-ment divorce ourselves from the masses.”1 The ‘MassLine’ has remained central to the Chinese CommunistParty, and Chinese politics more generally, ever since.

Although the ‘Mass Line’ is very similar to Lincoln’sfamous quote about democracy, and some scholars viewit as outlining a democratic decision-making process inwhich decisions result from deliberation between theleaders and the citizens (see Blecher, 1979), this styleof leadership departs in significant ways from what wewould consider pluralistic liberal democracy. Instead,the ‘Mass Line’ is much closer to what scholars havelabeled populism: “a thin-centered ideology that con-siders society to be ultimately separated into two ho-mogenous and antagonistic groups, ‘the pure people’versus ‘the corrupt elite,’ and which argues that politicsshould be an expression of the volonté générale (generalwill) of the people” (Mudde, 2004, 543).

Like populism, the ‘Mass Line’ separates society intotwo homogeneous and antagonistic groups: the peo-ple/masses and the people’s enemy. The ‘Mass Line’ asksall levels of CCPmembers to serve the people and repre-sent the people. Over the years, the enemy has changedfrom the corrupted Kuomingtang (KMT) governmentto capitalist roaders,2 to the corrupted factions withinthe party itself. In many cases, the enemy is an elementwithin the established elite. The enemy, though, can alsobe any group that threatens the rule of the CCP govern-ment and the stability of society. Although the preciseidentities of the enemy and the people have changedover time, the idea of an antagonistic relationship be-tween corrupted elements of the elite and the people hasalways remained a central feature of Chinese politics.

Although populism has been examined in somecompetitive authoritarian regimes, especially in LatinAmerica, it is has been relatively understudied in otherforms of authoritarian regimes and regions. Manyscholars, particularly in Latin America, have concep-tualized populism as a political strategy used by per-sonalistic leaders to mobilize excluded elements of thepopulation to help themgain power (seeWeyland, 2001;Levitsky and Loxton, 2013). They have also discussed

1The leadership method of the ‘Mass Line’ is addressed in many of Mao Tse-Tung’s essays. His earliest systematic discussion of the‘Mass Line’ is in his 1943 article, “Some Question concerning Methods of Leadership” (Mao, [1943] 1967c). He later discussed the ‘MassLine’ in more detail in his 1945 article, “On Coalition Government” (Mao, [1945] 1967b).

2The concept of ‘capitalist roaders’ comes from the Chinese word, ‘⾛资派’, and captures a corrupt Chinese official who has taken thecapitalist ‘road.’

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 31

the consequences of populism for various aspects ofdemocracy (Rovira Kaltwasser, 2014, 2012). In ad-dition, scholars have distinguished between differentsub-types of populism, particularly when comparingthe more inclusive populism in Latin America with themore exclusive populism seen in Europe (Mudde andRovira Kaltwasser, 2013). After pointing out the rela-tive lack of attention to populism in Asia, Case (2016)and Subramanian (2016) in this issue of the Compara-tive Politics Newsletter go on to examine how populismhas been employed as a political strategy in SoutheastAsia and India. There is almost no work in political sci-ence on populism in China. This is surprising becausepopulism has long been used as a strategy to securepower in China. Mao, for example, attributes the suc-cess of the CCP against the KMT in the 1940s to the‘Mass Line’. The later leadership of the CCP also treatsthe ‘Mass Line’ as an important ‘lifeline’ of the Commu-nist party (Xinhua, 2013a).

Mao Tse-Tung developed theleadership method for the ChineseCommunist Party (CCP) known asthe ‘Mass Line’ (‘群众路线’) …“forthe masses, relying on the masses,from the masses, and to the masses”…Like populism, the ‘Mass Line’separates society into twohomogeneous and antagonisticgroups: the people/masses and thepeople’s enemy.

How does the populist ‘Mass Line’ influence the sur-vival of the CCP? Under what conditions does the CCPadopt populism as a political strategy? In this article, webriefly demonstrate that the CCP has used populism asa tool to solve the two fundamental conflicts that existin all authoritarian regimes, namely, intra-elite conflictand elite-mass conflict (Svolik, 2012). Historically, fewChinese scholars have examined the role of populismin China. Recently, though, Tang (2016) has providedan innovative theoretical discussion of populism’s rolein regime sustainability in China. One issue, though,with studying populism, both as an ideology and as apolitical strategy, in an authoritarian regime has to dowith how populism is measured. One of the goals of ourcontribution is to examine the feasibility of measuringpopulism in China using automated content analysis of

public speeches from party leaders and state-controllednews reports. Our preliminary analysis suggests thatthis is, indeed, feasible, and we are able to produce ameasure of populism that varies across time and leadersin ways that are consistent with historical events andcommonsense understandings of Chinese politics.

I. Populism as a Strategy of Survival in China

Authoritarian leaders face two fundamental chal-lenges to their rule: challenges from within the elite andchallenges from the masses (Magaloni, 2006; Svolik,2012). No dictators govern alone. Although authoritar-ian leaders do not need to win elections to stay in power,they do need some cooperation from the masses to gen-erate rents and to avoid costly repression. The veryagents, such as the military and high ranking civil lead-ers, that help keep the dictator in power, though, alsopose a threat to the dictator. Below, we briefly describehow Chinese leaders have historically used populism toresolve both of these challenges.

Populism and Intra-elite Conflict

Historically, populism has been used to mobilize pre-viously excluded groups, the masses, to attack sectionsof the established elite, either within the Chinese Com-munist party or outside of it. Before taking control ofChina, for example, the CCP used populism as a tacticto mobilize excluded groups, especially peasants, in itsfight against the Kuomingtang Party (KMT). Althoughthe CCP won military battles against the KMT, manyscholars argue that the CCP’s ultimate victory was pri-marily political rather than military; that is, that itssuccess was based largely on mass mobilization throughpropaganda and land reform (Johnson, 1962; Hinton,1966; Pepper, 1999). According to the CCP’s rhetoric,Kuomintang Party rule was “anti-popular,” the “dis-rupter of China’s national unity,” and the “breeder ofcivil war” (Mao, [1945] 1967b). TheChinese people nat-urally “demand the immediate abolition” of the KMTone-party dictatorship (Mao, [1945] 1967b). Whereasthe KMT government was portrayed as anti-popular,Mao attributed the power of the People’s LiberationArmy to its roots in the masses. According to Mao, thesole purpose of the People’s Liberation Army was tostand firmly with the Chinese people and to serve themwhole-heartedly. Facing a broken economy and a popu-lation already tired of war, the CCP used land reform tomobilize vast numbers of peasants in its battle against

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 32

the KMT. They “launch[ed] large-scale rent reductioncampaigns and carr[ied] out rent reduction universallyin all the Liberated Areas, and particularly in the vastnewly liberated areas, so as to arouse the revolution-ary fervour of the great majority of the peasant masses”(Mao, [1945] 1967b).

After taking control of China, Mao continued touse populist appeals to the masses to consolidate hispersonal hold on power, to weaken institutional con-straints on that power, and to eliminate his rivals. Partyelites who were threats to Mao’s personalist rule wereportrayed as capitalists roaders and enemies of both theCommunist revolution and the Chinese people. Topleaders of the government were criticized for “adoptingthe reactionary stand of the bourgeoisie” (Mao, 1967a).Class struggle was emphasized and revolutionary ac-tion was praised. Mao encouraged Red Guards to rebelagainst “all landlords, bourgeois, imperialists, revision-ists, and their running dogs who exploit and oppress theworkers, peasants, revolutionary intellectuals and rev-olutionary parties and groupings” (Mao, 1966a). Maoused the mobilization of the masses to both justify hisopposition to government policy and as evidence insupport of his own policies. For example, he statedthat “the broad masses of students and revolutionaryteachers support us and resist the policies of the past”(Mao, 1966b). Liu Shaoqi, the head of the governmentbefore the Cultural Revolution, was soon replaced andarrested for being the “biggest capitalist roader in theparty” and was beaten regularly at public denunciationmeetings. By mobilizing the masses, Mao was able todestroy virtually all of the state and party institutions,and concentrate power in his own hands.

In many ways, Mao’s use of populism to mobilizethe masses in an attempt to consolidate his personalpower mirrors the strategy adopted by many populistleaders in Latin America. Like Mao, these populistleaders in Latin America called for “government powerbased on direct, unmediated, uninstitutionalized sup-port from large numbers of mostly unorganized follow-ers” (Weyland, 2001). Morales in Bolivia and Chávezin Venezuela both encouraged the previously voicelessmasses to participate in politics. Relying on ‘the people’,Morales and Chávez sought to build a form of ‘directdemocracy’ that ultimately undermined representativedemocratic institutions and concentrated power in theirown hands. As Morales pointed out, mobilizing thepeople to protest and blockade is important, because it

is this mass mobilization that allows one to change andenforce laws (Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser, 2013).

The use of populism as a strategic tactic can createa security dilemma, though. The mobilized masses thatare used to gain power are themselves a threat to thegovernment/leader. In fact, after the Cultural Revolu-tion, we observe much less mass mobilization by thegovernment. Nonetheless, populist rhetoric continuedto be used whenever political rivals within the partywere eliminated. Rivals of the party leaders are oftenportrayed as betraying the masses and as a threat tothe interest of the people. They are often charged withcorruption and removed during special anti-corruptioncampaigns (Tang, 2016; Jiang and Xu, 2015; Dai, 2016).

Populism and Elite-mass Conflict

In addition to intra-elite threats, authoritarian lead-ers also face threats from the masses. CCP leaders havebeen well aware of this threat. Indeed, this is why the‘Mass Line’ strategy contains the element, ‘to the mass’.After forming some ideas or policies, party membersand leaders are supposed to “go to the masses and prop-agate and explain these ideas until the masses embracethem as their own, hold fast to them and translate theminto action” (Mao, [1943] 1967c). Whereas the previ-ous section focused on constructing the people’s enemy,the process of ‘to the mass’ has to do with constructingthe homogeneous interests of ‘the people’. In practice,the people may or may not share coherent interests.Similar to what Disch (2011) has in mind when shetalks about ‘mobilization representation’, ‘Mass Line’leaders do not aim to make some preexisting interestvisible. Instead, ‘Mass Line’ leadership is about persua-sion and about constructing the people’s interests andtheir understanding of these interests. The party is alsoconstructed as the only true and loyal protector and rep-resentative of the people’s interests.

We argue that the CCP seeks to achieve two goalsthrough this process that help to prevent mass rebel-lion. First, populist rhetoric and policy are used toshow the government’s responsiveness to the massesand to coopt potential opponents. During and afterthe civil war, for example, the CCP attempted to securesupport among the peasants for the Party and the newcommunist regime through rent reduction and landredistribution. Indeed, the fact that the Chinese cen-tral government is perceived to be highly responsive to

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 33

popular needs suggests that, in many ways, this populiststrategy has been successful (Tang, 2016).

Second, a populist strategy has been used tomarginalize political opponents from the masses. Soci-etal groups that show dissatisfaction with the authori-tarian rule of the government are almost always por-trayed as enemies of the ‘national interest’ and ‘thepeople’ in an attempt to undermine any sympathy orsupport they might receive from the public. In general,stability is portrayed as the most important nationalinterest, because without stability there can be no de-velopment. Protesters against the government are oftenportrayed as threatening societal stability for their ownselfish interests; they are portrayed as enemies of thepeople. This is precisely what happened, for example,when Tibetans attacked the Wabaling Tibetan Muslimsin the late 1950s after theCCP took control of Tibet. TheWabaling Tibetan Muslims, who often served as trans-lators for the CCP, were attacked because they wereperceived to be collaborating with the CCP. Althoughthe Tibetans did not attack any other Muslim group, theChinese state-controlled media portrayed the incidentsas radical religious attacks that targeted all Muslims andsomething that therefore threatened the stability andunity of society (Atwill, 2016).

A much more recent example concerns the pro-democracy Hong Kong Umbrella Movement in 2014.After the decision by the National People’s Congressto revise Hong Kong’s electoral system, thousands ofstudents took to the streets in protest. Rather than re-port the full range of opinions held by Hong Kong res-idents towards the protests, China’s mainland mediaconcentrated on only the negative opinions. It focused,for instance, on complaints from residents about howthe protests blocked roads, created stress and inconve-niences, hurt the local economy, and in general threat-ened the interests of the majority of society (Xinhua,2013c,b). It is little surprise then that the Hong Kongstudent protests received almost no sympathy and sup-port from Chinese citizens on the mainland (New YorkTimes, 2014).

II. Measuring Populism in China

When do authoritarian leaders adopt a populist po-litical strategy? Under what conditions is a populiststrategy effective at promoting authoritarian survival?To answer research questions such as these, we need to

be able to measure populism. Scholars have measuredpopulism in Europe, Latin America, and the U.S. usingboth human-coded and automated content analysis.For example, Jagers and Walgrave (2007) use human-coded content analysis of political party broadcasts toexamine the use of populist discourse by six Belgianparties. Hawkins (2009) also uses human-coded con-tent analysis to measure the degree of populist languagein the speeches of political chief executives from thirty-four Latin American and other countries. Dictionary-based automated text analysis has recently been used tomeasure populism in Western Europe (Rooduijn andPauwels, 2011) and the United States (Bonikowski andGidron, 2016). Although automated text analysis usu-ally has lower content validity than human-coded con-tent analysis, it is often more reliable, less time and re-source intensive, and can produce high levels of validitywhen applied carefully (Rooduijn and Pauwels, 2011;Grimmer and Stewart, 2013; Laver andGarry, 2000). Inwhat follows, we provide the first measure of populismin China over time using a dictionary-based automatedtext analysis.

We apply our dictionary-based automated text anal-ysis to two different types of texts inChina: news reportsfrom the state-controlled media and the governments’annual work reports. The first type of text comprisesthe daily news reports from China Central Television’s(CCTV) Xinwen Lianbo (Daily News Program) from2003 to 2015. CCTV is the predominant state televi-sion broadcaster, and the main propaganda machine ofthe Chinese government. The Xinwen Lianbo programbroadcasts news every day from 7 p.m. to 7:30 p.m.All of the local TV stations are required to broadcastXinwen Lianbo on at least one of their local channelsduring that time period. In fact, for many years, Xin-wen Lianbo was the only TV program Chinese audi-ences could watch at this time in the evening. To a largeextent, our decision to examine populist discourse inChina’s state-controlled media follows the same basicapproach adopted by Rooduijn (2014), who examinesopinion articles in West European newspapers to mea-sure the diffusion of populism in public debates. In thecontext of authoritarian regimes, state-controlled me-dia acts as a propaganda machine and the mouthpieceof the government. As a result, news reports from state-controlled media such as CCTV should provide a fairlyaccurate reflection of the type of discourse used by thegovernment.

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 34

Table 1: Dictionary of the Content Analysis

Anti-Elitism People-Centrismclass (阶级) proletariat (⽆产阶级)

corrupt (腐败，腐化，堕落，贪污，私利) people (⼈民，⽼百姓)betray (背叛，背弃，背离) mass (群众)anti-revolution/(反⾰命) revolution (⾰命)

shame (耻辱，羞耻) worker (⼯⼈)struggle (⽃争) camp (阵营)

peasant (农民)

The second type of text comprises the annual workreports published by the Chinese central government.Around the beginning of each year, the Prime Minis-ter delivers an annual report to the National People’sCongress. The work report usually contains three mainparts: an overview of the government’s performance(achievement) during the past year, the government’spolicy and plan for the current/coming year, and thegovernment’s plan to build a better government. Inmany ways, annual work reports are similar to electionmanifestos.

Each of the two different types of text has itsstrengths and weaknesses. Compared to annual workreports, the subject matter of CCTV news reports ismore heterogeneous and may include topics that arenot always relevant for evaluating the use of populismas a political strategy. That said, CCTV news reportsprovide a much richer body of information. Signifi-cantly, CCTV news reports can be aggregated into dif-ferent units, such as days, weeks, or months. This isuseful if one wishes to examine whether and how theuse of populism responds to economic and politicalshocks. Another advantage with respect to external va-lidity is that news reports are potentially comparableacross countries. On the other hand, government workreports provide a more direct and ‘unmediated’ look atthe political strategy of the CCP. They also allow us toinvestigate the use of populism over a much longer pe-riod of time. For example, we can look at governmentwork reports from1954 to 1964 and from1975 to 2015,3whereas we have data on CCTV news reports only from2003 to 2015. In some ways, using two different typesof text acts as a validity check; the two measures shouldbe highly correlated in the period in which they overlap.

For the annual government work reports, each re-

port is treated as one document. For the preliminaryanalyses reported in this paper, each year’s news fromXinwen Lianbo are grouped as one document. The au-tomated content analysis assumes that each documentis a ‘bag of words’, in which the order of words doesnot matter. Although we only look at the frequencyof words and ignore the real-world generating processof the texts, a document that is produced to conveypopulist ideas should generally contain more populistwords than other documents. This method has beenshown to generate similar results to those generated byhuman-coded methods (Rooduijn and Pauwels, 2011;Grimmer and Stewart, 2013).

To build our dictionary, we draw on existing theo-retical and empirical work related to the measurementof populism. People-centrism and anti-elitism are rec-ognized as the two key components of populism, irre-spective of whether populism is measured by humancoders or a computer. Existing research has identi-fied words that reflect people-centrism and anti-elitism(Bonikowski and Gidron, 2016; Rooduijn and Pauwels,2011; Jagers and Walgrave, 2007). As this research fo-cuses primarily on Europe and Latin America, though,we cannot simply construct our dictionary by translat-ing this set of words into Chinese.

We first translate existing dictionaries of populisminto Chinese (Bonikowski and Gidron, 2016; Rooduijnand Pauwels, 2011; Jagers and Walgrave, 2007). Foreach word, we try to identify all possible Chinese trans-lations that express a similarmeaning. We then examinewhether both CCTV news and the government’s annualwork reports use these translated Chinese words. Onlywords used in both types of text are included in ourdictionary. We also randomly select and read texts thatcontain these populist words to see if the use of these

3With the exception of 1975, the People’s Congress did not meet during the Cultural Revolution.

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 35

words truly reflects populism in the China context. Forexample, the word ‘elite’ (精英) does not reflect anti-elitism in either type of text, and is thus not includedin our dictionary. We also identify and add China con-text specific words that reflect anti-elitism and people-centrism by reading random subsets of the texts. Forexample, the word ‘class’ (阶级) in the China context isoften used to separate society into the corrupted bour-geoisie and the pure proletariat. The word ‘class’ (阶级)reflects both people-centrism and anti-elitism, and istherefore included in our dictionary. The list of wordsin our dictionary is shown in Table 1.

The degree of populism is measured by the per-centage of populist words used in each document. Un-like English, Chinese is written without spaces betweenwords, and one word usually consists of multiple char-acters. We use the Stanford Word Segmenter developedby the Stanford NLP group to split the texts into a se-quence of words, i.e., to insert space between each Chi-nese word. In Chinese, characters such as “的”, “地”, and“得” are usually attached to a noun to change the wordfrom a noun to an adjective, verb, or adverb. During thesegmentation process, the root/noun is generally sepa-rated from the characters “的”, “地”, and “得”, a processwe can treat as word stemming as well. Therefore, al-though the dictionary only includes the nouns shown inTable 1, our word frequencies actually include all formsof the words. After segmentation, we use the R pack-age Quanteda developed by Benoit and Nulty (2016) toautomatically identify populist words and calculate thepercentage of populist words in a document.

In Figure 1, we show how the degree of populismin the government’s annual work reports changes overtime. Each color represents a different prime minister(speaker). Although the prime minister is supposedto give the reports, the deputy prime minister actuallygives the reports in some years. We use lighter colors tohighlight these particular years, but still label them asbelonging to the PM’s government. It turns out that thereports given by the deputy PM are much less populistthan the reports given by the PM in the same govern-ment. This might be because the deputy PM does notfeel the same ability to ‘represent’ the people and thegovernment as the prime minister. The annual reportsgiven just before the Cultural Revolution (1964) and atthe end of the Cultural Revolution (1975) are, by far,the most populist. The degree of populism is generallylower after Deng Xiaoping’s reforms in 1979, but there

is still variation across time.

The different color groups in Figure 1 are based onwho gave the annual work report speech. One issuethat arises here concerns ‘succession years’ in which theleadership of the CCP changes hands. In successionyears, such as 2003 and 2013, the incumbent head ofgovernment gives the report to the People’s Congress.However, the succession process happens during themeeting of the People’s Congress, and so it is hard to saywhether the reports reflect the policy of the incumbentgovernment or the new government. Things are mademore complicated by the fact that the annual work re-ports are drafted by groups of people in the governmentand usually collectively approved before the meeting.When it comes to analyzing the CCTV news reports, Itreat data for 2003 and 2013 as reflecting the degree ofpopulism in the new government’s policy. This is be-cause the succession process happened early (March) inthese years, and so the majority of the news coveragein these years should be influenced by the new govern-ment leadership.

In Figure 2, we show the degree of populism mea-sured in CCTV news reports. The light blue dots rep-resent the first tenure of the Hu Jingtao and Wen Jiabaoleadership. The green dots represent the second tenureof the Hu and Wen leadership. And the brown dotsrepresent the Xi Jinpin and Li Keqiang leadership. Aswe can see, populism peaked in 2008, after which it de-clined, before a small rise in the first two years (2013and 2014) of Xi Jinpin’s tenure. In Figure 3, we plotour two measures of populism based on the differenttypes of text side by side. The percentage of populistwords is not directly comparable across the two types oftext, because the document lengths and styles are quitedifferent and because the CCTV news reports containsignificantly more non-populist content. What mattersin Figure 3 is the extent to which the trends in the useof populism are similar. Although our analyses are verypreliminary at this stage, the trends over time in ourtwo measures of populism are fairly similar, suggestinga certain degree of concurrent validity.

Our project is in its very early stages. So far, we havebegun to evaluate the potential of using state-controllednews reports and public speeches to measure populismin a closed authoritarian regime (China) with auto-mated text analysis. This is our first attempt to measurepopulism inChina. As a result, there ismuchmorework

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 36

Figure 1: Degree of Populism in the Annual Work Reports of the Chinese Government

19541955195619571958195919601964197519781979198019811982198319841985198619871988198919901991199219931994199519961997199819992000200120022003200420052006200720082009201020112012201320142015

●

●

●

●

●

●

●

●

●

●

●

●

●

●

●

●

●

●

●

●

●

●

●

●

●

●

●

●

●

●

●

●

●

●

●

●

●

●

●

●

●

●

●

●

●

●

●

0.01 0.02 0.03 0.04 0.05

Percentage of Populist Words

●

●

●

●

●

●

●

●

●

●

Li KeqiangWen JiabaoZhu RongjiLi GovernmentLi PengZhao ZiyangHua GovernmentHua GuofengZhou GovernmentZhou Enlai

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 37

Figure 2: Degree of Populism in CCTV News Reports

2003 2005 2007 2009 2011 2013 2015

0.00

500.

0055

0.00

600.

0065

0.00

70

●

● ●

●

●

●

●

●

●

●

●

●

●

Year

Per

cent

age

of P

opul

ist W

ords

●

●

●

Hu & Wen 1Hu & Wen 2Xi & Li 1

Figure 3: Degree of Populism in the Annual Work Reports of the Chinese Government and CCTV News Reports

2003 2005 2007 2009 2011 2013 2015

0.00

40.

006

0.00

80.

010

0.01

20.

014

●

● ●

●●

●

●

●●

●

●

●

●

● CCTVWork Reports

Year

Per

cent

age

of P

opul

ist W

ords

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 38

that needs to be done to improve and evaluate the va-lidity of our measure. One possible extension is to usean expert survey to help evaluate and build our pop-ulism dictionary. Our analyses so far suggest that thedegree of populism in China varies both across timeand leaders. In the future, we plan to examine whetherourmeasure of populism varies in theoretically intuitiveways. Does the strategic use of populism, for example,demobilize opponents and contribute to the stability ofauthoritarian regimes?

References

Atwill, David G. 2016. “Boundaries of belonging: Sino-Indian relations and the 1960 Tibetan Muslim incident.”Journal of Asian Studies 75(3):595–620.

Benoit, Kenneth and Paul Nulty. 2016. “quanteda: Quantita-tive Analysis of Textual Data.” R package version 0.9.8.

Blecher, Marc. 1979. “Consensual politics in rural Chinesecommunities: The mass line in theory and practice.” Mod-ern China 5(1):105–126.

Bonikowski, Bart and Noam Gidron. 2016. “The populiststyle in American politics: Presidential campaign dis-course, 1952–1996.” Social Forces 94(4):1593–1621.

Case, William. 2016. “Profiles in populism: Southeast Asia.”CP: Newsletter of the Comparative Politics Organized Sec-tion of the American Political Science Association 26(2).

Dai, Yaoyao. 2016. “Anti-corruption campaigns and popularsupport for authoritarian governments.” Paper presentedat the Annual Meeting of the American Political ScienceAssociation, Philadelphia.

Disch, Lisa. 2011. “Toward a mobilization conception ofdemocratic representation.” American Political Science Re-view 105(01):100–114.

Grimmer, Justin andBrandonM. Stewart. 2013. “Text as data:The promise and pitfalls of automatic content analysismethods for political texts.” Political Analysis 21(3):267–297.

Hawkins, Kirk A. 2009. “Is Chávez populist? Measuring pop-ulist discourse in comparative perspective.” ComparativePolitical Studies 42(8):1040–1067.

Hinton, William. 1966. Fanshen: A Documentary of Revolu-tion in a Chinese Village. Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress.

Jagers, Jan and Stefaan Walgrave. 2007. “Populism as polit-ical communication style: An empirical study of politicalparties’ discourse in Belgium.” European Journal of Politi-cal Research 46(3):319–345.

Jiang, Junyan and Yan Xu. 2015. “Popularity and power: Thepolitical logic of anticorruption in authoritarian regimes.”Unpublished manuscript, University of Chicago.

Johnson, Chalmers A. 1962. Peasant Nationalism and Com-

munist Power: The Emergence of Revolutionary China,1937-1945. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Laver, Michael and John Garry. 2000. “Estimating policy po-sitions from political texts.” American Journal of PoliticalScience 44(3):619–634.

Levitsky, Steven and James Loxton. 2013. “Populism andcompetitive authoritarianism in the Andes.” Democratiza-tion 20(1):107–136.

Magaloni, Beatriz. 2006. Voting for Autocracy: HegemonicParty Survival and its Demise in Mexico. New York: Cam-bridge University Press.

Mao, Tse-Tung. [1943] 1967c. Some Question concerningMethods of Leadership. In SelectedWorks ofMaoTse-Tung.Vol. 3 Beijing: Foreign Languages Press.

Mao, Tse-Tung. [1945] 1967b. On Coalition Government. InSelected Works of Mao Tse-Tung. Vol. 3 Beijing: ForeignLanguages Press.

Mao, Tse-Tung. 1966a. “A Letter to the Red Guards of Ts-inghua University Middle School.”.

Mao, Tse-Tung. 1966b. “Speech at the Closing Ceremony ofThe Eleventh Plenum of the Eighth Central Committee.”.

Mao, Tse-Tung. 1967a. “Bombard The Headquarters – MyFirst Big-Character Poster.” People’s Daily, August 5.

Mudde, Cas. 2004. “The populist zeitgeist.” Government andopposition 39(4):542–563.

Mudde, Cas and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser. 2013. “Exclu-sionary vs. inclusionary populism: Comparing contempo-rary Europe and Latin America.” Government and Opposi-tion 48(02):147–174.

New York Times. 2014. “⼤陆年轻⼈同情⾹港 “占中” 者寥寥.” New York Times (Chinese), October 11.

Pepper, Suzanne. 1999. Civil War in China: The PoliticalStruggle 1945-1949. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Pub-lishers.

Rooduijn, Matthijs. 2014. “The mesmerising message: Thediffusion of populism in public debates in Western Euro-pean media.” Political Studies 62(4):726–744.

Rooduijn, Matthijs and Teun Pauwels. 2011. “Measuringpopulism: Comparing two methods of content analysis.”West European Politics 34(6):1272–1283.

Rovira Kaltwasser, Cristóbal. 2012. “The ambivalence of pop-ulism: threat and corrective for democracy.” Democratiza-tion 19(2):184–208.

Rovira Kaltwasser, Cristóbal. 2014. “The responses of pop-ulism to Dahl’s democratic dilemmas.” Political Studies62(3):470–487.

Subramanian, Narendra. 2016. “Populism in India.” CP:Newsletter of the Comparative Politics Organized Section ofthe American Political Science Association 26(2).

Svolik, Milan W. 2012. The Politics of Authoritarian Rule.New York: Cambridge University Press.

Tang,Wenfang. 2016. Populist Authoritarianism: Chinese Po-litical Culture and Regime Sustainability. New York: Ox-ford University Press.

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 39

Weyland, Kurt. 2001. “Clarifying a contested concept: Pop-ulism in the study of Latin American politics.” Compara-tive politics 34(1):1–22.

Xinhua. 2013a. “People’s Daily editorial stresses stronger tieswith masses.” July.

Xinhua. 2013b. “违法 “占中” 结束⾹港重回正常轨道.”Xinhua Net (新华⽹)，December 15.

Xinhua. 2013c. “专家解读⾹港 “占中”：违法、祸国且不利⼰道.” Xinhua Net (新华⽹)，October 3.

What Went Wrong? Leftwing Pop-ulist Democratic Promises andAutocraticPractices

by Carlos de la TorreUniversity of Kentucky

Hugo Chávez inaugurated a wave of leftwing pop-ulism in Latin America that also brought Evo Moralesand Rafael Correa to the presidencies of Bolivia andEcuador. These leaders promised to reform all nationalinstitutions, rejected neoliberalism, promoted LatinAmerican integration and unity, and aimed to establishparticipatory, communal, and direct forms of democ-racy. They came to power as a result of profound crisesof political representation and popular insurrectionsagainst neoliberal policies. They convened participa-tory constituent assemblies that drafted constitutionswith expanded rights. Leftist scholars expected thattheir regimes would inaugurate a new dawn towardsmore democratic societies. Yet after their long termsin power, the sobering reality is that their governanceeroded democracy. Chávez (and his successor NicolásMaduro), Morales, and Correa concentrated power inthe executive and subordinated all other branches ofgovernment, they used the state to colonize the publicsphere by regulating the content ofwhat themedia couldpublish, they clashed with social movements and crim-inalized protest, they regulated NGOs, and they createdparallel social movements. While their governmentsreduced poverty when the prices of oil and mineralsreached record levels, they also increased dependencyon natural resource extraction.

In order to explain what went wrong, scholars andactivists developed structuralist arguments that focusedon the dependence on natural resource extraction, in-stitutional explanations of why populism in contexts of

weak institutions led to competitive authoritarianism,and arguments that focused on how the political logicof populism led to the erosion of democracy.

I. Dependency on Natural Resource Extraction

Chávez, Morales, and Correa were elected on platformsto reverse neoliberal policies, and to reduce inequalityby increasing social spending. They promised to moveaway from natural resource extraction. Morales andCorrea even claimed that they were implementing sus-tainable models of development based on the Andeannotions of suma qamaña and sumak kawsay to achieve“the good life.”

Writing at the peak of Chávez’s ascent, Weyland(2009, 146) wrote that “rather than tracing a new de-velopment model (‘twenty-first century socialism’), thepopulist left led by Chávez is largely reviving the tra-ditional rentier model.” Oil and mineral rents allowedthese governments to reject neoliberal orthodoxy, in-crease state spending, and create regional organiza-tions free from U.S. hegemony, like the Bolivarian Al-liance for the Americas (ALBA). Despite their rhetoricof changing the economicmatrix of natural resource ex-ploitation and oil and mineral rents, these governmentsincreased state spending without reducing their eco-nomic dependence onminerals. “Between 1998 and thepresent, the percentage of Venezuela’s export earningsderived from oil increased from 68.7% to 96%” (Het-land, 2016, 9). In Bolivia, the exports of extractives rosefrom 41.8% in 2001 to 74% in 2009 (Schilling-Vacaflorand Vollrath, 2012, 128). In Ecuador, oil exports in-creased from 41% in 2002 to 58 percent in 2011, and by2007 Correa had granted “2,8 million hectares to min-ing companies, half of which were for the extraction ofmetals” (Martínez Novo, 2014, 118).

Oil and mineral rents were used to strengthen therole of the state in the economy and society, and fundedsocial programs and anti-poverty initiatives. WorldBank figures indicated that in Venezuela the povertyrate fell from 55.4% of the population in 2002 to 28.5%in 2009. Poverty in Ecuador was reduced from 37.4%in 2006 to 29.4% in 2011. In Bolivia, it dropped from60.4% in 2006 to 50.6% in 2009, with an even greaterdecrease in levels of extreme poverty (de la Torre andArnson, 2013, 28). Yet prosperity lasted as long as thebonanza, and as Weyland anticipated, the rentier modelproved to be unsustainable in the long run. Accord-

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 40

ing to the Economic Commission for Latin America,poverty in Venezuela jumped from 24% in 2012 to 32%in 2013. Another study concluded that 75% of Venezue-lans were poor according to their income in 2015 (Are-nas, 2016, 9).

Despite agreeing to consult indigenous communi-ties regarding the extraction of natural resources fromthe terrorities of these groups in their national constitu-tions, these administrations autocratically expanded ex-tractivist activities in indigenous territories. The resultis that, similarly to neoliberal multiculturalism, whichseparated “permitted Indians” from “recalcitrant” ones,given limited symbolic distribution and targeted redis-tribution to the first and punishing the later, compliancewith natural resource extraction determined the limitson the recognition of indigenous rights in these nations(Martínez Novo, 2014, 121). In Ecuador, indigenousprotesters were criminalized as terrorists, and as anthro-pologist Martínez Novo argued, the permitted Indian ofCorrea’s citizens’ revolution is conceived of as a passiverecipient of redistributive state policies. The extractionof natural resources also sets limits on indigenous rightsin Bolivia. As Nancy Postero (2016, 412) puts it, “it isclear that the state sees indigenous control over naturalresource extraction as a threat to its own power.”

II. Weak Institutions and Competitive Authoritarianism

In well functioning democracies with strong partiesand democratic institutions, elected populists are con-strained by national political institutions and supra-national organizations. (Rovira Kaltwasser and Tag-gart, 2016). Contrastingly, in these presidential sys-tems, elected populists systematically attacked plural-ism, privately ownedmedia, and independent organiza-tions during political crises, leading to what O’Donnell(2011) referred to as the slow death of democracy.

Levitsky and Loxton (2013) argued that populismpushed weak democracies into competitive authoritar-ianism for three reasons. Firstly, populists were out-siders with no experience of the process of parliamen-tary politics. Secondly, populists were elected with amandate to reform existing political institutions, specif-ically the institutional framework of liberal democracy.Lastly, populist leaders confronted congresses, the judi-ciary, and other institutions that were controlled bypolitical parties. In order to win elections, they setabout skewing the electoral playing field in their fa-

vor. As incumbents, they had extraordinary advan-tages. The could use the state media, selectively silencethe privately owned media, harass the opposition, con-trol electoral tribunal boards and all instances of appeal,and use public funds to influence the electoral process.Although these presidents won elections while adher-ing to formal electoral procedures, the electoral processblatantly favored incumbents.

Once in power, Chávez, Maduro, Morales, and Cor-rea turned to discriminatory legalism, understood asthe use of formal legal authority in discretionary ways(Weyland, 2013, 23). In order to use laws discretionar-ily, populist presidents packed the courts and institu-tions of accountability with loyal followers. Controland regulation of the media by the state was at the cen-ter of the populist struggle for hegemony. Chávez ledthe path in enacting laws to control the privately ownedmedia. In 2000, theOrganic Law of Telecommunicationallowed the government to suspend or revoke broad-casting concessions to private outlets when it was “con-venient for the interest of the nation”. The Law of So-cial Responsibility of 2004 banned “the broadcasting ofmaterial that could promote hatred and violence” (Cor-rales, 2015, 39). These laws were ambiguous at best, andthe government could interpret their content accordingto its interests. Correa’s government emulated Chávez.In 2013, the National Assembly, as congress is namedin Ecuador, controlled by Correa’s party, approved acommunication law that created a board tasked withmonitoring and regulating the content of what the me-dia could publish.

If the political is conceived as astruggle between friend and enemy,it is difficult to imagine adversarieswho have legitimate institutionalspaces.

To challenge the power of the private media,Chávez’s government shut down radio and televisionstations utilized by critics. The state became the maincommunicator, controlling 64% of television channels(Corrales, 2015, 41). In Bolivia, media concessionswereequally divided between the state, the private sector,and popular and indigenous organizations. Here, too,Correa followed Chávez, using discriminatory legalismto close down critics’ radio and television stations. He

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 41

created a state media conglomerate that included thetwo most popular TV stations, as well as several radiostations and newspapers (de la Torre and Ortiz Lemos,2016, 231). In the hands of governments that did notdifferentiate their interests from those of the state, theseoutlets were put to the service of populist administra-tions.

Bolivarian presidents also enacted legislation thatused ambiguous language to control and regulate thework of NGOs. In 2010, the Law for the Defense ofPolitical Sovereignty and National Self-Determinationin Venezuela barred Non-Governmental Organizationsthat defended political rights or monitored the perfor-mances of public bodies from receiving internationalassistance (Corrales, 2015, 39). Three years later, in2013, Correa enacted Executive Decree 16. This decreegave the government authority to sanction NGOs fordeviating from their specificied objectives, for engagingin politics, and for interfering in public policies in a waythat contravenes internal and external security or dis-turbs public peace (de la Torre and Ortiz Lemos, 2016,229-230). Morales followed suit by passing legislationin 2013 to revoke an organization’s permit to operateif it performs activities different from those listed in itsstatute, or if the organization’s representative is crimi-nally sanctioned for carrying out activities that “under-mine security or public order” (Human Rights Watch,2015).

In Venezuela and Ecuador, social movements werecreated from the top down to counteract the power ofworker’s unions, unionized teachers, students, and in-digenous groups. Protest was criminalized in Venezuelaand Ecuador. Union leaders and striking workers, eventhose that were supporting Chávez, were charged withterrorism (Iranzo, 2011, 28-31). Hundreds of peas-ant and indigenous activists were accused of terrorismand sabotage in Ecuador (Martínez Novo, 2014). Lawswere used discretionally to arrest and harass leadingfigures of the opposition in the Bolivarian nations. Themost notorious cases occurred under Chávez’s succes-sor, Nicolás Maduro, when opposition leader LeopoldoLópez was imprisoned on charges of inciting violence.

III. The Logic of Populism: Constructing the People andits Enemies

Laclau (2005) wrote that the logic of populism aimsto create popular subjects who have antagonistic rela-

tionships with their rivals. He argued that the divisionof society into two antagonistic camps was required torupture exclusionary institutional systems and createan alternative order. While Laclau saw populism as theonly construction of the political and as the only pathto rupture exclusionary administrative systems, I arguethat his reliance on Carl Schmitt’s theory of the polit-ical could justify authoritarianism. If the political isconceived as a struggle between friend and enemy, itis difficult to imagine adversaries who have legitimateinstitutional spaces. Enemies as in Schmitt’s view mightneed to be manufactured and destroyed. By giving nor-mative priority to populist rupture, Laclau embracedmyths of the revolution as the overhaul of all existinginstitutions, and as the dream of total discontinuitywith a given order. Positive reformist improvementsare ruled out by normative eschatological constructionsof revolutionary politics.

Populists used polarizing Manichaean discoursesthat pitted the people against the oligarchy. HugoChávez did not face political rivals, but the oligarchydefined as the enemies of the people, “those self-servingelites who work against the homeland” (Zúquete, 2008,105). He called traditional politicians imbeciles, squalidones, and little Yankees. He referred to the owners ofthe media as the “four horsemen of the Apocalypse”(López Maya and Panzarelli, 2013, 248). Similarly, Cor-rea created a long list of enemies to his government, hispeople, and his nation. The list included traditionalpoliticians, the owners of the privately owned media,journalists, the leadership of autonomous social move-ments, the “infantile left”, and almost anybody whoquestioned his policies. Morales defined external andinternal enemies. “At the external level, the foreign,especially the United States, the Drug Enforcement Ad-ministration, and the transnationals, are the enemies ofthe nation and the sovereign. At the domestic level, theoligarchy, whites, and Western culture are the enemy,as opposed to the people, the indigenous, and speciallythe Andean.” (Postero, 2010, 29).

Populists constructed political rivals as enemies butdid not physically eliminate them and did not use massterror and disappearances to create a homogeneous anduncorrupted national community. The foundation ofpopulism lies in winning open and free elections thatare considered to be the only expression of the popu-lar will (Peruzzotti, 2013). Classical populists like JuanPerón fought against electoral fraud, increased the fran-

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 42

chise, and gave women the right to vote. Hugo Chávez,Evo Morales, and Rafael Correa used ballots to displacepolitical elites. Venezuelans voted in sixteen electionsbetween 1999 and 2012, Bolivians in seven between2006 and 2014, and Ecuadorians in six. Constantly trav-eling the election trail, these presidents ruled as if theywere in permanent political campaigns. They used pop-ulist discourse and strategies to manufacture rivals intoenemies of the people and the homeland, while trans-forming elections into plebiscites on their personas – theembodiment of the revolutionary future, pitted againstthe defenders of the old regime.

Even though the legitimacy of populist leaders isgrounded in winning elections, they might have a hardtime accepting that they could lose popular elections.If the people are imagined to always be right, and thushaving one unified voice and will, it is “morally impos-sible” that they could vote for those constructed as theenemies of the people (Ochoa Espejo, 2015, 83). Underconditions of populist polarization, elections are rep-resented as titanic battles between the enemies of thepeople that want to restore the past of oppression, andthe leader of the people – the only guarantor able to ful-fill the populist project of redemption.

“The people” as Laclau (2005) wrote, is a discursiveconstruct, and a claimmade in struggles between politi-cians, activists, and intellectuals. The people could beconstructed as a diverse population, or as the people-as-one, as a single subject with one will. The people couldface democratic rivals within institutional and norma-tive settings, or antagonistic enemies that need to beeliminated. Constructing the people as plural, liberaland social democrats face democratic rivals that havelegitimate institutional and normative spaces. Unlikeliberals and social democrats, populists construct thepeople as a sacred entity with a single consciousnessand a will that can be embodied in a Redeemer. Chávezclaimed to be the embodiment of the Venezuelan peo-ple: “This is not about Hugo Chávez, this is about apeople” (Zúquete, 2008, 100). Because his mission wasto redeem his people from oppression, he could say, “Idemand absolute loyalty tome. I am not an individual, Iam the people” (Gómez Calcaño and Arenas, 2013, 20).Similarly, after winning his second presidential electionin 2009, Correa asserted, “Ecuador voted for itself ”.

The populist category of the people does not nec-essarily need to be imagined as one. Evo Morales did

not use exclusionary ethnic appeals; on the contraryhe constructed the notion of the people as multiethnicand plural (Madrid, 2008). The Constitution of 2009declared Bolivia as a plurinational and communitarianstate. Yet at times Morales attempted to be the onlyvoice of the people. When indigenous people from thelowlands challenged his policies of mineral extractionin 2011, they were depicted as manipulated by foreignNGOs and as not truly indigenous. Morales’s regimeattempted to impose a hegemonic vision of indigeneityas loyalty to his government. But because of the powerof social movements, Morales was not able to imposehis vision of the people-as-one.

Chávez, Correa, andMorales did not see themselvesas ordinary leaders elected for limited terms in office.On the contrary, they perceived themselves as lead-ing the refoundation of their republics. Only cancerprevented Chávez from becoming Venezuela’s perma-nently elected president for life. Correa modified theconstitution to allow for his permanent re-election withan amendment that prohibited him to run in the 2017election. If Correa wishes, he could be a candidate in2021 after his successor attempts to deal with a severeeconomic crisis. In February 2016, Morales narrowlylost a referendum to change the constitution that wouldhave enabled him to run for another term in the electionof 2019.

Constantly traveling the electiontrail, these presidents [Chávez,Morales, and Correa] ruled as if theywere in permanent politicalcampaigns. They used populistdiscourse and strategies tomanufacture rivals into enemies ofthe people and the homeland, whiletransforming elections intoplebiscites on their personas – theembodiment of the revolutionaryfuture, pitted against the defendersof the old regime.

Keane (2009, 285) writes that “enforcing the dis-tinction between holding and leaving office is a key in-dicator of whether or not a form of government canbe considered democratic.” In a democracy the pres-idency is a depersonalized or disembodied role. To

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 43

hold an office is not to own that office. For populists,the presidency is a possession that should remain intheir hands until the liberation of their people has beenachieved. Yet populists claim legitimacy through win-ning elections that they could conceivably lose and thusare bound by electoral results (Cheresky, 2015). Pop-ulism, thus, grounds its legitimacy in the democraticprecept of winning elections, and under the autocraticview of power as a possession of the liberator of the peo-ple.

IV. Conclusions

Left wing populists challenged neoliberal orthodoxy,committed to redistribute wealth, aimed to integrateLatin American nations, and mobilized the poor andthe excluded. What went wrong with these democratiz-ing promises, and why did populism lead to authoritar-ianism in Venezuela and Ecuador and, to a lesser extent,in Bolivia? Part of the answer is structural and has todo with the politics of natural resource extraction. Ren-tier states used fiscal resources discretionarily to securea clientelist base of support, undermining autonomouscitizenship. The need to increase natural resource ex-traction led to clashes with indigenous organizationsand environmentalists, setting limits on their politics ofinclusion and recognition. The populist promise to de-stroy existing institutions for the creation of a new orderled to conflicts with all of the institutions of constitutedpower. Moreover, populists relied on discriminatorylegalism to punish critics, concentrate power, and colo-nize the state and civil society. The Schmittian logic ofpopulism manufactured enemies as a threat that had tobe eradicated. Their language of love to the people andhatred to the oligarchy helped to create powerful ad-versarial and emotional, yet undemocratic, identities.Populists aimed to stay in power until fulfilling theirmissions to liberate their people, yet they used electionsthat, in principle, they could lose.

