Hence, it counters 2 of the main criticisms of the term, namely (1) that it is essentially a political Kampfbegriff (battle term) to denounce political opponents; and (2) that it is too vague and therefore applies to every political figure.
While no important concept is beyond debate, the discussion about populism concerns not just what it is, but whether it even exists. It truly is an essentially contested concept.
Part of the confusion stems from the fact that populism is a label seldom claimed by people or organizations themselves. Instead, it is ascribed to others, most often with a negative connotation.
In which populism is considered not only as the essence of politics, but also as an emancipatory force. In this approach liberal democracy is the problem and radical democracy is the solution. Populism can help achieve radical democracy by reintroducing conflict into politics and fostering the mobilization of excluded sectors of society with the aim of changing the status quo.
Populism can be understood primarily as a type of irresponsible economic policy, characterized by a first period of massive spending financed by foreign debt and followed by a second period marked by hyperinflation and the implementation of harsh economic adjustments.
In a more popular form “populist economics” refers to a political program that is considered irresponsible because it involves (too) much redistribution of wealth and government spending.
Agreement is general that all forms of populism include some kind of appeal to “the people” and a denunciation of “the elite.” Accordingly, it is not overly contentious to state that populism always involves a critique of the establishment and a adulation of the common people.
In other words, our definition of populism only makes sense if there is non-populism. And there are at least 2 direct opposites of populism: elitism and pluralism.
Simply stated, elitists believe that “the people” are dangerous, dishonest, and vulgar, and that “the elite” are superior not only in moral, but also in cultural and intellectual terms. Hence, elitists want politics to be exclusively or predominantly an elite affair, in which the people do not have a say; they either reject democracy altogether or support a limited model of democracy.
Pluralism is the direct opposite of the dualist perspective of both populism and elitism, instead of holding that society is divided into a broad variety of partly overlapping social groups with different ideas and interests. Within pluralism diversity is seen as a strength rather than a weakness. Pluralists believe that a society should have many centers of power and that politics, through compromise and consensus, should reflect the interests and values of as many different groups as possible. Thus, the main idea is that power is supposed to be distributed throughout society in order to avoid specific groups — be they men; ethnic communities; economic, intellectual, military or political cadres, etc. — acquiring the capacity to impose their will upon the others.
Clientelism is best understood as a particular mode of exchange between electoral constituencies and politicians, in which voters obtain goods (e.g., direct payments or privileged access to employment, goods, and services) conditioned on their support for a patron or party. Without a doubt, many Latin American populist leaders have employed clientelist linkages to win elections and remain in power. However, they are not the only ones to do this, and there is no reason to think that populism has a particular affinity to clientelism. While the former is first and foremost an ideology, which can be shared by different political actors and constituencies, the latter is essentially a strategy, used by leaders and parties (of different ideologies) to win and exercise political power.
However, Laclau has forcefully argued that it is exactly the fact that “the people” is an “empty signifier” that makes populism such a powerful political ideology and phenomenon. Given that populism has the capacity to frame “the people” in a way that appeals to different constituencies and articulate their demands, it can generate a shared identity between different groups and facilitate their support for a common cause.
However, the formation of a democratic regime does not imply that the gap between governed and governors disappears completely. Under certain circumstances, the sovereign people can feel that they are not being (well) represented by the elites in power, and, accordingly, they will criticize — or even rebel against — the political establishment. This could set the stage for a populist struggle “to give government back to the people.”
Speaking of “the common people” often refers to a critique of the dominant culture, which views the judgments, tastes, and values of ordinary citizens with suspicion. In contrast to this elitist view, the notion of “the common people” vindicates the dignity and knowledge of groups objectively or subjectively are being excluded from power due to their sociocultural and socioeconomic status. This is the reason why populist leaders and constituencies often adopt cultural elements that are considered markers of inferiority by the dominant culture.
First and foremost, the elite are defined on the basis of power, i.e.m they include most people who hold leading positions within politics, the economy, the media, and the arts. However, this obviously excludes the populists themselves, as well as those within these sectors that are sympathetic to the populists.
