'This lucid guide is essential reading' Guardian From Donald Trump to Recep Erdogan, populists are on the rise across the globe. But what exactly is populism? Should everyone who criticizes Wall Street or Washington be called a populist? What precisely is the difference between right-wing and left-wing populism? Does populism bring government closer to the people or is it a threat to democracy? Who are "the people" anyway and who can speak in their name? These questions have never been more pressing. In this provocative book, Jan-Werner Muller argues that at populism's core is a rejection of pluralism. Populists will always claim that they and they alone represent the people and their true interests. Contrary to conventional wisdom, populists can govern on the basis of their claim to exclusive moral representation of the people: if populists have enough power, they will end up creating an authoritarian state that excludes all those not considered part of the proper "people". Proposing a number of concrete strategies for how liberal democrats should best deal with populists, Muller shows how to counter their claims to speak exclusively for "the silent majority". *Updated with a new afterword*

What Is Populism

The dominant theoretical paradigm originating in the work of Cas Mudde conceives of populism as a thin-centered ideology that focuses on the antagonism between people and elites against the backdrop of popular sovereignty. While this framework has contributed significantly to an improved scientific analysis of populism, it is argued in this article that its ideological connotations are ill-conceived both conceptually and methodologically, and that its normative implications and failure to acknowledge the graded nature of populist behavior hinder the further evolution of the field of populism studies. Combining insights from the work of Ernesto Laclau and the proponents of frame theory, the article suggests dropping the ideological clause and simply conceiving populism as a discursive frame. The article contends that frame analysis reveals a strong fit between discursive elements and cognitive features of populism, furnishing solid methodological foundations to conduct empirical research and encouraging cooperation with neighboring fields of social science.

Is Populism an Ideology? A Refutation and a New Perspective:

Despite the wide application of the label “populist” in the 2016 election cycle, there has been little systematic evidence that this election is distinctive in its populist appeal. Looking at histo...

Rise of the Trumpenvolk: Populism in the 2016 Election

In recent years, populism has attracted considerable interest from social scientists and political commentators. Yet the term ‘populism’ remains both widely used and widely contested. It has been defined based on political, economic, social, and discursive features and analyzed from myriad theoretical perspectives and a variety of methodological approaches. This literature review surveys different academic approaches to the study of populism. It aims at promoting the theoretical understanding of the concept and opening new methodological pathways for the study of populist politics. The timeframe of the research we survey spans from the late 19th century to the present day, and its geographical focus ranges from Eastern Europe and Latin America to the Anglo-American democracies. A comprehensive discussion of the research on the topic is timely and warranted, considering the role of populist politics in contemporary democracies.

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Varieties of Populism: Literature Review and Research Agenda

We explore the relationship between populist attitudes and conspiratorial beliefs on the individual level with two studies using American samples. First, we test whether and what kinds of conspiratorial beliefs predict populist attitudes. Our results show that belief in conspiracies with greedy, but not necessarily purely evil, elites are associated with populism. Second, we test whether having a conspiratorial mentality is associated with all separate sub-dimensions of populist attitudes – people-centrism, anti-elitism, and a good-versus-evil view of politics. Results show a relation only with the first two, confirming the common tendency of both discourses to see the masses as victims on elites’ hands. These findings contribute to research on the correlates of populism at the individual level, which is essential to understanding why this phenomenon is so strong in contemporary democracies.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/spsr.12270

The Elite Is Up to Something: Exploring the Relation Between Populism and Belief in Conspiracy Theories

The Populist Vision offers an innovative re-evaluation. It argues that the Populists were modern people, rejecting the notion that Populism opposed modernity and progress. Looking at Populism as a national movement, it focuses on farmers but also wage-earners and bohemian urbanites. It examines topics from technology, business, and women's rights, to government, race, and religion.

The Populist Vision

In the 1880s and ‘90s, Waco, Texas, served as a trading center for the cotton districts of central Texas whose farmers gave rise to the Farmers’ Alliance and turned the region into a Populist hotbed. Waco was also known as the “City of Churches,” as it was the site of Baylor University and other efforts of evangelical churches to build up their institutions. What is less well known is that Waco and its rural environs were also hotbeds of religious heterodoxy. Waco's Iconoclast magazine became a lightning rod of conflict between the Baptists and their skeptical and liberal critics, a conflict that played out to a murderous conclusion. Historians have taken due note of the evangelical environment in which the Populist movement emerged in late nineteenth-century rural America. But in the process the notion of evangelical belief has been too often rendered static and total. The Baptist-Iconoclast conflict in Waco provides an entry point for a better understanding of the dynamic and conflicted nature of the religious context, and the influence of liberal and heterodox ideas within the communities that sustained the Populist cause.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S1537781415000833

Murder on the brazos: the religious context of the populist revolt

The Tea Party in Historical Perspective

Populist Cartoons: An Illustrated History of the Third-Party Movement in the 1890s

This paper explores the viability of populism as both a historical category and a political concept. Its starting point is the historical example of the first mass political expression that formed under the name of populism, and that was the U.S. People's Party of the 1890s. Although it carried the nickname of the Populist Party, this had virtually none of the meanings that were attached to the term populism at a later date. Historical populism in the U.S. was a farmer-labor movement that corresponded to labor and social-democratic movements across the late 19th -century capitalist world. This poses the challenge: is populism a capacious enough concept to include the U.S. historical precedent? Or does including the U.S. precedent render the category and concept toothless or even useless?

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Charles Postel

Papers

The Populist Vision

Murder on the brazos: the religious context of the populist revolt

The Tea Party in Historical Perspective

Populist Cartoons: An Illustrated History of the Third-Party Movement in the 1890s

Populism as a Concept and the Challenge of U.S. History