The undemocratic outcomes of populist promisesshould not lead us to conclude that the only route foravoiding authoritarianism lies in following the institu-tional designs of liberal democratic politics. In contrastto Laclau’s argument, populism was not the only alter-native to administration, and it was certainly not theonly way to construct the political. Whereas Laclauwas right in arguing that liberalism has been a mecha-nism for safeguarding property rights, liberalism is also“an indispensable bulwark against political despotism”

(Wolin, 2006, 251). Constitutionalism, the separationof powers, freedom of speech, assembly, and the pressare necessary to the politics of participatory democ-racy. These features strengthen the public sphere andallow independent social movements to push for theirdemocratizing demands. The historical evidence showsthat revolutions made in the name of a unitary peo-ple end in authoritarianism. Rather than populist rup-tures imagined as the overhaul of all institutions madein the name of a mythical people, as Kalyvas (2008,229) suggested, we should shift “to a plurality of socialmovements, and voluntary political associations as theinescapable ground upon which popular sovereignty isreconstructed.”

References

Arenas, Nelly. 2016. “El chavismo sin Chávez: la deriva deun populismo sin carisma.” Nueva sociedad (261):13–22.

Cheresky, Isidoro. 2015. El Nuevo Rostro de la Democracia.Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica.

Corrales, Javier. 2015. “Autocratic legalism in Venezuela.”Journal of Democracy 26(2):37–51.

de la Torre, Carlos and Andrés Ortiz Lemos. 2016. “Populistpolarization and the slow death of democracy in Ecuador.”Democratization 23(2):221–241.

de la Torre, Carlos and Cynthia Arnson. 2013. Introduction:The evolution of LatinAmerican populism and the debatesover its meaning. In Populism of the Twenty First Century,ed. Carlos de la Torre and Cynthia Arnson. Baltimore:Johns Hopkins University Press and the Woodrow WilsonCenter Press pp. 1–35.

Gómez Calcaño, Luis and Nelly Arenas. 2013. “El populismochavista: autoritarismo electoral para amigos y enemigos.”Cuadernos del CENDES (82):17–34.

Hetland, Gabriel. 2016. “Chavismo in crises.”NACLA (48):8–11.

Human Rights Watch. 2015. “World report 2015 Bolivia.”World Report 2015.

Iranzo, Consuelo. 2011. “Chávez y la política laboral enVenezuela 1999-2010.” Revista Trabajo 5(8):5–37.

Kalyvas, Andreas. 2008. Democracy and the Politics of theExtraordinary: Max Weber, Carl Schmitt, and HannahArendt. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ Press.

Keane, John. 2009. Life after political death: The fate of lead-ers after leaving high office. In Dispersed Democratic Lead-ership, ed. John Keane, Haig Patapan and Paul T. Hart. Ox-ford: Oxford University Press pp. 279–298.

Laclau, Ernesto. 2005. On Populist Reason. London: Verso.Levitsky, Steven and James Loxton. 2013. “Populism and

competitive authoritarianism in the Andes.” Democratiza-tion 20(1):107–136.

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 44

LópezMaya, Margarita and Alexandra Panzarelli. 2013. Pop-ulism, rentierism, and socialism in the twenty first century.In Latin American Populism in the Twenty-First Century,ed. Carlos de la Torre and Cynthia Arnson. Baltimore:Johns Hopkins University Press and the Woodrow WilsonCenter Press pp. 239–269.

Madrid, Raúl L. 2008. “The rise of ethnopopulism in LatinAmerica.” World Politics 60(3):475–508.

Martínez Novo, Carmen. 2014. “Managing diversity in post-neoliberal Ecuador.” The Journal of Latin American andCaribbean Anthropology 19(1):103–125.

Ochoa Espejo, Paulina. 2015. Power to whom? The peoplebetween procedure and populism. In The Promise and Per-ils of Populism, ed. Carlos de la Torre. Lexington: KentuckyUniversity Press pp. 59–91.

O’Donnell, Guillermo. 2011. Nuevas reflexiones acercade la democracia delegativa. In Democracia Delegativa,ed. Guillermo O’Donnell, Osvaldo Iazzetta and HugoQuiroga. Buenos Aires: Prometeo pp. 19–35.

Peruzzotti, Enriquei. 2013. Populism in democratic times:Populism, representative democracy, and the debate ondemocratic deepening. In Latin American Populism in theTwenty-First Century, ed. Carlos de la Torre and CynthiaArnson. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press andthe Woodrow Wilson Center Press pp. 61–85.

Postero, Nancy. 2010. “Morales’s MAS government buildingindigenous popular hegemony in Bolivia.” Latin AmericanPerspectives 37(3):18–34.

Postero, Nancy. 2016. “El pueblo Boliviano de Composi-ción Plural” A look at Plurinational Bolivia. InThePromiseand Perils of Populism. Global Perspectives, ed. Carlos de laTorre. Lexington: Kentucky University Press pp. 398–431.

Rovira Kaltwasser, Cristóbal and Paul Taggart. 2016. “Deal-ing with populists in government: A framework for anal-ysis.” Democratization 23(2):201–220.

Schilling-Vacaflor, Almut and David Vollrath. 2012. Indige-nous and peasant participation in resource governance inBolivia and Peru. In Civil Society and the State In Left-LedLatin America, ed. Barry Cannon and Peadar Kirby. Lon-don: Zed Books pp. 126–141.

Weyland, Kurt. 2009. “The rise of Latin America’s two lefts:Insights from rentier state theory.” Comparative Politics41(2):145–164.

Weyland, Kurt. 2013. “The threat from the populist left.” Jour-nal of Democracy 24(3):18–32.

Wolin, Richard. 2006. The disoriented left: A critique ofleft Schmittianism. In The Frankfurt School Revisited, ed.Richard Wolin. London: Routledge pp. 243–253.

Zúquete, José Pedro. 2008. “The missionary politics of HugoChávez.” Latin American Politics and Society 50(1):91–121.

Islam and Populism In The Middle Eastby Vedi R. Hadiz

University of Melbourne

This article addresses a specific variant of populism inthe Middle East, which places the ‘exploited masses’against the ‘rapacious elites’, by employing a religiouslyderived form of identity politics. Specifically, I dis-cuss an Islamic populism that facilitates broad socialalliances through the notion that individuals with po-tentially different preferences commonly belong to anummah (community of believers) that has been his-torically marginalised by secular nationalist elites (andtheir foreign backers). The ummah, in this sense, substi-tutes for the idea of a homogenous ‘people’ that is moreconventionally thought to be a major characteristic ofpopulist politics. But like the ‘people’, the ummah is heldtogether by a self-narrative that depicts it as a repositoryof moral virtue, thereby distinguishing members fromelites that are portrayed as immoral as well as culturallydistant (see Hadiz, 2016, 2014). And like ‘the people’,the symbols, imagery and terminologies associated withthe ummah enable whatmight be called the “suspensionof difference” – which is necessary for the mobilisationof support bases to transcend the reality that they areactually quite diverse – given the growing complexitiesof modern society.

I. Egypt and Turkey

Here I focus on the cases of Egypt and Turkey, two im-portant Muslim majority societies in the Middle Eastthat have produced Islamic movements identified asmodels in different parts of the Muslim world. Even ifthe political genealogies of these movements have in-tersected, their recent political fortunes could scarcelybe more different. While Turkish Islamists have drawninspiration from luminaries of the Egyptian MuslimBrotherhood (such as Hassan Al-Banna and SayyidQutb), more recently Egyptian Islamists have lookedto the more successful model offered by the AKP (Jus-tice and Development Party) in Turkey. For Turk-ish Islamic political activists, the Muslim Brotherhoodonce provided an example of how to build up bases ofsupport within civil society in the face of state repres-sion, gaining the loyalty of the rapidly growing urbanpoor. For newer Egyptian Islamic political activists,the AKP’s successes provided an example, which theyhoped to emulate, of how to obtain power through elec-toral means and adherence to the principles of a market

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 45

economy. In both cases this meant relegating the aim ofestablishing an Islamic state to the background.

Islamic populism…facilitates broadsocial alliances through the notionthat individuals with potentiallydifferent preferences commonlybelong to an ummah (community ofbelievers) that has been historicallymarginalised by secular nationalistelites (and their foreign backers). Theummah, in this sense, substitutes forthe idea of a homogenous ‘people’that is more conventionally thoughtto be a major characteristic ofpopulist politics.

Turkey’s experience is characterised by the emer-gence and quick triumph of the AKP out of a longstand-ing Islamic political tradition that had been subject tosecular nationalist state repression for large parts of thelast century. Under the leadership of Recep Tayyip Er-dogan, the AKP has ruled Turkey for one and a halfdecades and has successfully undermined the Kemal-ist establishment’s grip on the state and on the econ-omy. Although it gained power democratically in 2002,recent developments have shown a growing authori-tarian tendency as the AKP has faced challenges whilestrengthening its stranglehold on the institutions of thestate.

The Egyptian experience, in contrast, shows an Is-lamic movement, also subject to decades of state repres-sion and mainly under the leadership of the MuslimBrotherhood, which had long dominated the politicalopposition and civil society (Berman, 2003) but was un-able to seize control of state power until the events ofthe Arab Spring. Triumphing in the country’s first freeelectoral contests after the fall of Mubarak in 2011, itsbrief period of political ascendancy was to result in dis-astrous consequences.The organisation over-reached inattempting to wrest fuller control of still hostile institu-tions of the state, leading to the felool (remnants of theold regime) pushing back decisively in 2013. The proudMuslim Brotherhood is now in deep crisis, with almostall its top leadership incarcerated for the first time inhistory, leaving followers to regroup in undergroundactivity, and, perhaps, increasingly to resort to violent

political strategies. This shows that Islamic populism’sembrace of electoral politics and the market is contin-gent on the prospect of advancement through them; ifthis possibility is closed, then the political agenda couldshift again to extra-electoral politics and to a variety ofassociated strategies.

There are, however, some commonalities betweenEgypt and Turkey in spite of these different outcomes.In both countries, the Islamic variant of populismevolved in conjunction with Cold War-era social con-flicts, contested modernization projects, and processesof integration into the global economy as well as longhistories of struggles with state authoritarian tenden-cies. Islamic populism also developed bases of supportfrom a similar cross-section of societal elements: largesegments of the urban poor, the educated middle class,and parts of the business community that have been his-torically marginalised by more powerful forces.

The varied social bases of Islamic populism are en-abled by structural problems ingrained in the politicaleconomies of these countries, which have led to theproliferation of large numbers of new urban poor in-habiting vast urban slums as well as significant cohortsof educatedmiddle class youths. Both categories of peo-ple had bought into the promises of modernity but havegood reasons for discontent. Formany educated youths,for example, the promise of social advancement maynot be realized, as there is little prospect of meaning-ful employment in spite of the attainment of knowledgeand skills as part of modernizing state projects (Hefner,2005). Some individuals with higher education degreesboast conditions of life that are only marginally betterthan that of the poor around them (see Bayat, 2013,210-212). With political liberalism only having a weakpresence in both countries due to the legacies of ColdWar-era conflicts, Islamic populism holds significantappeal to both the urban poor and sections of this ed-ucated urban middle class. Such is the case especiallygiven that Islamic terminology regarding a virtuous so-ciety and economy has been grafted onto the rhetoric ofmodern social justice concerns (Tripp, 2006, 69).

In addition, in Turkey especially, and to a lesserextent in Egypt, culturally Muslim sections of the busi-ness class have been relatively peripheralized by state-business alliances centered on cronyistic relationshipsbetween the holders of power within the secular na-tionalist state and top businesspeople. Indeed, a ma-

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 46

jor source of support for the AKP in Turkey is the so-called “Anatolian bourgeoisie” (Yavuz, 2006) that so-cially, economically and politically had been sidelinedby large Istanbul-based business conglomerates that arean integral part of the Kemalist establishment. But inEgypt too, the tenuous accommodation of the MuslimBrotherhood by the Mubarak regime had allowed forsignificant large business elements within its supportbase. This was best represented by the prominence ofsuch people as the now-jailed former number two of theorganisation, Khairat El-Shater, as both a business andpolitical figure in the early days of the Arab Spring.

Today, ‘pious’ elements of the business class inTurkey are well integrated into the social alliancethat underpins the AKP’s Islamic populism, includingthrough organisations like MUSIAD (Independent In-dustrialist’s and Businessmen’s Association). They canreflect on the fact that their economic fortunes haverisen together with the political ascent of the AKP.1 Itshould be noted, however, that Erdogan’s break withthe community led by former ally and Islamic cleric-in-exile in the USA, Fethullah Gulen, has caused fissureswithin this business support base due to the wealth ofthe Gulen community and its vast business networks or-ganised through an association called TUSKON (Turk-ish Confederation of Businessmen and Industrialists).In Egypt, tentative attempts to enhance the infrastruc-ture of business support for the Muslim Brotherhoodwere dashed with the dramatic fall of the Morsi govern-ment,2 along with any ambitions held by those nurturedwithin the organization’s vast networks of quickly dis-placing entrenched politically-connected businesses.

II. Conceptualising Islamic Populism and its Evolution

Gidron and Bonikowski (2013), among others, have at-tempted to categorise existing approaches to populismin the theoretical literature. In their view, these ap-proaches differ according to whether they primarilyunderstand populism as ideology (e,g. Mudde, 2004);discursive style (e.g. Laclau, 2005); or political strategy(Madrid, 2008). Though with slightly different elucida-tions of their main features, I posit a way of categoris-ing these approaches that is quite similar (Hadiz, 2016,22-27). However, I suggest a fourth approach, used inonly a small number of analyses, which looks at pop-

ulism from the point of view of its social bases and owessomething to the broader traditions of class analysis.In basic terms, Ionescu and Gelner’s (1969) pioneering,though flawed, volume had ambitions of developing acomparative analysis of populist politics premised on itsdivergent social bases and evolution in different histor-ical contexts. Moreover, Oxhorn’s (1998) more recentanalysis of populism in LatinAmerica ismore clearly in-fluenced by the concerns associated with class analysis.Here, he argues that populism embodies asymmetrical“multi-class coalitions” that gather the frustrations oflower classes built up under conditions of profound so-cial inequalities, while noting that they are led by thosewho are only relatively marginalised within the socialhierarchy, such as elements of the middle class.

The suggestion of a fourth category of approaches tothe study of populism is made at this juncture to under-score the theoretical position taken in this article. Asoutlined above, it is largely premised on the idea of the‘cross-class’ nature of Islamic populist social alliancesin Egypt and in Turkey. The approach suggests that thedeployment of Islamic identity, based on symbolism,imagery, and terminology associated with the Islamicreligion, holds together the multiple class elements thatunderpin Islamic populism in these countries.

[In Turkey,] the demand for anIslamic state probably came to beseen as somewhat redundant, asIslamists gained power over theexisting state through democraticmeans due to broad and coherentlyorganized social bases of support.

The advantage of this approach is that it allows foranalysis of the evolution and shaping of populist politicsin relation to broader processes of social, political, andeconomic change. For example, it can help to accountfor shifts in the sorts of demands articulated by Islamicpopulism. For most of the 20th century, the purveyorsof Islamic populism almost uniformly called for the es-tablishment of an Islamic state. In their minds, not onlywould such a state be imbued with ‘morality’, given thatthose with demonstrated piety would lead, but it would

1Interview with Eyup Vural Aydin (MUSIAD general secretary) and Dr Hatice Karahan Piskin (MUSIAD deputy secretary general),Istanbul, 20 September 2011.

2These had included a plan to form a new business association.

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 47

actively nurture and protect an ummah that had beenmarginalized since the heyday of the age of Westerncolonial empires. Such a yearning was understandablegiven that the social base of Islamic populism was muchnarrower than it is now, being focused on communitiesof small traders and manufacturers – or what wouldhave been once considered the world of the bazaari(Keddie and Richard, 2006, 26).3 But this was priorto the social transformations experienced in large partsof the Muslim world, including Egypt and Turkey, asintegration with the global economy continued apace,especially with the growing pressures exerted with theadvent of neoliberalism since the latter part of the 20thcentury. Internally, the result of such integration wasnew transformations (and dislocations) within existingsocial structures, which, as described above, providedfertile ground for the expansion and diversification ofthe social bases of Islamic populism.

In Turkey, however, the old economic protection-ist policies that were championed by the precursorsof the AKP – particularly the late ‘grand old man’ ofTurkish Islamic politics, Necmettin Erbakan – are nolonger a major part of the demands articulated by thesocial agents of Islamic populism. In fact, the Erdogangovernment has been notable for its market orientedpolicies and enthusiasm for participation in the globaleconomy. Inmany ways, shifting social bases of supportcould explain the changing outlook of Islamic populismin Turkey. The more outward-looking orientation isfundamentally a reflection of the modern sensibilitiesof its educated urban middle class supporters, who viewthe AKP as a vehicle to realize ambitions of upward so-cial mobility that seemed frustrated by a close-knit andculturally exclusive Kemalist elite. It is also a reflec-tion of the direct material interests of a largely export-oriented Anatolian bourgeoisie that views its success asdependent on aggressiveness on theworld stage,makingmore inroads into markets not only in Europe, but alsoin the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia. Forthem, the economic structures established by Kemal-ism, which at one time relied on heavy state protectionof the economy, had mainly benefitted the businessesof elites in Istanbul as well as those connected with amilitary that had often suppressed Islamic political ten-dencies.

Furthermore, the demand for an Islamic state prob-

ably came to be seen as somewhat redundant, as Is-lamists gained power over the existing state throughdemocratic means due to broad and coherently orga-nized social bases of support. In Turkey, the AKP doesnot even refer to itself as an Islamic party – much lessone that strives for an Islamic state – calling itself insteada ‘conservative party that embodies the moral values as-sociated with Islamic teachings.

Interestingly, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt,whose highly influential ideologue in the 1950s and1960s, Sayyid Qutb, had been uncompromising on theissue of an Islamic state, appeared to develop a fasci-nation with the AKP experience. Thus, its electoralvehicle, the Freedom and Justice Party – defunct af-ter the military ouster of the Morsi government – alsoproclaimed itself to be pro-democracy and pro-marketand showed little overt interest in an Islamic state (El-Wardani, 2011). Such a change in outlook is also relatedto the shifting social bases of support for the MuslimBrotherhood, which encompass components of the ed-ucated middle class and a business class, though lessdeveloped than in Turkey, that had become quite signif-icant. For these interests, it was worth relegating the oldcommitment to an Islamic state, if adherence to democ-racy and the market could undermine the cronyistic re-lationships that lay behind the power of the felool. It is tobe expected, however, that the persecution of the Mus-lim Brotherhood in recent years, which has been morewide-ranging than that experienced under Mubarak,would resuscitate old misgivings about democratic pol-itics and the idea that only an Islamic state could reallyside with the ummah.

III. Outcomes and Prospects

When prospects emerge to productively benefit fromthemechanisms of electoral politics and themarket, thepurveyors of Islamic populism are likely to envision akind of state led by the righteous and who would pro-tect the interests of the ummah, but without necessar-ily requiring the establishment of an overtly theocraticIslamic state. Representatives of Islamic populism inTurkey, and until recently Egypt, have therefore aspiredtoward a state and society that would see power andresources redistributed more ‘justly’, without the ideo-logical component of being ‘anti-capitalism’ and ‘anti-democracy.’ Such a component has featured regularly, if

3Though the term comes out of the Persian experience, it has come to be utilized more broadly in the Middle East and the broader Is-lamic world.

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 48

sometimes ambiguously, in the thinking of generationsof Islamic activists that responded to the experienceof the capitalism introduced by a Western-dominatedcolonial world order. Democracy, which is often crit-icized for asserting the sovereignty of the laws of manover the laws of God, would be acceptable too becauseit potentially undermines the authority of the coerciveapparatus of secular nationalist states that hounded Is-lamic political activists in the past. Furthermore, in thisconception, charities and the delivery of social servicesto cater to the needs of the poor – rather than a radicalredistribution of power and wealth – would be a keyfeature of a ‘just society.’ The concern for such a justsociety is seen in the thought of Rached Ghannouchi,for example, the Tunisian thinker and politician whosepolitical genealogy also derives from theMuslim Broth-erhood tradition. While voicing support for any marketbased economy, he also speaks favourably of the Scan-dinavian model of capitalism, though ironically, whilehis En Nahda party was battling Tunisian trade union-ists for political dominance in the immediate years afterthe fall of the authoritarian Ben Ali regime.4

But the call for an Islamic state is far from a thing ofthe past. It lives in the Middle East where social, eco-nomic, and political circumstances make the advance-ment of an imagined homogenous ummah throughelectoral politics and the market highly improbable. Itcould be resuscitated too in places where the discourseon the Islamic state has become less a feature of politicsin recent years. From that point of view, countries likeTunisia and perhaps Morocco are places to watch. Inthis way, Egypt provides an interesting counterpoint toTurkey, where democratic contestation has suited theAKP. This is so even if it has resorted to increasinglyharsh methods in battling the so-called Kemalist ‘deepstate’ and its rival in claiming to represent the interestsof the ummah, the wealthy Gulen community.

When Mubarak fell from power and the MuslimBrotherhood emerged as the most organized force inEgyptian civil society, the aim seemed to be to attainand maintain power through electoral politics and em-bracing the market. That this path has now led to utterfailure could have longer-term consequences. In dis-array and with their assets frozen, the organization’sbusiness elements will not be able to steer the directionof the mainstream of Egyptian Islamic populism. Mid-dle class activists who had honed their skills in electoral

politics, since the days when the Muslim Brotherhoodwas forced to put forward its candidates under the ban-ners of other parties or as independents, are no doubtfrustrated and have likely lost influence too. Interest-ingly, in its persecution of the Muslim Brotherhood, theEl Sisi government has branded it a terrorist organisa-tion, decades after it had actually abandoned violenceas a strategy of struggle. Now locked out of state powerand banned from activities in the sphere of civil society,the option of taking up violent struggle may become in-creasingly appealing to some of the organization’s rankand file. After all, there are many potential foot soldiersto be recruited into such a strategy, especially from co-horts of unemployed youths left disillusioned by thebroken promises of modernity.

References

Bayat, Asef. 2013. Post-Islamism: The Many Faces of PoliticalIslam. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Berman, Sheri. 2003. “Islamism, revolution, and civil soci-ety.” Perspectives on Politics 1(2):257–272.

El-Wardani, Lina. 2011. “Ahram Online’s idiot’s guideto Egypt’s emergent political landscape.” Ahram Online,April 20.

Ghita, Ionescu andGellner Ernest. 1969. Populism: ItsMean-ings and National Characteristics. London: Weidenfeld &Nicolson.

Gidron, Noam and Bart Bonikowski. 2013. “Varieties of pop-ulism: Literature review and research agenda.” WorkingPaper Series 13-0004, Weatherhead Center for Interna-tional Affairs, Harvard University.

Hadiz, Vedi R. 2014. “A new Islamic populism and the con-tradictions of development.” Journal of Contemporary Asia44(1):125–143.

Hadiz, Vedi R. 2016. Islamic Populism in Indonesia and theMiddle East. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hefner, RobertW. 2005. Introduction: Modernity and the re-making of Muslim politics. In Remaking Muslim Politics:Pluralism, Contestation, Democratization, ed. Robert WHefner. Princeton: Routledge pp. 1–28.

Keddie, Nikki R and Yann Richard. 2006. Modern Iran: Rootsand Results of Revolution. New Haven: Yale UniversityPress.

Laclau, Ernesto. 2005. On Populist Reason. London: Verso.Madrid, Raúl L. 2008. “The rise of ethnopopulism in Latin

America.” World Politics 60(3):475–508.Mudde, Cas. 2004. “The populist zeitgeist.” Government and

Opposition 39(4):542–563.Oxhorn, Philip. 1998. “The social foundations of LatinAmer-

ica’s recurrent populism: Problems of popular sector class4Interview, Tunis, 18 April 2013.

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 49

formation and collective action.” Journal of Historical Soci-ology 11(2):212–246.

Tripp, Charles. 2006. Islam and the Moral Economy: TheChallenge of Capitalism. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-sity Press.

Yavuz, M. Hakan. 2006. Introduction: The role of the newbourgeoisie in the transformation of the Turkish Islamicmovement. In The Emergence of a New Turkey: Democracyand the AK Parti, ed.M.HakanYavuz. Salt Lake City: Uni-versity of Utah Press pp. 1–19.

Siren Songs: Reflections on Contempo-rary Populism in Europe’s Old Democra-cies

by Elisabeth IvarsflatenUniversity of Bergen

In summer 2016, we experienced an epic populist mo-ment in one of the world’s oldest democracies: Brexit.As will be well known to readers of this newsletter, thisBritish referendum on whether or not to leave the EUresulted in a small, but clear, majority in favor of leaving.

The referendum is one of the preferred democraticmechanisms of the right-wing populists I have studiedduring the past 15 years.1 While seldom explicitly ar-gued, the underlying reason why many populists likereferenda is that they regard the will of the majority asnormatively good. To populists, this view is a matterof doctrine or instinct. It is not an empirical questionor a question to be debated. From the premise that thepopular will is good, it follows that the purpose of insti-tutions and leaders should be to find out what this willis and to put it into practice.

In this populist reasoning that underpins their sup-port for referenda, all institutions should be regardedwith suspicion. Representatives, too, evenwhen elected,are from a populist point of view always in danger ofcorruption in so far as they become distanced from ‘thepeople.’ Distance from ‘the people’ can be geograph-ical (think about how centers of power become neg-atively charged —Brussels, London, or Washington);social (way of life, ways of speaking, and dressing); or

economic (abuses of the public purse; personal wealth).If they become removed from ‘the people’, political rep-resentatives and others in power, have according to pop-ulist reasoning, parted with ‘the good’ side. They havebecome obstacles to, or even threats to, the realizationof democracy.2

Quite naturally, since populist reasoning is so sus-picious of people in power, populist ideas have a ten-dency to be more appealing to those who do not haveit. Furthermore, since populist movements are so criti-cal of government and governing institutions, they tendto experience upswings in support in times of govern-ing crises or political scandals. Most political scientistswho study populism as an empirical phenomenon noteits Janus-faced nature (Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser,2013). On one side, populism can be a positive correc-tive that helps bring together the powerless against thepowerful, thereby contributing to throwing the rascalsout, or at least scaring them sufficiently to start neededreform. On the other hand, populism can be a set ofdeeply anti-systemic impulses that undermine the in-stitutions that generate the compromises necessary fordemocracy to work, the necessary authority of repre-sentatives, and the value of pluralism. Most worryingly,populism clearly has an authoritarian streak in its igno-rance of the very existence of a myriad of ways of livingand thinking and the potential this generates for realconflict among ‘the people.’

Brexit has, at least in Europe, raised a discussionabout whether or not an increase in referenda now isour predicament on a global, or at least regional, scale.In my view, we should not be surprised if in the futurewe see more initiatives mobilizing to ‘democratize’ theleast democratic field of policy-making – foreign pol-icy. The institutions most vulnerable to such possiblecalls for the ‘democratization of international politics’will be not only the EU, but also international courtsand international trade agreements. Whether we like itor not, there can be little doubt that there is a clear po-tential for populists to have a profound effect on futureglobal developments through their insistence that insti-tutions and representatives be more democratically ac-countable. It is not unlikely that populists will proposemore referenda as their preferred solution.

1For an updated analysis of the preferences for referenda among right-wing populist voters in Europe’s old democracies, see Bjånesøyand Ivarsflaten (2016).

2For a brand new effort to gather the knowledge, including from native language sources, about populist initiatives and their communi-cation styles from across all of Europe, see Aalberg et al. (2016).

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 50

Asmuch as it would be quaintly aristocratic, or evenauthoritarian, to fail to acknowledge that a populist cor-rective can be good for democracy, it is dangerous toignore that it also can be a real threat to it. The versionsof populism that rely on an inflexible notion of ‘the peo-ple’ and that legitimize turning against minority groupswhile simultaneously undermining the legitimacy of theinstitutions protecting these minorities and the politicalrepresentatives speaking up for them are rightly seen asthreats to democracy.

I am often asked by journalists and policy-makers ifI believe that the populist right movements in Europe,who mobilize opposition to immigration, are danger-ous (Ivarsflaten, 2008). My answer is that it depends.It depends on the exclusion criteria they use to iden-tify those who do not belong to ‘the people’, what theybelieve about these outsiders, and how they treat them.It depends on how vicious their antipathy to politicalrepresentatives is. And it depends on how apocalyptictheir ideas are of how elites and outsiders conspire tocorrupt societies.

After years of empirical research on the demarcationline between legitimate and illegitimate actors on the farright,3 I have come to the conclusion that this particu-lar boundary of democracy is crucial for understandingpolitical dynamics in Europe’s old democracies. Still,this boundary is a much more complicated and con-tentious matter than we all would have preferred. Inparticular, the relationship between populism and farright extremism is not at all clear: Some extremists arealso populists, some populists are also extremists; butnot all populists are extremist, and not all extremists arepopulists. So knowing that a movement is populist tellsus something about what energizes it. But many crucialaspects of the political initiative are not conveyed by the“populism” label, including whether or not the populistinitiative is truly democratic.

The right-wing populists that have put their markon European politics during the past 30 or so yearsare all problematic in democratic terms, primarily be-cause of how they exclude entire minority groups livingwithin the state territory from the notion of ‘the peo-ple’ and how they actively contribute to scapegoatingthese groups for societal and economic problems thatare not their fault. In the Brexit campaign, the Eastern

European labor immigrants were scapegoated not onlyfor the government´s austerity policies and the limitedUK welfare regime, but also for National Health Servicelines and rises in housing prices. We have seen time andagain in Europe that in the absence of convincing policysolutions to real economic and social problems, findingsomeone to blame (immigrants, the EU) carries the day.

Whether we like it or not, there canbe little doubt that there is a clearpotential for populists to have aprofound effect on future globaldevelopments through theirinsistence that institutions andrepresentatives be moredemocratically accountable. It is notunlikely that populists will proposemore referenda as their preferredsolution.

Their lack of convincing solutions to the very realproblems that feed the current surge in support forpopulist initiatives in Europe, is the most fundamentalweakness of the populist movements that we have seenso far in Europe. Most problems in Britain will not besolved by reducing immigration and not even by leavingthe EU. The discrepancy between the scale of the prob-lems raised and the solutions offered by the populistsis a fundamental reason why populists in Europe haveeither changed or, most often, not lasted very long ingovernment (Deschouwer, 2008). This does not meanthat populist initiatives can be safely ignored. Brexitwould not have happened in this way and at this time inthe absence of the right-wing populist party, UKIP.

Comparative political scientists have a lot of impor-tant work ahead of us on the topic of populism. We needto vigilantly and continuously examine the ideas, therhetoric or styles, the organizational structures, and theleaders and supporters of the populists movements inEurope and elsewhere (Gidron and Bonikowski, 2013).I hope that an over-arching contribution of this workwill be to inform, analytically and empirically, the likelynever-ending effort of distinguishing between the trueproposals for improving democracy and the siren songs.

3This work examines how and why far right parties with reputation shields against accusations of racism have been more successful atlarge-scale mobilization than parties without them. See Blinder, Ford and Ivarsflaten (2013); Harteveldt and Ivarsflaten (Forthcoming).

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 51

Both may appear, at first glance, as populist.

References

Aalberg, Toril, Frank Esser, Carsten Reinemann, JesperStromback and Claes De Vreese. 2016. Populist PoliticalCommunication in Europe. Abingdon: Routledge.

Bjånesøy, Lise Lund and Elisabeth Ivarsflaten. 2016. Demo-cratic transformations in Europe: Challenges and oppor-tunities. In What kind of challenge? Right-wing populismin contemporary Western Europe, ed. Yvette Peters andMichaël Tatham. Abingdon: Routledge.

Blinder, Scott, Robert Ford and Elisabeth Ivarsflaten. 2013.“The better angels of our nature: How the antipreju-dice norm affects policy and party preferences in GreatBritain and Germany.” American Journal of Political Sci-ence 57(4):841–857.

Deschouwer, Kris, ed. 2008. New Parties in Government: InPower for the First Time. London: Routledge.

Gidron, Noam and Bart Bonikowski. 2013. “Varieties of pop-ulism: Literature review and research agenda.” WorkingPaper Series 13-0004, Weatherhead Center for Interna-tional Affairs, Harvard University.

Harteveldt, Eelco and Elisabeth Ivarsflaten. Forthcoming.“Why women avoid the radical right: Internalized normsand party reputations.” British Journal of Political Science .

Ivarsflaten, Elisabeth. 2008. “What unites right-wing pop-ulists in Western Europe? Re-examining grievance mo-bilization models in seven successful cases.” ComparativePolitical Studies 41(1):3–23.

Mudde, Cas and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser. 2013. “Exclu-sionary vs. inclusionary populism: Comparing contempo-rary Europe and Latin America.” Government and Opposi-tion 48(2):147–174.

The Performative Turn in the Compara-tive Study of Populism1

by Benjamin MoffittStockholm University

It’s a good time for those of us who study populism. Asmall snapshot of the past few years: Trump. Duterte.Le Pen. SYRIZA. Brexit. The ascension of Europeanright-wing populists into the mainstream. The wax andwane of the Latin American populist left. The emer-gence of new populist actors in Africa and the Asia-Pacific. On top of this, near-constant media hysteria

over populism in all of its variants. The confluence ofthese phenomena has meant that interest in populism isperhaps at an all-time high – not only in the press, butin the academic literature as well.

Indeed, there has been a glut of academic work onpopulism in recent years, which has grown increas-ingly sophisticated in at least two ways. The first isthat the scope has expanded: comparativists workingon populism are gradually throwing off the regionally-bound shackles of the literature and instead undertakingimpressive cross-regional analyses that go beyond theusual European and Latin American cases. The secondis that this expanded scope has contributed to a growingsophistication in the way that populism is conceptual-ized. Given that concept formation in comparative pol-itics is (at its best) an iterative process, it is encouragingthat these processes are informing one another in sucha productive way.

In this short article, I argue that this shift has seenthe emergence of a sustained challenge to hegemonicunderstandings of populism. Instead of seeing pop-ulism as an ideology or strategy (two of the most domi-nant approaches to populism in the comparative politicsliterature), a growing number of authors have shiftedtheir focus towards how populism is done – that is, howit is performed or enacted. As such, I identify theseapproaches as part of a ‘performative turn’ in the com-parative study of populism – a shift towards focusing onthe political practice of populism.

The article sets out as follows. First, I discuss thefeatures of the ‘performative turn’ in the literature onpopulism, explaining what I mean by this term, outlin-ing the key authors within this approach, and exploringwhat unites them. Second, I presentmy own conceptionof populism as a ‘political style’ as an illustration of thisshift in conceptualizing populism. Third, I explain thebenefits of such a conceptual approach in the compara-tive political analysis of populism.

I. The Performative Turn in the Comparative Literatureon Populism

In my book, The Global Rise of Populism: Performance,Political Style, and Representation (Moffitt, 2016), Iidentify four central approaches to populism in the con-temporary literature – seeing it as ideology, strategy,

1Thanks to Pierre Ostiguy for his helpful comments on this piece.

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 52

discourse, or political logic. It is the first two that arearguably the most commonly utilized in the compara-tive literature on populism, particularly in the Europeanand Latin American literatures respectively. Yet theseapproaches have increasingly come under fire from crit-ics. The ideological approach has been criticized for itsbinarism, its methodological inconsistencies, and thecomplications of insisting that populism is a ‘thin’ ide-ology (Aslanidis, Forthcoming) – something that hasbeen most damningly rebuked by the very author re-sponsible for the concept of ‘thin ideologies’ (Freeden,2016). The strategic approach, meanwhile, has beencriticized for casting far too wide a net in terms of cases(Hawkins, 2010, 168), for not engaging with the keyreferent of ‘the people’, and for having limited ‘travela-bility’ outside the Latin American context (Moffitt andTormey, 2014).

In response to some of these problems, an alterna-tive approach has been developing and gaining groundin the comparative politics literature in recent years. Asopposed to focusing on the ideational or strategic/or-ganizational aspects of populism, this approach fore-grounds populism’s performative dimension. Here, thestylistic, politico-cultural, and relational aspects of pop-ulism take precedence. The authors I identify as partof this approach may use different terms to describepopulism – political style, communication style, or dis-course amongst others – yet all are united by the viewthat populism is something that is done, embodied, andenacted.

As such, I argue that it makes sense to talk abouta ‘performative turn’ in the comparative literature onpopulism. Why use this phrase? It echoes the wider talkof a performative turn in the social sciences in the 1990s,which forced a shift away from structure-based expla-nations of social phenomena towards making sense ofsymbolically mediated action in contemporary socialand political analysis (Bachmann-Medick, 2016). Theperformative turn highlighted the importance of speechacts, the creation of meaning through performance, therole of audiences, actors, scripts, and so forth in thestudy of social science (Alexander, Giesen and Mast,2006). In practical terms for the study of populism,this has meant a shift away from focusing strictly onideational material (such as manifestoes or party ma-terial) or what Hawkins (2010, 39) has called “largelymaterial aspects of politics, that is, coalitions, histori-cal preconditions and policies” under the strategic ap-

proach, towards the actual performance of populism.

This performative focus is reflected in the differ-ent definitions of populism that are utilized by authorsworking under this broad approach in the comparativestudy of populism. A number of authors see populismas a discourse, whether utilizing an Essex School in-formed approach to the term (Stavrakakis and Katsam-bekis, 2014; Poblete, 2015) or a more traditional defini-tion of discourse (Hawkins, 2010). Others have offeredvariations on the discursive approach, with Aslanidis(Forthcoming, 9) recently arguing that populism is ac-tually a discursive frame that constructs “an anti-elitediscourse in the name of the sovereign People”, whileBonikowski and Gidron (2016, 1593) see populism asa “discursive strategy that juxtaposes the virtuous pop-ulace with a corrupt elite and views the former as thesole legitimate source of political power.” Methodolog-ically, Bonikowski and Gidron (2016, 1593) argue thatit is best to focus on populist claim-making, contendingthat “populism is best operationalized as an attribute ofpolitical claims rather than a stable ideological propertyof political actors.”

Other authors have gone beyond the strictly discur-sive level, and have extended their definition to take infurther performative aspects. Ostiguy’s (2009a; 2009b)definition of populism as the “flaunting of the low” inpolitics makes this clear: “High and low have to do withways of relating to people; as such, they go beyond ‘dis-courses’ as mere words, and they include issues of ac-cents, level of language, body language, gestures, waysof dressing, etc. As a way of relating to people, theyalso encompass the way of making decisions” (Ostiguy,2009b, 5). As such, his definition combines politico-cultural aspects (such as personalistic, strong leader-ship and ‘immediacy’ in decision-making) with moreperformative social-cultural aspects (such as the use oflocal vernacular, demonstrative behaviour, ‘colorful-ness’, and so forth). Beyond this, others have soughtto include performative aspects of populism under theconcept of populism as a ‘political style’ (de la Torre,2010; Mondon, 2013; Knight, 1998) – a term which Ielaborate upon below.

A central theoretical influence of many of these au-thors is the work of Laclau (2005). While comparativepolitics scholars have sometimes shunned Laclau’s workon populism for being “extremely abstract” (Mudde andRovira Kaltwasser, 2012, 7), the authors operating un-

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 53

der the performative turn disagree. Instead, they haveused Laclau’s important insights into the roles of lead-ership, representation, affect, and the constituting pro-cesses of ‘the people’, and applied them to a wide array ofcases. In doing so, they have critiqued a number of theproblematic elements of Laclau’s work (such as his in-sistence that populism is the logic of ‘the political’), yetalso worked with, built upon, and extended his theoreti-cal framework in a way that has made it more accessibleand easily applicable to the comparative study of pop-ulism.

Another important aspect to note about those as-sociated with this turn is that their work is not focusedon one particular region; rather, it is truly compara-tive. While ideological approaches to populism havemostly been applied to the European context (withsome Latin American applications) and strategic ap-proaches almost entirely to Latin America, these per-formative approaches have been applied to contextsas distinct as Greece (Stavrakakis and Katsambekis,2014), South Africa (Mbete, 2015), the United States(Bonikowski and Gidron, 2016), Argentina (Ostiguy,2009a) and Australia (Moffitt, Forthcoming) amongstothers. This speaks to the ‘travelability’ of the defini-tions used by these analysts. Unlike ideological andstrategic approaches, which have the tendency to uni-versalize regional subtypes of populism as representa-tive of populism in toto, this approach takes account ofa truly global set of cases.

II. The Political Style Approach2

My own contribution to this performative turn hasbeen to put forward an understanding of populism asa distinct ‘political style’ that appears across a num-ber of political and cultural contexts. As laid out inMoffitt (2016), my aim in doing so was to build onthe work of previous scholars who had used the term‘political style’ to describe populism (Canovan, 1984,1999; Kazin, 1998; Knight, 1998; Taguieff, 1995), butwhose efforts had remained somewhat underdeveloped.Despite these authors’ important conceptual contribu-tions, Weyland’s (2001, 12) critique that “political styleis a broad not clearly delimited concept” still rang true,and as such, I sought to define the term more clearly forusage in comparative political analysis, with a particularfocus on the performative and embodied dimensions ofpopulism.

To do this, I first took a step back and examined theusage of the term ‘political style’ in the wider social sci-entific literature. Synthesizing the work of Ankersmit(1996, 2002), Hariman (1995), and Pels (2003) in thefields of political philosophy, rhetoric, and politicalsociology respectively, I defined political style as therepertoires of embodied, symbolically mediated perfor-mance made to audiences that are used to create andnavigate the fields of power that comprise the political,stretching from the domain of government through toeveryday life. The aimhere was to offer a social scientificcategory that took account of the discursive, rhetorical,and aesthetic aspects of political phenomena, framingthem under the rubric of performance to take accountof the intensely mediated (and mediatized) conditionsof contemporary political life.

It makes sense to talk about a‘performative turn’ in thecomparative literature onpopulism.…The three necessary andsufficient conditions of the populiststyle [are] …[an] appeal to ‘thepeople’ versus ‘the elite’; ‘badmanners’; and the performance ofcrisis, breakdown, or threat.

I then used the concept of political style to induc-tively identify the features of populism as a political style.This was done by examining twenty-eight cases of lead-ers from across the globe that are generally acceptedas populists within the academic literature, and iden-tifying what links them in terms of political style. Theassumption here was that while there is wide disparityin the literature as to how to conceptualize populism,there is at least some (mild) consensus regarding theactual cases of actors that are usually called ‘populist’.These leaders – all from the 1990s onwards, given thebook’s focus on contemporary populism – were drawnnot only from the ‘usual’ regions of Europe and theAmericas, but also fromAfrica and theAsia-Pacific, tworegions that are usuallymarginalized in the comparativepolitics literature on populism given its “Atlantic bias”(Moffitt, 2015a). Populist leaders, rather than populistmovements or parties, were focused on as they are mostclearly the central performers and ‘embodiments’ of

2This section reproduces some elements from Chapter 3 of my book, The Global Rise of Populism (Moffitt, 2016).

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 54

populism as a distinct political style.

It is important to note that this was not an attempt tocapture the very ‘essence’ of populism, nor is it an ideal-type. Rather, this approach allowed me to chart, as abaseline, what links a number of disparate cases of con-temporary populism across the world and to constructa minimal concept (in line with a number of alternativeapproaches to populism) that outlines the three nec-essary and sufficient conditions of the populist style.These three features were found to be: an appeal to ‘thepeople’ versus ‘the elite’; ‘bad manners’; and the perfor-mance of crisis, breakdown, or threat. I outline each ofthese features below.

Appeal to “the People” versus “the Elite”

‘The people’ is both the central audience of populists, aswell as the subject that populists attempt to ‘render-present’ (Arditi, 2007) through their performance.‘The people’ are also presented as the true holders ofsovereignty. This appeal to ‘the people’ can take manyforms, from invocations of ‘the people’, ‘the main-stream’, ‘the heartland’, or other related signifiers, toperformative gestures meant to demonstrate populists’affinity with ‘the people.

Connected to the appeal to ‘the people’ is the di-chotomous division of society between ‘the people’ and‘the elite’ (or other related signifiers, such as ‘the Es-tablishment’ or ‘the system’) – a divide that is acknowl-edged throughout the majority of contemporary defini-tions of populism. Populists may also target particularOthers – such as asylum seekers, immigrant workers, orparticular minority groups – as enemies of ‘the people’,but these Others will be linked to ‘the elite’. For exam-ple, it might be argued that ‘liberal elites’ have allowedincreased immigration, which has led to an influx ofmi-grants, which has threatened ‘the people’s’ livelihood. Insuch cases, it is ‘the elite’ or ‘the Establishment’ that isthe source of crisis, breakdown, corruption, or dysfunc-tionality, as opposed to ‘the people’, who in turn havebeen ‘let down’, ‘ripped off ’, ‘fleeced’, rendered power-less, or badly governed.