Because of the fundamental anti-establishment position of populism, many scholars have argued that populists can, by definition, not sustain themselves in power. After all, this would make them (part of) “the elite.” But this ignores both the essence of the distinction between the people and the elite, which is moral and not situational, and the resourcefulness of populist leaders. Essential to their argument is that the real power does not lie with the democratically elected leaders, i.e., the populists, but with some shadowy forces that continue to hold on to illegitimate powers to undermine the voice of the people. It is here that “the paranoid style of politics” most clearly comes to the fore.
Linking the elite to economic power is particularly useful for populists in power, as it allows them to “explain” their lack of political success; i.e., they are sabotaged by the elite, who might have lost political power but who continue to hold economic power.
The do argue, however, that the elite favors the interests of the immigrants over those of the native people.
Rousseau distinguished between the general will and the will of all. While the former refers to the capacity of the people to join together into a community and legislate to enforce their common interest, the latter denotes the simple sum of particular interests at a specific moment in time. Populism’s monist and moral distinction between the pure people and the corrupt elite reinforces the idea that a general will exists.
Seen in this light, the task of politicians is quite straightforward: they should be “enlightened enough to see what the general will is, and charismatic enough to form individual citizens into a cohesive community that can be counted on to will it.” Chavez provided a prime example of this:
Nothing is in greater agreement with the popular doctrine then to consult with the nation as a whole regarding the chief points upon which governments, basic laws, and the supreme rule are founded. All individuals are subject to error and seduction, but not the people, which possesses to an eminent degree of consciousness of its own good and the measure of its independence. Because of this its judgment is pure, its will is strong, and none can corrupt or even threaten it.
Rather than a rational process constructed via the public sphere, the populist notion of the general will is based on the notion of “common sense.” This means that it is framed in a particular way, which is useful for both aggregating different demands and identifying a common enemy.
However, populism also has a dark side. Whatever its manifestation, the monist core of populism, and especially its notion of a “general will,” may well lead to the support of authoritarian tendencies. Because populism implies that the general will is not only transparent but also absolute, it can legitimize authoritarianism and illiberal attacks on anyone who (allegedly ) threatens the homogeneity of the people.
Given that populism is a thin-centered ideology, addressing only a limited set of issues, almost all populist actors combine populism with one or more other ideologies, so-called host ideologies. Broadly speaking, most left-wing populists combine populism with some form of socialism, while right-wing populists tend to combine it with some type of nationalism.
The prairie populists of that time understood “the people” to be farmers, more specifically yeomen, free and independent farmers of European descent. In line with producerism, which has always informed populism in North America, farmers were depicted as the pure people, those who tilted the land and produced all the goods of society (notably clothing and food). The elite were the bankers and politicians in the Northeast, who produced nothing yet extorted goods from the farmers through high credits on loans. The distinction between the people and the elite was not primarily of an ethnic or religious nature. Rather, the basis was moral, geographical, and occupational, i.e., between the good, rural farmers and the corrupt, urban bankers and politicians.
While not a populist at heart, Nixon popularized the term “silent majority” as a reference to the majority of the (real) American people figuratively and literally silenced by the (liberal) elite.
While the main “enemy within” of right-wing populists has changed somewhat through time — for instance, the communist in the 1950s were replaced by the civil rights movement in the 1960s and the “activist judges” in the 1970s — the main socioeconomic and, even more important, sociocultural grievances have remained remarkably constant: “our way of life” is attacked by the “liberal elite” who use an oppressive (federal) and a far too expensive and expansive welfare state to stifle the initiative and values of the people while providing “special privileges” to non-deserving minorities.
Because these countries were suffering profound economic crises at the end of the 1980s, populist leaders were able to win elections by blaming the elite for the dramatic situation of the country and by proclaiming that the people had been robbed of their rightful sovereignty.
