Buying time: The delayed crisis of democratic capitalism

Academics are increasingly using the concept of populism to make sense of current events such as the Brexit referendum and the Trump presidency. This is certainly a welcome development, but two sho...

/pdf/studying-populism-in-comparative-perspective-reflections-on-2gw4ryzjcm.pdf

Studying Populism in Comparative Perspective: Reflections on the Contemporary and Future Research Agenda:

Authoritarian populist parties have advanced in many countries, and entered government in states as diverse as Austria, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, and Switzerland. Even small parties can still shift the policy agenda, as demonstrated by UKIP's role in catalyzing Brexit. Drawing on new evidence, this book advances a general theory why the silent revolution in values triggered a backlash fuelling support for authoritarian-populist parties and leaders in the US and Europe. The conclusion highlights the dangers of this development and what could be done to mitigate the risks to liberal democracy.

Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism

During the past few years a radical populist right has emerged in a number of West European democracies. Mixing xenophobia with a neoliberal economic program, radical right-wing parties have been increasingly successful at the polls. Their success can be explained partly in terms of a protest against immigration from third world countries and the established political parties and partly as the result of the profound social and cultural transformation of advanced western democracies.

The New Politics of Resentment: Radical Right-Wing Populist Parties in Western Europe

In this paper, we engage with the emerging literature that studies the support for populism by means of attitudes among the public at large. More specifically, our paper has two objectives. First, ...

Who Supports Populism and What Attracts People to It

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:

The Great Recession triggered an unprecedented level of political turmoil in Greece, leading to a major readjustment of the party system and the near disappearance of the once mighty socialists of PASOK. Gradually, SYRIZA – a radical-leftist-turned-populist party – rose to become the key electoral player under the aegis of its young and popular leader, Alexis Tsipras. SYRIZA eventually won two general elections in 2015 and ruled together with the populist radical right Independent Greeks (ANEL) as junior partner, a coalition of great analytical significance, representing the first ever governing alliance of left-wing and right-wing populist parties in Europe. This contribution investigates reactions to the SYRIZA-ANEL government, giving special emphasis to measures undertaken by domestic and external actors. A key finding that warrants further research is that, under the same conditions of economic crisis that bring populists to power, economic institutions and material constraints can play an imp...

Dealing with populists in government: the SYRIZA-ANEL coalition in Greece

Social movement scholars have thus far failed to give populism its deserved attention and to incorporate it into their field of study. Although sociologists, political scientists, and historians have explored diverse facets of the intersection of populism and social dissent, there has been no concerted effort towards building a comprehensive framework for the study of populist mobilization, despite its growing significance in the past decades. In this article I combine insights from populism studies, social movement scholarship, and social psychology to build a unified framework of analysis for populist social movements. I suggest populism is best understood as a collective action frame employed by movement entrepreneurs to construct a resonant collective identity of “the People” and to challenge elites. I argue that populism depends on the politicization of citizenship, and I apply this framework to the movements of the Great Recession to classify Occupy Wall Street and the European indignados as instanc...

Populist Social Movements of the Great Recession

Populism is a concept employed to qualify the political behavior of a large number of actors at a worldwide scale, with scientists classifying the latter into populists and non-populists according to dimensions such as ideology, strategy, discourse, economic policy, and even style. This article analyzes existing schools of thought on the nature of populism and argues that conceptualizing populism as a specific type of anti-elite discourse in the name of the People is both conceptually and methodologically the most coherent and useful way to understand the phenomenon. Additionally, it suggests discarding crude, dichotomous classification in favor of a gradated view of populist mobilization by means of quantifying populist discourse and observing its spatial and temporal variation. It adds value to current methods of measurement by demonstrating why and how clause-based semantic text analysis can provide optimal quantitative results while retaining qualitative elements for mixed-methods analysis. Aiming, moreover, at expanding the scope of populism studies by overcoming a narrow view that focuses exclusively at party system developments, it applies semantic text analysis to the study of grassroots mobilization during the Great Recession. Results point to the wide use of populist discourse on the part of movement activists seeking an inclusive language when framing disparate social grievances in a given constituency, a finding with important implications with regards to how populism can facilitate straddling the divide that purportedly distinguishes institutionalized party system behavior from the social movement milieu.

Paris Aslanidis

Papers

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

Dealing with populists in government: the SYRIZA-ANEL coalition in Greece

Populist Social Movements of the Great Recession

Measuring populist discourse with semantic text analysis: an application on grassroots populist mobilization

Populism and Social Movements