The appeal to ‘the people’ can also include claimsagainst the ‘political correctness’of the ‘the elite’, whichare used to demonstrate that the populist ‘really knows’what people are thinking as well as prove their outsiderstatus. This often takes the form of the denial of expert

knowledge, and the championing of ‘common sense’against the bureaucrats, technocrats, representatives,or ‘guardians of our interests’ (Saurette and Gunster,2011). This was particularly evident in the languageof Preston Manning’s Reform Party of Canada, whosecharter declared “we believe in the common sense of thecommon people” (Reform Party of Canada 1993, 2), aswell as figures like Evo Morales or Pauline Hanson’s val-orisation of the wisdom of ordinary citizens.

‘Bad Manners’

A function of the appeal to ‘the people’ as the arbitersof ‘common sense’ and of the urgency of the mattersthat populist actors present is a coarsening of politi-cal rhetoric, and a disregard for ‘appropriate’ modes ofacting in the political realm. Canovan (1999, 5) hasidentified this as the “tabloid style” of populism, whileas mentioned earlier, Ostiguy (2009b) has identifiedthis as the ‘low’ of a high-low axis that runs orthog-onal to the traditional left-right axis. Such elementsof this ‘low’ include the use of slang, swearing, politi-cal incorrectness, and being overly demonstrative and‘colourful’, as opposed to the ‘high’behaviors of rigid-ness, rationality, composure, and the use of technocraticlanguage. An American example of this high-low dis-tinction would be to compare themore refinedmannersof Hilary Clinton to the populist manners of DonaldTrump. Clinton’s manners are very much those of theestablishment: gravitas, intelligence, and the display ofsensitivity to the positions of others. Trump’s mannersare those of the ‘outsider’: directness, playfulness, bul-lying, coarse language, a disregard for hierarchy andtradition, ready resort to anecdotes as ‘evidence’, and astudied ignorance of that which does not interest him.What constitutes the ‘bad manners’ of populism maydiffer from one cultural context to another. As Ostiguy(2009b, 5) makes clear in his conceptualisation of pop-ulism, notions of what is considered ‘high’ or ‘low’ “linkdeeply with a society’s history, existing group differ-ences, identities, and resentments”, meaning that theconcrete specifics of such divisions are often culturallyparticular (and because of this specificity, have greatpolitical and cultural resonance), yet can nonetheless becompared across contexts as general traits.

The Performance of Crisis, Breakdown, or Threat

Populism gets its impetus from the perception of cri-sis, breakdown, or threat (Taggart, 2000), and at the

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 55

same time aims to induce crisis through dramatisationand performance (Moffitt, 2015b). This in turn leads tothe demand to act decisively and immediately. Crisesare often related to the breakdown between citizens andtheir representatives, but can also be related to immigra-tion, economic difficulties, perceived injustice, militarythreat, social change, or other issues (whether real orperceived). The effect of the evocation of emergencyin this fashion is to radically simplify the terms andterrain of political debate. For example, Hugo Chávezramped up his populist style in the light of a perceivedcrisis regarding an imperialist conspiracy perpetratedby the United States, while Geert Wilders has positedthe increasing Islamisation of the Netherlands as an im-minent threat to social and economic well-being.

This performance of crisis, breakdown, or threatrelates to a more general distrust of the complex ma-chinery of modern governance and the complicated na-ture of policy solutions, which in contemporary settingsoften require consultations, reviews, reports, lengthy it-erative design, and implementation. In contrast, pop-ulists favor short-term and swift action rather than the‘slow politics’ (Saward, 2011) of negotiation and delib-eration. Politics thus becomes highly instrumentalisedand utilitarian. That which gets in the way of addressing‘the issue’ or the ‘crisis’ has to be ignored, supplanted,or removed.

As such, taken together, populism can be definedas a political style that features an appeal to ‘the people’versus ‘the elite’, ‘bad manners’, and the performance ofcrisis, breakdown, or threat.

III. Repercussions of Thinking about Populism as a Polit-ical Style

Thinking of populism in this way has four major reper-cussions for the comparative study of populism. Thefirst is that it gives us a way to understand populismacross not only regional contexts, but across ideologicaland organisational contexts as well. No matter whetherpopulism is left or right, nationalist or transnational,grassroots or ‘top-down’, this approach allows us to com-pare populism as a general phenomenon.

The second is that the political style approachmovesaway from the dominant view of seeing populism as abinary category towards conceptualising it as a grada-tional concept. Binary approaches (such as the ideo-

logical and strategic approaches outlined above) placepolitical actors on a simple populism vs. non-populismbinary, whereas the political style approach acknowl-edges that political actors can be more or less populistat certain times. Put another way, while binary ap-proaches see populism in a ‘black-and-white’ fashion,the political style approach accounts for the ‘grey area’between the two extremes. Focusing on this grey areaacknowledges that “the degree of populism that a givenpolitical actor employs may vary across contexts andover time” (Gidron and Bonikowski, 2013, 9).

The third repercussion is that the approach allows usto make sense of populism’s alleged lack of ‘substance’or its ‘emptiness’, not by seeing it as somehow deficientor ‘thin’, but instead by taking its stylistic characteris-tics seriously. What is ‘on the surface’ when it comesto populism matters, and this approach gives style theanalytical weight it deserves, without condemning pop-ulism to being something ‘superficial’ – it acknowledgesthat style and content are interrelated, and style can gen-erate, affect, and interact with content in quite complexways.

The fourth repercussion of this approach is thatit offers up a new conceptual vocabulary for studyingpopulism, focusing on performers, audiences, stages,and the mise-en-scène of the phenomenon. This vo-cabulary captures the inherent theatricality of contem-porary populism, while also bringing the mechanismsof populist representation into focus. By conceptual-ising populism as a political style, the question is notonly who ‘the people’ are, but also how the activity ofinterpellating or ‘rendering-present’ ‘the people’ actu-ally occurs. The emphasis on performance shifts thefocus from forms of representation to the actual mecha-nisms of representation – mediated enactments, televi-sual performances, rallies, speeches, use of certain dress,vernacular, and so forth – and in doing so, stresses thevery important (and sometimes forgotten) role of pre-sentation in re-presentation.

While the ‘performative turn’ in the comparativestudy of populism has only just begun, its adherents of-fer a different perspective on the phenomenon of pop-ulism than other approaches – one that is arguablymoresensitive to the mediated political landscape we findourselves within today. The example provided in thisshort article – the notion of populism as a political style– is able to account for populism across contexts, opens

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 56

up possibilities for the gradationalmeasurement of pop-ulist performance, takes the appeal of populist perfor-mance seriously, and offers up an intuitive and easily ap-plicable conceptual languagewithwhich to analyse pop-ulism. In a context where populism is arguably becom-ing more ‘mainstream’, where populist/non-populistbinaries no longer hold, and where populism has gonetruly global, the performative turn offers a possible av-enue for making sense of one of the most importantphenomena in the comparative study of politics today.

References

Alexander, Jeffrey C., Bernhard Giesen and Jason L. Mast.2006. Social Performance: Symbolic Action, Cultural Prag-matics, and Ritual. Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress.

Ankersmit, Franklin Rudolf. 1996. Aesthetic Politics: Politi-cal Philosophy Beyond Fact and Value. Stanford: StanfordUniversity Press.

Ankersmit, Franklin Rudolf. 2002. Political Representation.Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Arditi, Benjamin. 2007. Politics on the Edges of Liberalism:Difference, Populism, Revolution, Agitation. Edinburgh:Edinburgh University Press.

Aslanidis, Paris. Forthcoming. “Is populism an ideology? Arefutation and a new perspective.” Political Studies pp. 1–17. DOI: 10.1111/1467–9248.12224.

Bachmann-Medick, Doris. 2016. Cultural Turns: New Orien-tations in the Study of Culture. Berlin: Walter de GruyterGmbH & Co KG.

Bonikowski, Bart and Noam Gidron. 2016. “The populiststyle in American politics: Presidential campaign dis-course, 1952–1996.” Social Forces 94(4):1593–1621.

Canovan, Margaret. 1984. “‘People’, politicians and pop-ulism.” Government and Opposition 19(3):312–327.

Canovan, Margaret. 1999. “Trust the people! Populism andthe two faces of democracy.” Political Studies 47(1):2–16.

de la Torre, Carlos. 2010. Populist Seduction in Latin America.Athens: Ohio University Press.

Freeden, Michael. 2016. “Populism and ideology: A prob-lematic pairing revisited.” ‘Current Populism in Europe:Impact on the Political Landscape’ Conference, Goethe-Institut, Prague, 23-24 May.

Gidron, Noam and Bart Bonikowski. 2013. “Varieties of pop-ulism: Literature review and research agenda.” WorkingPaper Series 13-0004, Weatherhead Center for Interna-tional Affairs, Harvard University.

Hariman, Robert. 1995. Political Style: The Artistry of Power.Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Hawkins, Kirk A. 2010. Venezuela’s Chavismo and Populismin Comparative Perspective. New York: Cambridge Uni-versity Press.

Kazin, Michael. 1998. The Populist Persuasion: An AmericanHistory. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Knight, Alan. 1998. “Populism and neo-populism in LatinAmerica, especially Mexico.” Journal of Latin AmericanStudies 30(2):223–248.

Laclau, Ernesto. 2005. On Populist Reason. London: Verso.Mbete, Sithembile. 2015. “The economic freedom fighters –

South Africa’s turn towards populism?” Journal of AfricanElections 14(1):35–59.

Moffitt, Benjamin. 2015a. Contemporary Populism and‘The People’ in the Asia-Pacific: Thaksin Shinawatra andPauline Hanson. In The Promise and Perils of Populism:Global Perspectives, ed. Carlos de la Torre. Lexington: Uni-versity of Kentucky Press pp. 293–316.

Moffitt, Benjamin. 2015b. “How to perform crisis: A modelfor understanding the key role of crisis in contemporarypopulism.” Government and Opposition 50(2):189–217.

Moffitt, Benjamin. 2016. The Global Rise of Populism: Perfor-mance, Political Style, and Representation. Stanford: Stan-ford University Press.

Moffitt, Benjamin. Forthcoming. Populism in Australiaand New Zealand. In The Oxford Handbook of Pop-ulism, ed. Paulina Ochoa Espejo, Pierre Ostiguy, CristóbalRovira Kaltwasser and Paul A. Taggart. Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press.

Moffitt, Benjamin and Simon Tormey. 2014. “Rethinkingpopulism: Politics, mediatisation and political style.” Po-litical Studies 62(2):381–397.

Mondon, Aurélien. 2013. The Mainstreaming of the ExtremeRight in France andAustralia: A Populist Hegemony? Farn-ham: Ashgate.

Mudde, Cas andCristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser. 2012. Populismand (Liberal) Democracy: A Framework for Analysis. InPopulism in Europe and the Americas: Threat or Correctivefor Democracy?, ed. CasMudde and Cristóbal Rovira Kalt-wasser. New York: Oxford University Press pp. 1–26.

Ostiguy, Pierre. 2009a. “Argentina’s double political spec-trum: Party system, political identities, and strategies,1944–2007.” Kellogg Institute Working Paper 361. NotreDame: Kellogg Institute for International Studies, Univer-sity of Notre Dame.

Ostiguy, Pierre. 2009b. “The high-low political divide: Re-thinking populism and anti-populism.” Political Concepts:Committee on Concepts and Methods Working Paper Se-ries, 35.

Pels, Dick. 2003. Aesthetic Representation and Political Style:Re-balancing Identity and Difference in Media Democ-racy. InMedia and the Restyling of Politics, ed. John Cornerand Dick Pels. London: SAGE Publications pp. 41–66.

Poblete, Mario E. 2015. “How to assess populist discoursethrough three current approaches.” Journal of Political Ide-ologies 20(2):201–218.

Reform Party of Canada. 1993. Blue Sheet: Principles, Policiesand Election Platform.

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 57

Saurette, Paul and Shane Gunster. 2011. “Ears wide shut:Epistemological populism, argutainment and Canadianconservative talk radio.” Canadian Journal of Political Sci-ence 44(1):195–218.

Saward, Michael. 2011. “Slow theory: Taking time overtransnational democratic representation.” Ethics & GlobalPolitics 4(1):1–18.

Stavrakakis, Yannis and Giorgos Katsambekis. 2014. “Left-wing populism in the European periphery: The case ofSYRIZA.” Journal of Political Ideologies 19(2):119–142.

Taggart, Paul A. 2000. Populism. Birmingham: Open Uni-versity Press.

Taguieff, Pierre-André. 1995. “Political science confrontspopulism: From a conceptual mirage to a real problem.”Telos 103:9–43.

Weyland, Kurt. 2001. “Clarifying a contested concept: Pop-ulism in the study of Latin American politics.” Compara-tive Politics 34(1):1–22.

How to Think – and How Not to Think –about Populism

by Jan-Werner Müller1Princeton University

No U.S. election campaign in living memory has seenas many invocations of ‘populism’ as the one unfoldingin 2015-2016. Both Donald Trump and Bernie Sandershave been labelled ‘populists.’ The term is regularlyused as a synonym for ‘anti-establishment’, irrespec-tive, it seems, of any particular political ideas; content,as opposed to attitude, simply doesn’t seem to matter.The term is thus associated with particular moods andemotions: populists are ‘angry’, their voters are ‘frus-trated’, or suffer from ‘resentment’. Similar claims aremade about figures in Europe and their followers, suchas Marine Le Pen and Geert Wilders. The latter politi-cians are clearly on the right, yet, as with the Sandersphenomenon, left-wing insurgents in Europe are alsolabeled populists: SYRIZA in Greece, a left-wing al-liance that came to power in January 2015, and Pode-mos in Spain, which shares with SYRIZA a fundamentalopposition to Angela Merkel’s austerity policies in re-sponse to the Eurocrisis. Both – especially Podemos– make a point of admitting that they feel inspired bywhat is commonly referred to as the ‘pink tide’ in LatinAmerica – the success of populist leaders such as Rafael

Correa, Evo Morales, and, above all, Hugo Chávez. Yetdo all these political actors actually have anything incommon? If we hold with Hannah Arendt that politicaljudgment is the capacity to draw proper distinctions,the widespread conflation of right and left when talkingabout populism should give us pause. Might the popu-larity of diagnosing all kinds of different phenomena as‘populism’ be a failure of political judgment? But then,what is a proper understanding of populism? In thisessay, I shall first review a number of, in my view, mis-taken (but very common) approaches to comprehend-ing populism, before suggesting a notion of populismas primarily a form anti-pluralism.

I. How Not to Think about Populism

The notion of populism as somehow ‘progressive’ or‘grassroots’ is largely an American phenomenon. In Eu-rope, one finds a different historically conditioned pre-conception of populism. There, populism is connected,primarily by liberal commentators, with irresponsiblepolicies or various forms of political pandering (with‘demagoguery’ and ‘populism’ often used interchange-ably). As the sociologist Ralf Dahrendorf (2003) onceput it, populism is simple; democracy is complex.

Populism is also frequently identified with a par-ticular class, especially the petty bourgeoisie and, untilpeasants and farmers disappeared from the Europeanand the American political imaginations (ca. 1979, I’d say), those engaged in cultivating the land. This canseem like a sociologically robust theory (classes are con-structs, of course, but they can be empirically specifiedin fairly precise ways). This approach usually comeswith an additional set of criteria drawn from social psy-chology: those espousing populist claims publicly and,in particular, those casting ballots for populist parties,are said to be driven by ‘fears’ (of modernization, glob-alization, and so on) or ‘resentment’.

Finally, there is a tendency among historians andsocial scientists – both in Europe and the U.S. – to saythat populism is best specified by examining what par-ties and movements that at some point in the past havecalled themselves ‘populists’ have in common. One canthen read the relevant features of the ‘-ism’ in questionoff the self-descriptions of the relevant historical actors.

1This text is based on my book, What is Populism? (Müller, 2016c), and two essays, “Trump, Erdoğan, Farage: The attractions of pop-ulism for politicians, the dangers for democracy” (Müller, 2016b) and “Real citizens” (Müller, 2016a).

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 58

None of these perspectives really helps us in pinningdown populism. First of all, when examining the qualityof policies, it’s hard to deny that some policies justifiedwith reference to ‘the people’ really can turn out to havebeen irresponsible: those deciding on such policies didnot think hard enough; they failed to gather all the rel-evant evidence; or, most plausibly, their knowledge ofthe likely long-term consequences should have madethem refrain from policies with only short-term elec-toral benefits for themselves. One does not have to bea neoliberal technocrat to judge some policies plainlyirrational. Think of Hugo Chávez’s hapless successor aspresident of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, who sought tofight inflation by sending soldiers into electronics storesand having them put stickers with lower prices on prod-ucts. Or think of the French Front National, which inthe 1970s and 1980s put up posters saying “TwoMillionUnemployed is Two Million Immigrants Too Many!”The equation was so simple that everyone could solve itand seemingly figure out with bon sens what the correctpolicy solution had to be.

It is rather peculiar to conflate thecontent of a set of political beliefs(populism is, after all, an ‘ism’) withthe socio-economic positions andthe psychological states of itssupporters. This is like saying thatthe best way to understand SocialDemocracy is to re-describe itsvoters as workers envious of richpeople.

Still, we cannot generate a criterion for what con-stitutes populism this way. For in most areas of publiclife, there simply is no absolutely clear, uncontestedline between responsibility and irresponsibility. Of-ten enough, charges of irresponsibility are themselveshighly partisan (and the irresponsible policies most fre-quently denounced almost always benefit theworst-off).In any case, making a political debate a matter of ‘re-sponsible’ versus ‘irresponsible’ poses the question of‘responsible according to which values or larger com-mitments?’ Free trade agreements – to take an obviousexample – can be responsible in light of a commitmentto maximizing overall GDP and yet have distributionalconsequences that one might find unacceptable in light

of other values. The debate then has to be about thevalue commitments of a society as a whole, or per-haps about the different income distribution that fol-lows from different economic theories. Setting up adistinction between populism and responsible policiesonly obscures the real issues at stake. It can also be anall-too-convenient way to discredit criticism of certainpolicies.

Focusing on particular socio-economic groups asthe main supporters of populism is empirically dubi-ous, as a number of studies have shown. Less obviously,such an argument often results from a largely discred-ited set of assumptions frommodernization theory. It istrue that in many cases voters who support what mightinitially be called populist parties share a certain incomeand educational profile: especially in Europe, those whovote for what are commonly referred to as right-wingpopulist parties make less and are less educated. (Theyare also overwhelmingly male–a finding that holds forthe U.S. as well, but not for Latin America.)2 Yet thispicture is by no means always true. As the Germansocial scientist Karin Priester has shown, economicallysuccessful citizens often adopt an essentially Social Dar-winist attitude and justify their support for right-wingparties by asking, in effect, “I have made it – why can’tthey?” (Think of the Tea Party placard demanding “Re-distribute my Work Ethic!”) (Williamson, Skocpol andCoggin, 2011). Not least, in some countries such asFrance and Austria, populist parties have become solarge that they effectively resemble ‘catch-all parties’:they attract a large number of workers, but their votersalso come from many other walks of life.

Surveys have shown that one’s personal socio-economic situation and support for right-wing populistparties often do not correlate at all, because the latter isbased on a much more general assessment of the situ-ation of one’s country (Elchardus and Spruyt, 2016). Itwould be misleading to reduce perceptions of nationaldecline or danger (‘elites are robbing us of our owncountry!’) to personal fears or ‘status anxiety’. Manysupporters of populist parties actually pride themselveson doing their own thinking (even their own research)about the political situation and deny that their stancesare just about themor drivenmerely by emotions (Kem-mers, van der Waal and Aupers, 2016).

However, even if one wants to hold on to the no-2On this ‘gender gap’, see Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser (2013).

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 59

tion that particular emotions consistently characterizevoters who want to ‘Make America Great Again’, it israther peculiar to conflate the content of a set of po-litical beliefs (populism is, after all, an ‘ism’) with thesocio-economic positions and the psychological statesof its supporters. This is like saying that the best way tounderstand Social Democracy is to re-describe its votersas workers envious of rich people. The profile of sup-porters of populism obviously matters in how we thinkabout the phenomenon. But it is not just patronizingto explain the entire phenomenon as an inarticulate po-litical expression on the part of the supposed ‘losers inthe process of modernization’. It is also not really anexplanation.

Then why do so many of us keep resorting to it?Because consciously or unconsciously, we continue todraw on a set of assumptions derived from moderniza-tion theory that had its heyday in the 1950s and ’60s.This is true even of many political theorists and socialscientists who, if asked, would say they consider mod-ernization theory to be thoroughly discredited. It wasliberal intellectuals like Daniel Bell, Edward Shils, andSeymour Martin Lipset (all heirs of Max Weber) whoin the course of the 1950s began to describe what theyconsidered to be ‘populism’ as a helpless articulationof anxieties and anger by those longing for a simpler,‘pre-modern’ life. Lipset, for instance, claimed thatpopulism was attractive for “the disgruntled and thepsychologically homeless, . . . the personal failures, thesocially isolated, the economically insecure, the unedu-cated, unsophisticated, and authoritarian personalities”(Lipset, 1963). The immediate targets of these socialtheorists were McCarthyism and the John Birch Soci-ety – but their diagnosis often extended to the originalAmerican populist revolt of the late nineteenth century.Victor C. Ferkiss, for instance, saw the original follow-ers of the Farmer’s Alliance and the People’s Party asnothing less than the precursors of a distinct Americanvariety of fascism (Ferkiss, 1957). This thesis was not toremain uncontested – but the background assumptionsremain present among many social and political com-mentators today.

Finally, there is the thought that populism musthave something to do with those who first called them-selves populists. Think of the Russian narodniki in thelate nineteenth century and their ideology of Narod-nichestvo, which is usually translated as ‘populism’. Thenarodniki were intellectuals who idealized the Russian

peasants and saw the village commune as a politicalmodel for the country as a whole. They also advocated‘going to the people’ for political advice and guidance.(Likemany urban intellectuals, they found that ‘the peo-ple’ neither welcomed them in the ways they had hopednor recognized the political prescriptions deduced fromtheir supposedly ‘pure ways of life’ by intellectuals).

For many observers, there simply has to be a reasonwhy something called ‘populism’ emerged simultane-ously in Russia and the United States towards the end ofthe nineteenth century. The fact that both movementshad something to dowith farmers and peasants gave riseto the notion – prevalent at least until the 1970s – thatpopulism had a close connection to agrarianism or thatit was necessarily a revolt of reactionary, economicallybackwards groups in rapidly modernizing societies.

There is no single political will, letalone a single political opinion, in amodern, complex, pluralist – inshort, enormously messy –democracy. Populists put words intothe mouth of what is, after all, theirown creation: the fiction of thehomogeneous, always righteouspeople.

While that association is largely lost today, the ori-gins of populism in the U.S. in particular still suggeststo many observers that populism must at least on somelevel be ‘popular’ in the sense of favoring the least ad-vantaged or bringing the excluded into politics – a sensethat is reinforced by a glance at Latin America, wherethe advocates of populism have always stressed its in-clusionary and emancipatory character in what remainsthe economically most unequal continent on the globe.

To be sure, one cannot simply by fiat ban such as-sociations: historical languages are what they are. Butpolitical and social theory also cannot simply root itselfin one particular historical experience – with, for exam-ple, every form of populism presumed to fit the templateof the American People’s Party (Dubiel, 1986). We haveto allow for the possibility that a plausible understand-ing of populism will in fact end up excluding historicalmovements and actors who explicitly called themselves

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 60

populists. With very few exceptions, historians (or po-litical theorists, to the extent that they care about suchhistorical phenomena) would not argue that a properunderstanding of socialism needs to make room forNational Socialism just because the Nazis called them-selves socialists. But then to decide which historical ex-perience really fits a particular ‘-ism’, we must of coursehave a theory of that particular ‘-ism’. So what is pop-ulism?

II. How to Think about Populism

We can only pin down populism by properly paying at-tention to what populist leaders themselves are saying.The crucial point is this: it’s not enough to be critical ofelites in order to be classified as a populist. Otherwise,anyone finding fault with the status quo in, for instance,Greece, Italy, or the US would by definition be a pop-ulist – and, whatever else one thinks about, for instance,Sanders, SYRIZA, or Beppe Grillo’s insurgent Five StarMovement in Italy, it’s hard to deny that their attackson the status quo can often be justified. Also, virtuallyevery presidential candidate in the US would be a pop-ulist, if criticism of existing elites is all there is to thephenomenon: everyone, after all, claims to run ‘againstWashington’.

When in opposition, populists for sure criticizeelites. But there is also always something else they do –and that is the tell-tale sign of populism: they claim thatthey, and only they, represent the people. Think, forinstance, of Turkish President Reccep Tayyip Erdoğanaddressing his critics in the country: “We are the people.Who are you?” Of course, he knew that they were Turks,too. The claim to exclusive representation is not an em-pirical one; it is always distinctly moral. Populists’ po-litical competitors and critics are inevitably condemnedas part of the immoral, corrupt elite, or so populists saywhen running for office; once in government, they willnot recognize anything like a legitimate opposition. Thepopulist logic also implies that whoever does not reallysupport populist parties might not be part of the properpeople at all: there areAmerican citizens, and then thereare what George C. Wallace always called ‘real Ameri-cans’ (white, God-fearing, hard-working, gun-owning,and so on).

Think of Nigel Farage celebrating the Brexit voteby claiming that it had been a “victory for real people”(thus making the 48 per cent of the British electorate

who had opposed taking the UK out of the EuropeanUnion somehow less than real – or, rather, questioningtheir status as members of the political community). Orconsider a deeply revealing remark by Donald Trumpthat went virtually unnoticed, given the frequency withwhich the New York billionaire has made scandalousstatements. At a campaign rally in May, Trump an-nounced that “The only important thing is the unifi-cation of the people – because the other people don’tmean anything.”

The conventional wisdom that populists want tobring politics closer to the people or even clamor fordirect democracy could not be more mistaken. They dosay that they are the only ones who care for the ‘people’s will’, but they are hardly interested in an open-ended,bottom-up process where citizens debate policy issues.What populists take to be the people’s real will is de-rived from what they stipulate to be the real people –and not all citizens will automatically be part of thatreal people. What’s worse, ‘the people’s will’, whichpopulists claim they will just faithfully execute – in thatsense denying their own role as leaders and also anyreal political responsibility – is a fiction. There is nosingle political will, let alone a single political opinion,in a modern, complex, pluralist – in short, enormouslymessy – democracy. Populists put words into themouthof what is, after all, their own creation: the fiction of thehomogeneous, always righteous people. And then theysay, like Trump, “I am your voice.” Or think again ofErdoğan claiming this July: “What do my people want?The death penalty!” Never mind that he had asked forits reintroduction first.

This split between the actual citizenry and ‘thereal people’ explains why populists so frequently ques-tion election outcomes, when they aren’t the winners(which, after all, seems to falsify their claim to be theonly legitimate representative of the people): populistsonly lose, if ‘the silent majority’ – shorthand for ‘the realpeople’ – has not had a chance to speak, or, even worse,has been prevented from expressing itself. Hence thefrequent invocation of conspiracy theories by populists:something going on behind the scenes has to accountfor the fact that corrupt elites are still keeping the peo-ple down. As long as Trump had not been assured ofthe Republican nomination, he kept alluding to fraud,and with a defeat in the November election looming,he is already trying to discredit Clinton’s victory. Re-cently, the right-wing populist FreedomParty inAustria

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 61

successfully contested the outcome of the presidentialelection in May. Its candidate, Norbert Hofer, had keptconfronting his rival, the economics professor Alexan-der Van der Bellen, with the claim: “You have the hautevolée behind you; I have the people with me.” Whatclearly follows: if the people’s politician doesn’t win,there must be something wrong with the system.

Populist politicians are not like other politicians ina democracy. But the difference is not that they aresomehow closer to the ‘masses’, or that they want direct,as opposed to representative, democracy. Populists arefine with the idea of representation, as long as they getto represent what they consider to be the real people.This is why one cannot score points against figures likeGeert Wilders (who has literally spent his entire adultlife in the Dutch parliament) or Trump by pointing outthat they themselves are not exactly ordinary people:their claim is that they will represent the real peoplefaithfully, not that they are like everyone else. The cru-cial difference is that populists deny, or wish away, thepluralism of contemporary societies. When they sayequality, theymean sameness, which is to say: conform-ing to some ideal of Middle America, Little England, orwhatever a symbolic representation of real peoplehoodcomes down to for them.

We need to understand that populism is not justanti-elitism – it is a form of anti-pluralism, based onan exclusionary identity politics. Populists implicitlypromise that homogeneity will solve social and politi-cal problems and that the world will be set to rights ifthe representatives of the real people are in power. Thisis not a helpful ‘corrective’ to a liberal democracy thatmight somehow have become too remote from ordinaryfolks, as some sympathetic scholars of populism haveargued. The fantasy of the fully homogeneous people isa danger for democracy itself. For, as Jürgen Habermasput succinctly, ‘the people’ can only appear in the plural.Equality is a democratic value; homogeneity – based onsome fantasy of the pure people – is not.

References

Dahrendorf, Ralf. 2003. “Acht Anmerkungen zum Populis-mus.” Transit: Europäische Revue 25:156–63.

Dubiel, Helmut. 1986. Das Gespenst des Populismus. In Pop-ulismus und Aufklärung, ed. Helmut Dubiel. Frankfurt amMain: Suhrkamp pp. 33–50.

Elchardus, Mark and Bram Spruyt. 2016. “Populism, persis-

tent republicanism and declinism: An empirical analysisof populism as a thin ideology.” Government and Opposi-tion 51(1):111–133.

Ferkiss, Victor C. 1957. “Populist influences on Americanfascism.” The Western Political Quarterly 10:350–373.

Kemmers, Roy, Jeroen van der Waal and Stef Aupers. 2016.“Becoming politically discontented: Anti-establishmentcareers of Dutch nonvoters and PVV voters.” Current So-ciology 64(5):757–774.

Lipset, SeymourMartin. 1963. PoliticalMan.The Social Basesof Politics. New York: Doubleday.

Mudde, Cas and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser. 2013. Pop-ulism. In The Oxford Handbook of Political Ideologies, ed.Lyman Tower Sargent Michael Freeden and Marc Stears.Oxford: Oxford University Press pp. 493–512.

Müller, Jan-Werner. 2016a. “Real citizens.” The Boston Re-view, October 26.

Müller, Jan-Werner. 2016b. “Trump, Erdoğan, Farage: Theattractions of populism for politicians, the dangers fordemocracy.” The Guardian, September 2.

Müller, Jan-Werner. 2016c. What is Populism? Philadelphia:University of Pennsylvania Press.

Williamson, Vanessa, Theda Skocpol and John Coggin. 2011.“The Tea Party and the remaking of Republican conser-vatism.” Perspectives on Politics 9(1):25–43.

Two Generations of African Populism:Applying a Cumulative Conceptual Ap-proach

by Danielle ResnickInternational Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI)

Most studies on populism have focused on Europe,North America, and Latin America (e.g. Hawkins, 2009;Kazin, 1998; Lowndes, 2008; Mudde and Rovira Kalt-wasser, 2013; Roberts, 2006; Taggart, 1995). TheAfrican context, however, poses an especially hard casefor conceptualizing the core essence of populism giventhe longstanding absence of well-institutionalized polit-ical parties and the attendant prominence of personalis-tic rule. Based on certain conceptualizations, an expec-tation of populism could be overdetermined. In fact, thepopulist modifier has described many disparate behav-iors of African politicians, including electoral handouts,xenophobic discourse, homophobic rhetoric, promisesof valence goods, and declarations of economic nation-alization. Consequently, there is substantial confusionabout what phenomenon is actually being catalogued

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 62

and how well it corresponds with its manifestations inother areas of the world.

As observed by Gidron and Bonikowski (2013),three main conceptual approaches exist with respect toidentifying populism. One involves populism as a mo-bilization strategy involving personalistic leaders forg-ing plebscitarian ties with a diverse and unorganizedconstituency for opportunistic purposes (see Weyland,2001). Another approach stresses the use of discourseand performances (Hawkins, 2009; Ostiguy, 2009). Os-tiguy (2009) particularly emphasizes performances thatemphasize a ‘flaunting of the low’ involving the use ofpopular and sometimes vulgar language and dramatic,colorful, and even politically incorrect acts that grabthe public’s attention. A third approach focuses on theimportance of ideology (see Mudde, 2004), wherebypopulism is characterized by a sharp delineation be-tween the corrupt elite, the pure people, and the generalwill.

This essay suggests that a cumulative conceptual ap-proach (see Gerring, 2001), which combines these threeapproaches, offers the most analytical leverage in dis-cerning African cases of populism over time than anysingle approach on its own. Specifically, the combinedpresence of personalistic leadership dependent on di-rect ties to the poor bolstered by socio-cultural perfor-mances and an inclusive ideology of the people versusthe elite helps delimit cases of African populism, bothhistorically and more recently. As in Latin America,and in contrast to its European and North Americanmanifestations, populism in Africa has revolved aroundleaders rather than political parties, and relies more onan inclusionary ideology with regards to social policy,incorporating marginalized constituencies, and beinganti-establishment rather than pro-nativist.1

I. First Generation African Populism

A first generation of African populism emerged as aconsequence of coups in the 1980s that were justifiedby military leaders as the only means of ousting cor-rupt incumbents who had exacerbated macroeconomicmismanagement and undermined citizens’welfare (seeChazan et al., 1999). The quintessential example wasFlight Lieutenant Jerry Rawlings, who ousted Ghana’s civilian government in 1981 through a popular coup.He espoused the need for a ‘social revolution’, entreating

Ghanaians to eliminate exploitation and claiming thathis goal was to provide “a chance for the people…tobe part of the decision-making process”(Rothchild andGyimah-Boadi, 1989, 222). He often toured the countryin his military fatigues, delivering impromptu speechesthat emphasized that he was not only a man of the peo-ple but also above the people, epitomized by his nick-name of “Junior Jesus”(see Chazan et al., 1999). Heestablished the Provincial National Defense Council(PNDC), as well as lower level institutions, to facilitatethe voice of the people and provide ‘popular justice’, in-cluding People’s and Workers’Defense Committees.

The combined presence ofpersonalistic leadership dependenton direct ties to the poor bolsteredby socio-cultural performances andan inclusive ideology of the peopleversus the elite helps delimit cases ofAfrican populism, both historicallyand more recently.

In neighboring Burkina Faso, known asUpperVoltaat the time, a charismatic army officer from the coun-tryside, Thomas Sankara, overthrew the civilian gov-ernment in 1983. Sankara justified this as a revolutionintended “to take power out of the hands of our nationalbourgeoisie and their imperialist allies and put it in thehands of the people”(Martin, 1987, 78). To implementhis peoples’revolution, he established neighborhoodComités de Défense de la Révolution (CDR) that weretied to a national political organ, comprised of key ele-ments of the military, known as the Conseil National dela Révolution (CNR). To dramatically demonstrate hisdistaste for profligacy, he gave away the state’s fleet ofMercedes cars in a national lottery and encouraged civilservants to accept salary reductions in order to re-orientinvestment to the rural masses (Martin, 1987).

Yoweri Museveni in Uganda likewise accessedpower by mounting a guerrilla campaign against thecorrupt regime of Milton Obote in 1986, taking overas president and leader of a movement he foundedcalled the National Resistance Movement (NRM). Hepromised a clean break from the past and appealed tothe commonmanby emphasizing his ownpeasant back-ground and through “a frequent use of metaphors and

1Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser (2013) usefully disaggregate the ideological approach into exclusionary and inclusionary types.

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 63

images that are near to people’s lives, or proverbs andshort phrases taken from vernacular languages”(Car-bone, 2005, 5-6). In addition to these performances,Museveni also set up a series of five-tiered ‘resistancecouncils’, ostensibly to encourage popular participationat the local level, but implicitly to further entrench theNRM’s reach at the grassroots level (see Tripp, 2010).

The common characteristics of these first gener-ation populists were fivefold. First, they attemptedto establish direct ties with their populations throughnew, local level, avowedly participatory structures. Sec-ondly, these leaders grounded their populism in ananti-establishment discourse and, by portraying theirusurpation of power as peoples’revolutions, impliedthat they were acting in the interests of the ‘general will’and against the ‘enemy of the people’. The latter en-compassed not only the political elite but also formercolonial powers. Thirdly, they pursued similar eco-nomic strategies focused on heavy state intervention,import substitution industrialization (ISI), and ruralcollectivization schemes. Fourthly, they all aimed fora broader societal transformation predicated on mod-ernization and equality, often attacking chiefly privi-lege in rural areas. Lastly, their populism was not eas-ily compatible with genuine democracy. Both Rawl-ings and Museveni banned other political parties, whileSankara’s increasingly iron grip on the CNR alienatedother members of the military corps, particularly hisdeputy, Blaise Compaoré. His populist experiment wascut short when he was assassinated in 1987, allegedlyon Compaoré’s orders.

II. Characteristics of Contemporary Populism

After a decade of democratic experiments in the 1990s,populism in Africa has re-emerged from the 2000s on-wards. Key exemplars include the late Michael Sata ofZambia, JuliusMalema of South Africa, Raila Odinga ofKenya, and Abdoulaye Wade of Senegal. Both supply-and demand-side factors contributed to these dynamics.On the supply-side, these countries have experiencedcritical junctures in the party system. As Roberts (2015,145-146) suggests, populism is more likely when partysystems are highly fluid and leave voters unattached, orwhen parties have been so entrenched that they appearto be detached from popular concerns. The former dy-namics were key in Zambia and Kenya, while the latterplayed an important role in Senegal and South Africa.

Africa’s changing economic and demographic land-scape provide the ‘demand-side’ grievances upon whichsavvy politicians can capitalize. As the world’s fastesturbanizing region, African cities are major sites of in-equality, as gleaming shopping malls and new middleclass housing estates abut informal markets and pock-ets of slums. These challenges are augmented by Africa’s persistent high unemployment and the world’s mostprominent youth bulge. In many of the region’s coun-tries, the youth are more likely to be susceptible to am-bitious promises by politicians to improve their lives ina very short time span (see Resnick and Casale, 2014).Consequently, a common feature of contemporary pop-ulist strategies is a concentration on mobilizing urban-ites, and particularly the urban poor. Consisting of het-erogeneous, unorganized masses, this constituency isoften disillusioned with slum housing, unemployment,poor service delivery, and often frequent harassment bythe ruling class. Therefore, unlike in the 1980s, whenpopulist regimes were particularly concerned about theexclusion of the peasant class, more contemporary pop-ulist strategies have been centered on urban areas.

Thus, the components of contemporary populismwitnessed in Africa consist of four key elements: (a)unmediated ties with the urban poor that are facilitatedby charisma and socio-cultural performances; (b) anti-elitism that often delineates between ‘the people’ and‘the establishment’; (c) an economically eclectic mes-sage centered on promoting employment and servicesfor the urban poor; and (d) combining populist appealsto the urban poor with ascriptive appeals to a select butsizeable group of rural voters (see Resnick, 2014). Thesedynamics are elaborated in more detail below.

Unmediated Ties

The lack of non-mediated rapport between a leader andhis/her followers, who singularly claims to represent‘the people’, closely reflects Weyland’s (2001) defini-tion of populism as a political strategy. These unmedi-ated ties are facilitated by a potent mixture of charis-matic leadership with the socio-cultural practices thatOstiguy (2009) stresses. At a basic level, this is illus-trated by the use of well-known nicknames that aim toendear these politicians to their constituencies. Theserange from the paternalist Gorgui (‘old man’) for Wade,the biting and acerbic ‘King Cobra’ for Sata, the am-biguous Agwambo (‘the mysterious one’) for Odinga,and the childhood moniker of Juju for Malema. More

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 64

specifically, each of these leaders has engaged in media-grabbing socio-cultural performances and antics. Oneexample includes Sata’s majestic arrival to the HighCourt in 2008 to register for the elections being tuggedin a speedboat because a boat was the PF’s campaignsymbol. Likewise, instead of the suits favored by thepreviously ruling Parti Socialiste (PS), Wade wore thetraditional Senegalese boubou in his 2000 campaignwhile his security guards favored blue jeans rather thanthe typical professional garb of civil servants. The aimwas to celebrate and honor Senegal’s informal sectorworkers who typically don denim (see Foucher, 2007).Malema has often been the most fanatical in the use ofcostume, making the trademark of his party, the Eco-nomic Freedom Front (EFF), a red beret, and aiming toshow an affinity with the working class. When he and24 other EFF MPs who were elected in the May 2014elections arrived for their first day of Parliament, theydressed up as miners and domestic workers to indicatetheir refusal to conform to the conventional Westerndress code of suit and tie.

As in other regions, the feasibility ofcombining populist with ascriptiveappeals is due to the emphasis onmarginalization. Feelings ofexclusion and grievances overinequality among the urban poorhave been complemented byperceptions among certain ethnicand religious groups of having beensidelined in the political sphere.

Other particular performance tactics relate to lan-guage. The ability to speak in the vernacular, rather thangive speeches that were translated from either French orEnglish, was an important distinction for both Wade’s and Sata’s campaigns vis-à-vis those of their com-petitors. Sata’s quick wit made him extremely popular.For instance, when a competitor, Hakainde Hichilema,claimed that he was the “best man”to be president, Sataretorted by asking “then who is the groom?”(Sishuwa,2011, 65). Wade was also famous for his oratory skills,which sometimes involved drawing on well-known fa-bles to make parallels between literary villains and theincompetence of the PS (Breuillac, 2000). Malema’sone liners enlivened South Africa’s parliamentary pro-ceedings with comments such as “[President Zuma] is a

man of tradition, a tradition of empty promises”(citedin Findlay, 2015).

Yet, language by some of these politicians and theirsupporters could also demonstrate violent undertonesthat truly emphasize their ‘flaunting of the low’. Odingaonce emerged from his campaign cavalcade to exclaimthat “This [PNU] government needs a hammer ... itneeds to be hammered out”(cited in Bosire, 2007).Malema gained widespread notoriety by singing DubuliBhuni (‘Shoot the Boer’) at campaign rallies, refer-ring to an old liberation song encouraging the killingof white Afrikaner farmers. He also incorporated ele-ments of sexist discourse, such as when he called theformer white leader of the opposition Democratic Al-liance, Helen Zille, a “racist little girl.”

People Power and Anti-elite Rhetoric

An anti-elite rhetoric also has been prominent amongAfrican populists. Wade did this mostly by show-ing how his leadership styles and priorities were morealigned with the people’s desires and how the politi-cal elite were unable to relate to the poor. Proclaimed“President of the street” because of his popularity witheveryday people (Onishi, 2002), Wade’s paternal im-age helped distinguish him from the PS regime, whichhad been led by the intellectual poet-president, LeopoldSenghor, and the stolid technocrat, Abdou Diouf. Re-sponding to questions about his novel campaign ap-proach of blue marches in the run-up to the 2000 elec-tions, he noted “I have wanted to do what no othercandidate can do. I reach out to the people”(cited inFoucher, 2007, 113).

For Odinga and Sata, the elite were not just divorcedfrom the concerns of the people but actually to blame forinequality and exploitation. Odinga’s campaign mani-festo presented stark dichotomies, evoking Manicheandiscourse and stating, “I give you a cast-iron guaran-tee that I will be a champion of social justice and socialemancipation – a champion of the poor, the dispos-sessed and the disadvantaged in our nation. I will re-dress the imbalance between the powerful and theweak,between the rich and the poor, between the satisfiedand the hungry”(Odinga, 2007, 7). To make the pointclear, his campaign T-shirts in 2007 espoused that hewas the “People’s President.”In Zambia, Sata likewiseviewed himself as the people’s liberator, proclaiming“Zambia needs a redeemer, Zambians wantMoses to re-

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 65

deem [them] and I am the redeemer of Zambia!”(citedin Chellah, 2006, 3).

Malema similarly has proclaimed himself the “Sonof the People”and has adopted the most divisive ap-proach. The EFF manifesto states: “Our decision is tofight for the economic emancipation of the people ofSouth Africa, Africa and the world. Economic FreedomFighters (EFF) locate the struggle for economic eman-cipation within the long resistance of South Africans toracist colonial and imperialist, political, economic, andsocial domination.”2 By extension, the people Malemaclaims to represent are specifically poor, majority blackSouth Africans, as evident from his 2014 campaign rallywhen he stated, “Youmust give the ANC a wake-up call.Black people your time is now. Political freedom with-out economic freedom is an incomplete freedom”(citedin Harding, 2014).

Eclectic Economic Ideologies and the Centrality of UrbanConcerns

Like their neo-populist counterparts in Latin America(see Roberts, 1995), African populists tend to adhereto eclectic economic ideologies, reinforcing Weyland’s(2001) contention that populism cannot be defined interms of economic strategy alone. Unlike the projectsembarked on by Rawlings or Sankara in the 1980s, thereis not a clear delineation of populist economic inter-ventions. Instead, most of these leaders fused normsfrom both the left and right of the ideological spectrum.Wade shied away from explicit claims about state inter-vention and at the time of his 2000 campaign, his partywas associated with having, at least in theory, an eco-nomically liberal bent. By contrast, the minerals-basedeconomies of South Africa and Zambia have inspiredmore rhetoric about government intervention.

A common thread across all of these populists hasbeen a more concerted focus on the priorities of theurban poor, especially employment but also upgradingslum housing and providing services such as sanitation,electricity, and water. For instance, Wade vowed toend the forced urban housing removals that had beencommonplace under the PS regime by either relocatingpeople into better housing or compensating them if theyhad to be moved elsewhere (see Resnick, 2014). Uponaccepting the ODM’s nomination as president, Odingapromised to rectify Kenya’s ‘economic apartheid’ by

ensuring his supporters jobs and highlighting the un-acceptably large share of urbanites living in informalsettlements. Sata’s main campaign slogan, used con-sistently across the 2006, 2008, and 2011 elections,was “lower taxes, more jobs, and more money in yourpockets.”This message directly attacked the lacklusterrecord of the previously ruling Movement for Multi-party Democracy (MMD) on employment, as well ashigh prices for food and services consumed by the poor.TheEFFmanifesto likewise promised to provide houses,sanitation, millions of sustainable jobs, and a minimumwage to reduce inequality.