Communism and fascism flirted with populism, particularly during their movement phases, in an attempt to generate mass support. In essence, however, both should be seen as ideologies and regimes that were elitist rather than populist.
These parties combine populism with two other ideologies: authoritarianism and nativism. Whereas the former refers to the belief in a strictly ordered society, and is expressed in an emphasis on “law and order” issues, the latter alludes to the notion that states should be inhabited exclusively by members of the native group (“the nation”) and that non-native (“alien”) elements are fundamentally threatening to the homogenous nation-state. Hence, the xenophobic nature of current European populism derives from a very specific conception of the nation, which relies on an ethnic and chauvinistic definition of the people.
They accuse the elite of destroying the welfare state to incorporate the immigrants, their alleged new electorate, and call for a welfare state for their “own people” first. With regard to foreign policy, they attack their national elite for allegedly “selling out” their country and people to the EU, a “bureaucratic, socialist, undemocratic Moloch” that servers only a cosmopolitan elite.
Like their brethren in NA, they subscribe to producerism, albeit a more moderate interpretation, accusing the elite of frustrating the hard-working common people with unnecessary laws and high taxes while rewarding their undeserving and unproductive electorate of public-sector workers and immigrants.
In Southeast Asia populism appeared in the wake of the Asian economic crisis of 1997, which brought an abrupt end to the spectacular rise of the so-called Asian Tigers. Particularly in the developing democracies of the region, populist actors gave voice to widespread dissatisfaction with the now discredited old leaders and policies.
When the Supreme Court declared one such referendum null and void, he responded in perfect populist fashion: “The government will not allow any authority, including the courts, to usurp the power of the people.”
The one slogan most associated with the Arab Spring, shouted at demonstrations from Tunisia to Egypt to Yemen, was “The people want to bring down the regime!”
First, political parties are organizations that seek to aggregate the interests of different sectors of society. Second, political parties elaborate policy programs that work as their pledges to the voting public, who can evaluate these programs to decide whom to vote for in elections. Third, political parties invest time and resources to train personnel, who are crucial for both running elections as well as implementing the proposed reforms through public offices.
While some populist parties live up to the stereotype of the flash party, many of these are better categorized as ad hoc electoral vehicles constructed by personalist leaders than as real political parties. Unsurprisingly, many of these parties are officially named after their leader.
However, these types of leaders are usually very bad at building institutions. By constructing a personalist electoral platform, rather than a well-organized political party with competent activists and personnel, they have serious problems at succeeding in terms of electoral persistence.
Many scholars argued that, above and beyond its diverse manifestations, a defining feature of populism is its reliance on strong leaders who are able to mobilize the masses and/or conduct their parties with the aim of enacting radical reforms. It is true that many manifestations of populism have given rise to flamboyant and strong political leaders. This has led the British political scientist Paul Taggart to state that populism “requires the most extraordinary individuals to lead the most ordinary of people.”
In Latin America the stereotypical populist leader is the caudillo, a generic term with roots in the Latin caput (head), which normally alludes to a strong leader, who exercise a power that is independent of any office and free of any constraint. Populist strongmen tend to rule on the basis of a “cult of the leader,” which portrays him as a masculine and potentially violent figure.
While there is a close association between populist leaders and strongmen, it is important not to conflate the two. In fact, only a minority of strongmen are populists and only a minority of populists is a strongman.
Many political leaders present themselves as a strong leader, but populist strongmen take it a step further, crafting an image of a man of action, rather than words, who is not afraid to take difficult and quick decisions, even against “expert” advice. Drawing upon anti-intellectualism and a sense of urgency, often largely created by the populist themselves, he will argue that the situation (“crisis”) requires “bold action” and “common sense solutions.”
This image of the strongman is frequently combined with an emphasis on the virility of the populist leader. For example, Estrada responded to a young woman’s claim that she was his illegitimate daughter by saying that this might be true, as “many women want babies with me.”
They relate to “the common man” by playing on sexist stereotypes and by using coarse language.