Ascriptive Identity Appeals in Rural Areas

As in Latin America, a common tactic by these lead-ers has been the use of ethno-populism (see Madrid,2008), by mobilizing the urban poor with a populistdiscourse and using ascriptive identity appeals to par-ticular ethnic or religious groups in rural areas. Forexample, in 2006 and 2008, Sata’s rural campaigns werepredominantly located in provinces where his fellowBemba co-ethnics are geographically concentrated. In2011, Sata expanded to Western Province and promisedto restore the sovereignty of the Barotse kingdom. InSenegal, Wade drew on his strong ties with one of thecountry’s four Sufi brotherhoods, the Mourides, whichhistorically have commanded strong voting allegiancesamong rural constituencies. Malema likewise draws onhis Pedi ethnicity, often using the SePedi language toaddress even urban rallies, such as his concluding onein Pretoria in 2014.

As in other regions, the feasibility of combiningpopulist with ascriptive appeals is due to the em-phasis on marginalization. Feelings of exclusion andgrievances over inequality among the urban poor havebeen complemented by perceptions among certain eth-nic and religious groups of having been sidelined inthe political sphere. Sata alluded to the exclusion ofBembas by MMD leaders, Odinga suggested that inter-provincial economic disparities had prevailed underKikuyu leadership, and Wade capitalized on growingdisenchantment by the Mourides of being sidelined bythe PS regime.

III. Conclusions

Elaborating on the features of populism over different

2See http://www.economicfreedomfighters.org/documents/economic-freedom-fighters-founding-manifesto

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 66

Table 2: Comparing Populist Eras in Africa

Characteristics 1980s Populism 2000-2015 Populism

Charismatic leadership Yes, leaders are genuine outsiders whoenter politics through military.

Yes, leaders are longstanding insiders whoenter politics by forming new parties.

Unmediated ties to the masses throughsocio-cultural performances.

Metaphors, use of vernacular, foster mes-sianic image, publicly eschewing politicaltraditions

Theatrical antics and clothing, speakingin vernacular, quick wit and metaphors,eschew intellectualism.

Anti-elitist discourse? Yes Yes

Pure people Rural peasants, unemployed, women,youth.

Urban poor, unemployed, co-ethnics,youth.

Corrupt eliteTraditional chiefs, civil servants andprofessionals, ‘parasitic classes’, post-independence leaders, colonial powers.

Leaders of democratic transitions, po-litically powerful ethnic/religious/racialgroups, international donors, foreign in-vestors.

General will A social revolution.

Greater access to the economic ‘pie’through creating more jobs, reducingtaxes, reducing harassment of poor, andexpanding social protection.

Economic ideologies State intervention, import substitutionindustrialization, rural collectivization.

Economic diversification, state interven-tion, nationalization.

eras illustrates the importance of adopting a cumula-tive approach to defining populism in the region. Boththe populism of the 1980s and of the 2000s onwardswere precipitated by disappointment with democraticexperiments and the emergence of a corrupt elite thatappeared detached from the poor masses. As shownin Table 2, anti-elitist discourse has therefore been aprominent feature in both eras. However, the people’s revolutions of the 1980s were driven by genuine out-siders, particularly military leaders, who often had thelatitude to implement radical plans for restructuringsociety and who sidelined existing bureaucratic admin-istrative structures in favor of new grassroots structuresostensibly aimed at facilitating popular participation.Though concerned with the poor in general, they gavespecial weight to the plight of peasants in rural areas.Their economic policies were firmly nationalist andinterventionist. By contrast, the economic ideologiesof more contemporary leaders have been highly var-iegated, their main constituency has been the (young)urban poor, and they have often courted traditional au-thorities where it helps to gain votes among particularethnic and religious groups in rural areas.

A cumulative conceptual approach not only traces

similarities in populism over time but also identifiesa narrower subset of cases that simultaneously satis-fies the conditions of all three approaches to populism.Weyland’s (2001) conceptualization of populism aspredominantly about personalistic leadership aroundplebiscitarian ties with a majority of citizens certainlyfits many of the leaders discussed here. Yet, while it maybe sufficient for identifying populism in North Amer-ica or Europe, where programmatic parties are well-institutionalized, the relative newness of democracyin Africa and the absence of mediating organizationsmeans that many parties are essentially synonymouswith their leaders. In other words, political strategy istoo broad a definition in the African context to provideanalytical precision on its own.

The ideological approach helps distinguish episodesof genuine populism from those where charismaticleaders simply try to mobilize voters based on promisesof valence goods. However, the ideological approachcan also encompass efforts by political leaders, such asHenrie Bédié of Côte d’Ivoire and Robert Mugabe ofZimbabwe, to use exclusionary discourse that identifiesa smaller set of the citizenry as the ‘pure people’. Inthese circumstances, ‘purity’ has been defined in ethnic,

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 67

racial, or religious terms rather than constituting ‘pu-rity’ in a moral sense of being uncorrupted. As a result,it can include cases in Africa that do not necessarily relyon Weyland’s (2001) notion of the principal power ca-pability, whereby mobilizing the masses is prioritized.Instead, such cases have depended on courting just aslice of the population who solely align with a leader’sown ascriptive identity.

The overlap between the political strategy and ide-ological approaches in the African cases is reinforcedthrough socio-cultural performances. Among the lead-ers discussed here, social-cultural practices sometimeshave been quite vulgar, even inciting violence and prais-ing anti-intellectualism. In other instances, they simplyhave involved clever, innovative techniques that craftthe image of a ‘common man’ who can relate to his peo-ple.

Importantly, while populism offers a means of mo-bilizing new constituencies, especially for oppositionparties, its sustainability is often short-lived once charis-matic leaders come to office. Leaders with strong directties to the rural or urban poor need to widen their poli-cies to the broader populace to gain a national foothold,and they rarely achieve the ambitious economic reformsthey initially promised in order to rectify inequality andinjustice. This results in alienating the leader’s coresupporters. At the same time, as witnessed by Sata’s orWade’s tenure as presidents in their respective coun-tries, African populists have exhibited a certain intol-erance for independent institutions, civil liberties, andinternal dissent within their parties. In this regard, thelegacy of populism for democracy and governance is nodifferent in Africa than that found inmost other regionsof the world.

References

Bosire, Bogonko. 2007. “Raila Odinga, Kenya’s mercurial po-litical ogre.” Agence France Presse.

Breuillac, Brigitte. 2000. “Portrait: Le lièvreAbdoulayeWade,ou la ténacité récompensée.” Le Monde, March 22.

Carbone, Giovanni M. 2005. “‘Populism’ visits Africa:the case of Yoweri Museveni and no-party democracy inUganda.”Crisis States ProgrammeWorkingPaper 73, Lon-don School of Economics.

Chazan, Naomi, Peter Lewis, Donald Rothchild, StephenStedman and Robert Mortimer. 1999. Politics and Societyin Contemporary Africa. Boulder: Lynne Rienner.

Chellah, George. 2006. “I am Zambia’s redeemer – Sata.” ThePost, June 15.

Findlay, Stephanie. 2015. “Is Julius Malema the new NelsonMandela?” Maclean’s, May 11.

Foucher, Vincent. 2007. ‘Blue Marches’: Public Perfor-mance and Political Turnover in Senegal. In Staging Poli-tics: Power and Performance in Asia and Africa, ed. Julia C.Strauss and Donal B. Cruise O’Brien. New York: IB Tauris& Co. pp. 111–131.

Gerring, John. 2001. Social Science Methodology: A CriterialFramework. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Gidron, Noam and Bart Bonikowski. 2013. “Varieties of pop-ulism: Literature review and research agenda.” WorkingPaper Series 13-0004, Weatherhead Center for Interna-tional Affairs, Harvard University.

Harding, Andrew. 2014. “Julius Malema strikes a chord inSouth Africa townships.” BBC News, May 2.

Hawkins, Kirk A. 2009. “Is Chávez populist? Measuring pop-ulist discourse in comparative perspective.” ComparativePolitical Studies 42(8):1040–1067.

Kazin, Michael. 1998. The Populist Persuasion: An AmericanHistory. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Lowndes, Joseph E. 2008. From the New Deal to the NewRight: Race and the Southern Origins of Modern Conser-vatism. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Madrid, Raúl L. 2008. “The rise of ethnopopulism in LatinAmerica.” World Politics 60(3):475–508.

Martin, Guy. 1987. “Ideology and praxis inThomas Sankara’spopulist revolution of 4 August 1983 in Burkina Faso.” Is-sue: A Journal of Opinion 15:77–90.

Mudde, Cas. 2004. “The populist zeitgeist.” Government andOpposition 39(4):542–563.

Mudde, Cas and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser. 2013. “Exclu-sionary vs. inclusionary populism: Comparing contempo-rary Europe and Latin America.” Government and Opposi-tion 48(2):147–174.

Odinga, Raila. 2007. Leadership Themes 2007. Nairobi: TheRaila Odinga Centre.

Onishi, Norimitsu. 2002. “Senegalese loner works to buildAfrica, his way.” New York Times, April 10.

Ostiguy, Pierre. 2009. “The high and the low in politics: Atwo–dimensional political space for comparative analysisand electoral studies.” Political Concepts: Committee onConcepts and Methods Working Paper Series, 35.

Resnick, Danielle. 2014. Urban Poverty and Party Populismin African Democracies. New York: Cambridge UniversityPress.

Resnick, Danielle and Daniela Casale. 2014. “Youngpopulations in young democracies: generational vot-ing behaviour in sub-Saharan Africa.” Democratization21(6):1172–1194.

Roberts, Kenneth M. 1995. “Neoliberalism and the transfor-mation of populism in Latin America: the Peruvian case.”World Politics 48(1):82–116.

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 68

Roberts, Kenneth M. 2006. “Populism, political conflict, andgrass-roots organization in Latin America.” ComparativePolitics 38(2):127–148.

Roberts, Kenneth M. 2015. Populism, Political Mobilization,and Crises of Political Representation. In The promise andperils of populism, ed. Carlos de la Torre. Lexington: Ken-tucky University Press pp. 140–158.

Rothchild, Donald and E. Gyimah-Boadi. 1989. “PopulisminGhana andBurkina Faso.”CurrentHistory 88(538):221–244.

Sishuwa, Sishuwa. 2011. “The making of an African populist:Explaining the rise of Michael Sata, 2001-2006.” M.Sc The-sis (Oxford University) .

Taggart, Paul. 1995. “New populist parties in western Eu-rope.” West European Politics 18(1):34–51.

Tripp, Aili Mari. 2010. Museveni’s Uganda: Paradoxes ofPower in a Hybrid Regime. Boulder: Lynne Rienner Pub-lishers.

Weyland, Kurt. 2001. “Clarifying a contested concept: Pop-ulism in the study of Latin American politics.” Compara-tive Politics 34(1):1–22.

PopulismasEpithet and Identity: TheUseand Misuse of a Contested Concept

by Kenneth M. RobertsCornell University

Although populism is widely recognized to be one of themost elusive and contested concepts in the social sciencelexicon (Gidron and Bonikowski, 2013), debates over itsmeaning are typically contained within the insular wallsof academia. The remarkable eruption of varied formsof populist leadership and discourse in contemporaryglobal politics, however, has injected some of these de-bates into the ‘real world’ of public affairs, making thepopulist label itself a focal point of political contesta-tion. Perhaps the most prominent example of this con-ceptual contestation can be seen in remarks made byPresident Barak Obama at a joint press conference inOttawa with the Canadian and Mexican heads of statein the summer of 2016. “I’m not prepared to concedethe notion that some of the rhetoric that’s been poppingup is populist,” President Obama said, in a thinly-veiledreference to Republican presidential nominee DonaldTrump. “I care about poor people who are working re-ally hard and don’t have a chance to advance. And I care

about workers being able to have a collective voice in theworkplace and get their fair share of the pie.” Claimingthat he wants to provide decent education for disadvan-taged kids, childcare for working moms, a progressivetax system, and curbs on the excesses of the financialsector, Obama concluded:

I suppose that makes me a populist. Some-body else who has never shown any re-gard for workers, has never fought on be-half of social justice issues or making surethat poor kids are getting a decent shot atlife or have healthcare – in fact, has workedagainst economic opportunity for workersand ordinary people, they don’t suddenlybecome a populist because they say some-thing controversial in order to win votes.That’s not the measure of populism. That’snativism or xenophobia or worse.1

Obama’s statement was notable in two principalrespects. First, in comparative perspective, the merefact that he claimed the populist mantle for his ownbrand of politics was unusual, though not unprece-dented. Scholars and pundits are often quick to as-sign the populist label to a diverse array of movementsand leaders – from charismatic leaders to leftist massmovements and far-right nativist parties – but rarelyis the label appropriated by such leaders and move-ments as a badge of honor or political identification.It is more typically hurled as a catch-all epithet de-signed to demean or discredit political forces viewedas demagogic, anti-democratic, or politically irrespon-sible in their disruptive appeals to the basest instinctsin a mass body politic. Such opprobrium has long beenthe norm in Europe and Latin America, although therecent economic and political crisis in Southern Eu-rope has spawned Laclauian-inspired efforts to reap-propriate – and positively valorize – the populist mantleby radical left protest movements and parties (see La-clau, 2005; Errejón and Mouffe, 2016; Fernández Liria,2016). Obama’s statement, however, reflected a sin-gular propensity in U.S. progressive circles to use thepopulist label as a euphemism for ‘left’, reflecting, per-haps, the country’s 19th century tradition of progressive‘populist’ reform, the lack of a meaningful socialist tra-dition, and a discursive tool-kit that was truncated anddistorted by Cold War antipathy for anything charac-

1Statement delivered by President Barak Obama at the “Three Amigos” Press Summit Conference, Ottawa, June 29, 2016.2Such distortion also helps to account for the anomalous usage of the term ‘liberal’ in the U.S., which elsewhere in the world is associ-

ated with free markets and private property rights rather than an interventionist and redistributive state.

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 69

terized as ‘left’.2

Second, Obama’s statement reflected a highlyeconomistic conceptualization of populism that asso-ciates the phenomenon with economic policies that ap-peal to popular constituencies. When positively val-orized, as by Obama, such economic policies are un-derstood to respond to the just and legitimate mate-rial needs of such constituencies. When negatively val-orized, however, as by the economists Dornbusch andEdwards (1991) orAcemoglu, Egorov and Sonin (2013),populism becomes synonymous with myopic and irre-sponsible economic policies that harm such constituen-cies over the long term, whatever their short-term pop-ularity. So conceived, populism becomes a pejorativelabel that is used to signify fiscal profligacy and the feck-lessness of politicians who promise to tax less, spendmore, and stoke mass consumption, consequences bedamned.

Whether used as an epithet or as a marker of po-litical identity, such economistic conceptualizations ofpopulism are strikingly at odds with most contempo-rary theorizing on the subject by political scientists andsociologists. These latter social scientists may disagreeabout the essential or defining political traits of pop-ulism, but they share a common premise in their un-derstanding that populism has such traits. Populism, inother words, is conceptualized in political terms and as-signed to the political field of behavior, rather than thedomain of economic policies. Expansionary economicpolicies may (or may not) be employed by populists tohelp mobilize mass support, but they are ancillary andinstrumental to the phenomenon itself.

Not all populisms are identifiably leftor right, inclusionary or exclusionary,but those that are should becharacterized as such. The populistlabel, in short, badly needs its owndescriptors to identify its substantivecontent and differentiate among itsmultiple expressions or sub-types.

Conceived in political terms, populism is more thansimply an appeal to the ‘common’ (i.e., non-elite) peo-ple. It is, more fundamentally, a way of structuringthe political field along an antagonistic divide between

‘the people’ however defined, and some kind of elite orpolitical establishment, also however defined (Laclau,2005, 67-124). Beyond this basic starting point, schol-ars diverge on the question of where to look to iden-tify and define a populist brand of politics. Followersof Laclau prioritize the discursive construction of ‘thepeople’, while others emphasize the ideational dimen-sions of the antagonistic divide (Mudde, 2007; Muddeand Rovira Kaltwasser, 2013), its leadership component(Weyland, 2001), its mobilizational properties (Jansen,2015), or its ‘flaunting’ of the socio-cultural ‘low’ (Os-tiguy, 2009). Despite their differences, these politi-cal conceptualizations of populism all disentangle thephenomenon from any predetermined set of economicpolicies, practices, or development stages, an analyticaldemarcation that became increasingly transparent asscholars sought to interpret the unexpected coupling ofanti-establishment populist politics with market liber-alization in Latin America in the 1990s (Roberts, 1995;Weyland, 1996).

To be sure, a political conceptualization of populismis capable of ‘traveling’ to a wide range of national andhistorical settings, which helps to account for its analyti-cal appeal. Indeed, it is capable of accommodating bothtop-down and bottom-up patterns of socio-politicalmobilization, ‘inclusive’ and ‘exclusive’ constructionsof ‘the people’ and the elite or establishment ‘other’, andboth left- and right-wing variants of populist politics(see Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser, 2013). This mal-leability, however, can be both a blessing and a cursefor scholarship on populism, as it allows the label tobe loosely attached to disparate political phenomenathat share little beyond an anti-establishment bent anda discursive invocation of ‘the people’. The questionposed by Jansen (2015, 159) – “What, then, is the value-added of the ‘populist’ descriptor?” – becomes espe-cially germane in a global context of generalized discon-tent with established parties and professionalized lead-ership castes (aptly labeled ‘castas políticas’ in SouthernEuropean protest movements). If leaders from DonaldTrump to Evo Morales, or parties from the French Na-tional Front to the Spanish Podemos all fit under thepopulist rubric, that rubric is clearly highly elastic. Thepopulist label runs the risk of losing its analytical bitewhen it lumps together without differentiating amongradically divergent forms of anti-establishment politics.

The distinction between inclusionary and exclu-sionary forms of populism identified by Mudde and

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 70

Rovira Kaltwasser (2013) provides one important cor-rective to this problem, as it allows for the identificationof sub-types within the populist genus that are differ-entiated by their specific ideological content and theconception of ‘the people’ articulated within it. By em-phasizing the limited, ‘thin-centered’ character of pop-ulist ideology, they make it possible to analyze howpopulist appeals can be grafted onto other ideologies,such as nationalism and socialism, and shaped by theirarticulation of ‘the people’ and ‘the other’. Such graftinghelps to account for much of the variation across pop-ulist sub-types; the inclusionary forms of populism thatemerged in the recent Latin American experience andthe more exclusionary patterns which have predomi-nated in much of Europe (with the partial exception ofthe region’s southern ‘periphery’, which looks increas-ingly ‘Latin American’) are the products, respectively,of populist grafting onto socialist and nationalist (oreven nativist) ideological currents.

It is important to note that such grafting is neither anecessary condition nor a definitional attribute of pop-ulism. Some forms of populism, such as Argentine Per-onism or the “Five Star”movement in Italy, draw looselyfrom a range of different (and often conflicting) ideo-logical currents and are virtually impossible to locateon an ideological spectrum (in part due to their inter-nal heterogeneity). They are, in a sense, more ‘purely’populist than movements which graft populist appealsonto more well-defined nationalist or socialist projects.As such, no other label – or, in Jansen’s terms, descrip-tor – captures their traits better than ‘populist’. Wherepopulist appeals are explicitly grafted onto nationalismor socialism, however, the populist traits are generallysecondary to those of the host or anchoring ideology,as they convey less substantive content to identify andlocate the movement within the larger field of politicalcontestation. In Jansen’s terms, the value-added of thepopulist descriptor is less than that of the anchoringor host ideology; to call France’s National Front party,Spain’s Podemos, Greece’s SYRIZA, or Bolivia’s MAS‘populist’ is to say far less about their political identity,role, and impact than to call them right-wing nation-alists (for the case of the National Front) and eitherradical left (SYRIZA) or movement left (Podemos andMAS) alternatives. The same goes for Donald Trump,who is surely a populist by the conventions of the socialsciences – President Obama’s commentary notwith-standing – but clearly of the nationalist (or better yet,nativist) right sort, which determines the highly exclu-

sionary character of his discursive construction of ‘thepeople’.

This is not to say that the populist descriptor shouldbe abandoned in the analysis of such cases. It onlymeans that it should not be used in isolation from thehost or anchoring ideology which defines the specificcontent of its elite-popular divide. Not all populismsare identifiably left or right, inclusionary or exclusion-ary, but those that are should be characterized as such.The populist label, in short, badly needs its own descrip-tors to identify its substantive content and differentiateamong its multiple expressions or sub-types.

Such conceptual precision is especially importantat a time when populism is seemingly ascendant onthe global political stage. Though he surely would nothave put it in such terms, Laclau’s (2005) influentialwork identified two basic preconditions for the rise ofpopulism: a crisis of representation in the political-institutional domain, and forms of social heterogeneityor fragmentation that can only be overcome througha discursive construction of a new popular bloc, con-ceived as a unified ‘people’, in confrontation with analien or elite ‘other’. Such conditions are clearly presentin much of the world today, in both economically ad-vanced and developing regions, but they are capable ofeliciting wildly varying populist responses. The chal-lenge for scholars of populism is not only to identifywhat these responses share in common, but also to clar-ify along which dimensions they diverge, and to whateffects for democratic governance.

References

Acemoglu, Daron, Georgy Egorov and Konstantin Sonin.2013. “A political theory of populism.” The Quarterly Jour-nal of Economics 128(2):771–805.

Dornbusch, Rudiger and Sebastian Edwards. 1991. TheMacroeconomics of Populism. Chicago: University ofChicago Press.

Errejón, Íñigo and Chantal Mouffe. 2016. “Constructing anew politics.” Soundings: A Journal of Politics and Culture62:43–55.

Fernández Liria, Carlo. 2016. En Defensa del Populismo.Madrid: Los Libros de la Catarata.

Gidron, Noam and Bart Bonikowski. 2013. “Varieties of pop-ulism: Literature review and research agenda.” WorkingPaper Series 13-0004, Weatherhead Center for Interna-tional Affairs, Harvard University.

Jansen, Robert S. 2015. Populist Mobilization: A New The-

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 71

oretical Approach to Populism. In The Promise and Perilsof Populism, ed. Carlos de la Torre. Lexington: KentuckyUniversity Press pp. 159–188.

Laclau, Ernesto. 2005. On Populist Reason. London: Verso.Mudde, Cas. 2007. Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Mudde, Cas and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser. 2013. “Exclu-

sionary vs. inclusionary populism: Comparing contempo-rary Europe and Latin America.” Government and Opposi-tion 48(2):147–174.

Ostiguy, Pierre. 2009. “The high and the low in politics: Atwo–dimensional political space for comparative analysisand electoral studies.” Political Concepts: Committee onConcepts and Methods Working Paper Series, 35.

Roberts, Kenneth M. 1995. “Neoliberalism and the transfor-mation of populism in Latin America: The Peruvian case.”World Politics 48(1):82–116.

Weyland, Kurt. 1996. “Neopopulism and neoliberalism inLatin America: Unexpected affinities.” Studies in Compar-ative International Development 31(3):3–31.

Weyland, Kurt. 2001. “Clarifying a contested concept: Pop-ulism in the study of Latin American politics.” Compara-tive Politics 34(1):1–22.

Populism in Latin America and Beyond:Concept, Causes, and Consequences

by Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser1Universidad Diego Portales (Chile)

When considering populism, the first cases that cometo mind are from Latin America. From Juan DomingoPerón in Argentina to Alberto Fujimori in Peru andHugo Chávez in Venezuela, the political history of LatinAmerica has been marked by the rise (and fall) of pop-ulist leaders who have undertaken major reforms withcontentious legacies. While still prominent in LatinAmerica, populism is today making headlines in otherparts of the world, such as Eastern and Western Eu-rope, as well as in the United States and South East Asia.Comparative politics scholars are increasingly using theconcept of populism to try to make sense of the emer-gence of ‘unusual’ political leaders, movements, andparties.

In this short piece, I would like to draw some lessonsfrom the scholarship on Latin American populism to

those who are interested in analyzing the phenomenonbeyond the region and thus seek to develop concepts andtheories that are useful for studying populism acrossthe world. The rest of this contribution is structuredin three sections. I begin by providing a brief reviewof how populism has been conceptualized by analystsof Latin American politics. Based on what has been re-ferred to as the ideational approach, I then reflect on thecauses of populism and conclude by briefly discussingthe consequences of populism.

I. Conceptualizing Populism

Scholars of Latin American politics have long debatedhow to define populism. This conceptual debate staysin close relationship with the discussions taking placetoday around developing a definition of populism forthe analysis of politicians and parties as diverse as Don-ald Trump in the U.S., the Front National in France,Podemos in Spain, Thaksin Shinawatra in Thailand, orViktor Orbán’s FIDESZ in Hungary. Instead of startingfrom zero, scholars working on different case studiesand world regions can draw important lessons by re-viewing the Latin American conceptual debate on pop-ulism. All in all, four conceptual approaches dominatethe discussion in Latin America.2

The first approach is ‘structuralist’ and has its ori-gins in the work of Latin American sociologists (e.g.Germani, 1978) who understood populism as a spe-cific type of political regime supported by heteroge-neous class alliances and commanded by strong leaders,who are able to mobilize and incorporate previouslyexcluded sectors. According to this approach, struc-tural changes such as industrialization and rural-urbanmigration paved the way for the emergence of new pat-terns of class formation that facilitated the rise of pop-ulism. Peronism in Argentina is a typical example ofthis. Given that this conceptualization equates pop-ulism with a specific type of political regime, it offerslittle to the analysis of populist forces in opposition.Moreover, by putting too much emphasis on the multi-class nature of populism, this definition overlooks thefact that all political projects that aim to conquer powervia democratic means are inclined to develop hetero-geneous class alliances (consider Christian and SocialDemocracy in Europe).

1I am grateful for helpful comments from Sofia Donoso and Kirk A. Hawkins.2For a more detailed overview of these four conceptual approaches, see Rovira Kaltwasser (2014a).

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 72

The second approach is linked to economics. Itwas introduced at the beginning of the 1990s by Dorn-busch and Edwards (1991), who claimed that populismshould be thought of as a specific pattern of macroeco-nomic malfunctioning, characterized by excessive pub-lic spending financed by debt and heterodox policiesthat lead to a hyperinflationary crisis, thereby forcingthe implementation of painful structural reforms in or-der to bring the economy back on track. While this typeof ‘irresponsible’ economic policy-making can be seenin various cases of populist leadership in the past (e.g.Allende in Chile and Perón in Argentina), it cannot befound in many of the most contemporary examples ofpopulism in the Latin American region (e.g. AlbertoFujimori in Peru and Evo Morales in Bolivia). Nev-ertheless, similar definitions of populism centered onirresponsibility and pressures for socioeconomic redis-tribution are quite common in the economics literature(e.g., Acemoglu, Egorov and Sonin, 2013).

Populism is not only aboutcharismatic political entrepreneurswho mobilize angry anddisenchanted voters, but also aboutordinary people who sometimeshave good reasons for interpretingpolitical reality through the lens ofpopulism.

A third approach that has been influential inLatin American scholarship can be labelled ‘politico-institutional’ (e.g. Weyland, 2001). It defines populismas a strategy employed by political leaders to conquerand stay in power by developing a direct and unmedi-ated link with large swaths of the population that areunorganized. Although this approach is useful for an-alyzing many instances of populism across the region,it has two important shortcomings. First, this defini-tion puts excessive emphasis on the leader and thusoverlooks the micro-foundations of populism – the rea-sons why, under certain circumstances, ordinary peoplelike you and me might become fervent populists (I willcome back to this point later). Second, this conceptu-alization fails to notice that populism neither always,nor necessarily, comes to the fore due to the rise of acharismatic leader. The word ‘populism’ comes fromtwo movements of the late nineteenth century charac-terized by their leaderless nature (the People’s Party in

the U.S. and the Narodnik in Russia). Moreover, manyof the contemporary examples of populism in WesternEurope are characterized by the development of strongparty organizations.

Finally, there is a fourth tradition within the schol-arship on Latin American populism that has been gain-ing increasing traction in the European debate, namelythe so-called ideational approach (e.g. Mudde andRovira Kaltwasser, 2013b). Here populism is definedas a moral discourse, which by pitting ‘the pure people’against ‘the corrupt elite’, defends the idea that popularsovereignty should be respected by all means. In otherwords, populism can be understood as a set of ideaswhereby the establishment is seen as a dishonest entityand the people are depicted as a virtuous community.Although this approach retains a close relationship withthe normative political theory advanced by the Argen-tine philosopher Laclau (2005), an increasing numberof scholars are working from a ‘positivist’ or ‘empiricist’perspective according to which it is possible not onlyto measure the existence of populist discourse both atthe elite level (e.g. Hawkins, 2009) and the mass level(e.g. Akkerman, Mudde and Zaslove, 2014), but also tostudy the negative and positive impact of populism ondemocracy (e.g. Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser, 2012;Rovira Kaltwasser, 2012).

Although this is not the place to go into detailabout the advantages of the ideational approach overthe structuralist, economic and politico-institutionalunderstandings of populism, let me highlight two par-ticularities of this definition. An important advantageof the ideational approach lies in allowing the analysisof diverse populist phenomena, particularly along theclassic left-right spectrum. While it is true that all pop-ulist forces rely on the moral distinction between ‘thepeople’against ‘the elite’, these are constructions – or‘imagined communities’to paraphrase Benedict Ander-son’s language (1983) – whose content can be definedin very different ways. For instance, most Europeanpopulists are exclusionary due to their nativist visionof ‘the people’, whereas most Latin American populistsare inclusionary because of their idea of ‘the people’asthe socioeconomic underdog (Mudde and Rovira Kalt-wasser, 2013a). In addition, once populists win elec-tions and stay in power for a long period of time theybecome part of the establishment, but they deny thisby claiming that ‘the elite’is still governing the coun-try in alliance with powerful allies from outside. This

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 73

means that populist actors always frame themselves asoutsiders, i.e., as political novices without links to theestablishment. However, whether populist actors actu-ally are outsiders or not is an open question that shouldaddressed empirically.

The second advantage of the ideational approachlies in facilitating the study of both the supply of, anddemand for, populism. Populism is not only aboutcharismatic political entrepreneurs who mobilize an-gry and disenchanted voters, but also about ordinarypeople who sometimes have good reasons for inter-preting political reality through the lens of populism.There is a fair chance that many of us would have votedfor Hugo Chávez in Venezuela in 1998 or for SYRIZAin Greece in 2015, when those countries were experi-encing critical moments that facilitated the emergenceof populist sentiments across the population. In otherwords, those actors who rely on the populist set of ideasdo not operate in a vacuum, but rather in societies thathave specific political cultures, historical legacies, andpolitical opportunity structures that can either facilitateor hinder the support for populist projects. Therefore,the ideational approach invites us to take into accountthe standing debate about agency and structure: thesuccess of populist forces hinges upon both (a) politicalentrepreneurs who are able to advance a populist framearound perceived social grievances, and (b) specific so-cioeconomic and sociopolitical contexts that give moresaliency and validity to themoral language of populism.

II. Causes of Populism

One should think about populism neither as an abnor-mality nor as a democratic pathology. The populist setof ideas is quite widespread across the population, butstays dormant. As Kirk A. Hawkins has noted, mostof us have a Hugo Chávez inside of us, but he is hid-den and does not define our everyday political prefer-ences. In other words, populist ideas lie latent and be-come activated under specific circumstances. Why doesthis set of ideas resonate with certain citizens? Whatcauses voters to support populist leaders, movements,and parties? New research based on the ideational ap-proach presented above helps us to answer this question(Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser, 2017). Although muchmore empirical evidence is needed, some preliminaryresearch supports the idea that there are at least two im-portant triggers for the activation of populist sentimentsacross the population: political unresponsiveness and

major failures of democratic representation.

Authoritarian regimes are controlled by leaders andgroups who don’t need to pursue the interests of thepeople, and, consequently, they have no problem gov-erning in an unresponsive manner. By contrast, demo-cratic regimes need to take into consideration the opin-ion of the electorate. The periodic execution of freeand fair elections serves as a mechanism to ensure thatthose who govern try to satisfy the expectations andwishes of the voting public. So why are many democ-racies seeing the rise of populist forces? Part of theanswer is that the more political leaders and partiesbecome unresponsive, the higher the odds that voterssupport populist forces. These voters are not necessarilyauthoritarian; they are tired of the growing convergencebetween mainstream parties, and the inability of theseparties to deal with some of the most pressing concernsof ‘the people’. At the same time, elected politicianshave been losing power due to the increasing influenceof international markets as well as supranational insti-tutions, but are usually reluctant to accept this situationand often present themselves as almighty figures able tocreate jobs and take control of the country.

Mainstream leaders and parties are not blind to thisreality. They can adapt their political programs to tryto address (some of) the issues raised by populist forcesand that way find a better balance between responsive-ness and responsibility. This is occurring to an extentin Europe today, where populist radical right and pop-ulist radical left parties are succeeding in forcing theestablishment to rethink some of the policies they havedefended in the past. As a consequence, mainstreamattempts to act more responsively limits the electoralgrowth of populist forces. Not by chance, populist forcesin most (but not all) European countries obtain a size-able, but comparatively limited, amount of votes.

Quite different is the situation in Latin America,where populist leaders and parties have not infrequentlybeen able to obtain more than fifty percent of the voteand win consecutive elections. To understand this, wehave to consider not only the unresponsiveness of the es-tablishment, but also something more dramatic: majorfailures of democratic representation. By this I meanwhen democratic elected governments are unable toproduce some basic outcomes that are crucial for thevery legitimacy of the political regime. For instance,if democratic elected governments have little capac-

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 74

ity to enforce the rule of law against criminal groupsand powerful elites or have serious problems generatingeconomic stability and guaranteeing minimum levels ofwelfare, one shouldn’t be surprised that populist forcesobtain massive electoral support. Under these circum-stances, populists can plausibly claim that ‘the people’have been robbed of their rightful sovereignty and thetime is ripe to get rid of ‘the elite’.

This is indeed an important lesson we can learnfrom Latin America: major failures of democratic rep-resentation should be seen as fertile soil for the rise ofelectorally strong populist forces. The very weakness ofLatin American states facilitates the activation of pop-ulist sentiments across the population and the existenceof relatively free and fair elections permits the emer-gence of populist entrepreneurs. Ultimately, this is whypopulism and democracy in countries such Argentina,Ecuador, and Peru maintain a kind of love-hate rela-tionship: one cannot live without the other. This islikely also occurring in other places that are seeing therise of democratic elected governments predisposed toexperiencing major failures of democratic representa-tion, because they have serious stateness problems andlong histories of oligarchical rule. Take, for instance,Thaksin Shinawatra in Thailand, a populist leader whowon massive electoral support at the beginning of the2000s by not only criticizing the establishment but alsoby proposing a new policy platform focused on poorvoters in rural areas. As Slater (2013) has indicated, Shi-nawatra’s rise to power cannot be understood withoutrecognizing that the bureaucratic-military-monarchicalpower elite that have historically controlled Thailand isincreasingly challenged by new groups, which seek togive voice to excluded constituencies in urban and ruralareas alike.

III. Consequences of Populism

Much has been written about the impact of populism ondemocracy and the common assumption is that populistforces should be seen as a threat. However, as I have ar-gued elsewhere in more detail, populism can have bothpositive and negative effects on the democratic system(Mudde andRoviraKaltwasser, 2012, 2017; RoviraKalt-wasser, 2012, 2014b). For example, as discussed above,populist radical left and populist radical right parties incontemporary Europe are forcing mainstream politicalactors to become more responsive. Furthermore, whileit is true that the very rise of populist forces in coun-

tries with serious problems of stateness can be harmfulfor democracy, the democratic credentials of those con-trolling the government in those countries in the pastshould not be overstated. For instance, Venezuela be-fore Chávez was governed by a corrupt two-party sys-tem that despite the wealth of the country was not ableto address thematerial needs of the population or to rec-ognize the full rights of democratic citizens (Hawkins,2016).

Beyond the normative and empirical debates aboutthe impact of populism on democracy, I would like toraise a second argument about the consequences of pop-ulism, namely, that growing polarization can potentiallylead to the emergence of a populism vs. anti-populismcleavage. When populist actors are able to obtain a size-able share of the vote over time, mainstream politicalparties are forced to respond to the populist challengers.One potential response consists in developing a com-mon electoral umbrella for mainstream parties againstpopulism. The problem with this response is that ittends to give more validity and visibility to the populistdiscourse. Fighting fire with fire is problematic becauseit usually leads the establishment to present itself as ‘thegood and smart guys’ at odds with ‘the bad and stupidfellas’. By employing this moral language, political po-larization increases and can foster the true formationof a populism vs. anti-populism cleavage that crosscutsother cleavages, such as the traditional left-right distinc-tion, that normally structures the political game. To acertain extent, this has occurred in Argentina due to theelectoral consolidation of Peronism to the point thatPeronist leaders in power have supported both right-wing policies (Menem in the 1990s) and left-wing poli-cies (Kirchner in the 2000s). Therefore, the Argentinepolitical space is structured much more around a pop-ulism vs. anti-populism cleavage than the traditionalleft-right distinction (Ostiguy, 2009).

A similar situation is developing in Greece today,where since 2015 an awkward coalition of two populistparties has been in power: the populist radical rightparty ANEL and the populist radical left party SYRIZA.This means that contemporary Greece is governed byan alliance between inclusionary and exclusionary pop-ulists, who have big differences in terms of their pre-ferred policies, but have the same understanding of whoshould be blamed for the problems that the country isfacing: local oligarchs with strong ties to foreign gov-ernments and international institutions (Aslanidis and

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 75

Rovira Kaltwasser, 2016). Although it is too early toknow if this will result in a durable political coalition, itshows us that Western democratic countries are not im-mune to the emergence of a populism vs. anti-populismcleavage. Another case in point might be contemporaryItaly, where the centrality of populist figures such as Sil-vio Berlusconi, Umberto Bossi, andBeppeGrillo revealsthat populism vs. anti-populism is probably becomingas relevant as the traditional left-right distinction.

Given that the very emergence of a populism vs.anti-populism cleavage does not facilitate the construc-tion of stable governments or robust liberal democra-cies, scholars and policy-makers should try to thinkmore thoroughly about how to respond to the rise ofpopulist forces. Research on this topic is still in its in-fancy,3 but there is little doubt that there is a great dealof variation in the success of opposition to populismand my impression is that much more emphasis shouldbe given to the ways in which actors can try to mediatepopulist impulses in the electorate. After all, once largeswaths of the population understands political realitythrough the lens of populism, it might be too late toavoid the rise of strong populist forces, which can leadto the consolidation of a populism vs. anti-populismcleavage.

References

Acemoglu, Daron, Georgy Egorov and Konstantin Sonin.2013. “A political theory of populism.” The Quarterly Jour-nal of Economics 128(2):771–805.

Akkerman, Agnes, Cas Mudde and Andrej Zaslove. 2014.“How populist are the people? Measuring populist atti-tudes in voters.” Comparative Political Studies 47(9):1324–1353.

Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities: Reflec-tions on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London:Verso Books.

Aslanidis, Paris and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser. 2016.“Dealing with populists in government: The SYRIZA-ANEL coalition in Greece.” Democratization 23(6):1–17.

Dornbusch, Rudiger and Sebastian Edwards. 1991. TheMacroeconomics of Populism. Chicago: University ofChicago Press.

Germani, Gino. 1978. Authoritarianism, Fascism, and Na-tional Populism. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers.

Hawkins, Kirk A. 2009. “Is Chávez populist? Measuring pop-

ulist discourse in comparative perspective.” ComparativePolitical Studies 42(8):1040–1067.

Hawkins, Kirk A. 2016. “Chavismo, liberal democracy,and radical democracy.” Annual Review of Political Science19:311–329.

Laclau, Ernesto. 2005. On Populist Reason. London: Verso.Mudde, Cas and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser. 2013a. “Exclu-

sionary vs. inclusionary populism: Comparing contempo-rary Europe and Latin America.” Government and Opposi-tion 48(2):147–174.

Mudde, Cas and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser. 2013b. Pop-ulism. In The Oxford Handbook of Political Ideologies, ed.Michael Freeden, Lyman Tower Sargent and Marc Stears.Oxford: Oxford University Press pp. 493–512.

Mudde, Cas and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser. 2017. Pop-ulism. A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford Uni-versity Press.

Mudde, Cas and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, eds. 2012. Pop-ulism in Europe and the Americas: Threat or Corrective forDemocracy? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Ostiguy, Pierre. 2009. “Argentina’s double political spec-trum: Party system, political identities, and strategies,1944–2007.” Kellogg Institute Working Paper 361. NotreDame: Kellogg Institute for International Studies, Univer-sity of Notre Dame.

Rovira Kaltwasser, Cristóbal. 2012. “The ambivalence of pop-ulism: Threat and corrective for democracy.”Democratiza-tion 19(2):184–208.

Rovira Kaltwasser, Cristóbal. 2014a. “Latin American pop-ulism: Some conceptual and normative lessons.” Constel-lations 21(4):494–504.

Rovira Kaltwasser, Cristóbal. 2014b. “The responses of pop-ulism to Dahl’s democratic dilemmas.” Political Studies62(3):470–487.

Rovira Kaltwasser, Cristóbal and Paul Taggart. 2016. “Deal-ing with populists in government: a framework for analy-sis.” Democratization 23(2):201–220.

Slater, Dan. 2013. “Democratic careening.” World Politics65(4):729–763.

Weyland, Kurt. 2001. “Clarifying a contested concept: Pop-ulism in the study of Latin American politics.” Compara-tive Politics 34(1):1–22.

3For a partial exception, see the special issue on “Dealing with Populists in Government” of the journal Democratization that I haveedited with Paul Taggart (Rovira Kaltwasser and Taggart, 2016).

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 76

Populism in Indiaby Narendra Subramanian

McGill University and the Max Planck Institute for the Study ofReligious and Ethnic Diversity

In earlier work, I highlighted the recurrent salience ofpopulism through different phases of Indian politicalhistory since the late 19th century, its role in mobilizingemergent groups, its coexistence with diverse ideolo-gies and different forms of movement and party orga-nization, the varied consequences of populist politicalforces for civil society and democracy, and the diversepolicies enabled by populist discourses and mobiliza-tion. Placing these Indian experiences in a comparativeperspective clarified that populism has assumed thesevaried forms at different points in many world regions.Despite the varied contexts of emergence, modes of ex-pression, patterns of mobilization, and consequencesof political forces that are considered populist, I foundpopulism to be a useful analytical category to under-stand the dynamics of many movements and parties(Subramanian, 1999, 2007). I revisit these argumentsin the light of developments in India and certain recentanalyses of populism, especially in Latin America andEurope.

I. Populism – An Understanding

I use the term populism to characterize movements,parties, and regimes that deploy distinctions betweenthe virtuous ‘people’, said to have limited access to var-ious spheres of privilege, and an elite, considered to beunfairly dominant in these spheres and to be culturallydistinct from the ‘people’. Populists claim to representthe will of the people to overcome their subordination,and thus infuse their projects with an air of righteous-ness. Such discourses mobilize groups that are subordi-nate in certain spheres, yet may enjoy significant powerin others. Populists may oppose not only elites, but alsocertain marginal groups. Populism is an analyticallyuseful concept if applied only to cases in which suchcontrasts between the people and the elite shape move-ment strategy and organization, mass response, thecomposition of support, and the policies pursued. Thisview bridges conceptualizations of populism primar-ily as a discursive style (e.g. Shils, 1972; Laclau, 2005),a type of ideology (e.g. Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser,2012), a form of movement organization (e.g. Taggart,2000), and a kind of policy orientation (e.g. Weyland,2001).

This understanding enables me to account for thesignificant roles populism has played in societies at dif-ferent levels of industrialization, with varying degreesof citizen organization, and in association with differentkinds of regimes, varied movement and party organi-zations, and various policy frameworks. Populism wasimportant in the predominantly agrarian Eastern Eu-ropean and South Asian societies of the late 19th andearly 20th centuries, in rapidly industrializing LatinAmerican countries in the mid-20th century, and in thepostindustrial United States and Europe. While citizenorganization was low in precommunist Eastern Europe,it is high in contemporary Western Europe.

Populism shaped authoritarian regimes such asthose of Getúlio Vargas in Brazil and Ferdinand Mar-cos in the Philippines and semi-democracies such asthose that existed during the rule of the Pakistan Peo-ple’s Party and Hugo Chávez’s United Socialist Party ofVenezuela. Indian nationalism of the interwar periodand the PASOK in Greece in the 1970s enabled transi-tions to democracy, and the Movement for Socialismaided the consolidation of democracy in Bolivia overthe past two decades. Moreover, populist forces en-hanced the quality of India’s consolidated democracysince the 1960s by increasing emergent group represen-tation, but diminished the quality of some of WesternEurope’s consolidated democracies by attacking minor-ity rights over the past two decades.

Populist organizations such as Juan Perón’s Justicial-ist Party in Argentina were loose and leader-centered,while others such as Evo Morales’s Movement for So-cialism were more cadre based and socially engaged.Populist policy frameworks ranged from the agro-artisanal romanticism of Mohandas Gandhi and thepeasant egalitarianism of the Bulgarian Agrarian Na-tional Union between the two World Wars to import-substitution industrialization in Argentina and Brazilfrom the 1930s to the 1950s, neo-liberalism in Peru andBrazil in the 1990s, and redistributive reactions againstneo-liberalism in Venezuela and Bolivia over the pasttwo decades.

Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser (2012) define pop-ulism as a thin-centered ideology based on a limitednumber of core concepts, which need to be combinedwith other concepts and ideologies, enabling one to un-derstand how distinctions between the people and theelite vary with context and are paired with rather dif-

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 77

ferent ideologies, ranging from fascism to socialism(Mudde, 2004). Populists distinguish plebeian frompatrician with reference to categories such as languageand dialect use, pigmentation, occupation, levels of ed-ucation, types of education (colonial/traditional), andpatterns of worship. Although this increases the politi-cal significance of certain cultural differences, populistdiscourses sometimes enable inter-ethnic coalitions byconceiving the popular community as composed of var-ious partly overlapping ethnic, status, and class cate-gories.

II. Late Colonial India

In India, populist discourses, modes of mobiliza-tion, mentalities, and policies were most often and cen-trally associated with appeals to nationhood, caste, andlanguage, and less frequently and crucially with reli-gious political forces. Two kinds of political forces de-ployed populist appeals extensively in the late colonialperiod – multiethnic Indian nationalism and middleand low caste movements. Gandhi’s revaluation of animagined pre-colonial social economy based in self-sufficient villages had marked populist characteristics.It mobilized peasants and artisans as well as groupsof middling and high class and caste status into anti-colonial agitations, and influenced a strategy alternatingbetween non-violent civil disobedience and social workto rebuild village social infrastructure. This vision ofa popular national community aiming for cultural andpolitical decolonization also built a multi-religious andmulti-ethnic alliance, albeit one fraught with tensions.Certain other anti-colonial nationalists such as AhmedSékou Toure in Guinea, Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana,and Julius Nyerere in Tanzania also similarly revaluedprecolonial popular mores, but Gandhi differed fromthem in that he led the formation of strong party in-stitutions. The Indian National Congress (CongressParty) struck root in much of India and provided spacefor many with rather different social visions, includ-ing modernists such as Jawaharlal Nehru. These mod-ernists gained control over policy after independence,and abandoned Gandhi’s plans to build a radically de-centralized democracy with a limited state presence anda non-industrial economy.

Low and middle caste movements were particularlystrong in western and southern India. In regions thatbecame Maharashtra state, the Satya Shodhak Samaj(Truth Seeker Society) led by Jyotirao Phule appealed

to a bahujan samaj (a popular/ majority community)composed mainly of the low and middle castes, tooppose various caste inequalities and exclusions, par-ticularly the dominance of the upper Brahman caste.Moreover, certain members of formerly untouchablecastes, notably Bhimrao Ambedkar, adopted the labeldalit (meaning broken people) to express their deter-mination to gain full citizenship in alliance with otherunderprivileged groups (O’Hanlon, 1985; Rao, 2009).In the current state of Tamil Nadu, the Self RespectAssociation and the Dravidar Kazhagam (DK - Dra-vidian Party) mobilized middle castes, and to a lesserextent low castes, to reclaim the autonomy these groupsenjoyed. These organizations only had small pocketsof support before Indian independence, but effectivelypressed larger organizations to promote caste mobil-ity. They inspired various later initiatives for low andmiddle caste empowerment that gained greater support(Subramanian, 1999).

In India, populist discourses, modesof mobilization, mentalities, andpolicies were most often andcentrally associated with appeals tonationhood, caste, and language,and less frequently and crucially withreligious political forces.

III. Postcolonial Experiences

The Congress Party’s populist features diminishedwhen postcolonial state-building and state-led industri-alization began in the 1950s and the 1960s. Democracywas consolidated through this period, but political par-ticipation was low especially among lower strata, whosesubstantive representation was limited by the close linksbetween the state and dominant groups. From thelate 1960s onward, the participation and representa-tion of middling and lower strata increased, inspired inpart by populist forces. The populist challengers to theCongress Party included forces that foregrounded caste(the socialist parties, middle caste parties such as theJanata Dal (People’s Party), the Samajwadi Party (SP -Socialist Party) and the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD - Na-tional People’s Party), and low caste parties, particularlythe Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP – Party of the PopularCommunity)), caste and language (especially the laterDravidian parties, the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 78

(DMK–Party for the Progress of Dravidam) and the AllIndia Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK)),or class (the communist parties, that also deployed pop-ulist discourses at times), or revived aspects of Gand-hian Indian nationalism (e.g., the socialist parties, themovement that opposed the erosion of democracy inthe mid-1970s under Jayaprakash Narayan’s leadership,and movements that resisted logging in the Himalayasin the 1970s and that protested the construction of theNarmada dam inwestern India from the 1990s onward).

The socialist parties and their successors adoptedcertain Gandhian notions, gained considerable middlecaste support in states such as Uttar Pradesh, Bihar,and Karnataka, and became important parts of nationalcoalition governments from 1977 to 1980, from 1989to 1991, and from 1996 to 1998. The later Dravid-ian parties connected the movement’s initial focus onthe middle castes to the Tamil language and to vari-ous indicators of modest status. Their populist artic-ulation of ethnicity lent them strategic flexibility andincreased their support so that that they dominatedTamil Nadu politics from the late 1960s. Moreover, itmade them more tolerant of groups at the margins ofthe movement’s early visions, such as Brahmans, non-Tamil-speakers, low castes, and non-Hindus. Besides,the Dravidian parties built close political links acrossreligious boundaries and thereby inhibited the growthof Hindu nationalism, which promoted attacks on non-Hindus, tribal groups, and sometimes also low castes inits bastions. The success of the Dravidian parties influ-enced the formation of similar ethno-populist partieslater, notably the Telugu Desam and the Asom GanaParishad (AGP), which have been important forces inthe states of Andhra Pradesh and Assam respectivelysince the 1980s.

More recently, the BSP became the most successfullow-caste-led party. It incorporated certain ethnic andsubaltern notions developed by early low and middlecaste mobilizers (specifically, dalit and bahujan) intoa vision of a multi-ethnic popular community. Awarethat the influence of earlier low caste parties such as theRepublican Party of India had been restricted by theirfailure to build multi-caste support, the BSP leadersprioritized doing so as a means to acquire state power.Their encompassing communitarian vision helped themrecruit Muslim, middle caste, and upper caste candi-dates and build significant, though inconsistent, sup-port among these groups. This enabled the party to

rule the largest state of Uttar Pradesh at times, either onits own or in alliance with other parties (1993-5, 1997,2002-3, 2007-12), and gain significant support in othernorth Indian states, including Uttarakhand, Punjab,Madhya Pradesh, Haryana, and Bihar (Jaffrelot, 2002;Subramanian, 1999; Chandra, 2004; Guha, 2008).

In response to such challenges, the Congress Party’spopulist features were revived, particularly throughthe 1970s. Indira Gandhi, who then led the party, re-placedmanyparty leaders –who she claimedhadhelpedmaintain elite dominance – and concentrated power inher hands, pledging to use this power to end poverty.These promises strengthened the Congress Party amongmarginal groups, and motivated anti-poverty policiesthat however aided only a small proportion of the poor.The nationalization of some major banks in 1969, pur-portedly to enable microcredit provision, was the mostnoted of these measures. The partial dismantlement ofCongress Party institutions focused the popular man-date on the leader, encouraging her to repress oppo-nents and curtail the autonomy of other parties, civilsociety, and opposition party-ruled state governments.These changes led to the imposition of authoritarianrule from 1975 to 1977. Popular opposition to thismove caused the Congress Party to lose control overthe national government for the first time in 1977, afterwhich Indira Gandhi retreated from populist rhetoricand policies.

Populism’s demonstrated mobilizing success ledthe two parties that have ruled India since 1998, theCongress Party and the Hindu nationalist BharatiyaJanata Party (BJP), to use populist appeals at times andto introduce new anti-poverty measures even after theyadopted a neo-liberal agenda in the 1990s. While theCongress Party’s recent populist rhetoric associated itwith the common people, the BJP also presented itselfas offering a popular indigenous alternative to India’ssecularist and multicultural institutions, which it por-trays asWestern imports that enjoy support only amonga narrow elite. Despite their use of such appeals, pop-ulism has not been central to the functioning of eitherthe BJP or the Congress Party since the 1980s.

IV. Democracy, Inclusion, and Equality

All of India’s populist forces increased the politicalparticipation and representation of emergent groups,and provided some members of these groups increased

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 79

benefits. However, their discourses, forms of organiza-tion, and policies varied, with different consequencesfor democracy, inclusion, equality, and conflict.

Gandhian populism dramatically increased polit-ical participation in opposition to the authoritariancolonial regime, organized this opposition in a durableparty, pressed the colonial regime to grant some au-thority at times to local and provincial governmentsthat were popularly elected albeit under a limited fran-chise, and enabled decolonization. These experiences inturn made the consolidation of democracy after inde-pendence much more likely, especially as representativeinstitutions were introduced despite Gandhi’s prefer-ence for direct democracy. Gandhi used his charismaticauthority to contain pressures for the rapid redistribu-tion of power and resources. This made it easier forhis postcolonial successors to implement their growthagenda more than their redistributive promises, andencouraged them to limit the upward mobility in theCongress Party of those who prioritized faster redis-tribution. Thus, the legacies of Gandhian populismhelped the consolidation of democracy, but also limitedits equality.

By weakening party institutions and civil society,Indira Gandhi prepared the way to override democraticinstitutions and curtail resistance to authoritarianism inthe mid-1970s. Yet her populist claim that her authori-tarian rule enjoyed popular support might have encour-aged her to call competitive elections within two years,and to respect the popular mandate when the majorityof voters rejected the abandonment of democracy. Thewelfare policies that accompanied her populist rhetoricprovided limited benefits to a small number of poorercitizens, but also helped her contain growing pressuresfor the more extensive representation and entitlementof emergent groups.

The late colonial middle and low caste movementsincreased their target groups’ power and public pres-ence in their regions of strength, and developed idiomsin which these groups conceived their projects later incertain other regions too. Despite their use of inclusiverhetoric, their support remained largely restricted tothe castes that led them. Their postcolonial successorswere more attentive to, and successful in, gaining broadsupport, partly because their strategies were shaped bycompetition in universal franchise elections. They builtparties deeply embedded among themiddling and lower

strata, which nevertheless varied in how authority wasdistributed between leaders and cadre. While the cadreenjoyed considerable autonomy in the socialist parties,the DMK, and the AGP in their early years, leaders ex-ercised much more control, either individually or col-lectively, over the SP, the RJD, the BSP, the AIADMK,the Telugu Desam, and the communist parties.

These parties increased the representation of mid-dling and lower strata and gained them greater patron-age and policy benefits. The most important redistribu-tive andwelfare policieswithwhich theywere associatedwere middle caste quotas in higher education and gov-ernment employment, introduced in some states fromthe 1950s to the 1990s and then in national governmentemployment and national educational institutions in1990, and free lunch schemes that were adopted in var-ious states from the 1980s. Moreover, their pressurescontributed to the adoption of low caste quotas in highereducation, government employment, and political rep-resentation at the national and state levels in 1950, andthe extension of these quotas to local government repre-sentation in 1993. The BSP’s mobilization empoweredlow castes in particular in parts of north India. Whenit ruled Uttar Pradesh, the party pressed for low castequotas to be filled in the elite bureaucratic layers, forlow caste bureaucrats to be promoted, for social infras-tructure to be improved in low caste neighborhoods,and for the police to better address violations of lowcaste civil rights, and erected statues of major low casteleaders throughout the state. Besides, the communistsintroduced extensive land reforms or caused their com-petitors to do so in their regions of strength – Kerala,Bengal, and Tripura. The populist forces that focusedon the intermediate and lower strata thus increased thesymbolic, political, and, to a lesser extent, material in-clusion of these groups.

However, certain populist forces limited redistri-bution to lower strata and increased conflicts betweenmiddle castes and low castes. This was particularly thecase with the middle caste parties that aided their sup-porters in their conflicts with low castes over resourcesand access to public space, restricted the fulfillment oflow caste quotas, and redirected resources earmarkedfor low castes to middle castes. The communist parties,whose leaders were drawnmore from upper andmiddlecastes than from low castes, distributed land more ex-tensively to the middle castes even though more of thelow castes were landless and land-poor. Furthermore,

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 80

it was the most advanced low caste of north India, theChamars, which was predominant in the leadership andcadre of the BSP, which directed most resources to theupwardly mobile among the low castes. Thus, populistforces usually channeled only meager resources to themostmarginalized, and obscured this tendency throughallusions to a broad popular community including themiddling strata. Worse, the populist rhetoric and wel-fare policies of the Congress Party and the BJP helpedcontain opposition to the regressive neoliberal policiesof the past quarter century, and in the case of the Hindunationalists, also increased support for their attacks onthe rights and persons of the religious minorities, tribalgroups, and sometimes the low castes.

References

Chandra, Kanchan. 2004. Why Ethnic Parties Succeed: Pa-tronage and Ethnic Head Counts in India. New York: Cam-bridge University Press.

Guha, Sohini. 2008. “Ethnic Parties, Material Politics andthe Ethnic Poor: The Bahujan Samaj Party in North India.”PhD Dissertation, McGill University.

Jaffrelot, Christophe. 2002. India’s Silent Revolution: TheRise of Low Castes in North Indian Politics. New York:Columbia University Press.

Laclau, Ernesto. 2005. On Populist Reason. London: Verso.Mudde, Cas. 2004. “The populist zeitgeist.” Government and

Opposition 39(4):542–563.Mudde, Cas and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, eds. 2012. Pop-

ulism in Europe and the Americas: Threat or Corrective forDemocracy? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

O’Hanlon, Rosalind. 1985. Caste, Conflict and Ideology: Ma-hatma Jotirao Phule and Low Caste Protest in Nineteenth-Century Western India. New York: Cambridge UniversityPress.

Rao, Anupama. 2009. The Caste Question: Dalits and the Pol-itics of Modern India. Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress.

Shils, Edward Albert. 1972. Intellectuals and the Powers.Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Subramanian, Narendra. 1999. Ethnicity and Populist Mobi-lization: Political Parties, Citizens and Democracy in SouthIndia. New York: Oxford University Press.

Subramanian, Narendra. 2007. “Populism in India.” SAIS Re-view of International Affairs 27(1):81–91.

Taggart, Paul A. 2000. Populism. Birmingham: Open Uni-versity Press.

Weyland, Kurt. 2001. “Clarifying a contested concept: Pop-ulism in the study of Latin American politics.” Compara-tive Politics 34(1):1–22.

The Surge of ‘Exclusionary’ Populism inEurope

by Stijn van KesselLoughborough University

Particularly in recent times, populism is a concept usedwidely across the globe (Moffitt, 2016). The term isemployed to describe political actors and phenomenasuch as Chavismo in Venezuela, the rise of xenopho-bic far right parties across Europe, the Labour lead-ership of Jeremy Corbyn in the United Kingdom, andthe successes of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump inthe presidential primaries in the United States. Fromthese examples, it is clear that populism is used to referto an ideologically heterogeneous set of politicians andmovements around the globe. Sadly for those who seekconceptual clarity, in the vernacular the term is oftenused without much consistency, or pejoratively – veryoften as a synonym for opportunism or demagogy – torefer to those with opposing political views (Mudde,2004; Bale, Van Kessel and Taggart, 2011).

The academic debate on populism is more sophis-ticated, even though there is an on-going – perhapsnever-ending – debate about whether populism canbest be conceived of as a discourse, (thin-centred) ide-ology, style, or discursive frame (e.g. Laclau, 2005; Stan-ley, 2008; Moffitt and Tormey, 2014; van Kessel, 2014;Aslanidis, 2015). Many scholars, however, broadlyagree on the constitutive elements of the concept.Accordingly, populism entails a defense of popularsovereignty and a Manichean distinction between thecorrupt ‘elites’ and the virtuous ‘people’ (e.g. Mudde,2004). Populism can thus be seen as a set of ideas aboutthe functioning of democracy. It chooses the side ofthe ordinary people, and opposes the political estab-lishment and other ‘elites’. While populism is also reg-ularly associated with organizational or stylistic aspects(e.g. ‘charismatic’ leadership and plain, confrontationallanguage), such elements are arguably not definingproperties of populism, and often derive from its moreideational elements (e.g. Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser,2012; van Kessel, 2015).

While it blames the ‘elites’ for the ills in society,and appeals to the ‘common wisdom’ of the ordinary

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 81

people, populism per se remains silent as far as concretepolicy proposals are concerned – hencewhy some schol-ars prefer to treat it as a ‘thin-centered’ ideology (seeFreeden, 1998). Populism can be combined with morecomprehensive ideologies. Indeed, it is not necessarilyproblematic to conclude that populism is used for sucha wide variety of political actors across the globe; pop-ulism is ‘chameleonic’ in appearing in different ideolog-ical guises in different contexts and throughout history(Taggart, 2000). Moreover, movements, politicians, andpolitical parties that express populism differ in the waythey define ‘the people’ they appeal to and ‘the elites’they oppose.

Taking this into consideration, and subscribing tothe notion that populism can be seen as a key character-istic of certain political actors, it is possible to identifyvarious subtypes of populism. One example of schol-arly work engaging in such an exercise is the article ofMudde and Rovira Kaltwasser (2012), which comparescontemporary populism in Europe and Latin America,and argues that European populism predominantly hasan ‘exclusive’ character, whereas Latin America is char-acterized by a more ‘inclusive’ type of populism. In theremainder of this contribution, I will predominantly fo-cus on the (dominant) exclusionary type of populism inEurope, and the characteristics, key themes, and elec-toral drivers of the populist radical right (PRR) partyfamily in particular (Mudde, 2007). While current af-fairs and developments related to the various crises inEurope provide a conducive environment for populism,the success and failure of individual populist parties isalso a matter of their own ‘agency’.

I. Populism in Europe

Since political parties are still the main vehicles ofpolitical competition in European democracies, pop-ulism in Europe is typically associated with parties andtheir leaders. In Western European countries with (pre-viously) dominant party families, it is mainly partiesat the ideological fringes that are associated with pop-ulism – though some cases such as the Five Star Move-ment (M5S) in Italy are quite hard to pin down ideolog-ically. In former communist countries in Central andEastern Europe, populism is a more broad-spectrumphenomenon (e.g. Učeň, 2007). After the fall of com-munism, it was practically impossible to distinguishbetween ‘established parties’ – save, perhaps, the ‘com-munist successor’ parties – and populist parties chal-

lenging them. Economic crises and corruption scan-dals, furthermore, fed into a favorable context for pop-ulism, and a large number of new parties, some moresuccessful than others, aimed to capitalize on a prevail-ing anti-political mood by promising to offer a ‘clean’alternative to the corrupt political class. Some of theseparties’ anti-establishment traits soon waned, however,once they took the opportunity to govern themselves.Furthermore, it is a moot point whether all these par-ties were, beyond their anti-establishment character,truly populist. Some scholars indeed prefer to stay awayfrom the concept, resorting instead to terms such as‘anti-establishment reform parties’ (Hanley and Sikk,2016).

When populism is widespread, it is not alwaysstraightforward ormeaningful to separate populist fromnon-populist parties (see e.g. Rooduijn, de Lange andvan der Brug, 2014; Aslanidis, 2015). However, forsome political actors, which express populist statementsfrequently and consistently, populism is arguably an es-sential element of their ideology. Particularly in theWestern European context, the concept has discrimi-nating power, as populism is not a consistent trait oftraditionally dominant party families. Irrespective ofmore ‘mainstream’ populist examples such as SilvioBerlusconi’s Forza Italia (Albertazzi and McDonnell,2015), populist parties are typically found on the radi-cal left and, in particular, the radical right.

The European debt crisis, like thesubsequent refugee crisis, arguablyproved the PRR’s point that the EU isa malfunctioning apparatus unableto solve pressing problems …theUK’s decision by referendum to leavethe EU has further emboldened PRRparties with an anti-EU agenda.

Left-wing populist parties frame the ‘people’ andthe ‘elites’ mainly in socio-economic terms, wherebyordinary people are portrayed as the victims of neo-liberalism and its agents (e.g. multinationals, bankers),and a political elite supporting the capitalist system(March, 2011). Examples of such parties are Die Linkein Germany and the relative newcomers Podemos inSpain and SYRIZA in Greece. The latter two partiesexperienced remarkable electoral success recently, with

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 82

Podemos receiving a fifth of the vote in the 2015 Spanishnational election – although it was not able to extend itssupport in the early 2016 reprise. SYRIZA polled overa third of the vote in both 2015 national elections, andhas been the senior governing party since – though itsbehavior in government and compliance with the EUbailout packages has led to some debate as to whetherthe party is still populist (Aslanidis and Rovira Kalt-wasser, 2016; Katsambekis, 2016).

In general, left-wing populists do not attain the samelevels of success as their populist radical right counter-parts. FollowingMudde (2007), these PRR parties sharean ideological core of nativism, authoritarianism, andpopulism; besides their populist anti-establishment ap-peals, they are characterized by a xenophobic versionof nationalism, and express the belief in a strictly or-dered society with clear norms and lines of authority.In Western Europe, the PRR’s nativism has predomi-nantly translated in anti-immigration and, particularlyin more recent times, anti-Islam positions. In the post-communist context, where immigration levels have re-mained low, the PRR has typically taken a hostile stancetowards ethnic minority groups. This applies not leastto the Roma, who have a considerable presence acrossparts of Central and Eastern Europe.

Given the party family’s nativist character, the char-acterization of the PRR by Mudde and Rovira Kalt-wasser (2012) as primarily ‘exclusive’ makes sense. PRRparties favour the exclusion of ‘non-natives’ where itconcerns the distribution of state resources (material di-mension) and political influence (political dimension).They furthermore primarily define the ‘people’ they ap-peal to in a negative way, that is, by identifying thosewho do not belong to the nation (symbolic dimension).This sets them apart from contemporary populistmove-ments in Latin America, as well as left-wing populistparties in Europe, which are primarily geared at rep-resenting (or ‘including’) the ordinary (working-class)people. The notion of an exclusive-inclusive dichotomyshould not be pushed too far. The PRR arguably strivesfor the political inclusion of the ‘silent majority’ of na-tive people, whose interests have, they argue, been ig-nored by the corrupt elites. At the same time, left-wingpopulist parties in Europe can be exclusionary in theirwariness of intra-EU labour immigration, which theyfear brings down working-class wages and leads to arace to the bottom in terms of welfare provision.

In terms of electoral results, the PRR party familyhas gradually expanded its popular support in the pastdecades. Early members include the French Front Na-tional and Austrian People’s Party (FPÖ), which havesurvived leadership changes and, judging from recentFrench regional and Austrian presidential elections,currently experience highs in their popular support.The Danish People’s Party (DF) has been another suc-cessful PRR party that has seen stable support levels inthe 2000s – a period during which it repeatedly acted assupport partner for minority governments – and whichhas increased its vote share (21.1 per cent) in the lat-est national election of 2015. Examples of other PRRcases enjoying considerable support during the pastdecade are the Dutch Freedom Party (PVV), the TrueFinns (PS), and the Sweden Democrats (SD). Hungar-ian politics is arguably dominated by the PRR, if onecounts Fidesz (which has progressively shifted awayfrom ‘mainstream’ politics) and Jobbik (perhaps too‘extreme’) among its members (see e.g. Pirro, 2015; Ba-tory, 2016). Between them, the parties obtained almosttwo-thirds of the vote in the 2014 national election (44.9per cent for Fidesz and 20.2 for Jobbik).

While the PRR is on the rise in various parts ofEurope, it is worth noting that not all parties have ex-perienced stable successes. The Slovak National Party(SNS), the Flemish Interest (VB) in Belgium, the LegaNord (LN) in Italy, and the Greater Romania Party(PRM), for instance, saw their electoral results fluctu-ate or deteriorate. In certain countries, moreover, thePRR has still failed to (genuinely) break through at thenational level. The German Bundestag lacks represen-tatives of the party family – even though the Alternativefor Germany (AfD), which currently qualifies as a PRRmember, is represented at the regional and Europeanlevels, and is likely to enter the federal parliament afterthe elections scheduled for the autumn of 2017. TheHouse of Commons in the United Kingdom only hasone member from the PRR UK Independence Party, al-though this is largely due to the mechanics of the First-Past-the-Post electoral system – a similar majoritariansystem also holds back the French FrontNational in par-liamentary elections. Finally, in crisis-stricken Greeceand Spain, the populist left has shown itself to be amoreattractive option in recent years.

II. A Conducive Environment for the PRR

Despite variation in the levels of PRR success across

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 83

Europe, it is fair to argue that the party family is experi-encing a high in terms of electoral strength. This is nota great surprise, considering the issues that have dom-inated the news in recent years, notably the Europeandebt crisis, the refugee crisis, and the series of terroristattacks and assassinations carried out by Muslim men.All of these issues played into the hands of PRR parties,who are in a position to argue that the recent eventsprove right their analysis of the current state of affairsin Europe.

Starting with the latter issue, the recent terrorist at-tacks in France, Belgium, Germany, as well as those be-yond Europe, arguably lend credence to the PRR’s warn-ings about Islam’s violent and expansionist tendencies.Since the terrorist attacks of 9/11, Islam has becomea key issue for the party family, with Muslims beingdepicted as a dangerous non-native group, or a ‘fifthcolumn’ in Western societies. The inflow of refugeesfrom Syria and other war-torn countries provides a re-lated issue on which PRR parties can capitalize. Besidesconcerns about overpopulation and the ‘Islamisation’of Europe, reports about some of the violent acts be-ing committed by returned Islamic State recruits, orotherwise traumatized refugees, play into the PRR’shand. Even in Central and Eastern Europe, a regionwith few immigrants or Muslims, these issues have be-come more salient. Notably, dominant ‘mainstream’party figureheads Jarosław Kaczyński in Poland, andPrime Ministers Viktor Orbán in Hungary and RobertFico in Slovakia – all branded as populists by some ob-servers – have expressed their opposition to harboringrefugees. Refugees are alleged to pose risks concerningsafety, cultural homogeneity, as well as public health.

In previous years, the European financial and eco-nomic crises provided ammunition for PRR parties,which tend to share a Eurosceptic outlook. The contem-porary PRR typically portrays the EU as a ‘super state’threatening the sovereignty of the nations and, throughthe opening of borders, the cultural homogeneity ofcountries. In addition, the complex and elitist Europeandecision-making process is at odds with the populistappeal of these parties (e.g. Canovan, 1999). With thecrisis unfolding and amidst rising levels of Euroscep-ticism (Serricchio, Tsakatika and Quaglia, 2013), thePRR in debt-ridden EU countries could, similar to left-wing populists, voice dissent with the harsh austeritystipulations of the European Commission and creditorcountries – not least Germany. In creditor countries,

on the other hand, the PRR could express oppositionto tax-payer-funded bailouts and the transfer of moresovereignty to the European level, in the form of ar-rangements such as the European Stability Mechanismand the banking union. More generally, the Europeandebt crisis, like the subsequent refugee crisis, arguablyproved the PRR’s point that the EU is a malfunctioningapparatus unable to solve pressing problems. Most re-cently, the UK’s decision by referendum to leave the EUhas further emboldened PRR parties with an anti-EUagenda. That said, while the EU is, or has become, acentral issue for parties like UKIP, AfD and PVV, notall PRR parties have prioritized the issue, or gone as faras to oppose EU-membership outright (Pirro and vanKessel, 2015).

It further is questionable whether the socio-economic downturn itself has fueled the PRR’s suc-cess. Following Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser (2012,167), “the European populist radical right is in essence[...] a post-material phenomenon, based first and fore-most on identity rather than (material) interest” (seealso Mudde, 2007). Indeed, studies have shown thatPRR supporters are primarily motivated by ‘cultural’concerns about immigration and multiculturalism, in-stead of socio-economic grievances (e.g. Ivarsflaten,2008; Oesch, 2008). There are indications, however,that (Western European) PRR parties are convergingaround a well-defined ‘welfare chauvinist’ position (An-dersen and Bjørklund, 1990; Lefkofridi and Michel,2014; Ivaldi, 2015). This position basically entails asupport for economic redistribution and the preserva-tion of welfare state entitlements, but only for ‘deservingnatives’. Immigrants, on the other hand, should be ex-cluded frommost entitlements. It is conceivable that thewelfare chauvinist positions of PRR parties contributeto their success. PRR parties tap into an amalgamationof cultural and economic anxieties: resistance to immi-gration is not only related to concerns about culture,identity and safety, but also borne out of fears of eco-nomic competition and deprivation. The role of ‘theeconomy’ in PPR support thus deserves a fresh look,particularly in the context of the European debt crisisand its consequences.

III. Success is also a Matter of ‘Agency’

While the breeding ground for the PRR in Europeis fertile, the success of individual parties does not de-pend on the presence of political opportunities alone.

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 84

There are other factors at play which explain why thePRR is currently more successful in some countriesthan in others. Notably, in order to seize the opportu-nities provided, PRR parties, just like their contenders,need to present themselves as credible alternatives toother (established) parties (Carter, 2011; Mudde, 2007;van Kessel, 2015). PRR parties need capable and vis-ible leadership in order to put their agenda across tothe electorate, and should frame their grievances withthe current state of affairs in a non-extremist way toremain palatable to a sufficient number of voters (Ry-dgren, 2005). After their breakthrough, furthermore,they need to remain organizationally cohesive in or-der to survive and impress their supporters. Once ingovernment, they need to preserve their credibility aspopulist anti-establishment forces, which is a challeng-ing, yet not impossible, balancing act (Albertazzi andMcDonnell, 2015). Yet in many countries PRR partieshave now become the natural ‘owners’ of issues such asimmigration and European integration. Many main-stream parties find it difficult to formulate a clear visionconcerning these issues, which means that the fortunesof PRR parties are unlikely to wane any time soon.

References

Albertazzi, Daniele and Duncan McDonnell. 2015. Populistsin Power. Oxon: Routledge.

Andersen, Jørgen Goul and Tor Bjørklund. 1990. “Structuralchanges and new cleavages: The Progress Parties in Den-mark and Norway.” Acta Sociologica 33(3):195–217.

Aslanidis, Paris. 2015. “Is Populism an Ideology? A Refu-tation and a New Perspective.” Political Studies 64(1):88–104.

Aslanidis, Paris and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser. 2016.“Dealing with populists in government: the SYRIZA-ANEL coalition in Greece.” Democratization 23(6):1077–1091.

Bale, Tim, Stijn Van Kessel and Paul Taggart. 2011. “Thrownaround with abandon? Popular understandings of pop-ulism as conveyed by the print media: A UK case study.”Acta Politica 46(2):111–131.

Batory, Agnes. 2016. “Populists in government? Hun-gary’s ‘system of national cooperation’.” Democratization23(2):283–303.

Canovan, Margaret. 1999. “Trust the people! Populism andthe two faces of democracy.” Political Studies 47(1):2–16.

Carter, Elisabeth. 2011. The Extreme Right in Western Europe:Success or Failure? New York: Oxford University Press.

Freeden, Michael. 1998. “Is nationalism a distinct ideology?”Political Studies 46(4):748–765.

Hanley, Seán and Allan Sikk. 2016. “Economy, corruption

or floating voters? Explaining the breakthroughs of anti-establishment reformparties in eastern Europe.” Party Pol-itics 22(4):522—533.

Ivaldi, Gilles. 2015. “Towards the median economic crisisvoter? The new leftist economic agenda of the Front Na-tional in France.” French Politics 13(4):346–369.

Ivarsflaten, Elisabeth. 2008. “What unites right-wing pop-ulists in Western Europe? Re-examining grievance mo-bilization models in seven successful cases.” ComparativePolitical Studies 41(1):3–23.

Katsambekis, Giorgos. 2016. “Radical left populism in con-temporary Greece: Syriza’s Trajectory from minoritarianopposition to power.” Constellations 23(3):391–403.

Laclau, Ernesto. 2005. On Populist Reason. London: Verso.Lefkofridi, Zoe and Elie Michel. 2014. “Exclusive solidarity?

Radical right parties and the welfare state.” Robert Schu-man Centre for Advanced Studies Research Paper, Euro-pean University Institute.

March, Luke. 2011. Radical Left Parties in Europe. Oxon:Routledge.

Moffitt, Benjamin. 2016. The Global Rise of Populism: Perfor-mance, Political Style, and Representation. Stanford: Stan-ford University Press.

Moffitt, Benjamin and Simon Tormey. 2014. “Rethinkingpopulism: Politics, mediatisation and political style.” Po-litical Studies 62(2):381–397.

Mudde, Cas. 2004. “The populist zeitgeist.” Government andOpposition 39(4):542–563.

Mudde, Cas. 2007. Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Mudde, Cas and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, eds. 2012. Pop-ulism in Europe and the Americas: Threat or Corrective forDemocracy? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Oesch, Daniel. 2008. “Explaining workers’ support for right-wing populist parties in Western Europe: Evidence fromAustria, Belgium, France, Norway, and Switzerland.” In-ternational Political Science Review 29(3):349–373.

Pirro, Andrea. 2015. The Populist Radical Right in Centraland Eastern Europe: Ideology, Impact, and Electoral Per-formance. Abingdon: Routledge.

Pirro, Andrea and Stijn van Kessel. 2015. “United in oppo-sition? The populist radical right’s EU-pessimism in timesof crisis.” Paper for theCES 22nd International Conferenceof Europeanists.

Rooduijn, Matthijs, Sarah L. de Lange and Wouter van derBrug. 2014. “A populist zeitgeist? Programmatic conta-gion by populist parties in Western Europe.” Party Politics20(4):563–575.

Rydgren, Jens. 2005. “Is extreme right-wing populism con-tagious? Explaining the emergence of a new party family.”European Journal of Political Research 44(3):413–437.

Serricchio, Fabio, Myrto Tsakatika and Lucia Quaglia. 2013.“Euroscepticism and the global financial crisis.” JCMS:Journal of Common Market Studies 51(1):51–64.

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 85

Stanley, Ben. 2008. “The thin ideology of populism.” Journalof Political Ideologies 13(1):95–110.

Taggart, Paul A. 2000. Populism. Birmingham: Open Uni-versity Press.

Učeň, Peter. 2007. “Parties, populism, and anti-establishment politics in East Central Europe.” SAISReview of International Affairs 27(1):49–62.

van Kessel, Stijn. 2014. “The populist cat-dog: Applying theconcept of populism to contemporary European party sys-tems.” Journal of Political Ideologies 19(1):99–118.

van Kessel, Stijn. 2015. Populist Parties in Europe: Agents ofDiscontent? Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Special Topic: Populism in the U.S.

Listening to Rural Populist Support forRight-Leaning Candidates in the UnitedStates

by Katherine CramerUniversity of Wisconsin-Madison

What drives populism? Economic insecurity and lackof representation by political elites seem to be key ingre-dients. But those things are not sufficient to have a pop-ulist uprising (Oliver and Rahn, 2016). It is perceptionsand the construction of identity, not objective condi-tions, that are at the root of populism. Populist can-didates are buoyed by a perception among voters thatelites are out of touch with ordinary people, tramplingon their interests and usurping resources for themselvesand undeserving minorities (Canovan, 1999). Populistspledge to restore order to ‘the people’ by taking poweraway from elites and experts. They strive through theirrhetoric to define who is the ‘us’ and who is the ‘them’and to map good vs. evil onto the will of the people vs.that of the elite (Hawkins, 2009).

Because perceptions and identities are key to under-standing when members of the mass public will be mo-bilized by populist appeals, it is worth our while to lis-ten to themanner in which people are interpreting theircircumstances and how they are understanding them-selves in relation to others. It is by listening to thoseperspectives that we can better understand how sup-port for a tough-talking, economic populist candidatelike Trump can emerge from a party like the RepublicanParty whose establishment leaders have been pro-free

trade and include the economic elites that we might ex-pect populist arguments would be railing against.

In the 2016U.S. presidential campaign, bothDemo-crat Bernie Sanders andRepublicanDonaldTrumphavevied for the ‘populist mantle’ (Azari and Hethering-ton, 2016, 104) and used anti-establishment rhetoric(Oliver and Rahn, 2016, 193-4). In this essay, I focus onpopulism as it pertains to the right-leaning candidate,Trump, to dwell on the question of how it is possible foreconomic populism to emerge in support of a party thathas in recent years been the party of the wealthy andpro-business elite.

In addition, I focus on support for Trump in orderto delve into the nature of the rural vs. urban divide insupport for this candidate. The last time that the UnitedStates experienced a populist resurgence of this magni-tude, during the Gilded Age of the late 1800s, we did notobserve the extensive rural vs. urban split in support forthe parties that we do now, particularly in areas outsidethe deep South (Azari andHetherington, 2016, 99-100).

I have been listening to the perceptions of peoplethroughfieldwork in the upperMidwestern state ofWis-consin since 2007. In this essay, I will apply what I havelearned from listening to conversations among regularsin local gathering places to illuminate populism in thecontemporary United States, particularly as it pertainsto support from rural areas for the Trump candidacy.

I. Observing rural resentment in Wisconsin

Thestudy I drawonhere consisted of observing con-versations among 39 groups of ‘regulars’ that I foundwith the help of informants across 27 communities thatI had sampled across the state ofWisconsin. I repeatedlyinvited myself into these groups between May of 2007and November 2012, and have revisited some of thesegroups during the 2016 presidential campaign. Thesewere groups of people typically meeting early in themorning in gas stations and diners. The modal personwas a middle-aged white man on his way to work, butmost groups contained a mix of workers and retirees, aswell as men and women.1

My initial purpose was to study the role of socialclass identity in political understanding, so I sampledmunicipalities to vary in socioeconomic background

1More details on the methods are in Cramer (2016, ch. 2).

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 86

and type of industry. That sampling approach meantthat I spent time in urban and suburban areas, but agreat deal of time in rural places as well, as about halfof the population in Wisconsin resides in a rural place.Wisconsin has two main metropolitan centers, Madi-son, the state capitol and home to the flagship univer-sity of the state university system, and Milwaukee, thelargest city and its industrial center.

I was not expecting to observe, nor looking for, ruralvs. urban divides. But the pervasive resentment towardthe major cities in the non-metropolitan places I visitedsurprised me. This ‘rural consciousness’ consisted of astrong identity as a person from a small town combinedwith a perception that rural communities do not gettheir fair share of decision-making power, resources, orrespect.

The resentment I heard was acomplex perception of injustice anda sense that people less deservingthan people ‘like us’ were gettingmore than their fair share.

For example, in a small town in northwestern Wis-consin, I occasionally spent time with a group of peoplethat gathers in the basement of the local church everyTuesday morning: stay-at-home moms and some kids,retirees, and people taking a break from work. On myfirst visit to this group, they told me that people in themajor cities in the state, Madison and Milwaukee, haveno understanding of what rural life is like and regularlyoverlook the concerns of people in rural places.

KJC: What do you think the Universityof Wisconsin–Madison does not do well?When you think about [it] . . .

Martha:2 Represents our area. I mean weare like, we’re strange to Madison. Theywant us to do everything forMadison’s lawsand the way they do things, but we totallylive differently than the city people live. Sothey need to think more rural instead of allthis city area.

Donna: We can’t afford to educate our chil-dren like they can in the cities. Simple asthat. Don’t have the advantages.

Ethel: All the things they do, based onMadison and Milwaukee, never us.

Martha: Yeah, we don’t have the advan-tages that they give their local people there,I think a lot of times. And it is probablybecause they don’t understand how ruralpeople live and what we deal with and ourproblems.

KJC: I think that’s right. I think there is awhole lot of distance between – especiallythis corner of the state.

Martha: Oh we’re, like, we’re lost up here!

Rosemary: They don’t even understandhow we live in [our community]! [Laugh-ter]

Martha: Yeah that’s right! It’s very true.They won’t even come and help us with ourroads until you demand it.

I heard about the unfair distribution of resources inmany different forms, but most prominently in conver-sations about public education funding and the struc-ture of taxation. In a small town in central Wisconsin, Itook part in the following conversation among a groupof men playing dice in the back room of a diner on aweekday morning in May 2007:

Mark: One thing we were bitching aboutyesterday is that you – is the state’s pen-chant for unfunded mandates – what threetimes, two times they got a referenda in thecommunity that was not wanted. And sonow – they keep jamming the cost down tothe county so they can avoid spending it onthe state’s nickel, that has to stop.

2All names have been changed to protect the confidentiality of the people I observed.

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 87

Ernie: Things that are mandated should bepaid for.

Mark: Yeah, the tax structure in this state isweird. I think that is a fundamental prob-lem with the state is that they have to re-organize their tax structure. Local schools,local municipalities, and of course the state– what they’re doing is they’re just redi-recting tax burden on the local taxes whichends up being more evident to the locals,so they more complain and then what endsup happening is they say it isn’t their fault.

Richard: We don’t have the economic basehere to pay the kind of taxes that comes outof Madison. You know I mean down thereif things go up 1 percent it doesn’t – but1 percent means a hell of a lot more herethan it does in Madison or what Henrycalls south of the Mason Dixon Line, theline east and west going through Wausau.

Dale: Or Portage [a city about an hour’sdrive north of Madison].

Richard: Well –

Mark: But I mean you know, right downto the tax form or the support form forthe schools – why is a kid worth fourteenthousand dollars in Mequon [a suburbanMilwaukee city] and what is he up here,Henry? Seven?

Henry: Oh yeah – the consistency inschools that we’re spending money –ridiculous. ... Why don’t they give eachschool X number of dollars per kid? If theywant to spend eleven thousand dollars ona kid, tax the school district for the differ-ence.

Ernie: Have it averaged.

Henry: Yeah, have it averaged. Everybodygets eight thousand dollars and if you wantto spend eleven, tax the local district for it.

Comprehensive plan.

Mark: This goes with the schools, in termsof facilities – facilities are gorgeous becausethey have the money to spend on it.

Henry: If you take the state of Wisconsinand take a ruler and start at Green Bay anddiagonally and just go fifty miles north ofMadison, right over to the corner of thestate, all your money lies in the south endof the state, your votes weight there. You’renever going to get nothing changed to thenorth.

Dave: That is absolutely correct.

Henry: That’s it.

Mark: That’s not just the schools.

Henry: We listen to the – being on theschool board, we went several times to tes-tify to the legislature to tell you that theformula was wrong, but they don’t changeit, because we haven’t – if anybody on thesouth endwould say change the formula forthe schools, they never would get electedanother two years and that’s why all they areis looking for their own job.

This conversation reveals a perspective of peoplewho feel ignored, overlooked, and disrespected by elites,especially those in government. For many of the con-versations, the resentment was directed specifically atliberal urban elites.

These views also carry another hallmark of contem-porary populism: identity anxiety. In the conversationsof this and other small town or rural groups, I heardconcern that the way of life they associate with commu-nities like their own, which they consider quintessentialAmerican communities, is rapidly becoming a thing ofthe past. They see the population in their small townsdisappearing, along with their Main Street storefronts,family farms, and even their local schools (e.g David-son, 1996; Carr and Kefalas, 2009; Lobao and Kraybill,2005; Domina, 2006).

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 88

I observed these views as far back as May 2007. In2010, Republican Scott Walker successfully tapped intothem to win election as Governor of Wisconsin. Onepart of his strategy was to direct this rural resentment,and economic and identity anxiety more generally, to-ward public employees (Cramer, 2014). Even thoughroughly 10% of the workforce in any given Wisconsinmunicipality are public employees, the people I spenttime with viewed those employees as people driven byurban values and decisions. I heard many people talkabout public school teachers, for example, even thosewho had lived in the community for decades, as peoplewhose behavior was influenced by teachers’ unions, and‘those bureaucrats in Madison’. The policies that drovethem and others, such as employees of the Departmentof Natural Resources, were regularly viewed as out oftouch with local wisdom and concerns.

In addition, public employees have pensions andhealth care insurance, and in the smaller communities,salaries that outpaced employees in the private sector(see analyses in Cramer (2016, 133)). In that context,Walker was able to campaign on a platform that paintedpublic employees as the target of blame. They were thehaves, and private employees were the have-nots. Forexample, during a debate during the 2010 gubernatorialcampaign, Walker said, “We can no longer have a soci-ety where the public-sector employees are the ‘haves’and the people who foot the bill, the taxpayers, are the‘have-nots”’.3 Among people who believed they wereworking hard to make ends meet, and couldn’t affordhealth insurance, and yet were being forced to pay taxesfor public employees who seemed to neither work veryhard or address local concerns,Walker’s argumentswerewelcome.

Donald Trump is a very different candidate fromScott Walker. Walker is a pro-business, small govern-ment Republican, heavily backed by the Koch brotherswho conduct significant fundraising, organizing, andpolicy development work on behalf of the RepublicanParty (Skocpol and Hertel-Fernandez, 2016). One ofTrump’s signature stances has been to oppose free trade.Establishment Republicans have tended to denounceTrump. During the Wisconsin presidential primary,Walker denounced Trump and announced his supportfor Ted Cruz.

The conversations I have listened to suggest that

people who supported Walker may also be supportingTrump due to more than the fact that they are bothRepublicans. Both Walker and Trump are saying, in ef-fect, “You are right. You are not getting your fair share.What you consider to be the American way of life hasevaporated and it is in part because people who are un-deserving are getting more than they should.” Walkerplaced blame on public employees. Trump is pointingto immigrants, Muslims, and out-of-touch elite politi-cians.