Popular leaders are described as “strong” because of their popularity, while unpopular leaders are portrayed as “weak” because of their lack of popularity.
In a Weberian understanding, charismatic leadership is about a specific bond between leader and followers, which is defined at least as much by the expectations and perceptions of the followers as by the individual characteristics of the leader. Hence, it makes little sense to look for certain universal features of charisma. Rather, charisma and its individual features are culturally determined; what is considered charismatic in, say, Sweden will differ rom what is considered charismatic in, say, Peru.
Most notably, they use their sex to construct their outsider status. The mere fact that a populist leader is female, whereas the vast majority of the (political) elite is male, strengthen her image as a political outsider.
I care so passionately about this country, it’s like I’m its mother, Australia is my home and the Australian people are my children.
Another rather common but largely ignored populist leader is the economic entrepreneur. Some of the most famous populists were successful businessmen who belonged to the richest people in their country before becoming the voice of the common people.
Because populism is based on a frontal attack against the establishment, the combination of “entrepreneur-populist” is not always easy to sell. But given that the populist distinction between the people and the elite is not fundamentally based on socioeconomic criteria — like class or wealth — but rather on morality, entrepreneur-populists are able to use their business acumen to construct their status as a political outsider. They present themselves as honest and self-made businessmen who have made their fortune despite the corrupt politicians, not because of them! Moreover, entrepreneur-populists claim to be reluctant politicians, who, unlike professional politicians, did not enter politics to profit from it financially. In the always colorful words of Berlusconi: “I don’t need to go into office for the power. I have houses all over the world, stupendous boats… beautiful airplanes, a beautiful wife, a beautiful family… I am making a sacrifice.”
As a fellow non-European Peruvian, he was included in the category of the excluded people. Moreover, belonging to an ethnic minority contributed to crafting an image of a political outsider of humble origins, who had risen thanks to personal talent rather than connections with the establishment.
In sharp contrast to the professional “political class,” a popular term of populists, the populist claims to be driven to engage in politics not by personal ambition but by a higher calling, namely to bring politics (back) to the people. In reality, most populist leaders are very much part of the national elite. They often belong to the same sociodemographic strata as the political elite, i.e., highly educated, (upper) middle-class, middle-aged males of the majority ethnicity. And many of them have been politically active for years.
Overall, one can distinguish between 3 types of populists: outsiders, insider-outsiders, and insiders. True outsiders are very rare. They have not significant links to the elite, broadly defined, and build their career completely outside of the political mainstream. Among the few more prominent populist outsiders are Hugo Chavez and Alberto Fujimori. Chavez was a relatively low-ranked officer in the Venezuelan army who gained national notoriety only because of a failed coup d’etat in 1992. Fujimori was an academic and university president who had no political network when he first ran for president. True outsiders are probably more successful in more personalized and fluid political systems, such as the presidential systems in Latin America, than in more institutionalized and established political systems, like the party-dominated parliamentary systems in western Europe.
In fact, commentators tend to use the term insider populism in reference to this particular type of politician. However, neither these politicians nor their parties were truly populist, as populism was not a core feature of their ideology. These insiders merely used populist rhetoric to set themselves apart from other mainstream politicians and (try to) look authentic. Not by chance, mainstream politicians tend to employ populist discourse mostly during election campaigns, while largely ignoring it in government.
Moreover, the success of populist leaders is less dependent upon a universal list of specific personality characteristics than on a carefully constructed image of vox populi, based on the combination of outsider-status and authenticity.
It is not far-fetched to suggest that the conventional position is that populism constitutes an intrinsic danger to democracy. Populism could be conceived of as “a perverse inversion of the ideals and procedures of representative democracy.”
Depending on its electoral power and the context in which it arises, populism can work as either a threat to or a corrective for democracy. This means that populism per se is neither good nor bad for the democratic system. Just as other ideologies, such as liberalism, nationalism, or socialism, can have a positive and negative impact on democracy, so can populism.
Democracy is best defined as the combination of popular sovereignty and majority rule; nothing more, nothing less. Hence, democracy can be direct or indirect, liberal or illiberal.
However, in most day-to-day usages the term democracy actually refers to liberal democracy rather than to democracy per se. The main difference is that liberal democracy refers to a political regime, which not only respects popular sovereignty and majority rule, but also establishes independent institutions specialized in the protection of fundamental rights, such as freedom of expression and the protection of minorities. When it comes to protecting fundamental rights, there is no one-size-fits-all approach, and, in consequence, liberal democratic regimes have adopted very different institutional designs. For instance, some of them have a strong written constitution and Supreme Court (e.g., United States), while others have neither (e.g., United Kingdom). Despite these differences, all liberal democracies are characterized by institutions that aim to protect fundamental rights with the intention of avoiding the emergence of a “tyranny of the majority.”
Populism holds that nothing should constraint “the will of the (pure) people” and fundamentally rejects the notions of pluralism and, therefore, minority rights as well as the “institutional guarantees” that should protect them.
Populism exploits the tensions that are inherent to liberal democracy, which tries to find a harmonious equilibrium between majority rule and minority rights. This equilibrium is almost impossible to achieve in the real world, as the two overlap on important issues. Populists will criticize violations of the principle of majority rule as a breach of the very notion of democracy, arguing that the ultimate political authority is vested in “the people” and not in unelected bodies. In essence, populism raises the question of who controls the controllers.
In theory, populism is more negative for democracy in terms of public contestation and more positive in terms of political participation. On the one hand, populism tends to limit the scope of competition because it often maintains that those actors who are depicted as evil should be allowed to neither play the electoral game nor have access to the media. While it goes too far to call populism “the paranoid style of politics,” populist forces are prone to highly charged rhetoric and conspiracy theories.
On the other hand, populism tends to favor political participation, since it contributes to the mobilization of social groups who feel that their concerns are not being considered by the political establishment. As its core belief is that the people is sovereign, all the people and only the people should determine politics.
Effects of populism on liberal democracy:
Positive:
- Populism can give voice to groups that do not feel represented by the political elite.
- Populism can mobilize excluded sectors of society, improving their integration into the political system.
- Populism can improve the responsiveness of the political system, by fostering the implementation of policies preferred by excluded sectors of society.
- Populism can increase democratic accountability, by making issues and policies part of the political realm.
Negative:
- Populism can use the notion and praxis of majority rule to circumvent minority right.
- Populism can use the notion and praxis of popular sovereignty to erode the institutions specialized in the protection of fundamental rights.
- Populism can promote the establishment of a new political cleavage, which impedes the formation of stable political coalitions.
- Populism can lead to a moralization of politics whereby reaching agreements becomes extremely difficult if not impossible.
Democracy is always incomplete and can at any time experience either deterioration or improvement. Therefore, it is important to think not only about regimes of (liberal) democracy, but also about processes of democratization (and de-democratization).
The stage of democratic erosion includes incremental changes to undermine the autonomy of those institutions that specialize in the protection of fundamental rights, such as diminishing judiciary independency, jettisoning the rule of law, and weakening minority rights. Populist leaders and followers are inclined to trigger episodes of democratic erosion because they support, in essence, an extreme majoritarian model of democracy that opposes any groups or institutions that stand in the way of implementing “the general will of the people.”
A second important factor is the type of political system. Like all political actors, once populists come to power in a democratic system they are more or less constrained by the specific features of the political regime in which they operate. While presidential systems make it easier for populist “outsiders” to gain power, they often lack support at other levels to push through their agenda — particularly when they lack a strong party organization. In contrast, parliamentary systems tend to limit the power of populists-in-power because they often lead to coalition governments, in which populist parties have to work together with mostly stronger nonpopulist parties. However, if a populist actor, acquires a parliamentary majority, they have fewer counterbalancing forces to contend with.