The nativist appeals of Trump deserve attention.The blatant ethnocentrism of Trump’s rhetoric on thecampaign trail has surprised many. However, it isan oversimplification to explain the appeal of Trumpamong the people I studied as simply racism.

When the people I talked with were expressing re-sentment toward urban areas, it is highly likely that thatwas at times a reference to race (Hurwitz and Peffley,2005), especially given the highly racially segregatednature of Wisconsin and its cities (Frey, 2010). Thereference to the Mason-Dixon line in the conversationabout the allocation of resources above has an obviousracial reference, for example.

However, the resentment I heardwas a complex per-ception of injustice and a sense that people less deserv-ing than people ‘like us’ were getting more than theirfair share. When people talked about ‘those people inMadison’ or ‘those people in Milwaukee’, they were re-ferring to white, professional, upper-middle class peo-ple, Democrats, and elite urban decision-makers – aswell as to people of color. And the references to citieswere also often references to public employees. Theywere perceiving of all of these groups as less hard work-ing and therefore less deserving than themselves (Sossand Schram, 2007; Winter, 2008).

I do not mean to suggest that economic anxietydrives racism. Indeed, the opposite may be the case,given evidence that people higher in racial resentmentare more likely to perceive that the economy is worse off(Tesler, 2016). What I am suggesting is that economicanxiety and racism were intertwined in the sentimentsI heard, and understanding the political implicationsrequires paying attention to how they are intertwined.

Politicians have much to gain by giving people tar-3This comment was reported here: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/04/business/04labor.html?_r=0.

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 89

gets to blame for the economic, political, and socialinjustices people believe they are experiencing. The factthat these perceptions are complex means that one can-didate can successfully tap into them by claiming thatpublic employees are lazy, inefficient bureaucrats whoare getting way more than their fair share, while an-other seemingly very different candidate can capitalizeon them by claiming that non-whites are undeservingand enjoying unjust public support. Both candidatesare tapping into a similar well of economic and identityanxieties.

Those similarities underscore the fact that populistappeals operate through perceptions more than indi-viduals’ objective circumstances. Observing individ-uals’ objective economic situations is not enough tounderstand whether or not they will support a populistcandidate. A recent Gallup analysis of Trump support-ers suggests that they are not less well-off economicallythan the average American. However, it does suggestthat his supporters tend to be from places that are strug-gling economically and socially; they are from placeswith less intergenerational mobility and lower life ex-pectancy (Rothwell, 2016).

Understanding populism requires understandinghow people perceive their situation and how they per-ceive the threat of others. Trump supporters do notappear to be living in places more exposed to trade orimmigration (Rothwell, 2016), but they are neverthe-less drawn to a candidate who points to these things asthreats to their well-being. They see their personal fi-nancial situation as worse and are dissatisfied with theirown life and economic status (Sides and Tesler, 2016).

Notice that the geographic context in which peopleare living is related to whether or not a populist candi-date like Trump has an appeal. This is a reminder thatthe rural vs. urban divides we see in populist appeals areabout more than people with particular socioeconomiccharacteristics living in certain types of places. Peopleconstruct perceptions of who is getting their fair shareof power, resources, and respect in ways that are oftenrelated to the places that they live, and they use theseperceptions to interpret politics. The conversations Iobserved suggest that Trump may have extra appeal in

rural places not because such places have more expe-rience with trade or immigration, but because in suchplaces there is a geographic map of residents’ under-standing of who is and is not getting their fair share.For many in more rural places, urban areas seem to begetting public resources, they are the location where thedecisions affecting their lives are made, and they are atthe same time out of touch and disrespectful of theirown communities’ way of life.4

Populism is a political phenomenon that builds ona complex mix of conditions and sentiments. That iswhy I find it useful to refer to resentment as opposedto anger. In the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, wehave heard a lot about the anger motivating supportfor Trump and Sanders, but there is a need to noticethe undertone of resentment that has been brewing formultiple decades. It is this undertone that sets the stagefor enterprising politicians to tap into andmobilize sup-port by fomenting that resentment into anger. How is itthat Trump can create ‘ungentleness’ in a crowd withinminutes of starting a speech (Saunders, 2016)? He hasnot created that ungentleness from scratch. He is culti-vating it out of perceptions that are already there.

References

Azari, Julia and Marc J. Hetherington. 2016. “Back to the fu-ture? What the politics of the late nineteenth century cantell us about the 2016 election.” The ANNALS of the Ameri-can Academy of Political and Social Science 667(1):92–109.

Canovan, Margaret. 1999. “Trust the people! Populism andthe two faces of democracy.” Political Studies 47(1):2–16.

Carr, Patrick J. and Maria J. Kefalas. 2009. Hollowing Outthe Middle: The Rural Brain Drain and What it Means forAmerica. Boston: Beacon Press.

Cramer, Katherine J. 2014. Political Understanding of Eco-nomic Crises: The Shape of Resentment Toward PublicEmployees. In Mass Politics in Tough Times: Opinions,Votes, and Protest in theGreat Recession, ed.Nancy Bermeoand Larry M. Bartels. Oxford: Oxford University Presspp. 72–104.

Cramer, Katherine J. 2016. The Politics of Resentment: RuralConsciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker.Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Davidson, Osha Gray. 1996. Broken Heartland: The Rise of4In the Wisconsin Republican presidential primary in April 2016, Ted Cruz beat Donald Trump. The map of returns shows that Cruz

was particularly successful within the Milwaukee media market, and that Trump was more successful in the more rural areas of the state(http://www.nytimes.com/elections/results/Wisconsin). It is notable that the Republican establishment in the state is primarilywithin the Milwaukee media market, and Walker expressed his support for Cruz on a highly popular Milwaukee conservative talk radioshow.

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 90

America’s Rural Ghetto. Iowa City: University of IowaPress.

Domina, Thurston. 2006. “What clean break?: Educationand nonmetropolitanmigration patterns, 1989–2004.”Ru-ral Sociology 71(3):373–398.

Frey, William H. 2010. “Census data: Blacks and Hispanicstake different segregation paths.” Brookings Op-Ed, De-cember 16.

Hawkins, Kirk A. 2009. “Is Chávez populist? Measuring pop-ulist discourse in comparative perspective.” ComparativePolitical Studies 42(8):1040–1067.

Hurwitz, Jon andMark Peffley. 2005. “Playing the race card inthe post-Willie Horton era: The impact of racialized codewords on support for punitive crime policy.” Public Opin-ion Quarterly 69(1):99–112.

Lobao, Linda and David S. Kraybill. 2005. “The emergingroles of county governments in metropolitan and non-metropolitan areas: Findings from a national survey.” Eco-nomic Development Quarterly 19(3):245–259.

Oliver, J. Eric and Wendy M. Rahn. 2016. “Rise of theTrumpenvolk populism in the 2016 election.” The AN-NALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Sci-ence 667(1):189–206.

Rothwell, Jonathan T. 2016. “Explaining nationalist politicalviews: The case of Donald Trump.”Working Paper, Gallup.

Saunders, George. 2016. “Who are all these Trump support-ers?” The New Yorker, July 11 & 18.

Sides, John and Michael Tesler. 2016. “How political sciencehelps explain the rise of Trump (part 3): It’s the economy,stupid.” The Washington Post, March 4.

Skocpol,Theda andAlexander Hertel-Fernandez. 2016. “TheKoch network and Republican Party extremism.” Perspec-tives on Politics 14(3):681–699.

Soss, Joe and Sanford F. Schram. 2007. “A public trans-formed? Welfare reform as policy feedback.” American Po-litical Science Review 101(1):111–127.

Tesler, Michael. 2016. Post-Racial or Most-Racial?: Race andPolitics in the Obama Era. Chicago: University of ChicagoPress.

Winter, Nicholas J. G. 2008. Dangerous Frames: How Ideasabout Race and Gender Shape Public Opinion. Chicago:University of Chicago Press.

Populism and the 2016 U.S. PresidentialElection in Comparative Perspective

by Kirk HawkinsBrigham Young University

With the 2016 U.S. Presidential campaign, populismfinally seems to have found the United States (Ger-son, 2015; Stoehr, 2016). A putative populist (Don-ald Trump) managed to win a major party nomina-tion; other alleged, if less successful populist candidates,dominated the ranks of the Republican Party nomina-tion; and a populist contender (Bernie Sanders) nearlywon the Democratic Party’s nomination. Commen-tators have noticed the strong ideological and stylisticsimilarities between these candidates and radical pop-ulists in Latin America and Europe, and they fear thepolarization and authoritarianism these populistsmightbring (Carroll, 2016; Seib, 2016; Wofford, 2016).

Reactions to populism in the campaign have fo-cused especially on Trump. Early reactions were am-bivalent (in a scientific sense): Trump was acknowl-edged as someone very anti-establishment, who hadpolicy views associated with the European radical right(Kazin, 2016; Norris, 2016; Hamid, 2016) – hence def-initely populist. But skeptical academics argued thathe also lacked clear references to a popular subject thatshould be the bearer of sovereignty; indeed, his speecheswere mostly about himself (Barr, 2016; Mudde, 2015).

While this newfound awareness of populism is wel-come, one is reminded of the foreign language studentwho, after learning a new word in his second language,discovers that all the native speakers have learned thesame word as well. Populism, of course, is not a newphenomenon in the United States. Populist third-partymovements have challenged the traditional parties atregular intervals for over 150 years (Kazin, 1998). Yet,according to one review (Ochoa Espejo et al., Forth-coming), fewer than five articles on populism in the U.S.have appeared in mainstream political science journalsin the past 25 years, and recent studies of ostensiblypopulist movements – such as Ross Perot’s United WeStand, the Tea Party, or Occupy Wall Street – almost en-tirely fail to mention the term (Hardt and Negri, 2011;Skocpol and Williamson, 2013; Stone and Rapoport,2008).

Comparativists are especially worried that Amer-icanists will ignore the insights gleaned from years of

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 91

study of populism in Latin America and Europe. Cover-age of the U.S. campaign has not been very comparativeor scientific. With rare exceptions (see especially Oliverand Rahn, 2016), articles, blog posts, and other mediacoverage of the campaign have ignored the theories de-vised by political scientists who study populism in othercountries. U.S. scholars and pundits have been extraor-dinarily hasty to declare different candidates populist,and almost none of them use the measurement toolscreated by other scholars. Thus, we really don’t know ifTrump, Sanders, or any other candidates are populist,and if they are, we don’t know how strong their pop-ulism is comparatively.

In an effort to provide this comparative perspective,members of Team Populism, an international researchnetwork studying the causes of populism, have beenconducting a project measuring the populist discourseof the major candidates during the presidential cam-paign. (Because of this joint effort, I will speak in theeditoral ‘we’). Furthermore, we consciously incorpo-rate insights from the broader study of populism to ananalysis of events in the United States. Our results aretentative – the campaign is incomplete as of this writing– but we feel confident sharing a summary.

As it turns out, there have been strong populist can-didates in the current campaign, and at least one candi-date (Trump) became more populist. But populism inthe U.S. is still not at the level one finds in Latin Amer-ican countries. Instead, it is similar to what we see inmost Western European countries, where radical pop-ulists rarely win seats, but mild populists occasionallywin pluralities or membership in a government coali-tion (Hawkins and Silva, 2015). We argue that this com-parative perspective helps us better understand what iscausing populism in the U.S. and how severe its conse-quences might be for this nation’s democracy if it cameto power. We also suggest where the study of populismin the United States could go if Americanists were totake it more seriously.

I. How Populist Are They?

For us, populist discourse is the essential indicatorof whether a politician (or voter) is populist. Like manyof the contributors to this issue of the Comparative Pol-itics Newsletter, we define populism in ideational terms,as a discursive frame or thin-centered ideology that seespolitics as a Manichaean struggle between a reified will

of the people and a conspiring elite. We recognize thatmany scholars prefer to add other features to their def-initions, such as a charismatic, outsider leadership; amovement-based organization; short-sighted economicpolicies; or the presence of certain types of coalitions.However, most definitions consider a pro-people/anti-establishment discourse a necessary condition for any-thing to be considered populist, and so we feel confidentthat our measurement speaks to diverse academic audi-ences.

In our study, we measure populist discoursethrough a textual analysis of speeches and party mani-festos, using a technique called holistic grading that wehave successfully deployed in other settings (Hawkins,2009; Hawkins and Kocijan, 2013). Holistic grading isa type of content analysis, in that it assigns a numeri-cal value to the text based on the content. But unlikein traditional content analysis, which works at the levelof words or sentences, the coders read each text in itsentirety and assign a single score, based on a codingrubric and a set of anchor texts that illustrate each pointin the measurement scale. Roughly, the scale runs from0 (no populism) to 1 (clear populists elements, but usedinconsistently or with only a mild tone) to 2 (clear pop-ulist elements used consistently and with a strong tone).Just to be clear, by ‘populist elements’ we mean the twocore elements of populist discourse: a reified will of thecommon people and a conspiring elite. Thus, an antag-onistic speech is not populist unless it references bothelements, and a speech cannot merely contain positivereferences to ordinary citizens, butmust situate the peo-ple in a struggle with the elite.

For each text, we have two student coders read thetext in its original language (English), assign a score,and complete a record with a short, typed justificationfor their score and illustrative quotes. In this study, weasked coders to provide an additional decimal score, aswell as subscores for the key elements of populist dis-course (reified people, and conspiring elite). These sub-scores are a new feature that give added information forsome of the candidates. All of the scoring sheets, scores,and original texts are available at the Team Populismwebsite, populism.byu.edu. Just to be clear, holisticgrading is not the only way tomeasure populism – otherscholars have used other techniques of textual analysisproductively (Rooduijn and Pauwels, 2011) – but it iscurrently one of the few that allows large-scaled inter-national comparison.

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 92

The average scores for all of the candidates are inTable 1. These are averages of all the speech scoresand the manifesto score, with the speech total weightedtwice as heavily as the manifesto (the total number ofspeeches varies from 3 to 8 for each candidate). Fora truly comparative perspective, we include scores forthe major parties in the Spanish parliamentary electionof December 2015 and the candidates for the Venezue-lan presidential by-election of 2013; these scores usesmaller but similar samples of just three texts: the an-nouncement speech by the party leader or presidentialcandidate, the closing speech, and the party manifesto.By way of background information, the Spanish elec-tion took place less than two years after the emergenceof Podemos, a widely discussed left-populist party thatexploited popular anger towards the post-2009 auster-ity measures; this was the second parliamentary elec-tion in which Podemos participated. It also marked thefirst appearance of Unidad Popular, a coalition of tradi-tional leftist parties that in later elections formed a coali-tion with Podemos. In Venezuela, the 2013 presidentialby-election was held to elect a successor following thedeath of Hugo Chávez; Nicolás Maduro, Chávez’s vice-president, defeated the opposition candidate HenriqueCapriles by a small margin after a campaign marked byirregularities.

As can be seen, the level of populism in the U.S.campaign is more like that of the Spanish election thanthe Venezuelan election. Consider first the U.S. cam-paign versus the Spanish election. Only one candidate/-party in each of these countries has a score close to thethreshold of 1.5, Bernie Sanders and Unidad Popular.Below these are one or more moderately populist can-didates (average scores greater than .5): Trump and TedCruz in the United States, and Podemos and Democra-cia i Libertad in Spain. And in each country there aretwo or three essentially non-populist parties or candi-dates: Hilary Clinton, Marco Rubio, and John Kasich inthe United States, and the traditional governing partiesof PP and PSOE in Spain.

By contrast, Venezuela is a seething cauldron ofpopulism. Admittedly, the context is different, in thatwe have just two parties/candidates competing in a sit-uation of declining democracy. But both the govern-ing and opposition candidates receive very high scoresacross the entire campaign. For the current U.S. cam-paign to end up similarly, not just Clinton but Trumpwould need to significantly ratchet up their rhetoric and

re-write their party manifestos. Only Sanders’discoursecomes close to what we hear in Venezuela.

Because we have a large number of datapoints forthe U.S. campaign, we can break these results downacross time, allowing us to look more closely at individ-ual candidates – and thus at some of the specific claimsthat pundits and scholars have made about Trump. Theresults are in Figure 1. Most of the candidates have fairlyconsistent rhetoric: Sanders stays high (coders all notedhow similar his speeches were), and Clinton, Kasich,and Rubio remain low. The candidate who shifts themost is Trump, who has become more populist acrossthe course of his campaign, especially after May 2016when he begins to change his campaign team and ef-fectively wins the nomination. Thus, our scores showthat Trump was not initially very populist, but that hebegan to speak a more clearly populist language as thecampaign progressed.

Comparativists are especiallyworried that Americanists will ignorethe insights gleaned from years ofstudy of populism in Latin Americaand Europe. Coverage of the U.S.campaign has not been verycomparative or scientific.

Table 2 clarifies this shift by providing subscoresfor two crucial elements of Trump’s speeches: a reifiedwill of the people and a conspiring elite. These showthat both sets of scholars – those who see populism inTrump, and those that note the absence of key elementsearly in the campaign – are somewhat right. The no-tion of a reified will of the people is relatively weak inhis speeches, often showing up at barely a moderatelevel that is half as strong as the notion of a conspiringelite, confined frequently to vague references to ‘we’ or‘America’. But it is not entirely absent and increases asthe campaign progresses, often moving in tandem withthe notion of a conspiring elite. After Trump’s break-through to the nomination inMay, both elements beganto show through more consistently and Trump appearsmore fully populist, as in his June 22 speechwhen he de-clares “This election will decide whether we are ruled bythe people, or by the politicians,” or in the conventionspeech when he says: “I have visited the laid-off factoryworkers, and the communities crushed by our horrible

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 93

Table 1: Populist Discourse of Major Candidates/Party Leaders

US 2016 Spain 2015 Venezuela 2013Candidate Average Score Party Average Score Candidate Average Score

Bernie Sanders 1.5 Unidad Popular 1.3 Nícolas Maduro 1.7Donald Trump 0.8 Podemos 0.8 Henrique Capriles 1.5

Ted Cruz 0.8 Democracia i Libertad 0.8Marco Rubio 0.3 PP 0.1

Hillary Clinton 0.2 PSOE 0.1John Kasich 0.1 Ciudadanos 0.0

Figure 1: Individual Speech Scores by Candidate

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 94

Table 2: Subscores by Text for Donald Trump

Will of the people Conspiring elite

Announcement 0.2 1.3New Hampshire 2/9/2016 0.6 0.8S. Carolina (R), Nevada (D) 2/20/2016 1.0 0.9Super Tuesday 3/1/2016 0.2 0.9Informal Acceptance 5/3/2016 0.5 0.9New Jersey (R) 6/7/2016 1.0 1.4New York (R), N. Carolina (D) 6/22/2016 1.2 1.6Veterans Issues (R) 7/11/2016 0.6 1.5RNC 7/21/2016 0.7 1.0

Average 0.6 1.1

and unfair trade deals. These are the forgotten men andwomen of our country. People who work hard but nolonger have a voice. I AM YOUR VOICE.” That said,Trump still does not feature these elements as stronglyor as consistently as Sanders – he is, perhaps, only mod-erately populist.

II. What is Causing This?

The discussion of Trump against a background ofthe other candidates and their more consistent dis-courses raises the question of causes. At a micro-level,we can ask why Trump changed his discourse while thatof other candidates remained steady. Likewise, we canask how the radical populism of Sanders could be rec-onciled with the decisively pluralist discourse of Clin-ton (given the near rebellion within the ranks duringthe convention, the answer is “not very easily”). Thesequestions are not unimportant, since they get at thequestion of whether populism is a sincere feature of po-litical rhetoric or something instrumental.

But we can also look at the macro-level, where wecan ask what broader conditions facilitate the rise ofpopulist forces across countries and across time – andwhat kinds of consequences they have for democracy.Scholars and pundits in the U.S. have suggested roughlytwo explanations for this latest wave of populism (al-beit, as we have seen, a fairly moderate one). They aresimilar to explanations coming out of the broader com-parativist literature on radical-right populism. First, anumber of U.S. scholars and pundits are arguing that

populism grows out of economic resentment; specif-ically, the losers of globalization (especially manuallow-skilled labor) are seeking some kind of economicretrenchment or revenge against a political elite thathas abandoned them (e.g. Sides and Tesler, 2016). Sec-ond, another group of scholars argues that populism isinstead culturally driven, a response by holders of tradi-tional values to the inroads made by liberal progressives(e.g Inglehart and Norris, 2016).

While each argument has a grain of truth, they bothrepeat the mistakes made by a first generation of stud-ies of radical right populism in Western Europe. Thesestudies focused primarily on the radical right dimen-sion of these parties (i.e., their anti-immigrant views,opposition to EU governance, and welfare state chau-vinism), finding that support for these positions wasespecially common among the blue-collar sectors thatsupported these parties (Oesch, 2008; Ivarsflaten, 2008;van der Brug, Fennema and Tillie, 2005). While helpfulfor understanding the radical right, these theories laterstruggled to explain the inroadsmade by left-populist orother non-radical right populist parties, such as Pode-mos in Spain, SYRIZA in Greece, or the Five StarMove-ment in Italy, which have different issue profiles. Thus,more recent work on populism has shifted away from afocus on the narrow issues that drive particular flavorsof populism, and towards general explanations for pop-ulism per se. These theories focus on the substance ofpopulist ideas: the claim that politics is a cosmic strug-gle between the virtuous people and a conspiring elite.

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 95

Taking this populist argument at face value, these newertheories suggest that populism is a response to broadfailures of democratic representation (Hawkins, Readand Pauwels, Forthcoming; Kriesi, 2014; Oliver andRahn, 2016; Rovira Kaltwasser, 2014). According tothis view, populist forces arise whenever politicians col-lude to deny citizens their fundamental rights, especiallyequality before the law.

Seen in this comparative light, explanations that fo-cus either on economic globalization or culture shiftsare not wrong, but they are missing the larger picture.A comparative approach suggests that the current waveis similar to previous populist moments in U.S. history,reflecting a temporary disconnect between traditionalparties and their constituents, rather than widespreadoutrage at a political system that has routinely failed tosatisfy basic standards of governance. Much the samehas been said of the newer populist parties and move-ments in Western Europe, such as those in Spain (de laTorre, 2015). This is not the situation one finds in manyparts of Latin America and other developing democ-racies, and we should not expect to see the same over-whelming victories for highly radical populists in theUnited States.

III. Directions for Further Research

While the recent study of populism in the U.S. pres-idential campaign should be applauded, much moreresearch remains to be done. The work of compara-tivists provides some helpful avenues for Americanists(or ambitious comparativists) to consider.

First, of course, is the possibility of measuring thesupply of populist parties at earlier points in U.S. his-tory. Impressive work has been done recently for thelatter half of the twentieth century (Bonikowski andGidron, 2016), but a fully comparative focus wouldgreatly help this analysis. And there are one and a halfcenturies to study still, an impressive time series thatcannot be duplicated in very many other countries.

Second, scholars studying populism in the U.S.have available a number of comparative tools for study-ing the demand for populism at the individual levelthrough public opinion surveys (Akkerman, Muddeand Zaslove, 2014) and experiments (Bos, van der Brugand de Vreese, 2013; Hameleers, Bos and de Vreese,Forthcoming). While some of the first survey research

on populist attitudes was actually done in the U.S.(Hawkins, Riding and Mudde, 2012), there has beenvery little follow-up. And, somewhat embarrassingly,there are no published studies of populism using exper-iments in the United States. These tools are essential forstudying the mechanisms by which populist attitudesare created and activated, and they create opportunitiesfor political psychologists to study the intersection offraming, emotion, and other cognitive mechanisms.

References

Akkerman, Agnes, Cas Mudde and Andrej Zaslove. 2014.“How populist are the people? Measuring populist atti-tudes in voters.” Comparative Political Studies 47(9):1324–1353.

Barr, Rob. 2016. “Has Latin American populism spread tothe US?” Mobilizing Ideas, April 8.

Bonikowski, Bart and Noam Gidron. 2016. “The populiststyle in American politics: Presidential campaign dis-course, 1952–1996.” Social Forces 94(4):1593–1621.

Bos, Linda, Wouter van der Brug and Claes H. de Vreese.2013. “An experimental test of the impact of style andrhetoric on the perception of right-wing populist andmainstream party leaders.” Acta Politica 48(2):192–208.

Carroll, Rory. 2016. “Insult, provoke, repeat: How DonaldTrump became America’s Hugo Chávez.” The Guardian,June 22.

de la Torre, Carlos. 2015. “Podemos, el populismo y lademocracia.” El País, February 2.

Gerson,Michael. 2015. “Is populism on the rise in America?”The Washington Post, October 1.

Hameleers, Michael, Linda Bos and Claes H. de Vreese.Forthcoming. “‘They Did It’ The effects of emotionalizedblame attribution in populist communication.” Communi-cation Research .

Hamid, Shadi. 2016. “Donald Trump and the authoritariantemptation.” The Atlantic, May 6.

Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. 2011. “The fight for ‘realdemocracy’ at the heart of OccupyWall Street.” Foreign Af-fairs 11.

Hawkins, Kirk A. 2009. “Is Chávez populist? Measuring pop-ulist discourse in comparative perspective.” ComparativePolitical Studies 42(8):1040–1067.

Hawkins, Kirk A. and Bojana Kocijan. 2013. “Codebook formeasuring populist discourse: Populist discourse projectat Central European University.”.

Hawkins, Kirk A. and BrunoCastanho Silva. 2015. “Mappingpopulist parties in Europe and the Americas.”Working Pa-per.

Hawkins, Kirk A., Madeleine Read and Teun Pauwels. Forth-coming. Populism and its Causes. In The Oxford Hand-book of Populism, ed. Paulina Ochoa Espejo, Pierre Os-

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 96

tiguy, Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser and Paul A. Taggart.New York: Oxford University Press.

Hawkins, Kirk A., Scott Riding and Cas Mudde. 2012. “Mea-suring populist attitudes.” Working Paper Series on Polit-ical Concepts, ECPR Committee on Concepts and Meth-ods.

Inglehart, Ronald and Pippa Norris. 2016. “Trump, Brexit,and the rise of populism: Economic have-nots and cul-tural backlash.” HKS Faculty Research Working Paper Se-ries, RWP16-026.

Ivarsflaten, Elisabeth. 2008. “What unites right-wing pop-ulists in Western Europe? Re-examining grievance mo-bilization models in seven successful cases.” ComparativePolitical Studies 41(1):3–23.

Kazin, Michael. 1998. The Populist Persuasion: An AmericanHistory. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Kazin, Michael. 2016. “How can Donald Trump and BernieSanders both be ‘populist’?” The New York Times, March22.

Kriesi, Hanspeter. 2014. “The populist challenge.” West Euro-pean Politics 37(2):361–378.

Mudde, Cas. 2015. “The Trump phenomenon and the Euro-pean populist radical right.” The Washington Post, August26.

Norris, Pippa. 2016. “It’s not just Trump. Authoritarian pop-ulism Is rising across the West. Here’s why.” The Washing-ton Post, March 11.

Ochoa Espejo, Paulina, Pierre Ostiguy, Cristóbal Rovira Kalt-wasser and Paul A. Taggart. Forthcoming. Introduction.In The Oxford Handbook of Populism, ed. Paulina OchoaEspejo, Pierre Ostiguy, Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser andPaul A. Taggart. New York: Oxford University Press.

Oesch, Daniel. 2008. “Explaining workers’ support for right-wing populist parties in Western Europe: Evidence fromAustria, Belgium, France, Norway, and Switzerland.” In-ternational Political Science Review 29(3):349–373.

Oliver, J. Eric and Wendy M. Rahn. 2016. “Rise of theTrumpenvolk populism in the 2016 election.” The AN-NALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Sci-ence 667(1):189–206.

Rooduijn, Matthijs and Teun Pauwels. 2011. “Measuringpopulism: Comparing two methods of content analysis.”West European Politics 34(6):1272–1283.

Rovira Kaltwasser, Cristóbal. 2014. “The responses of pop-ulism to Dahl’s democratic dilemmas.” Political Studies62(3):470–487.

Seib, Gerald F. 2016. “Behind the rise of populism, economicangst.” The Wall Street Journal, January 20.

Sides, John and Michael Tesler. 2016. “How political sciencehelps explain the rise of Trump (part 3): It’s the economy,stupid.” The Washington Post, March 4.

Skocpol,Theda andVanessaWilliamson. 2013. TheTea Partyand the Remaking of Republican Conservatism. New York:Oxford University Press.

Stoehr, John. 2016. “Bernie’s bank-busting isn’t progressive.”US News & World Report, April 15.

Stone, Walter J. and Ronald Rapoport. 2008. Three’s a Crowd:The Dynamic of Third Parties, Ross Perot, and RepublicanResurgence. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

van der Brug, Wouter, Meindert Fennema and Jean Tillie.2005. “Why some anti-immigrant parties fail and otherssucceed A two-step model of aggregate electoral support.”Comparative Political Studies 38(5):537–573.

Wofford, Ben. 2016. “Pinochet. Chavez. Trump?” POLITICOMagazine, March 24.

Populism in the 2016 U.S. Electionby Joseph LowndesUniversity of Oregon

In the 2016 U.S. presidential election, populism hasbeen strongly evident in both the Democratic Party, inthe unsuccessful primary campaign of Vermont Sen-ator Bernie Sanders, and the Republican Party, in thesuccessful nomination of Donald Trump. The centralconflicts in both major parties turned – albeit very dif-ferently – on populist framings of outsiders versus in-siders, people versus elites, virtue versus corruption,and production versus parasitism. This is not to saythat either figure is a populist as such, rather that eachdeployed populist language and style. Ultimately, pop-ulism was more strongly distinguishable in the Trumpcampaign, which also resulted in a takeover of the na-tional party in this election season.

Populist phenomena in theUnited States differ fromthose elsewhere in two respects – one institutional,the other historical. Institutionally, the constitutionalframe of U.S. politics constrains and fragments politicalexpression. Indeed, where populism demands popu-lar sovereignty and unmediated representation of thepeople, the Constitution separates governance betweenthree branches of government, breaks up representa-tion over time and space (staggered elections, overlap-ping electoral units), divides sovereignty between thenational government and the states, and filters popularpolitical expression into two great parties. Thus thereare, on the one hand, no durable ‘populist’ parties asone finds in Europe, nor the possibility of populist ma-joritarian control of government as one finds in Latin

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 97

America. Rather, populism in the United States is ex-pressed in the discourse of political candidates, or insocial movements.

To say that populism occupies no formal space inthe U.S. political system is not to diminish its potentialpower within party politics however, and this leads toits second distinguishing feature. As historian MichaelKazin described it, U.S. populism has historically oper-ated as a ‘mode of persuasion’. This mode can be quitepowerful because it invokes the people – which in theU.S. context has always been the greatest form of legit-imation. This notion of the people is deeply rooted inMachiavellian republicanism – which has been an au-thorizing form of political discourse since the founding.Populism’s republican roots in the U.S. are also shapedby the ‘producerist ethic’, as historian Alexander Saxtoncalled it, which divides society between the great ma-jority who produce society’s wealth and the minority(both elites and the dependent poor) who are seen asparasitic. This is reflected in the Jeffersonian belief thatthe yeoman farmer, as neither a master nor a slave, wasthe proper subject of civic virtue, republican liberty, andself-rule.

Unlike past populists, Trump’sfollowers respond less to appeals totheir value as producers, which in afinancialized economy seemsnostalgic anyway, than to brutal rageagainst immigrants and Muslims,and a new generation of blackinsurgents, who along withestablishment elites are seen as theauthors of the misery Trumpsupporters feel themselves to beexperiencing.

For this reason U.S. populism remains open politi-cally, because authorizing definitions of the people can-not be given in advance. Populist movements emerge atmoments when powerful institutions can be convinc-ingly cast as corrupt or parasitic on the body politic. Itis then that myths of the latent authority that resides inthe people become more powerful. This is the tensionat the heart of U.S. populism – at moments of populistupheaval, the boundaries around the people can be fluid

and unstable. Yet the intelligibility of populist claims re-quire an idea of the people that can credibly be narratedwithin identifiable logics. In the United States, this logichas employed the binary of producer and parasite – onethat is often rendered in raced and gendered associa-tions, yet need not be. Its expressions can be egalitarianand inclusive, or hierarchical and exclusive, or some ofboth. It is most potent, I argue, when expressed throughstrong affect.

Both Sanders and Trump proclaimed themselvesto be tribunes of the people against entrenched elites.Announcing his candidacy in May 2015, Sanders thun-dered, “Today, with your support and the support ofmillions of people throughout this country, we begin apolitical revolution to transform our country econom-ically, politically, socially and environmentally. Today,we stand here and say loudly and clearly that; ‘Enoughis enough. This great nation and its government belongto all of the people, and not to a handful of billionaires,their Super-PACs and their lobbyists.’” Similarly, Trumpannounced his candidacy as a political outsider, an anti-establishment figure who would refuse donations fromWashington insiders.

To be sure, most presidential candidates sinceJimmy Carter in 1976 have in some sense run againstWashington, D.C. As trust in government has declinedacross the last half century, most contenders havesought to be saviors of a corrupt system. Sanders insome ways is both a political outsider and institutionalinsider. He has been an independent for his entire po-litical career, only changing his partisan affiliation toDemocrat to run for president. Yet he has had a longpolitical career, first as mayor of Burlington, Vermont;then as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives,and finally as a U.S. Senator. Trump, meanwhile, pre-sented himself as an outsider by virtue of his personalwealth, which he argued kept him free of ‘special inter-ests’.

Sanders ran a campaign that drew explicitly on thepopulist language of the Occupy Wall Street movement,claiming to speak for the 99%. Identifying Clinton withthe pro-financial wing of the Democratic Party, he wasable to paint Clinton as a political and economic elite,laying at her feet the enormous gap between the veryrich and everyone else. “I don’t think I have to explainto the American people what Wall Street did to thiseconomy,” he said in a typical campaign statement about

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 98

Clinton. “Are you qualified to be president of the UnitedStates when you’re raising millions of dollars from WallStreet?” Trump also claimed special connection to thepeople, drawing on old Nixonian language of ‘the silentmajority’ and the ‘forgotten American’. Trump arguedthat he alone among his Republican rivals was a truth-teller, someone who could represent what Americansreally think, and perhaps more importantly, feel.

Key to the populist politics is the claim of corrup-tion – that small groups conspire against the people.Sanders supporters across the campaign season cameto see the Democratic National Committee (DNC) asa corrupt force doing all in its power to rig the partynomination process on Clinton’s behalf. This sen-timent exploded into tumultuous theater during theNevada Democratic caucuses, and gained steam amongSanders voters prior to the Democratic National Con-vention when Wikileaks released internal DNC docu-ments, some of which evinced some support for Clin-ton among DNC staff members. Although the emailsdid not demonstrate a clear conspiracy against Sanders,the backlash was severe enough to get DNC chair Deb-orah Wasserman-Schultz relieved of her position, andthousands of Sanders supporters demonstrated both inand outside the Democratic Convention in the days thatfollowed.

Language of corruption has been fundamentalto the Trump campaign, particularly in the generalelection. He refers to his Democratic rival solely as“Crooked Hillary” and her vice presidential candidateas “Corrupt Kaine.” Hammering away at charges of cor-ruption concerning Benghazi, the email scandal, theClinton Foundation, and more – Trump has made thevenality of his opponent a central feature of his rhetoric.

Producerism was also a strong element in both theSanders and Trump campaigns. Both spoke of bringingmanufacturing jobs back to the US, and sought to doso through criticism of free trade – an issue that tiescriticism of unrepresentative elites to the produceristethic. Yet while both spoke of it on the campaign trail,Trump inhabited the stronger version of it, linking na-tional decline to the absence of production. Throughouthis campaign, Trump told crowds: “We don’t win anymore.” “We don’t make anything.” “We are losing somuch.”

Trump is arguably a more populist candidate than

was Sanders. That is partly because right-wing pop-ulism has had far greater purchase in the United Statesover the last half century, but also because of Trump’s mastery of performance and ability to generate affec-tive popular identifications. Stated in its barest form,Trumpism links anxious racial standing to economicprecarity, masculine worth, and political abandonment.Each of these terms impacts and amplifies the otherthrough circuits that are at once rhetorical, visual, andemotional.

The populist politics that originally emerged aswhatRichard Nixon famously called the ‘silent majority’ in1968 was forged in opposition to the black freedommovement and related anti-racist struggles, feminism,gay rights, and the counterculture. This politically con-servative identitywas steeped in resentment, and indeeddrew strength, focus, and direction from its determina-tion to maintain whiteness, masculinity, the hetero-patriarchal family, and global might as the governingterms of U.S. political culture.

Today, this formation is still marked by resentment,but it can no longer sustain the dream of white majori-tarianism in a demographically changing electorate, thecomfort of economic security after decades of growingprecarity, nor the perceivedmasculine virtue of produc-erism in an increasingly financialized economy. It wasin this context that the billionaire deal-maker and realitytelevision star yoked traditions of right-wing populismto contemporary mass-media skills to produce a sin-gularly affective political campaign of rage, violence,melancholy, and profound intra-party disruption thatdramatically exploited fissures already present in theGOP.

Observers have been continually startled by theopen white nationalism that marks both Trump’s ownactions and those of his supporters. Trump announcedhis candidacy by calling Mexicans rapists and crimi-nals, and promising to build a wall across the borderwith Mexico. He continued to expand the dimensionsof his racist platform by calling for the tracking of Mus-lims within the U.S. and a ban on those who seek toenter the country.

The 2016 presidential campaign of Donald Trumpwas alsomarked by violence in his rhetoric, at his rallies,and among white nationalists more generally. Negativecomments about Latino immigrants and Muslims drew

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 99

people to his rallies, where physical assaults on blackand Latino protesters were common. His rhetoric alsoinspired attacks, including two men severely beatingand urinating on a homeless Latino man in Boston, oneof whom said afterward, “Donald Trump was right; allthese illegals need to be deported.”Far fromdenouncingthe assault, Trump said when asked about it, “I will saythat people who are following me are very passionate.They love this country and they want this country to begreat again. They are passionate” (Moyer, 2015).

The relationship between transgressive rage andracism is complex. Right-wing populism in the U.S.was conceived principally in opposition to the blackfreedom struggle of the 1960s, but also in opposition tochanging politics of gender and family. The represen-tative figure of populism was an aggrieved white mandisplaced from his centrality in politics, the workplace,and the home. Themoral force of what came to be calledidentity politics forbade this figure from expressions ofracism, chauvinism, and so on. Hence the extraordinarypopularity of the phrase ‘politically correct’. Within thislogic, any opposition to expressions of racism, misog-yny, or homophobia are acts of repression – indeed of‘repressed truths’.

In the context of right-wing populism, rage againstgovernment officials on behalf of an aggrieved majorityis a well-developed pleasure, and one that evinces notonly a ‘return of the repressed’, but what psychoanalytictheorist Melanie Klein called projective identification.In other words, the violent rhetoric of populism de-pends on the notion that you are responding to threatsof violence. Political scientist Pierre Ostiguy discusseswhat he calls a “combative pleasure principle,” expressedin the sociocultural dimension of populism. This trans-gression can be rhetoric that provides fantasies of vio-lence.

Racial violence underscored the campaign in nu-merous ways. While Trump unabashedly employed thelanguage of white supremacy and misogyny, rage, andeven violence, at Trump rallies was like nothing seenin decades. Assaults on journalists and protestors ofcolor became a near regular event, while the numberof assaults on people of color and Muslims spiked intothe high hundreds during Trump’s campaign. Fromwhite racists shouting “Trump 2016” while shootinginto a crowd and wounding two Black Lives Matterprotestors in Minneapolis to the burning down of a

mosque in North Dakota, Trumpism emerged as a so-cial phenomenon beyond electoral politics.

This urge to violence toward protesters easily re-calls George Wallace in 1968 threatening to run overany demonstrator who lay down in front of his car. In-deed, in a strategy that anticipates Trump, the Wal-lace campaign purposely held rallies in venues thatwere too small in order to encourage fistfights betweenprotesters and supporters. It also echoes white populistPat Buchanan’s 1992 GOP convention speech when heassociated feminism, gay rights, and pornography withthe LosAngeles riots that year, and compared theGOP’spolitical task to the federal troops called in to Los Ange-les, exhorting the party to “take the country back blockby block.” Yet Trump is neither a third party candidate,nor an inter-party insurgent who could be ultimatelymarginalized and contained, but the party nominee forpresident.

The other side of this rage was the language of per-manent loss. While Trump’s campaign slogan was“Make America Great Again”, much more emphasiswas placed on defeat. Unlike the leaders of past pop-ulist revolts, Trump seems less a champion of workingpeople than a figure who confirms their debased sta-tus. Unlike past populists, Trump’s followers respondless to appeals to their value as producers, which in afinancialized economy seems nostalgic anyway, thanto brutal rage against immigrants and Muslims, and anew generation of black insurgents, who along with es-tablishment elites are seen as the authors of the miseryTrump supporters feel themselves to be experiencing.In the Super Tuesday primaries, Trumpperformedmoststrongly in the counties where middle-aged whites weredying the fastest.

The populist revolt in the Republican Party allowsus to see how a party responds to extraordinary stressunder structural circumstances it no longer controls.Given the high correlation between racism and nativismon the one hand and economic liberalism on the other,and the growing prevalence of voters with this profilein the GOP, it would appear likely that racial populismwill become an even more pronounced trend over timein the party, even as party elites have sought to empha-size multiculturalism, not class, as the basis for partyexpansion among donors and voters. These elementspulling in opposite directions have created an historiccrisis for the party. Trump is the first figure to exploit

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 100

this crisis to the great detriment of the party, but he isunlikely to be the last.

References

Moyer, Justin Wm. 2015. “Trump says fans are ‘very passion-ate’ after hearing one of them allegedly assaulted Hispanicman.” The Washington Post, August 21.

Populism, Nationalism, and U.S. ForeignPolicy

by David SmithUniversity of Sydney

“Americanism, not globalism, will be our credo.”Donald Trump, August 9 2016.

The 2016 election, and particularly the candidacy ofDonald Trump, has seen a rupture in public discoursebetween American nationalism and globalism. The op-position between nationalism and globalism has beenbuilding since the end of the Cold War, when sharedconsensus between foreign policy elites and ordinaryAmericans about their country’s role in the world be-gan to break down. This gradual breakdown, exacer-bated by the Iraq War, has led to a populist opening forTrump and other anti-globalist candidates, who framesometimes-radical foreign policy alternatives in termsof moral opposition between elites and ordinary citi-zens. A key part of Trump’s appeal is his claim thatthe domestic problems of the United States stem fromthe weakness of American elites on the global stage.While he is sometimes mischaracterized as an ‘isola-tionist’,’ Trump’s vow to ‘make America great again’ isa promise to restore unconstrained American domi-nance, not to abdicate it. This essay traces the break-down of the nationalist-globalist link from the end ofthe Cold War, and then examines the extent to whichTrump’s domineering nationalist anti-globalism fits amatrix of populism that may allow it to flourish beyondthe candidacy (or presidency) of Trump.

I. Nationalism and Globalism from Truman to Trump

Throughout the decades of the Cold War, the conceptsof nationalism and globalism sat comfortably side by

side. As Ambrose and Brinkley (2010, i.) note, “TheUnited States of theColdWar period, like ancient Rome,was concerned with all the political problems in theworld ... Americans had a sense of power, of bigness,of destiny.” John F. Kennedy’s “Ich bin ein Berliner”speech and Ronald Reagan’s “Tear down this wall”speech, delivered more than two decades apart, wereemblematic of American nationalist globalism. Publicconsensus in support of ColdWar ‘leadership of the freeworld’ was firmly grounded in nationalist sentiment, awidespread belief that national greatness imposed theresponsibility of global leadership in the fight againstcommunism (Fousek, 2000). The United States govern-ment, as it committed its political and military weightto increasingly remote sites of engagement throughoutthe world, could rely on public acceptance of the ideathat American national interest was synonymous withmaintaining the global order. The United States wasboth the chief benefactor and chief beneficiary of thisorder, what Ikenberry (2009) describes as the “ownerand operator of the liberal capitalist political system.”Even the disaster of Vietnam, while it shook confidencein the military and the government, did not dispel theidea that American prosperity and security dependedon global hegemony. If anything, the national humil-iation of Vietnam and the ‘malaise’ of the second halfof the seventies created the conditions for a renewalof nationalist globalism under Reagan, framed as theUnited States reassuming its rightful position in theworld (Lieven, 2004).

The disappearance of the existential threat ofcommunism began to expose contradictions in thenationalism-globalism nexus that would ultimately leadto a populist opening for anti-globalist politicians. Atthe outset of the 1990s, George H.W. Bush retained andeven accelerated the rhetoric of global leadership as anobligation of American greatness. In an address before ajoint sitting of Congress to announce action against Iraqover its invasion of Kuwait, Bush spoke of the need fora “new world order” of freedom and peace guaranteedby American military strength and the cooperation ofits allies, including the newly liberalizing Soviet Union(Bush, 1990). Despite the apparent success and pop-ularity of the Gulf War, foreign policy realists becameincreasingly disquieted by a new American interven-tionism that seemed decoupled from any sense of na-tional interest or respect for global political realities.George Kennan, like fellow Cold War intellectuals Wal-ter Lippmann, Gabriel Almond, and Henry Kissinger,

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 101

saw the crusading moralism of the American public asa serious and perennial danger to prudent foreign pol-icy. Reflecting on The US mission in Somalia in 1993,Kennan worried that “if American Foreign Policy fromhere on out ... is to be controlled by popular emotionalimpulses, and particularly ones provoked by the com-mercial television industry, then there is no place – notonly for myself, but for what have traditionally beenregarded as the responsible deliberative organs of ourgovernment, in both executive and legislative branches”(Kennan, 1993).