While it is true that the success of political actors is normally measured by the number of votes they obtain (electoral strength), political success can be analyzed in at least 2 other ways: the ability to put topics on the public agenda (agenda-setting) and the capacity to shape public policies (policy impact).
There is a dormant Hugo Chavez or Sarah Palin inside all of us. The question is how does he or she get activated?
Once voters feel orphaned by the established political actors, they become inclined to interpret political events through the mental map of populism: “the elite only cares about themselves and are not interested in the concern of the (real) people.”
When mainstream political parties converge, and few significant differences remain between their programmatic platforms, it becomes easier for populist forces to argue that “they” are all the same.
Often nonintentionally helped by sensationalist media, populist radical right parties in Europe try to redefine (sometimes relatively modest) increases in refugees as an “immigration crisis,” which they contend is caused by the incompetent and corrupt mainstream parties. In other words, whether populist actors become successful in terms of electoral strength, agenda-setting, or policy impact is strongly related to their ability to develop a credible narrative of crisis. This is important for another reason as well: by creating a sense of crisis, populists inject urgency and importance to their message.
In fact, the extremely complex and quite dysfunctional political system created by the nation’s founders reflected both their anti-elite and anti-people sentiments, as can be seen from the checks and balances they put in place and the Electoral College they established, respectively.
Related, reality television programs featuring ordinary people, like Big Brother, or “low culture” celebrities, like the Kardashians, have largely replaced shows about the lives of the “high culture” elites.
Populist forces are suspicious about the very existence of unelected institutions, not always without reason, that can run amok and end up protecting the interests of powerful minorities rather than upholding the common good. This means that populists present a different, more complex, challenge to democracies than extremists and, therefore, require a different, more complex, response. In fact, overreacting to the populist challenge can do more harm than good to liberal democracy.
The first lesson to be drawn from this is that, once a major corruption scandal comes to light, the worst thing to do is to deny it or avoid a proper transparent investigation. An important part of the legitimacy of liberal democracy comes precisely from the existence of autonomous institutions, which are able to hold state officials and elected politicians accountable to the citizens.
Most politicians claim full agency when things go well and almost full lack of agency when things go wrong. For example, economic growth is claimed as a success of the government’s economic policies, while an economic downturn is externalized as a consequence of “globalization” and international institutions like the EU, and the IMF. Essentially, politicians set themselves up for failure by claiming to have more power than they really have. As they cannot change the fundamental restrictions to their power, they should be more open about them, which includes explaining why they accept the restrictions. This would still leave space for populists to present ta potentially more attractive story, i.e, of full sovereignty, but it would at least make the mainstream parties look less deceiving and more genuine.
However, two bad approaches, which are unfortunately often suggested, can be identified. First, in many cases establishment actors launch a coordinated frontal attack on the populists. By collectively portraying “them” as “evil” and “foolish,” the establishment actors play into the hands of the populists, who can depict their political struggle as “al against one, one against all.” Second, some established actors argue that populist actors can be defeated only by adopting part of their populist message. Both approaches further intensify the moralization and polarization of politics and society, which fundamentally undermines the foundations of liberal democracy.
Populism is part of democracy. Rather than the mirror image of democracy, however, populism is the (bad) conscience of liberal democracy. Populists ask uncomfortable questions about undemocratic aspects of liberal institutions and policies, such as constitutional courts and international financial institutions, and they give illiberal answers to them.
In the past decades unelected bodies and technocratic institutions, such as the ECB and the IMF, have established control over important policy domains, thereby seriously limiting the power of elected politicians. National governments have become heavily constrained by private companies, transnational organizations, and the (in)visible hand of the market.
In trying to win over populist supporters, and perhaps even some elites, liberal democrats should avoid both simplistic solutions and pander to “the people” and elitist discourses that dismiss the moral and intellectual competence of ordinary citizens — both will only strengthen the populists. Most importantly, given that populism often asks the right questions but provides the wrong answers, the ultimate goal should be not just the destruction of populist supply, but also the weakening of populist demand. Only the latter will actually strengthen liberal democracy.