Kennan, however, was wrong to attribute 1990s in-terventionism to popular sentiment, especially when itcame to humanitarian interventions in distant or evennearby countries. Jentleson and Britton (1998) foundthat while theAmerican public was generally supportiveof actions aimed at containing foreign policy aggressors,it was less comfortable with humanitarian interventionsand generally opposed to actions aimed at forcing inter-nal political change in other countries. Kull and Destler(1999) showed that although foreign policy-makers atthe end of the Cold War believed Americans wanteda reduced global diplomatic presence while maintain-ing high levels of defense spending, the opposite wasactually true, according to opinion polls that both thePresident and Congress usually ignored. And Drezner(2008) used opinion polls of both foreign policy elitesand the general public to show that realists had it back-wards: ordinary citizens generally had far more ‘realist’and less crusading views about America’s role in theworld than foreign policy elites. Americans no longersaw the benefits, but were increasingly conscious of thecosts, of policing a post-Cold War world. And despitebuoyant bipartisan rhetoric about the potential of anever more integrated global economy, many citizens re-sented the post-Westphalian intrusions of globalization,a system that operates beyond the sovereign authorityof the United States, even within its own borders (Iken-berry, 2009).

George H.W. Bush’s ‘new world order’ coinagewould ultimately come to symbolize not a new era ofAmerican globalism but a dark backlash against it, es-pecially on the right. Former Nixon speechwriter PatBuchanan campaigned for the Republican nominationin 1992 and 1996 on a program of moral traditional-ism at home and isolationism abroad. His nationalistopposition to free trade deals and immigration wouldfind echoes in Trump’s campaign twenty years later.

Buchanan was joined in his opposition to the NorthAmerican Free Trade Agreement by third party can-didate Ross Perot, who warned of the threats it posedto American jobs and sovereignty. Perot won 18.9% ofthe popular vote in 1992, and 8.4% in 1996. He andBuchanan were both referred to as ‘populists’ in themedia (Wilentz, 1993; Stark, 1996), and Buchanan ex-alted in leading ‘peasants with pitchforks’ against hisown party’s elites. By the end of the Clinton era, Re-publican Presidential candidate George W. Bush wascampaigning on a ‘humble foreign policy’ that acknowl-edged the limits of U.S. action in the world. In a debatewith Democratic candidate Al Gore, Bush stated “I justdon’t think it’s the role of the United States to walk intoa country and say, ‘we do it this way, so should you’”(Newshourl, 2000).

Despite widespread criticism ofTrump’s foreign policy as‘incoherent’, his foreign policyworldview is one of his few points oflong-term political consistency. Putsimply, Trump has believed fordecades that the global orderunderwritten by the United Statesdoes not serve American interests,and needs to be renegotiated.

George W. Bush would go on to deal a major blowto nationalist globalism himself by way of the Iraq War.Bush framed the war, and his administration’s wholeapproach to the post 9/11 world, in resolutely nation-alist terms. This won popular support, making himappear, in contrast to the internationalist Clinton, as aleader who would use the military decisively in Amer-ican interests (Lieven, 2004). Dividing the world intocountries that were ‘with us or against us’, and promisinga bloody end to America’s enemies, Bush tapped intoan important populist tradition in American foreignpolicy, which Walter Russell Mead terms ‘Jacksonian-ism’. Jacksonians, according to Mead, “are prepared tosupport wholesale violence against enemy civilians inthe interest of victory; they do not like limited wars forlimited goals. Although they value allies and believethat the United States must honor its word, they do notbelieve in institutional constraints on the United States’freedom to act, unilaterally if necessary, in self-defense.”

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 102

(Mead, 2011, 35).

Bush flaunted his willingness to act unilaterally andin violation of numerous international conventions.However, he broke with the Jacksonians’“deep skep-ticism about the United States’ ability to create a liberalworld order” (Mead, 2011, 35). Bush went much fur-ther than his father had gone in his ambition to createsuch an order. He wanted not just to defeat SaddamHussein and the Taliban, but to bring liberal democracyto Iraq and Afghanistan, which he saw as the surest wayof bringing about wholesale political change in theMid-dle East, change that would ultimately make the UnitedStates safer and more prosperous. The rhetorical ide-alism, if not the rapacious conduct of this approach,was more reminiscent of Woodrow Wilson than An-drew Jackson, leading Peter Katzenstein to brand it“Wilsonianism with heavy boots” (Katzenstein, 2005,305). The expensive failure of this project led to a puristJacksonian backlash within American conservatism.While some libertarian and paleoconservative criticslike Buchanan or Ron Paul advocate a return to ‘Jeffer-sonian’ principles – an end to all ‘entangling alliances’and the complete return of the military to homelanddefense – the bulk of right-wing responses to Bush’sfailure, from Sarah Palin and the Tea Party to Ted Cruzand Donald Trump, have been framed in the languageof domination rather than withdrawal.

Effectively campaigning against the party whosenomination he sought, Trump denounced the Bushesand the Iraq War more brazenly during the 2016 pri-mary debates than any previous Republican had done,to the point of denying (falsely) that he had ever sup-ported it. Far from punishing him for violating a taboo,Republican voters rewarded him for his mockery anddismissal of party elites. Even Trump’s slur againstJohn McCain’s war heroism (“I prefer people whodon’t get captured”) seemed to act as a positive sig-nal to the Republican electorate that he would be un-bound by political correctness or decorum of any kind.Trump insists the United States should have ‘taken’ Iraq’s oil during the war. He has cited apocryphal storiesabout war crimes committed by American troops in thePhilippines under Pershing as his preferred model forcounter-terrorism, further demonstrating the affinitybetween Jacksonianism and imperialism (Cha, 2015).But Trump’s attack on foreign policy orthodoxy goesfar beyond the Jacksonian backlash against the Bushes.

Despite widespread criticism of Trump’s foreignpolicy as ‘incoherent’, his foreign policy worldview isone of his few points of long-term political consistency.Put simply, Trump has believed for decades that theglobal order underwritten by the United States does notserve American interests, and needs to be renegotiated.Trump held this view before the end of the ColdWar. In1987, he published an open letter in theNewYork Times,Washington Post, and Boston Globe with the headline“There’s nothingwrongwithAmerica’s ForeignDefensePolicy that a little backbone won’t cure.” Trump toldreaders that:

For decades, Japan and other nations havebeen taking advantage of the United States... Theworld is laughing atAmerican politi-cians as we protect ships we don’t own, car-rying oil we don’t need, destined for allieswho won’t help ... Make Japan, Saudi Ara-bia and others pay for the protection weextend to our allies. Let’s help our farm-ers, our sick and our homeless by takingfrom some of the greatest profit machinesever created – machines created and nur-tured by us. “Tax”these wealthy nations,not America. End our huge deficits, re-duce our taxes, and let America’s economygrow unencumbered by the cost of defend-ing those who can easily afford to pay us forthe defense of their freedom. Let’s not letour great country be laughed at anymore.(Trump 1987, quoted in Kruse (2016)).

This statement closely mirrors Trump’s 2016rhetoric on alliances, which has generated the mostalarm from the foreign policy establishment. Becausehe has little time for the alliance system and views it asa waste of American resources, Trump has often beencharacterized as an ‘isolationist’, which seems in keep-ing with his adoption of Charles Lindbergh’s ‘AmericaFirst’ slogan (see e.g. Haass (2016)). This, however, is aserious misreading of Trump.

Trump does not, like Pat Buchanan, argue for with-drawal and modesty in foreign affairs. He wants theUnited States to engage with the world, but on its ownand much tougher terms. Trump wants domination,not leadership. Foreign policy is central to Trump’spolitical appeal because he attributes nearly every do-mestic problem to other countries getting the better ofthe United States. On his signature issue of immigra-

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 103

tion, for example, he claims “we are the only country inthe world whose immigration system places the needsof other nations ahead of our own.” Illegal immigrationis not a matter of “a few individuals seeking a better wayof life,” but is a way for foreign governments to “get ridof their worst people without paying any price for theirbad behaviour” (Trump, 2015, Ch.3). Trump is not op-posed to foreign trade, but he believes inept Americannegotiators have given away the advantages the U.S.should enjoy in trade deals thanks to its superior la-bor force and markets, costing the country good jobsand wages (Trump, 2015, Ch.8). Trump does not, as thequotation above shows, want towithdraw from alliances– he wants them to turn a profit, which should be thenatural state of affairs given that the U.S. supplies theoverwhelming firepower. Themessage is consistent: theUnited States should be winning, but is not. This is botheconomically draining and psychologically humiliating.Trump essentially presents a wounded, imperial versionof the old connection between national greatness andinternational responsibility: a country as mighty as theUnited States should be demanding tribute from othercountries, not allowing them to take advantage of itsgenerosity.

II. The Populist Moment in United States Foreign Policy

A Pew poll in May 2016 found that 57% of respondentsbelieve the U.S. should “deal with our own problemsand let others deal with theirs the best they can,”whileonly 37% favored “helping other countries deal withtheir problems.” In the same survey, 49% of respon-dents (and 65% of Trump supporters) agreed that U.S.involvement in the global economy was a “bad thing,”because it “lowers wages and costs jobs.” Only 44% ofrespondents agreed the global economy was a “goodthing”because it “creates new markets and growth.” Re-sults such as these, along with the success of candi-dates Trump, Sanders, and Cruz, have led numerouscommentators to declare a new era of populism thatthreatens the traditional precepts of U.S. foreign policy(Rothwell, 2016; Heilbrunn, 2016; Fontaine and Ka-plan, 2016). Richard Haass, President of the Council onForeign Relations, summarizes the situation in starklypopulist terms. The first great debate about post-ColdWar foreign policy, between those who wanted to stabi-lize theworld and those whowanted to liberalize it, tookplace between groups of elites. The second great debate,“on whether the U.S. should retain the internationalleading role it has held since the end of World War II,” is

taking place between elites and non-elites (Haass, 2016).

While not all of Trump’s supporters may hew to avision of imperial domination, a mood of disenchant-ment with their country’s role in the international sys-tem probably makes them receptive to his claim thatAmerican elites have placed the needs of other coun-tries ahead of their own. To what extent does this fita ‘populist’ matrix? In one sense, because foreign pol-icy is the area of politics traditionally most dominatedby elite consensus (Saunders, 2014, 2015), any majorchallenge to that consensus has the potential to be seenin populist terms. Trump has framed his campaign interms of sweeping away incompetent elites, and some ofthe detailed and vehement criticism he receives comesfrom experienced foreign policy operatives. But it isworth exploring further how much Trump’s nationalistanti-globalism conforms to populist tropes, styles, andworld-views. The future of nationalist anti-globalism asa political force after Trump may depend on the extentto which it has a genuinely populist appeal.

The parties are internally polarizedon foreign policy, with the‘establishment’ wings of each partycontrolling foreign policies at oddswith grassroots activists on bothsides. Under these circumstances,we should expect figures such asTrump, Cruz, and Sanders to appealto the idea that Washington is asrotten in the realm of foreign policyas it is in any other area, and that theelites of their own parties are barelydistinguishable from the other side.

Core to most scholarly definitions of populism is aworldview based around a moral opposition betweencorrupt elites and the virtuous ‘people’. (Oliver andRahn, 2016; Bonikowski and Gidron, 2016; Inglehartand Norris, 2016; Moffitt, 2016). This is usually cast asan internal social division. The people are the virtuousmass of society who work, produce, and sacrifice for thenation, and expect basic guarantees of security and dig-nity in return. The elites are those who hold economic,political, and cultural power in society, along with theirallies on the unproductive and criminalmargins of soci-ety, including those who have no right to be there in the

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 104

first place. Ordinary people find themselves squeezedfrom the top by elites who take the lion’s share of whatthey produce, and from the bottom by a threateningunderclass who enjoy elite patronage in exchange forpolitical support (Kazin, 1998).

In this worldview, both the political problem andthe political remedy is national. National elites deprivetheir own people of what is rightfully theirs and al-low increasingly exorbitant claims by those who haveno right to make them. The people must reclaim theirrightful share of the nation’s prosperity, hold elites ac-countable to basic morality and common sense, andexclude those who have benefited from the social com-pact while having no stake in it. Populism, then, usuallydemands a nationalism that is inward rather than out-ward facing, a nationalism of repair and rebirth. It seeksto supplant poisonous social divisions with a renewednational consciousness, and to replace privilege and pa-tronage with the natural allocation of rewards to thedeserving, as defined by the national ethos. And it re-quires clear boundaries to be drawn around ‘the people’to prevent elites and political opportunists from over-powering them by enlisting outsiders.

In the United States, the link between populism andnationalism is relatively straightforward when it comesto trade and immigration. Cosmopolitanism and freetrade undermine the privileges of being an ordinary cit-izen of the wealthiest and most powerful country onearth. They benefit wealthy, mobile elites, and the cit-izens of other countries (as immigrants or exporters)while weakening national solidarity and standards ofliving. The slogan “America First” concisely expressespopulist disdain for elites who they believe have tradedaway America’s advantages for the sake of personal en-richment and globalist ideology. But how does pop-ulism manifest on the other side of US foreign policy –the projection of American interests abroad?

While there have been many waves of populism ofdifferent colors in American history, it surfaces farmorerarely in the context of outward-facing foreign policy.In the traditional self-image of American politics, for-eign policy is a different realm altogether, a place wheresocial and partisan divisions melt away – “politics stopsat the water’ edge,” in the words of Arthur Vandenburg,who chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committeein 1947. On the one hand, this vision seems to fulfil thepopulist project of creating a unified national body in

which both sacrifice and reward are shared. This wouldhave seemed particularly true when Vandenburg firstsaid it, in the immediate aftermath of the Second WorldWar, and as the early Cold War was taking shape. Thedefeat of one existential enemy and the challenge posedby another sharpened an ingroup-outgroup boundarythat was truly national, suppressing for a while painfulinternal divisions that could not be reconciled underany simple conception of ‘the people’. On the otherhand, this conforms to a very elitist idea of foreign pol-icy as something that should be insulated from normaldemocratic politics, the ‘high politics’ among nationsthat is so important it has to be left to skilled experts(see e.g. Lippmann, 1943; Almond, 1950).

The current populist moment in foreign policy ismade possible by the fact that politics, in 2016, ob-viously does not stop at the water’s edge (Milner andTingley, 2015). Four years of Republican-led Congres-sional inquiries into the attack on Benghazi, targetingtheDemocratic presidential candidate, are symptomaticof the extension of partisan polarization to foreign pol-icy (Gries, 2014). Furthermore, the parties are inter-nally polarized on foreign policy, with the ‘establish-ment’ wings of each party controlling foreign policiesat odds with grassroots activists on both sides. Underthese circumstances, we should expect figures such asTrump, Cruz, and Sanders to appeal to the idea thatWashington is as rotten in the realm of foreign policyas it is in any other area, and that the elites of their ownparties are barely distinguishable from the other side.In a 2016 debate between Bernie Sanders and HillaryClinton, for example, Clinton invoked Henry Kissingerin support of her foreign policy, leading Sanders to re-tort that he was proud Kissinger was no friend of his.Populist potential, then, will exist in foreign policy ar-guments for as long as the current polarization contin-ues, both between and within parties. The 2016 electionmay play a large role in determining whether Trump’sracially-charged, domineering nationalism remains thedominant form of that populism.

References

Almond, Gabriel Abraham. 1950. The American People andForeign Policy. New York: Brace and Company.

Ambrose, Stephen E. and Douglas E. Brinkley. 2010. Rise toGlobalism: American Foreign Policy Since 1938. New York:Penguin.

Bonikowski, Bart and Noam Gidron. 2016. “The populist

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 105

style in American politics: Presidential campaign dis-course, 1952–1996.” Social Forces 94(4):1593–1621.

Bush, George H.W. 1990. “Address before a joint session ofCongress (September 11, 1990).” Miller Center, Universityof Virginia.

Cha, Taesuh. 2015. “The formation of American exceptionalidentities: A three-tier model of the ‘standard of civiliza-tion’ in US foreign policy.” European Journal of Interna-tional Relations 21(4):743–767.

Drezner, Daniel W. 2008. “The realist tradition in Americanpublic opinion.” Perspectives on Politics 6(1):51–70.

Fontaine, Richard and Robert D. Kaplan. 2016. “How pop-ulism will change foreign policy: The Bernie and Trumpeffects.” Foreign Affaris 6:277–296.

Fousek, John. 2000. To Lead the Free World: American Na-tionalism and the Cultural Roots of the Cold War. ChapelHill: University of North Carolina Press.

Gries, Peter. 2014. The Politics of American Foreign Policy:How Ideology Divides Liberals and Conservatives Over For-eign Affairs. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Haass, Richard N. 2016. “The isolationist temptation.” WallStreet Journal, August 5.

Heilbrunn, Jacob. 2016. “The GOP’s new foreign-policy pop-ulism.” The National Interest, February 17.

Ikenberry, G John. 2009. “Liberal internationalism 3.0:America and the dilemmas of liberal world order.” Perspec-tives on Politics 7(1):71–87.

Inglehart, Ronald and Pippa Norris. 2016. “Trump, Brexit,and the rise of populism: Economic have-nots and cul-tural backlash.” HKS Faculty Research Working Paper Se-ries, RWP16-026.

Jentleson, Bruce W and Rebecca L Britton. 1998. “Stillpretty prudent: Post-Cold War American public opinionon the use of military force.” Journal of Conflict Resolution42(4):395–417.

Katzenstein, Peter J. 2005. Semisovereignty in UnitedGermany. In Governance in Contemporary Germany:The Semisovereign State Revisited, ed. Simon Green andWilliam E. Paterson. Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress.

Kazin, Michael. 1998. The Populist Persuasion: An AmericanHistory. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Kennan, George F. 1993. “Somalia, through a glass darkly.”The New York Times, September 30.

Kruse, Michael. 2016. “The true story of Trump’s first cam-paign speech—in 1987.” POLITICO Magazine, February5.

Kull, Steven and I.M. Destler. 1999. Misreadin the Public: TheMyth of a New Isolationism. Washington D.C.: BrookingsInstitution Press.

Lieven, Anatol. 2004. America Right or Wrong: An Anatomyof American Nationalism. New York: Harper Collins.

Lippmann, Walter. 1943. US Foreign Policy: Shield of the Re-public. Boston: Little, Brown and Company.

Mead, Walter Russell. 2011. “The Tea Party and Americanforeign policy: What populism means for globalism.” For-eign Affairs 90(2):28–44.

Milner, Helen V. and Dustin Tingley. 2015. Sailing the Wa-ter’s Edge: TheDomestic Politics of American Foreign Policy.Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Moffitt, Benjamin. 2016. The Global Rise of populism: Perfor-mance, Political Style, and Representation. Stanford: Stan-ford University Press.

Newshourl, PBS. 2000. “Presidential debate excerpts: Gov.George W. Bush vs. Vice President Al Gore.” October 12.

Oliver, J. Eric and Wendy M. Rahn. 2016. “Rise of theTrumpenvolk populism in the 2016 election.” The AN-NALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Sci-ence 667(1):189–206.

Rothwell, Jonathan T. 2016. “Explaining nationalist politicalviews: The case of Donald Trump.”Working Paper, Gallup.

Saunders, Elizabeth N. 2014. Good Democratic Leadershipin Foreign Affairs: An Elite-centred Approach. In GoodDemocratic Leadership: On Prudence and Judgment, ed.John Kane and Haig Patapan. Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress.

Saunders, Elizabeth N. 2015. “War and the inner circle:Democratic elites and the politics of using force.” SecurityStudies 24(3):466–501.

Stark, Steven. 1996. “Right-wing populist: Pat Buchanan’spresidential campaign is testing a political potentiality thatcould have a future in downsizing America.” The Atlantic,February.

Trump, Donald. 2015. Great Again: How to Fix CrippledAmerica. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Wilentz, Sean. 1993. “Pox populi: Ross Perot and the corrup-tion of populism.” New Republic, August 9.

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 106

Special Topic: Brexit

Brexit and Beyond: Euroscepticism in aComparative Perspective

by Catherine E. De VriesUniversity of Oxford

On 23 June 2016, against the recommendation of mostpolitical and economic experts, the British people votedto leave the European Union (EU). The result sent ashock wave through the political establishment andultimately led to the resignation of the British PrimeMinister, David Cameron. The Brexit vote has graveeconomic and political consequences for the UnitedKingdom (UK). Over 100 billion pounds was wiped offthe London Stock Exchange in the immediate aftermathof the vote (although it has since recovered), the Britishpound and the 10-year government bond yield havefallen to record lows, and the UK has been stripped ofits triple-A credit rating. In a grim assessment of post-Brexit Britain, the National Institute of Economic andSocial Research predicts that theUK economy has a fiftyper cent chance of slipping into a recession next year,which could result in the loss of 320,000 jobs (Farrell,2016). The two major political forces in Westminster,the Conservative Party and the Labour Party, find them-selves in disarray over how to shape the UK’s relation-ship with the EU. The new Prime Minister Theresa Mayfaces the daunting task of organizing the British exitfrom the EU while keeping the UK together. Scotland,Northern Ireland, and London voted to remain in theEU, while Wales and the rest of England voted to leave.TheUK is currently characterized by enormous politicaland economic uncertainty.

I. Brexit: A Leap into the Unknown

Given that the British economy benefits from EU mem-bership and the UK has secured opt-outs and rebates,why did many British citizens favor a highly uncer-tain future over the arguably imperfect, but nonethe-less beneficial status quo? This type of risky behaviorruns not only against commonly held stereotypes about‘the British’ (‘keep calm and carry on’ is the official na-tional slogan), but also against what we know aboutvoting behavior in referendums. Referendums are usu-ally characterized by a status quo bias. A status quo biasrefers to the tendency to favor decisions that maintainthe current state of affairs, the status quo. Faced with

new options, people often stick to what they know. Forexample, voters often choose to reelect an incumbentto Congress over an unknown candidate. Translatingthese insights to referendums, LeDuc (2003) found atendency for people to vote increasingly for the statusquo as the campaign progresses. This occurs even whena large majority prefers to reject the status quo at thestart of a campaign. Both political scientists and tradersexpected to observe a status quo bias in the Brexit vote,as demonstrated by the rallying ofU.S. stockmarkets theevening before the vote. Yet, despite the large amount ofpolitical and economic uncertainty associated with anexit from the EU, a (narrow) majority of British votersvoted to leave.

People are only willing to take therisk of leaving the EU when theyperceive the alternative, theircountry without EU membership, asbetter, even if only slightly so.

II. Brexit and Euroscepticism: The Role of National Ref-erence Points

Support for EU membership is commonly perceivedas the result of two factors: economic interest and na-tional identity (Hobolt and de Vries, 2016). Work oneconomic interest stresses that market integration fa-vors citizens with higher levels of human capital (edu-cation and occupational skills) and income, and, con-sequently, such individuals will be more supportive ofEuropean integration (Gabel and Palmer, 1995; Gabel,2009). Studies on identity highlight that the Europeanproject, however, is not only about market integration,but also about the creation of a sense of European polit-ical identity andmutual obligation (Hooghe andMarks,2009). As a result, people’s strong attachment to theirnation and their perceptions of people from other cul-tures also influences their support for the EU (Hoogheand Marks, 2005, 2009; McLaren, 2006). Both explana-tions are important, but perhaps cannot fully accountfor the outcome of the Brexit vote (or the rise in Eu-roscepticism more generally). Although Brexit supportwas high in many economically deprived areas, wealthyareas in the South of the UK voted to leave, while poorerareas in Scotland and Northern Ireland voted to re-main. Moreover, although people’s feelings of nationalbelonging have always been strong in the UK and their

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 107

sense of European identity low, both attitudes have beenremarkably stable over the years, and cannot explain therecent spike in Eurosceptic sentiment (European Com-mission, 2016).

In my forthcoming work, I suggest that the extentto which people are willing to change the status quoby voting for exit crucially depends on their nationalreference point (de Vries, 2017). It depends on howthey perceive the counterfactual of their country beingoutside the EU. Research on risk taking behavior byKahneman and Tversky (1979) suggests that risk atti-tudes are shaped by the subjective reference points thatpeople employ. Translating this to the EU, people areonly willing to take the risk of leaving the EU whenthey perceive the alternative, their country without EUmembership, as better, even if only slightly so.

One can think about this in the followingway. Everyindividual (or group of individuals) derives some bene-fits from their country through the provision of publicgoods and services, such as roads, public television, na-tional defense, and so on. Yet, some public goods andservices require international cooperation to be deliv-ered efficiently due to scale advantages, think trade forexample, or because they transcend borders and requireinternational solutions, such as environmental protec-tion. Being part of the EU institutional architecturemay deliver unique goods and services for individualsthat the national system alone could not provide. Whendeciding to stay or go, people compare the current EUstatus quo to the potential losses or gains based on analternative state, namely their nation. People thus eval-uate the EU by comparing to a national reference point(see also Sánchez-Cuenca, 2000).

This intuition fits nicely with the conclusion reachedin other work, namely that individuals, particularlythose who are politically aware, are capable of distin-guishing between EU and national institutions whenmaking their evaluations (Karp, Banducci and Bowler,2003). People thus weigh up differences between twosets of evaluations, European and national. These eval-uations, as my work shows, are influenced by people’s background characteristics and their socioeconomicstatus, as well as the political environment in whichthey find themselves; that is to say, party and mediaopinion leaders provide them with cues (Steenbergen,Edwards and De Vries, 2007; de Vries and Edwards,2009; de Vries, 2017). People will only be expected to

take the risk of leaving the EU when they perceive thattheir country could do as well or even better outside.Hence, those who supported the UK to leave shoulddisplay more positive evaluations of their own systemcompared to the EU.

III. UK Survey Evidence: National Reference Points ofBrexit Supporters and Opposers

Together with the Bertelsmann Foundation, I conductregular polls, EUpinions, in all Europeanmember statesto explore what European citizens think about currentpolitical issues. The latest wave of the survey from theend of April 2016 was devoted to people’s opinions onthe Brexit referendum and their own country’s mem-bership in the EU (de Vries and Hoffmann, 2016). Weasked British people how they planned to vote in theBrexit referendum. Fifty-three per cent of respondentsindicated that theywould vote to leavewhile forty-sevenper cent of respondent indicated they would vote to re-main. National and European evaluations are capturedby two sets of questions about the UK and the EU. Thefirst set of questions focus on regime evaluations, andsurvey respondents’ opinions about the democratic in-stitutions and procedures in the UK and the EU. Thesecond set of questions relate to policy evaluations, andtap into respondents’ assessments of the content of col-lective decisions taken by EU or national actors. Dahl(1989) has argued that these elements tap into the twoimportant aspects of representative democracy. Giventhat we ask the same questions about the national andEU levels, we can judge if voters intending to vote leaveemploy more favourable national versus EU referencepoints compared to those who want to remain.

Figures 1a and 1b present the share of people whodisplay positive national and EU evaluations aboutpolicies and the regime among leave and remain sup-porters respectively. Several interesting patterns standout. First, among leave supporters, national evaluationstrump EU evaluations (these differences are statisticallysignificant). Second, among those backing remain, thisis not the case; the share holding positive EU evaluationsis equal or slightly higher than the share of positive na-tional evaluations. Third, the share of leave supportersholding positive policy or regime evaluations is lowerthan the share with positive evaluations among thosewanting to remain.

In the next step, I model voting intentions in the

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 108

Figure 1: Evaluations of Leave vs Remain Supporters in the UK

(a) Policy Evaluations (b) Regime Evaluations

Note: ‘Policy Evaluations’ have to do with the content of collective decisions taken by national or EU actors. ‘Regime Evaluations’ have to dowith opinions about the democratic institutions and procedures in the UK and the EU.

Source: EUpinions, April 2016.

Brexit referendum as a function of people’s Europeanand national regime and policy evaluations, while con-trolling for a host of individual level characteristics, suchas age, education, subjective class perception, as well aseconomic perceptions. The main explanatory variablescapture the difference between people’s national andEuropean policy and regime evaluations (the nationaldifferential where I subtract people’s national evalua-tions from their EU evaluations), while the dependentvariable is whether they intend to vote leave or not.

I present the results of this model in Figure 2. Thedots represent the coefficients from a logistic regressionanalysis, while the horizontal blue lines represent the95% confidence intervals of these estimates. Negativecoefficients (those to the left of the vertical red zero line)indicate variables that reduce the probability of votingto leave, whereas positive coefficients (those to the rightof the vertical red zero line) indicate variables that in-crease the probability of voting to leave. The effect of avariable is statistically significant when the horizontalbar representing the 95% confidence interval does notintersect the zero line. The coefficients for the nationalpolicy and regime differentials are positive and statis-tically significant, indicating that people who evaluatenational policies better than EU policies and the na-tional regime better than the EU regime are more likelyto vote leave in the Brexit referendum. Older, male,less highly educated, working class voters with morenegative economic outlooks are also more likely to voteleave. The effects of more positive national reference

points hold when we control for a set of individual-levelcharacteristics.

These findings are interesting as the Remain andLeave campaigns tried to influence people’s perceptionsabout the UK in reference to the EU. The Remain cam-paign, also coined Project Fear, painted a dark picture ofa Brexit Armageddon, characterized by economic melt-down and the collapse of the housing market. Peopleshould vote to remain in the EU as the UK alone wouldnot be able to prosper in an increasingly interconnectedworld. The Leave campaign aimed to convince peoplethat these doom scenarios were exaggerations, and thatpost-Brexit savings would bring prosperity and allowBritain to take complete control over its own affairs.After the vote, however, prominent Leave campaignerslike Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson quickly reneged ontheir pledge that £350m aweekwould go to theNationalHealth Service (NHS) instead of the EU, as these sav-ings would be needed to compensate for income lossesby farmers and others. The Brexit campaign was verymuch a fight over the national reference point peopleshould employ.

IV. Comparative Survey Evidence: National ReferencePoints of Eurosceptics and Eurosupporters

How do these British findings compare to other coun-tries? In the EUpinions survey, we also explore thevoting intentions of citizens in the other 27 memberstates in a hypothetical referendum on EU membership

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 109

Figure 2: Predicting Brexit Vote Intention, UK April 2016

Notes: Dots are logistic regression coefficients. The horizontal blue lines represent 95% confidence intervals. The reference category forclass is lower class and the reference category for age is a 26-35 year-old. The dependent variable is coded 1 if the respondent intends to vote‘Leave’ and 0 otherwise.

Source: EUpinions, April 2016.

in their respective countries. While fifty-three percentof British people in our survey indicated that theywouldvote leave and forty-seven percent indicated that theywould vote remain, the vast majority of EU-27 citizens,namely over two-thirds, indicated that theywanted theircountry to remain in the EU. Yet, when we explore thenational and EU evaluations of leave and remain sup-porters in the EU-27, as displayed in Figures 3a and 3b,we find a very similar pattern to UK respondents. Leavesupporters always display higher national evaluationscompared to European ones, even though their over-all share of positive regime and policy evaluations arelower.

Figure 4 shows thatmore positive national referencepoints indeed increase the likelihood of voting leave ifan EU exit referendum were held, even when we controlfor a host of individual-level characteristics. Taken to-gether, these results show that leave supporters employmore positive national reference points, but are also lesssatisfied overall with policies and the regime at both thenational and EU level compared to remain supporters.This might suggest that EU exit supporters perceive thatthey have less to lose from a change from the status quo,that is to say from leaving the EU. Even if the outcomesof an exit are highly uncertain, the current status quo of

EU membership is less attractive to begin with. Againstthis backdrop, taking a leap into the great unknown byvoting to leave the EU may seem like a calculated risk.

V. Beyond Brexit: What’s Next?

The EU today is facing enormous challenges, some ofthe biggest since its foundation. In the midst of theEuro and refugee crises sweeping across Europe, pop-ular support for European integration seems more im-portant than ever. Yet, enthusiasm for the EU seems tobe waning as the support for Eurosceptic parties is onthe rise, and the British have voted to leave theUnion forgood. Following the Brexit vote, many commentatorsspeculated if other countries would hold exit referen-dums. While Eurosceptic politicians like Geert Wildersin the Netherlands have since tried to push exit referen-dums through parliament, so far none of these bills haspassed. The analysis I present here would suggest thateven if Eurosceptic politicians would be able to call exitreferendums, they might not lead to the same outcomeas in the UK. Presently, over two-thirds of EU citizensintend to vote for their country to remain in the EU if anexit referendum were held. That said, I also find paral-lels with the UK case. In the remaining 27 EU memberstates, leave supporters, like their British counterparts,

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 110

Figure 3: Evaluations of Leave vs Remain Supporters in the EU-27

(a) Policy Evaluations (b) Regime Evaluations

Note: ‘Policy Evaluations’ have to do with the content of collective decisions taken by national or EU actors. ‘Regime Evaluations’ have to dowith opinions about the democratic institutions and procedures at the national and EU levels.

Source: EUpinions, April 2016.

Figure 4: Predicting EU Referendum Vote Intention, EU-27 April 2016

Notes: Dots are logistic regression coefficients. The horizontal blue lines represent 95% confidence intervals. The reference category forclass is lower class and the reference category for age is a 26-35 year-old. The dependent variable is coded 1 if the respondent intends to vote‘Leave’ and 0 otherwise.

Source: EUpinions, April 2016.

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 111

hold more favourable national reference points. WhenI inspect differences between countries further, I findthat public opinion in countries like Finland, Sweden,and the Netherlands most closely mimics the UK situa-tion.

Figure 5 presents the difference between people’sEU and national policy and regime evaluations in 2015across member states included in the European SocialSurvey (ESS). Positive values here indicatemore positiveevaluations of EU policies and regime compared to na-tional ones. Although in the vast majority of countries,the EU is still evaluatedmore positively compared to thenational level, in Finland, Sweden, and the Netherlands,

like in the UK, national regime and policy evaluationsexceed or are equal to European ones. While it currentlyseems unlikely that EU referendumswould take place inthese countries in the near future as mainstream partieshold parliamentarymajorities, if they do, the outcome ishighly uncertain. Given the contours of public opinionin these countries, Eurosceptic political entrepreneurscould, like the Brexit campaigners in the UK beforethem, construct positive national counterfactuals anddiscredit the doom scenarios remain campaigners putforward. If that happens, exit referendums might actu-ally become winnable.

Figure 5: EU Regime and Policy Differential in 2015

Notes: The dots display the difference between country mean EU regime and policy evaluations. Positive values indicate that people onaverage evaluate EU policy and regime higher than national policy and regime, and vice versa.

Source: European Social Survey 2015

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 112

References

Dahl, Robert Alan. 1989. Democracy and its Critics. NewHaven: Yale University Press.

de Vries, Catherine E. 2017. Euroscepticism and the Futureof European Integration. Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress.

de Vries, Catherine E. and Erica E. Edwards. 2009. “TakingEurope to its extremes: Extremist parties and publicEuroscepticism.” Party Politics 15(1):5–28.

de Vries, Catherine E. and Isabell Hoffmann. 2016.“Spotlight-Europe: Keep calm and carry on. WhatEuropeans think about a possible Brexit.” EUpinionsReport.

European Commission. 2016. “Eurobarometer 40 Years.”.Farrell, Sean. 2016. “UK has 50% chance of slipping into

recession within 18 months.” The Guardian, August 2.Gabel, Matthew Joseph. 2009. Interests and Integration:

Market Liberalization, Public Opinion, and EuropeanUnion. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Gabel, Matthew Josheph and Harvey D. Palmer. 1995.“Understanding variation in public support for Europeanintegration.” European Journal of Political Research27(1):3–19.

Hobolt, Sara B. and Catherine E. de Vries. 2016. “Publicsupport for European integration.” Annual Review ofPolitical Science 19:413–432.

Hooghe, Liesbet and Gary Marks. 2005. “Calculation,community and cues public opinion on Europeanintegration.” European Union Politics 6(4):419–443.

Hooghe, Liesbet and Gary Marks. 2009. “Apostfunctionalist theory of European integration: Frompermissive consensus to constraining dissensus.” Britishjournal of political science 39(1):1–23.

Kahneman, Daniel and Amos Tversky. 1979. “Prospecttheory: An analysis of decision under risk.” Econometrica47(2):263–291.

Karp, Jeffrey A., Susan A. Banducci and Shaun Bowler.2003. “To know it is to love it? Satisfaction withdemocracy in the European Union.” ComparativePolitical Studies 36(3):271–292.

LeDuc, Lawrence. 2003. The Politics of Direct Democracy:Referendums in Global Perspective. Toronto: BroadviewPress.

McLaren, Lauren. 2006. Identity, Interests and Attitudes toEuropean Integration. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Sánchez-Cuenca, Ignacio. 2000. “The political basis ofsupport for European integration.” European UnionPolitics 1(2):147–171.

Steenbergen, Marco R., Erica E. Edwards and Catherine E.De Vries. 2007. “Who’s cueing whom? Mass-elitelinkages and the future of European integration.”European Union Politics 8(1):13–35.

Brexit, Populism, and the 2016 UKReferendum to Leave the EU

by Matthew GoodwinUniversity of Kent

Oliver HeathRoyal Holloway, University of London

The United Kingdom’s vote to leave the EuropeanUnion (EU) marked a watershed moment in the coun-try’s history. Despite a long tradition of Euroscepti-cism, with the UK long being more negative about itsEU membership than other EU member states, few an-alysts or opinion polls had forecast the eventual result.When all votes had been counted, 52% of the electoratehad opted to leave the EU, a figure that increased tonearly 54% in England. The vote to leave the EU sur-passed 70% in eight local authority areas, 60% in 102,and 50% in 263. Only Northern Ireland, Scotland, andLondon voted to remain in the EU. In this essay, we con-sider the dynamics of the result, the role of populism inthe campaign, and the implications for British and EUpolitics.

Populist politics is a central part of the story abouthow the UK came to vote for Brexit. In sharp con-trast to other European states, the populist radical rightin Britain has historically been something of a failure.Confronted with a majoritarian electoral system and,on the supply-side, a legacy of stigmatized neo-Naziparties, such as the National Front and British NationalParty, populist parties historically remained an isolatedand local phenomena (Goodwin, 2011). Populist ap-peals against the EU were often also led by the main-stream Conservative Party, which under various lead-ers, from Margaret Thatcher to William Hague, ralliedagainst the Euro single currency, free movement of EUworkers, and economic and political integration. Yetfrom 2010, during the more liberal Conservative lead-ership of David Cameron and against the backdrop ofa financial crisis, a fairly new populist actor attractedrising support. Though founded in 1993, it was notuntil after 2010 that the hard Eurosceptic and populistUK Independence Party (UKIP), led by Nigel Farage,became increasingly prominent. Against the backdropof growing public concern over unprecedented levels ofnet migration into the country that would soon surpass

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 113

300,000 per year, and which were fuelled mainly by thearrival of Central and East European workers, UKIPtransitioned from the margins to the mainstream.

The geography of the vote sparked adebate about a divided Britain inwhich many trace the vote for Brexitto impoverished left behindcommunities that in the moderneconomy are struggling to keeppace with high skilled areas.

Capitalizing on a long national tradition of Eu-roscepticism and growing concern over immigra-tion, from 2010 onward UKIP replaced the LiberalDemocrats in the opinion polls as the third most popu-lar party, it won the 2014 European Parliament electionswith almost 27% of the vote, and, at the 2015 generalelection, it attracted four million votes (though under amajoritarian system secured only one seat in the HouseofCommons). Between 2010 and2014, therefore, UKIPcultivated dissatisfaction with the established ‘liberalconsensus’ among sections of the electorate that felt eco-nomically ‘left behind’ by the country’s rapid economictransformation and also culturally under threat from in-ward migration. Research on support for UKIP foundthat this was often strongest in ‘left behind’ areas, amongvoters who tended to be old, white, working-class and,in terms of their attitudinal profile, strongly disapprov-ing of EU membership, concerned over immigration,and dissatisfied with the established elite (Goodwin andFord, 2014; Goodwin and Milazzo, 2015). It was thesedifferences in demography that help to explain why theEurosceptic and populist UKIP attracted 40% of thevote in an economically struggling area like Rotherhambut only 14% in the more affluent and leafy Richmondupon Thames. Traditionally, a significant portion ofthese voters had once supported the centre-left LabourParty; though since the mid-1990s, the aggressive cen-trism of the ‘New Labour’ project that focused more onthe aspirational middle-classes alienated working-classvoters and helped create space for this populist mobi-lization (Heath, 2015, Forthcoming).

The 2016 referendum thus provided a frameworkfor populist undercurrents that had long been evidentin British politics to take centre stage. As Gidron and

Bonikowski note in this issue, populism is best under-stood as “a rhetorical style or thin centered ideologybased on a Manichean, anti-elitist logic and a desireto reclaim political institutions on behalf of the peo-ple.” Populists often present themselves as the ‘truedemocrats’, voicing grievances and opinions of ‘the peo-ple’ that are systematically ignored by the establishedpolitical, media, and business elites (Canovan, 1999).

Strong echoes of this type of populism were clearlyevident in the official ‘Vote Leave’ campaign, which wassupported unofficially by UKIP’s ongoing grassrootsmobilization. In communicating its populist message to‘Take BackControl’ from an unelected and out-of-touchEU elite, Leave campaigners also benefitted from twoof the most charismatic messengers in British politics,Boris Johnson, the former Mayor of London, and NigelFarage, the UKIP leader. Supported by senior Con-servatives, a handful of Eurosceptic Labour Membersof Parliament, and a myriad of grassroots movements,such figures sought to mobilize economically marginal-ized voters while articulating an “anti-elite, nationalistrhetoric that valorizes ordinary people” (Jansen, 2011,82). Much of their claims focused on the perceivedcosts and threat of free movement and the alleged abil-ity to redirect contributions to the EU into the NationalHealth Service.

I. Brexit: The Results Analyzed

In England, the ‘Leave’ vote ranged from nearly 76% inthe disadvantaged and coastal town of Boston to 21%in the highly diverse district of Lambeth in London.Like Boston, many of the local authorities that recordedsome of the strongest support for Brexit are strugglingareas where average incomes, education, and skill levelsare low and there are few opportunities to get ahead.Authorities that recorded some of the highest levels ofsupport for Brexit included the mainly working-class,coastal, or decaying industrial communities of CastlePoint, Great Yarmouth, Mansfield, Ashfield, Stoke-on-Trent, and Doncaster. In such communities, life experi-ences contrast sharplywith those in areas that gave someof the strongest support to remaining in the EU, suchas the London boroughs of Islington and Richmond-upon-Thames, or Edinburgh, Cambridge, and Oxford.The geography of the vote sparked a debate about a di-vided Britain in which many trace the vote for Brexitto impoverished left behind communities that in themodern economy are struggling to keep pace with high

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 114

skilled areas. The left behind, it is argued, were espe-cially responsive to the populist appeal to ‘take backcontrol’.

At the aggregate-level, it is certainly true that sup-port for Brexit was strongest in areas that tended tobe older, have lower than average levels of education,have experienced relative deprivation and, over the pastten years, witnessed significant demographic change asa consequence of the inward migration of EU nation-als. In the immediate aftermath of the referendum, weexamined data from 380 of the 382 local authoritiesacross the UK, linking this to data from the 2011 cen-sus (Goodwin and Heath, 2016a). Support for Brexitwas strongest in areas where a large percentage of cit-izens did not have any qualifications and hence werepoorly equipped to compete amid the modern econ-omy; 15 of the 20 ‘least educated’ areas voted to leave,while all of the 20 ‘most highly educated’ areas votedto remain. Support for Brexit was also stronger thanaverage in areas with a larger number of pensioners; ofthe 20 youngest authorities 16 voted to remain, but ofthe 20 oldest authorities 19 voted to leave.

To a large extent then, the sort of places that weremost likely to support Brexit were the same ones thathad previously given support to UKIP, and propelledthe party onto the national stage. Indeed, this pointcomes out very clearly if we consider the bivariate re-lationship between past support for UKIP in the 2014European Parliament elections and support for Brexitin the 2016 Referendum. The R-square between the twovariables is 0.73, indicating a very strong relationship.

These aggregate patterns are also evident at the in-dividual level. Further analysis based on data from theBritish Election Study (Goodwin and Heath, 2016b)reveals how people living in the poorest householdswere much more likely to support leaving the EU thanthose in the wealthiest households. In households withincomes of less than £20,000 per year the average sup-port for leave was 58%, but in households with incomesover £60,000 per year support for leaving the EU wasonly 35%. Those out of work were also far more likelyto support Brexit than those in full employment: sup-port for leave among the former was 59% but only 45%among the latter. Similarly, people engaged in low-skilled manual occupations were much more likely tosupport leaving the EU than those who work in moresecure professional occupations – on average the leave

vote among the former was 71% but among the latterwas only 41%. Lastly, and consistent with past studieson support for Eurosceptic parties (Goodwin and Ford,2014), people without any educational qualificationswere far more likely to support Brexit than those withpostgraduate degrees. Support for leaving the EU wasa striking 75% among those who lacked qualifications,but just 27% among those who had achieved the highestlevel of education.

The role of values also occupied a key position inthe referendum campaign, from debates about threatsto national sovereignty and national identity to themorespecific issue of immigration. Unsurprisingly, attitudeson these issues are closely related to the leave vote.Nearly 90%of peoplewho thought immigrationwas badfor the economy supported leave, compared to just un-der 10% for people who thought immigration was goodfor the economy. Similarly, whereas 88% of people whothought that the country should allow fewer immigrantssupported Brexit, whereas the equivalent figure amongpeople who wanted to keep immigration as it is was just21%. People who feel ‘very strongly’English were muchmore likely to say they would vote leave than anybodyelse (71% vs 36%) – and it was this narrow conceptionof national identity – rather than a broader sense offeeling ‘very strongly’British that mattered most. Thereis also some evidence that those people who felt disil-lusioned with politics – and agreed with the statementthat “politicians don’t care what people like me think”– were more likely to support leave than people whodisagreed with the statement (70% versus 30%).

These findings point to deep divides in Britain, bothgeographically, socially, and culturally. Moreover, to acertain extent these divides cross-cut. When we com-bine individual-level survey data with aggregate-leveldistrict data, we find evidence of a cross-level interac-tion between an individual’s level of education and theeducational profile of the area where they live (Good-win and Heath, 2016b). Controlling for a whole host ofvariables, the level of support for Leave among gradu-ates varied much more than among those with low lev-els of education across different types of areas and dif-ferent parts of the country. Graduates who live in low-skilled communities were more likely to support Brexit,andweremore similar to those with low education, thangraduates who live in high-skilled communities (andwho were, in contrast, very different to those with loweducation).

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 115

There are several plausible interpretations for thispattern. One is to do with the role of place and theavailability of local resources and opportunities. Evenif people possess educational qualifications and skills, ifthey are stuck in left behind areas that are experiencingdecline, then they are less likely to be presented withlocal opportunities to use these skills and get ahead inlife. Such an environment can fuel feelings of exclu-sion or marginalization. Therefore, the left behind inBritain face a ‘double whammy’. On one level, the leftbehind may feel marginalized because of their lack ofqualifications and skills, which puts them at a signifi-cant disadvantage in a modern and increasingly com-petitive economy. But on a second level, they may alsofeel marginalized because they lack the opportunities toget ahead within their local communities. The populistrhetoric of the Leave campaign, with its promise to ‘takeback control’ directly engaged with these marginalizedconstituencies and sought to empower them. As a re-sult, this message perhaps had far more resonance withlarge parts of the country than the economic messageof the Remain camp, which emphasized the potentialrisk that Brexit posed to continued economic prosper-ity, which many felt they had never benefited from.

II. Implications of the Result

As Gidron and Bonikowski observe in this issue of theComparative Politics Newsletter, there is a duality be-tween populist politics and democracy: populism chal-lenges the common sense of liberal democratic practiceand may have ominous implications for liberal democ-racy; but at the same time, populism identifies otherwiseoverlooked problems and awards marginalized groupsa legitimate voice in the political debate. The UK’s 2016referendum on EU membership provided a frameworkin which long-held grievances among large sections ofthe electorate found voice.

Primarily, though not exclusively, the vote for Brexitwas driven by economically disadvantaged, older, loweducated, white, English-identifying, and socially con-servative sections of the electorate who were motivatedby their concern over immigration and disapproval ofEU membership. For the new Prime Minister TheresaMay, delivering on these demands amid negotiationsover the United Kingdom’s future relationship with theEU will not be straightforward. Since the referendum,opinion polls have suggested that most voters desirestrong restrictions on the free movement of EU work-

ers, a core pillar of the EuropeanUnion that is also likelyto influence debates over whether or not the UK shouldretain access to the European single market. ShouldTheresa May deliver fundamental reform of free move-ment, this is likely to strengthen her appeal among theeconomically disaffected and immigration-minded vot-ers who provided the bulk of support to the Brexit camp.Should she fail to deliver such reform, however, then itappears likely that populist mobilization around theimmigration issue will remain at the forefront of con-temporary politics in the United Kingdom.

References

Canovan, Margaret. 1999. “Trust the people! Populism andthe two faces of democracy.” Political Studies 47(1):2–16.

Goodwin, Matthew J. 2011. New British Fascism: Rise of theBritish National Party. Abingdon: Routledge.

Goodwin,Matthew J. andCaitlinMilazzo. 2015. UKIP: Insidethe Campaign to Redraw theMap of British Politics. Oxford:Oxford University Press.

Goodwin, Matthew J. and Oliver Heath. 2016a. “The 2016referendum, Brexit and the left behind: An aggregate-levelanalysis of the result.” The Political Quarterly 87(3):323–332.

Goodwin, Matthew J. and Oliver Heath. 2016b. “Brexit voteexplained: Poverty, low skills, and lack of opportunity.”Joseph Rowntree Foundation .

Goodwin, Matthew J. and Robert Ford. 2014. Revolt on theRight: Explaining Public Support for the Radical Right inBritain. London: Routledge.

Heath, Oliver. 2015. “Policy representation, social represen-tation and class voting in Britain.” British Journal of Politi-cal Science 45(1):173–193.

Heath, Oliver. Forthcoming. “Policy alienation, social alien-ation and working-class abstention in Britain, 1964-2010.”British Journal of Political Science .

Jansen, Robert S. 2011. “Populist mobilization: A newtheoretical approach to populism.” Sociological Theory29(2):75–96.

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 116

Taking Control: Before and After theBritish EU Referendum

by Anand MenonKing’s College London

Of the many lessons that could be learned from the UKreferendum on EU membership, one is that predictionis something of a mug’s game. While the pollsters man-aged to relatively accurately predict what kinds of peo-ple in what kinds of areas might support each of the twocamps, they were far less successful at anticipating thelevels of turnout, which were generally higher in morepro-Leave areas (Goodwin and Heath, 2016). Be thatas it may, what follows involves the same mug’s game.For it is my contention here that, just as the effective-ness with which the Leave camp ran its campaign swungvoters behind it, so, too, will that effectiveness continueto shape the post-referendum debate.

I. Securing Victory

Many factors conspired to create the conditions inwhich the British voted for an outcome opposed by vir-tually all of what we have increasingly come to call thepolitical and economic establishment. First was the factthat the Leave camp had over twenty years – since thebad tempered debates over the ratification of the Maas-tricht treaty – to make their case. In the subsequentyears, campaigners had honed their attacks, bringingthe idea of exit from the EU from the fringes to themainstream of political acceptability (Lancaster, 2016).Anti-European arguments provided ‘the backgroundhum of political discourse at Westminster and in thecountry’ (Lancaster, 2016).

Little wonder that the Remain camp struggled toconfront 20 years of negative newspaper stories. Theperiod from the end of the Prime Minister’s renegotia-tion of the terms of British EU membership in Februaryto the referendum in June was simply not long enoughto permit the crafting and embedding of a credible pos-itive message about the benefits of EU membership. Inany case, the Government’s strategists believed that theresults of the 2014 Scottish independence referendumand 2015General Election supported the view that fearsof economic risk are electorally effective. Consequently,the casemade for remaining in theUnionwas a negativeone – based on the dangers of being out rather than the

advantages of being in. The negative nature of the cam-paign was revealed in the polling. A YouGov survey car-ried out on 9-10 June found thatwhilst 45% thought thatleaving the EU would damage the British economy (thecentral theme of the pro-membership campaign), 24%were of the opinion that remaining within the Unionwould have the same effect. A campaign rooted in thenotion of the lesser of two evils was always going tostruggle. Indeed, a YouGov poll carried out between20 and 22 June revealed that 23% thought that Britainwould be better off should it leave.1

The problem was all the more marked given that thePrime Minister himself had to perform something ofa political pirouette. Prior to his renegotiation, he wasadamant that he could imagine supporting the Brexitcamp. Following his return from Brussels on 19 Febru-ary, he became a passionate defender of British mem-bership in the EU. Yet despite the alleged role of Britain’s‘new settlement’in bringing about this transformation,the Remain camp did not refer to it during the cam-paign, casting doubt on the Prime Minister’s sincerityand undermining the Remain camp’s most importantspokesperson.

In contrast, the Leave campaign had a clear mes-sage that they rammed home at every opportunity. Inone hour-long television debate, then Justice SecretaryMichael Gove used the phrase ‘take back control’23times. The phrase resonated, and meant all things to allpeople – for some it meant a reassertion of parliamen-tary sovereignty, for others the ability to stop payingmoney to ‘Brussels’, and for others an end to uncon-trolled immigration from elsewhere in the EU. This fedinto perceptions about the economic case for mem-bership: YouGov (20-22 June) found that 35% felt thatleaving the EU would be good for the National HealthService (NHS) compared to 24% who thought it wouldbe bad.2

For the majority of Leave voters, Brexit implied anability to control flows of people into the UK. And thecontrast with the resonance of the Remain message onthe economy was all too clear. Whilst, as we have seen,many believed that the British economy would suffereven if it remained in the EU, 49% believed that im-migration would go down in the event of Brexit, while52% assumed it would increase should Britain remain

1http://tinyurl.com/gt8thcc.2http://tinyurl.com/h8ynknv.

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 117

within the EU. For those concerned about immigration,in other words – and polling has consistently shown thisto be one of themost important issues to theBritish pub-lic – exiting the Union implied real advantages.

II. Shaping the Future

This brief history is interesting enough in its own right,but all themore so as the forces that shaped the outcomeon 23 June look set to continue to shape the politicalagenda in the months to come. Strikingly, the effective-ness of the message propounded by the Leave campaignoutlived the referendum itself.

There has been much discussion about the fact that,despite the outcome of the referendum, Brexit mightstill not occur. A large majority of MPs – 73%, includ-ing 56% of Conservative MPs – voted remain (Smith,2016). Consequently, some have speculated that theHouse of Commons may prevent the triggering of Ar-ticle 50 of the EU treaty, which commences the processof exit.

Yet the politics belies this. For all the relative close-ness of the aggregate result, research by Chris Hanrettyhas suggested that 421 of 574 English and Welsh parlia-mentary constituencies voted to leave (Hanretty, 2016).And both major political parties face significant pres-sure from their electorates that militate against defyingthe popular will. Significantly, fewer than 50% of Con-servative voters voted to remain (42% or 39%, depend-ing on which poll you believe) (Curtice, 2016b).

On the Labour side, for all the fact that the majorityof Labour supporters voted Remain, a significant pro-portion – around a third – voted to leave. And the on-going political implications for the Labour Party are sig-nificant. In many of its traditional heartlands, Labourfaces a potential challenge fromUKIP. At the 2015 Gen-eral Election, UKIP came second to Labour in 44 seats.The referendum underlined Labour’s vulnerability. Inmany traditional strongholds, a strong vote to leave theEU pointed to the popularity of core UKIP messages,particularly around immigration (precise comparisonis difficult because the geographical areas used to countthe referendum votes were not the same as the con-stituencies used for general elections) (Menon, 2016).

Consequently, it is hard to imagine MPs from ei-ther major party being willing to attempt to overrule

the electorate by preventing the triggering of Article 50(even should they be offered the opportunity to do so).And as the Brexit process commences, so public opin-ion will continue to weigh on the choices made.

The debate about Brexit now revolves around thekind of relationship that the UK might end up havingwith the EU once it has ceased to be a member. Simplyput, the options range on a spectrum from ‘membershiplite’– the so-called ‘Norway option’of full participationin the single market – via ‘Canada’(a detailed free tradeagreement) to a relationship based on WTO rules.

The Remain camp struggled toconfront 20 years of negativenewspaper stories. The period fromthe end of the Prime Minister’srenegotiation of the terms of BritishEU membership in February to thereferendum in June was simply notlong enough to permit the craftingand embedding of a crediblepositive message about the benefitsof EU membership.

Each option involves trade-offs. For many Britishbusinesses, continued membership of the single mar-ket should be a red line in the negotiations to come. Formany Leave voters, the notion that Britain, having votedto leave, would have to pay into the EU budget, acceptthe primacy of EU laws, AND accept the freemovementof workers (as Norway does) is nonsensical.

And here, we can expect politicians to be sensi-tive to public opinion. Early polling in the wake of thereferendum reveals support for continued free marketmembership. Yet the crucial issue was whether thiswas seen as more important than limiting free move-ment, and here the evidence is moremixed. In late June,Greenberg Quinlan Rosner asked respondents whethercontrol over immigration or access to the single mar-ket was more important. 40% said immigration controland 44% said market access. In early July, ComResfound 66% prioritising access to the single market and31% restriction of free movement (All polls accessed viaCurtice (2016a)). However, polling by Lord Ashcroft inmid-August and published on 5 September showed 52%giving priority to controlling immigration and 28% to

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 118

single market access (Lord Ashcroft, 2016). John Cur-tice has suggested that the different result in the LordAshcroft polling might reflect different wording, andthe fact that respondents were offered a 1-10 scale ratherthan a binary choice (Curtice, 2016a).

More detailed post-referendum polling by ICM fora British Future report published in August suggestedthat public attitudes to future immigration levels – notjust from the EU – vary strongly depending on the typeof immigration at issue (Katwala, Rutter and Ballinger,2016). The vast majority of respondents wanted thenumbers of skilled migrants coming to the UK to in-crease (46%) or stay the same (42%). However, 40% ofrespondents wanted to see fewer construction workerscoming to the UK in the future, and 49% fewer wait-ers and bartenders. 65% wanted to see fewer unskilledworkers in general coming to the UK.

EU leaders have been quick to claim that member-ship of the single market involves acceptance of all ‘fourfreedoms’– movement of goods, capital, services, andpeople. A recent report pointed out that the lattermostis a political rather than a functional requirement whenit comes to the workings of the market (see Pisani-Ferryet al., 2016), but this should not lead us to underesti-mate the level of political commitment to the principle.

In his mid-August polling, Lord Ashcroft alsoprobed respondents’views of the conditions underwhich they would consider the UK to have left the EU– ‘Brexit means Brexit’– and the referendum result tohave been honoured. 61% percent of respondents feltthat having full access to the Single Market was com-patible with Brexit. 77% felt that allowing non-UK EUnationals already living and working in the UK to staywould also not violate the Brexit result.3 However, 79%said that allowing further EU nationals an automaticright to come to the UK – in other words, free move-ment – was not compatible with Brexit.

And free movement may not be the only issue thathangs over the negotiations to come. One of the mostwell-known claims for the Leave campaign was thatthe UK pays £350 million per week to the EU. The ve-racity of this claim was challenged loud and long, notonly by campaigners but also by experts. Nevertheless,the notion that the UK was contributing money to theEU, whatever the precise amount, proved an effective

campaigning tool. And it continues to be so. In LordAshcroft’s poll, 81% said that the UK would not haveleft the EU if it continued to pay into the EU budget(Lord Ashcroft, 2016).

III. Conclusion

Many reflections about Brexit and the relationship be-tween the UK and EU that will emerge from it haveadopted a functional approach. Businesses (and a ma-jority of economists) argue that losing membership ofthe single market would have profoundly negative con-sequences for the British economy. Yet the politics ap-pears to be moving in a different direction. Pressure onthe two main political parties, along with the contin-ued resonance of key Leave messages among the public,mean that the negotiation of such membership mightprove highly problematic. The implication is that Brexitmight be hard, and messy.

References

Curtice, John. 2016a. “The people’s priority? Free trade orimmigration control?” The New Statesman, September 7.

Curtice, John. 2016b. “Don’t blame Jeremy Corbyn - Pollsshow only Tory voters could have kept us in the EU.” TheNew Statesman, June 30.

Goodwin, Matthew J and Oliver Heath. 2016. “The 2016 ref-erendum, Brexit and the left behind: An aggregate-levelanalysis of the result.” The Political Quarterly 87(3):323–332.

Hanretty, Chris. 2016. “The EU referendum: How did West-minster constituencies vote?” University of East Anglia,June 29.

Katwala, Sunder, Jill Rutter and Steve Ballinger. 2016. “Whatnext after Brexit?” British Future, August.

Lancaster, John. 2016. “Brexit blues.” London Review ofBooks, July 28.

Lord Ashcroft. 2016. “The new blueprint: The conserva-tive agenda in post-Brexit Britain.” Lord Ashcroft Polls,September.

Menon, Anand. 2016. “Uniting the United Kingdom.” For-eign Affairs, July 6.

Pisani-Ferry, Jean, Norbert Röttgen, André Sapir, PaulTucker and Guntram B. Wolff. 2016. “Europe after Brexit:A proposal for a continental partnership.” London Schoolof Economics and Political Science.

Smith, Matthew Nitch. 2016. “Morgan Stanley: There is noway parliament will block Brexit.” Business Insider, June29.

3The ICM polling for British Future showed 84% of respondents saying that EU nationals already in the UK should be able to stay.

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 119

Populism and the Brexit voteby Stephanie Rickard

London School of Economics

In a surprise result, fifty-two percent of voters in the UKreferendum on European Union membership chose toleave the EU. Was this unexpected outcome the result ofpopulist politics? If so, what can we learn from ‘Brexit’about populism?

I. What Role did Populism Play?

Brexit is viewed by many as a triumph of populism.“Populist anger against the established political order fi-nally boiled over” (Yardley, 2016). While some aspectsof the campaign appear populist in nature, others situneasily with conventional accounts of populism. Anti-hegemonic language used by outsiders who challengethe establishment defines populism for many (Laclau,2005; Barr, 2009). Yet, the Leave campaigners cannotbe descried as outsiders by any stretch of the imagi-nation. The former mayor of London and Member ofParliament, Boris Johnson, along with the Secretary ofState for Justice, Michael Gove, led the Leave campaign.The referendum itself did not arise from popular dis-content. Former Prime Minister David Cameron calledthe referendum in an attempt to paper over divisionsabout Europe within the Conservative party and wardoff electoral threats from the euro-sceptic UK Indepen-dence Party (UKIP). These characteristics of the refer-endum campaign do not fit squarely with conventionalaccounts of populism. Yet, others do.

As a mode of political expression, populism buildson a dichotomy between ‘us’ and ‘them’ (Kazin, 1998).Just such a dichotomywas at the heart of the Leave cam-paign. ‘Them’ invariably referred to immigrants. Thedichotomy between ‘us’ and ‘them’ gained traction withvoters due to growing frustration with globalization.Since 2007, the average British worker experienced a10 percent decrease in their real wages (OECD, 2016).Many blame globalization. Britain’s economy is nearlytwice as exposed to foreign trade as America’s (TheEconomist, 2016a). While trade has brought big bene-fits to Britain overall, the gains from trade are unevenlydistributed. Some people win from international tradebut others lose. British workers in industries highly

exposed to foreign imports earn less and spend moretime out of employment than those in other industries(Pessoa, 2016). This may explain why areas dispropor-tionately affected by Chinese import competition wereespecially likely to vote for Brexit (Colantone and Stanig,2016). Former Prime Minister Gordon Brown blamedglobalization, writing: our industrial towns have beenhollowed out “as a result of the collapse of manufac-turing in the face of Asian competition. These townsare home to a disproportionate share of the semi-skilledworkers who feel on the wrong side of globalisation andwho opted to vote Leave” (Brown, 2016).

Yet, Brexit was not inevitable. Elected leaders couldhave done more to pacify discontent about globaliza-tion. Government spending of various sorts can buildpublic support for economic openness. Governmentspending can minimize the impacts of globalizationand help to compensate citizens for their trade-inducedlosses. Government-funded subsidies for domestic pro-ducers, for example, help to offset the effects of in-creased import competition (Rickard, 2012). In theUnited States, legislators fund programs specifically de-signed to help workers who lose their jobs because oftrade (Rickard, 2015). An analysis of US Congressionalroll call votes from 1980–2004 reveals that pro-tradelegislators who represent relatively more exporters aremore likely to vote for increased spending on Trade Ad-justment Assistance (TAA), a program that providesfinancial assistance to workers who lose their jobs orexperience a reduction in wages due to increased for-eign trade (Rickard, 2015). Exporters do not benefitdirectly from TAA programs. Yet, exporters and theirelected representatives support increased TAA fund-ing. Even Republicans, who often oppose spending in-creases, fund TAA programs when a substantial portionof their constituents are employed in exporting indus-tries (Rickard, 2015). This evidence suggests that legis-lators fund compensation programs to minimize publicopposition to economic openness. Current discontentregarding international trade in the United States sug-gests additional funding is needed.

If the British government wanted to secure publicsupport for the EU, investment in similar compensationprograms, as well as public services and public housing,would have been one way to do it. Increased spendingon compensation programs would have muted opposi-tion to globalization. Of course, concerns about glob-alization were not the only reason why people voted

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 120

Leave. But reducing opposition to globalization wouldundoubtedly have reduced the number of Leave vot-ers. Yet, the British government failed to adequatelyfund compensation programs. The British governmentcould have, for example, applied for money from theEU’s ‘globalisation adjustment fund’ for training andsupport for workers displaced by foreign competition.It didn’t. Neither did they adequately fund active la-bor market policies to assist unemployed workers inre-skilling (The Economist, 2016a). In the run up to thereferendum, the government cut expenditures insteadin an attempt to return the government finances to asurplus by 2020. The government recently abandonedthe 2020 budget target. Yet, spending on job trainingand support for mass layoffs via the UK’s equivalent toTAA – Rapid Response Service – was just £2.5 millionlast year - less than 1% of the US TAA program (TheEconomist, 2016b).

Brexit was not inevitable. Electedleaders could have done more topacify discontent aboutglobalization. Government spendingof various sorts can build publicsupport for economic openness.Government spending can minimizethe impacts of globalization andhelp to compensate citizens for theirtrade-induced losses.

Increased spending on public services and pub-lic housing would have muted the impression that azero-sum game exists between natives and immigrants(O’Rourke, 2016). This was just one of many reasonswhy people voted to leave the EU, but polling showsconcerns about access to public services were an im-portant issue in the referendum. The Leave campaignrepeatedly argued that migration from the EU put pres-sure on public services, like the National Health Service(NHS), lengthening queues for doctor appointmentsand surgeries. Perceived reductions in access to theNational Health Service and public housing were of-ten attributed to immigration, rather than governmentspending decisions. A survey by NatCen revealed that63 percent of respondents think the National HealthService is being stretched by immigration. One of themost effective Leave campaign messages was that an ex-tra £350 million pounds per week would be available

to spend on the NHS after Brexit thanks to savings inthe UK’s EU budget contribution. This claim was re-peatedly shown to be false, yet it resonated with many.Polling shows it was the single most remembered fig-ure from the campaign (BBC News, 2016). Greatergovernment funding for the NHS and other programscould have eased voters’concerns about trade and im-migration. As the economic historian O’Rourke (2016)succinctly stated, “too much market and too little stateinvites a backlash.” In this case, the backlash was Brexit.

II. What Can We Learn from ‘Brexit’ about Populism?

Brexit provides a unique opportunity to examine and re-fine theories of populist politics. Many possibilities forexploration exist. First, Brexit provides an opportunityto examine the contagion of populism across nationalborders. In the immediate aftermath of the vote, Brexitseemed to embolden populists in other countries. InItaly, for example, the leader of the populist NorthernLeague tweeted: “Now it’s our turn”(The Economist,2016a). Yet, the subsequent political and economicturmoil increased popular support for the EuropeanUnion in other countries. In Denmark, for example, anotoriously euro-sceptic country, support for the EUrose eight percentage points following Brexit. Similarincreases occurred in France, Germany, and Finland.The extent to which populism ‘diffuses’ across nationalborders remains unclear, but it likely depends on theperceived success of populist politics.

Second, Brexit may spur a realignment of politicalparties – or even change the composition of the UnitedKingdom. Scotland voted overwhelmingly to remainin the EU with 62 percent of Scottish voters choosingRemain. The outcome renewed calls for Scottish inde-pendence and politicians warned that Scotland wouldnot be taken out of the EU “against our will”(Johnston,2016). In addition to whipping up nationalist senti-ment in Scotland, the vote also threw the Conservativeand Labour parties into chaos. Contentious leadershipcontests followed the vote in both parties. Althoughthe Conservative contest ended without much carnage,Labour’s ongoing leadership contest threatens to splitthe party apart. How existing political parties respondto Brexit will reveal just how much ground populistshave gained.

Third, Brexit offers an opportunity to test themicro-level foundations of populist politics. Why were some

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 121

individuals more susceptible to populist mobilizationthan others? Goodwin, Hix and Pickup (2016) explorethis question using an on-line survey experiment, em-bedded in a panel design. They test the effects of a rangeof different pro-Remain and pro-Leave frames. Theyreport that the effectiveness of pro-Leave argumentsdepends on individuals’party-identification and level ofeducation.

Finally, how the UK actually exits the EU will shednew light on the power of populist politics. Populistssee the primary task of political institutions as tools fortranslating themajority will into political decisions (Ur-banati, 1998). Will Westminster’s institutions faithfullytranslate the majority’s will into action? Months afterthe vote, the British government has yet to trigger Arti-cle 50, the formal mechanism by which countries leavethe EU.The new PrimeMinister,TheresaMay, sought toreassure the majority by stating, “Brexit means Brexit”. But the details of Britain’s exit from the EU remainto be negotiated. Britain’s exit may be relatively ‘soft’.For example, many have suggested that the UK couldremain in the single market or adopt Norway’s type ofrelationship with the EU. Are such options politicallyviable? Would a ‘soft’ Brexit be viewed as a betrayal bythe 17 million voters who chose Leave? A new politicaldivide is emerging between those who want a soft Brexitand those who demand a ‘hard’ Brexit. How this debateplays out will shed further light on the power of pop-ulism.

References

Barr, Robert R. 2009. “Populists, outsiders and anti-establishment politics.” Party Politics 15(1):29–48.

BBC News. 2016. “Eight reasons Leave won the UK’s refer-endum on the EU.” June 24.

Brown, Gordon. 2016. “The Key lesson of Brexit is that glob-alisation must work for all of Britain.” The Guardian, June29.

Colantone, Italo and Pier Stanig. 2016. “Brexit: Data showsthat globalization malaise, and not immigration, deter-mined the vote.” Bocconi Knowledge, July 12.

Goodwin, Mathew, Simon Hix and Mark Pickup. 2016. “Forand against Brexit: A survey experiment of the impact ofcampaign frames on public attitudes toward EU member-ship.” Working Paper.

Johnston, Ian. 2016. “EU referendum: Scotland voted Re-main ‘to live in an outward-looking country, not a dimin-ished little Britain’.” Independent, June 27.

Kazin, Michael. 1998. The Populist Persuasion: An AmericanHistory. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Laclau, Ernesto. 2005. On Populist Reason. London: Verso.OECD. 2016. “OECDEmploymentOutlook 2016.” Technical

Report.O’Rourke, Kevin H. 2016. “Brexit: This backlash has been a

long time coming.” Vox, August 7.Pessoa, João Paulo. 2016. “International competition and

labor market adjustment.” Centre for Economic Perfor-mance Discussion Paper No 1411.

Rickard, Stephanie J. 2012. “Welfare versus subsidies: Gov-ernmental spending decisions in an era of globalization.”The Journal of Politics 74(4):1171–1183.

Rickard, Stephanie J. 2015. “Compensating the losers: Anexamination of Congressional votes on trade adjustmentassistance.” International Interactions 41(1):46–60.

The Economist. 2016a. “The impact of free trade: Collateraldamage.” July 30.

The Economist. 2016b. “Managing globalization: To thelosers, the scraps.” October 29.

Urbanati, Nadia. 1998. “Democracy and populism.” Constel-lations: An International Journal of Critical andDemocraticTheory 5(1):110–124.

Yardley, Jim. 2016. “Populist anger upends politics on bothsides of the Atlantic.” The New York Times, June 25.

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 122

Editors and Contributors

Matt GolderMatt Golder is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at The Penn-sylvania State University. He received his Ph.D. in 2004 from New York University. Hisresearch looks at how political institutions affect democratic representation. In additionto articles in leading journals, such as the American Journal of Political Science, the AnnualReview of Political Science, the British Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, andPolitical Analysis, he has also published a textbook on comparative politics, Principles ofComparative Politics. He is currently working on two research projects. The first looks atnegative campaigning in amulti-party context, while the second involves a bookmanuscripton interaction models. In addition to serving as chair of APSA’s section on Representationand Electoral Systems (2011-2013), he is also a member of the executive board for the Mak-ing Electoral Democracy Work project led by André Blais at the University of Montreal andthe advisory board for the Electoral Integrity Project led by Pippa Norris at Harvard Uni-versity. More information can be found at his website and on his Google scholar profile.

Sona N. GolderSona Golder is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at The Penn-sylvania State University. She is also an editor at the British Journal of Political Science. Shereceived her Ph.D. in 2004 from New York University. She studies political institutions,with a particular interest in coalition formation. In addition to publishing two books, TheLogic of Pre-Electoral Coalition Formation and Principles of Comparative Politics, she hasalso published in many of the discipline’s leading journals, including the American Journalof Political Science, the British Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, and Politi-cal Analysis. She is currently completing a third book project, Multi-Level Electoral Politics,with Oxford University Press. She is involved in the women in methods group — she wasthe organizer and host for the 4th Annual Visions in Methodology (VIM) Conference, shehas served as a VIM mentor for female graduate students and junior faculty, and she was amember of the diversity committee for APSA’s Political Methodology Section. More infor-mation can be found at her website and on her Google scholar profile.

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 123

Hans-Georg Betz

Hans-Georg Betz is an academic at the University of Zurich. His research focuses on pop-ulist parties in Europe. His research has been published in a variety of journals, includingComparative Politics, Comparative Political Studies, Political Science Quarterly, the Journalof Political Ideologies, Patterns of Prejudice, and the Socio-Economic Review. He has alsopublished several edited volumes and books. Two books, Radical Right-Wing Populism inWestern Europe and Postmodern Politics in Germany: The Politics of Resentment, were pub-lished with Palgrave Macmillan. More information can be found on his Google Scholarprofile.

Bart BonikowskiBart Bonikowski is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Harvard University and ResidentFaculty at theMinda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies. Relying on surveys, textualdata, and experimental methods, his research applies insights from cultural sociology to thestudy of politics in Europe and the United States, with a particular focus on populist claims-making in political discourse. He has published articles in journals such as the AmericanSociological Review, the Annual Review of Sociology, Social Forces, and Theory & Society.More information can be found at his website and on his Google Scholar profile.

Lenka BustikovaLenka Bustikova is an Assistant Professor in the School of Politics andGlobal Studies at Ari-zona State University. Her research focuses on political extremism, voting behavior, ethnicrelations, clientelism, and state capacity in Eastern Europe. Her research has been publishedin journals such as Comparative Political Studies, Communist and Post-Communist Studies,the Journal of Contemporary European Studies, and World Politics. More information canbe found at her website and on her Google Scholar profile.

William CaseWilliamCase is a Professor in the Department of Asian and International Studies at the CityUniversity of Hong Kong. His research interests include comparative democratization andauthoritarian resilience, elite studies, and the politics of Southeast Asia. He has publishedarticles in journals such asAsian Survey, the International Journal of Southeast Asian Studies,the International Political Science Review, and theAustralian Journal of International Affairs.In addition, he has published two books and one edited volume. His first book, Mahathir’sSuccessors: Sharpening Dilemmas in Malaysian Politics, was published by the University ofMaryland School of Law. His second book, Executive Accountability in Southeast Asia: TheRole of Legislatures in New Democracies and Under Electoral Authoritarianism, was pub-lished with East-West Center. More information can be found at his website and on hisGoogle Scholar profile.

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 124

Nic CheesemanNicCheeseman is anAssociate Professor in theDepartment of Politics and International Re-lations and the African Studies Center at OxfordUniversity. He is the Joint Editor ofAfricanAffairs. His work focuses on sub-Saharan Africa and processes of democratization. Morespecifically, he looks at a range of questions such as whether populism is an effective strat-egy of political mobilization in Africa, how paying tax changes citizens’attitudes towardsdemocracy and corruption, and the conditions under which ruling parties lose power. Inaddition to publishing in many of the discipline’s leading journals, he has also publishedthree edited volumes and one book. His book, Democracy in Africa, was published withCambridge University Press. His second book, How to Rig an Election, is currently undercontract with Yale University Press. More information can be found at his website and onhis Google Scholar profile.

Katherine CramerKatherine Cramer is a Professor in the Department of Political Science and Director of theMorgridge Center for Public Service at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Her re-search focuses on the way people in the United States make sense of politics and their placein it. She is known for her innovative approach to the study of public opinion, in which sheinvites herself into conversations of groups of people to listen to the way they understandpublic affairs. In addition to publishing articles in journals such as the American PoliticalScience Review, the British Journal of Political Science, Political Research Quarterly, and Po-litical Communication, she has also published three books with the University of ChicagoPress: The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of ScottWalker, Talking about Race: Community Dialogues and the Politics of Difference, and Talk-ing about Politics: Informal Groups and Social Identity in American Life. More informationcan be found at her website.

Yaoyao Dai

Yaoyao Dai is a graduate student in the Department of Political Science at PennsylvaniaState University. Her research interests include information manipulation (censorship andpropaganda) and anti-corruption campaigns in authoritarian regimes. Methodologically,she is interested in experiments and quantitative text analysis. Her research has been pub-lished in the Journal of Chinese Academy of Governance. More information can be found ather website.

Carlos de la TorreCarlos de la Torre is a Professor of Sociology and Director of International Studies at theUniversity of Kentucky. His research interests include the political sociology of Latin Amer-ica, with an emphasis on populism and democracy, as well as racism and citizenship. Inaddition to publishing in numerous journals such as Constellations, the Journal of Democ-racy, the Journal of Latin American Studies, and Social Forces, he has also published fiveedited volumes and five books, including Populist Seduction in Latin America, with OhioState University Press. More information can be found at his website.

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 125

Catherine de VriesCatherine de Vries is a Professor of European Politics in the Department of Politics andInternational Relations at the University of Oxford and Director of the Oxford Q-Step Cen-tre. She is also co-editor of the online journal Research & Politics. Her research focuses onimportant societal and political problems facing contemporary Europe, including the riseof Euroscepticism, the success of extremist parties, and the electoral ramifications of theEuro crisis. She has published numerous articles in journals such as the Journal of Politics,Comparative Political Studies, the Annual Review of Political Science, the British Journal ofPolitical Science, and Electoral Studies. She also has a book, Ambivalent Europeans? PublicOpinion and the Future of European Integration, forthcoming at Oxford University Press.More information can be found at her website and on her Google scholar profile.

Noam GidronNoam Gidron is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Government at Harvard Univer-sity. His research focuses on political sociology and electoral politics. It draws on multiplemethods, including survey analysis, experiments, text analysis, and elite interviews. His re-search has been published in the Journal of Politics and Social Forces. More information canbe found at his website and on his Google Scholar profile.

Matthew GoodwinMatthew Goodwin in a Professor in the Department of Politics and International Relationsat the University of Kent. His research focuses on Britain and Europe, radicalism, immigra-tion, and Euroscepticism. In addition to publishing in journals such as the European Journalof Political Research, Political Studies, Parliamentary Affairs, and the European Political Sci-ence Review, he has also published three books. His first two books, New British Fascism:Rise of the British National Party and Revolt on the Right: Explaining Support for the RadicalRight in Britain (with Robert Ford) were published with Routledge. His third book, UKIP:Inside the Campaign to Redraw British Politics (with Caitlin Milazzo), was published withOxford University Press. More information can be found at his webpage and on his Googlescholar profile.

Vedi R. HadizVedi R. Hadiz is a Professor of Asian Studies at the University of Melbourne. His researchinterests focus on political sociology and political economy issues in Indonesia, SoutheastAsia, and the Middle East. He has published articles in journals such as Development andChange, Democratization, the Journal of Development Studies, and Critical Asian Studies.He has also published four books and two edited volumes. His first book, Workers and theState in New Order Indonesia, was published with Routledge. His second book with RichardRobison, Reorganising Power in Indonesia: The Politics of Oligarchy in an Age of Markets,was also published with Routledge. His third book, Localising Power in Post-AuthoritarianIndonesia: A Southeast Asia Perspective, was published with Stanford University Press. Andhis fourth book, Islamic Populism in Indonesia and the Middle East, was recently publishedwith Cambridge University Press. More information can be found at his website and on hisGoogle Scholar profile.

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 126

Kirk HawkinsKirk Hawkins is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at BrighamYoung University and the coordinator of Team Populism, an international network study-ing the causes of populism. His research focuses on party systems and populism in LatinAmerica. In addition to publishing in journals such as theAnnual Review of Political Science,Comparative Political Studies, the Journal of Theoretical Politics, and Latin American Politicsand Society, he has also published two books, Latin American Party Systems (with HerbertKitschelt, Juan Luna, Guillermo Rosas, Elizabeth Zechmeister) and Venezuela?s Chavismoand Populism in Comparative Perspective, with Cambridge University Press. More informa-tion can be found at his website.

Oliver HeathOliverHeath is a Reader in Politics in theDepartment of Politics and International Relationsat the RoyalHolloway, University of London. His research focuses on political participation,public opinion, and electoral behavior in Britain, as well as political stability and electoralchange in secondwave democracies. In addition to publishing in journals such as theBritishJournal of Political Science, the European Journal of Political Research, Politics and Gender,and Electoral Studies, he has also published a book, Political Research: Methods and PracticalSkills, at Oxford University Press (with Sandra Halperin). More information can be foundat his webpage and on his Google scholar profile.

Elisabeth Ivarsflaten

Elisabeth Ivarsflaten is a Professor in the Department of Comparative Politics at the Univer-sity of Bergen in Norway. She is also the principal investigator of the Digital Social ScienceCore Facility (DIGSSCORE) and the Norwegian Citizen Panel. She specializes in publicopinion and political parties, with a particular emphasis on radical extreme right partiesand social movements. Her research has appeared in numerous journals, including theAmerican Journal of Political Science, the British Journal of Political Science, ComparativePolitical Studies, and the European Journal of Political Research. More information can befound at her website and on her Google Scholar profile.

Joseph Lowndes

Joseph Lowndes is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the Uni-versity of Oregon. His research focuses on American political development, racial politics,conservatism, political culture, and discourse. His research has been published in journalssuch as Polity, International Labor and Working-Class History, Radical Society, and the In-ternational Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society. In addition to an edited volume, he hasalso published a book, From the New Deal to the New Right: Race and the Southern Originsof Modern Conservatism, with Yale University Press. More information can be found at hiswebsite.

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 127

Anand MenonAnand Menon is a Professor in the Department of European and International Studies atKing’s College London and head of The UK in a Changing Europe project. His researchfocuses on international organizations, EU institutions, EU foreign and security policies,theories of European integration, and British and French politics. He is also a SpecialistAdviser to the Foreign Affairs Committee of the House of Commons and co-editor of thejournalWest European Politics. In addition to publishing several edited volumes, he has alsopublished numerous articles in journals such as the Journal of Conflict Resolution, ForeignAffairs, the Journal of European Public Policy, the Journal of Common Market Studies, andWest European Politics. More information can be found at his website and on his Googlescholar profile.

Benjamin Moffitt

Benjamin Moffitt is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Political Science at Stock-holm University. His research is located at the intersection of comparative politics, con-temporary political theory, and political communications, and it focuses on contemporarypopulism across the globe. His work has appeared in journals such as Political Studies, Gov-ernment and Opposition, and Commonwealth and Comparative Politics, as well as a numberof edited collections. He has also published a book, The Global Rise of Populism: Perfor-mance, Political Style and Representation, with Stanford University Press. More informationcan be found at his website.

Jan-Werner Müller

Jan-Werner Müller is a Professor of Politics at Princeton University. He also directs theProject in the History of Political Thought at the University Center for Human Values. Hisresearch interests include the history of modern political thought, liberalism and its critics,constitutionalism, religion and politics, and the normative dimensions of European inte-gration. He has published numerous articles in journals such as the New Left Review, theJournal of Political Ideologies, Contemporary Political Theory, Constellations, and the An-nual Review of Political Science. He has also published seven books and two edited volumes.More information can be found at his website.

Danielle ResnickDanielle Resnick is a Senior Research Fellow in the International Food Policy Research In-stitute’s Development Strategies and Governance Division (DSGD). She currently co-leadsIFPRI’s strategic research on Strengthening Institutions and Governance (SIG) and is IF-PRI’s theme leader for Governance. She has published articles in journals such as the Jour-nal of International Development, Comparative Political Studies, Journal of African Elections,African Affairs, and Party Politics. In addition, she has published one book and two editedvolumes. Her book, Urban Poverty and Party Populism in African Democracies, was pub-lished with Cambridge University Press. More information can be found at her website andon her Google scholar profile.

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 128

Stephanie Rickard

Stephanie Rickard is an Associate Professor in the Department of Government at the Lon-don School of Economics. Her research focuses on international trade. She has publishednumerous articles in journals such as the British Journal of Political Science, InternationalOrganization, the Journal of Politics, International Studies Quarterly, and Comparative Po-litical Studies. More information can be found at her webpage.

Kenneth RobertsKenneth Roberts is a Professor in the Department of Government at Cornell University.He has served as the Robert S. Harrison Director of the Institute for the Social Sciencesand the Senior Associate Dean for the Social Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciencesat Cornell. His research explores the intersection between political parties, populism, andlabor and social movements in the Andean region and the Southern Cone of Latin America.In addition to publishing in many of the discipline’s leading journals, he has also publishedthree edited volumes and two books. His first book,DeepeningDemocracy? TheModern Leftand Social Movements in Chile and Peru, was published by Stanford University Press. Hissecond book, Changing Course in Latin America: Party Systems in the Neoliberal Era, waspublished by Cambridge University Press. More information can be found at his websiteand on his Google scholar profile.

Cristóbal Rovira KaltwasserCristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser is an Associate Professor at the School of Political Scienceof the Diego Portales University (Chile). His research focuses on contemporary populistforces in Europe, Latin America, and the U.S. His research has been published in journalssuch as Comparative European Politics, Democratization, South European Society & Poli-tics, Latin American Politics and Society, and Political Studies. In addition, he has also pub-lished two book and two edited volumes. His first book, Kampf der Eliten: Das Ringen umgesellschaftliche Führung in Lateinamerika, 1810-1982, was published with Campus. Hissecond book, with Cas Mudde, Populism. A Very Short Introduction, was published withOxford University Press. More information can be found at his website.

Zijie Shao

Zijie Shao is a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Government at Peking University. She isalso a visiting researcher in the Center for the Study of Asia at Boston University. Relyingon surveys and textual data, her research focuses on authoritarian regimes, the media, andpropaganda. She has published articles in journals such as the Journal of Chinese Academyof Governance, the Journal of Tsinghua University (Philosophy and Social Sciences), ZhejiangSocial Sciences, and the Journal of Northeastern University (Social Science).

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 129

David SmithDavid Smith is the Academic Director of the United States Studies Centre and a SeniorLecturer in the Department of Government and International Relations at the University ofSydney. His research focuses on religion in the United States, U.S. elections and presidentialpolitics, U.S. domestic politics and foreign policy, and U.S. political history. He has pub-lished articles in journals such as the Australian Journal of Political Science, Electoral Stud-ies, the Review of International Organizations, PS: Political Science and Politics, and PublicOpinion Quarterly. In addition, he has published one book, Religious Persecution and Polit-ical Order in the United States, with Cambridge University Press. More information can befound at his website.

Narendra SubramanianNarendra Subramanian is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at McGill Uni-versity. His research examines the politics of nationalism, ethnicity, religion, gender, andrace, with a particular focus on India. He has published articles in journals such as theJournal of Asian Studies, the Canadian Journal of Political Science, and the Journal of Com-monwealth and Comparative Politics. He has also published two books. His first book, Eth-nicity and Populist Mobilization: Political Parties, Citizens, and Democracy in South India,was published with Oxford University Press. His second book, Nation and Family: PersonalLaw, Cultural Pluralism, and Gendered Citizenship in India, was published with StanfordUniversity Press. More information can be found at his website.

Stijn van Kessel

Stijn van Kessel is a Lecturer in the Department of Politics, History, and International Re-lations at the University of Loughborough in the United Kingdom. His research focuses onthe concept of populism and the electoral performance of populist parties in Europe. He haspublished in journals such as the Journal of Political Ideologies, Government and Opposition,the Journal of Contemporary European Research, and Acta Politica. He has also publisheda book, Populist Parties in Europe: Agents of Discontent? with Palgrave Macmillan. Moreinformation can be found at his website and on his Google Scholar profile.

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 130

About the Section

The Organized Section in Comparative Politics is the largest organized section in the American Political ScienceAssociation (APSA) with over 1,300 members. The purpose of the Section is to promote the comparative, especiallycross-national, study of politics and to integrate the work of comparativists, area studies specialists, and those inter-ested in American politics. The Section organizes panels for APSA’s annual meetings; awards annual prizes for bestpaper, best article, best book, and best data set; and oversees and helps finance the publication of the Newsletter. Formore information, please visit the Section’s website.

About the Newsletter

The goal of the Comparative Politics Newsletter is to engender a sense of community among comparative politicsscholars around theworld. To this end, theNewsletter publishes symposia on various substantive andmethodologicalissues, highlights new data sets of broad appeal, prints short comments from readers in response to materials inthe previous issue, and generally informs the community about field-specific developments. Recent symposia havelooked at the varieties of authoritarianism, the global economic crisis, field experiments, and sensitive data. It ispublished twice a year, once during the Spring and once during the Fall. The Newsletter is currently edited by MattGolder and Sona N. Golder at The Pennsylvania State University.

How to Subscribe

Subscription to the APSA-CP Newsletter is a benefit to members of the Organized Section in Comparative Politicsof the American Political Science Association. To join the section, check the appropriate box when joining APSAor renewing your Association membership. You may join the APSA online at http://www.apsanet.org/content.asp?contentid=4.

Copyright 2016 American Political Science Association.Address: 1527 New Hampshire Ave, NW Washington, DC 20036-1206

Phone: (202) 483-2512 | Fax: (202) 483-2657 | Email: apsa@apsanet.org

http://comparativenewsletter.com/ contact@comparativenewsletter.com 131