Question

Does it make sense to compare instances of populism throughout time and space ? Answer this in relation to Roodujin, M (2014) ' The nucleus of Populism : in Search of the lowest common denominator', Goverment and Opposition, 49(4), 572-598.

Please answer in more 1000 Words.

Answer 1

Answer :

Populism has become pervasive in political language and in the diagnosis of the malaise of contemporary politics. At the same time, more narrow definitions of populism have become shared in scholarship on the subject, nourishing more analytical approaches that put populism in historical and cross‐regional perspective. The purpose of this introduction is to use the evidence assembled in this special issue to ask some fundamental questions concerning the study of populist mobilization. Most importantly, what do we gain and what do we lose from sight by focusing on the commonalities between parties based on their populist appeals, when populist parties differ dramatically in terms of the substantive ideologies they adhere to? Are there distinctive features in terms of voter attitudes that underlie populist mobilization? And if failures of political representation and populism are intimately related, can we expect populists to render party systems more responsive to voters’ substantive policy preferences?

As populism seems to become ever more widespread in different regions of the world, there is a growing consensus on a minimal definition of the phenomenon that centers on its ideological traits. In Mudde and Kaltwasser's (2013) terms, populism is a “thin ideology” that builds on the juxtaposition of the elite and the people. Employing this discourse enables charismatic leaders to mobilize citizens who no longer feel represented by established political actors. The aim of this special issue is to gauge the contribution of the concept of populism to our understanding of political mobilization in the recent period and to compare these instances of populist mobilization to earlier ones. While more and more phenomena are looked at through the lens of populism, it is important to know how important this thin ideology is compared to the host ideologies that these parties or movements almost invariably also exhibit, and thus how similar they really are. For example, how much do we gain in looking at the populist radical right in terms of the concept of populism, rather than theories from the established literature on the radical or extreme right?

The growing consensus on what populism constitutes has the advantage of allowing for comparisons across time and space. While populism can be associated with various more substantive “host ideologies” such as socialism or cultural traditionalism and nativism, a common definition allows us to compare its left‐wing, right‐wing, and more “pure” manifestations that fail to exhibit clear‐cut affinities to host ideologies. How far, then, do the commonalities between left‐wing and right‐wing populist mobilization go? The aim of this exercise is not to proclaim either the populism lens or more classical approaches as superior to the other, but rather to contribute to a fruitful cross‐fertilization or integration of approaches. Certainly, in looking through the lens of populism, we should not forget everything we have learned when explaining more specific instances of populist mobilization based on different approaches. Our efforts to understand the challenge posed by new political actors – whether they are of a populist type or not – should be truly cumulative.

This introduction is organized around five themes. I start by discussing the growing consensus in understanding populism as a set of ideas, and use the contributions to this special issue to take stock of the varied ways populist parties and movements have conceptualized “the people” and “the elite” across space and time. I then go on to discuss the relationship between populism and substantive ideologies, exploring the potential for the populism approach and more traditional theories of party system change to fruitfully nourish one another. The third section turns to the demand side of populism, and looks at the distinctiveness of populist mobilization in terms of voter orientations, and how these may contribute to our understandings of the social structural underpinnings of populism on the left and right. This leads up to the final two sections that address the relationship between populism and representation: If populism is a consequence of failures of political representation, what are the consequences of the emergence of populist challengers for the substantive representation of voters’ policy preferences? In the final section, I ask whether different types of populist mobilization – those whose appeal is confined to specific segments of the electorate as opposed to those capable of winning electoral majorities – may have diverging effects on substantive political representation.

Putting Populism in Comparative Perspective

One part of the literature sees populism as a discourse or a distinctively top‐down strategy of political mobilization (e.g., Weyland 2001), or as in the vast literature on the radical right, simply as an additional feature that specific party types use to mobilize voters. In a similar vein, in their conceptual framework for understanding the “Left Turn” of the late 1990s and 2000s in Latin America, Levitsky and Roberts (2011: 12‐13) highlight the concentration of authority in the hands of a dominant personality as a distinguishing feature of the populist left as opposed to other currents of the left. More recently, definitions of populism have become both more demanding and more empirically precise. Despite some remaining disagreement on whether populism is a “thin ideology” or simply a type of discourse, much of the current research converges on what has been termed the “ideational” approach to populism. Hawkins and Rovira Kaltwasser (forthcoming) identifying the latter's first central element as a dualistic worldview, a Manichean juxtaposition between “the good” and “the evil”, or “the people” and “the elite”. Furthermore, the people and the elite are seen as homogeneous entities, constituting populism's anti‐pluralist ideological core that is reflected in the idea that politics should be the expression of the “volonté générale” or the general will of the people, as argued by Canovan (2002) and Mudde (2004: 543).1 Based on the success of populists’ discourse that centers on the idea that “the people” has been betrayed by the “the elite”, the diagnosis of the ideational approach is one of a generalized crisis of democratic representation that makes citizens susceptible to being mobilized against a corrupt and self‐serving elite (c.f. Caramani 2017; Hawkins 2010; Hawkins et al. forthcoming; Mudde 2004; Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser 2013; Rovira Kaltwasser 2012). According to Rooduijn's (2014) analysis, being anti‐elite, pro‐people, conjuring up the homogeneity of the people, and cultivating a permanent crisis actually constitutes the smallest common denominator of the various approaches to populism. The advantage of the ideational definition is thus that it is both precise and encompassing enough to grasp those phenomena that researchers on populism are most concerned with.

In this conception, populism is compatible with a range of distinct “host” or “thick” ideologies that populism can cling onto (e.g., Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser 2012). As Mény and Surel (2000) have pointed out, “the people” can be defined in various ways, namely, politically (the sovereign), culturally (the nation), or in economic terms (in categories of class, but also in more recent forms such as “the hard working” as against the lazy, and so forth), accounting for the malleable character of populism. Nonetheless, the minimal definition offered by the ideational approach allows for a clear distinction between populist and non‐populist forms of mobilization in theoretical terms, as well as for drawing the boundaries between populist worldviews and other manifestations of democratic malaise such as political alienation, or lack of political trust (e.g., Hawkins 2010; Hawkins et al. forthcoming).

The contributions to this special issue attest to the basic commonalities in the worldviews that populists evoke across time, from the 19^th century to present, and space, from Latin America, over Northern America to Southern and Northern Europe. Going back to the 1970s, Manucci and Weber (2017, this issue) show that populism is a cyclical phenomenon in the five Western European countries studied, and not something that is characteristic of the most recent past. In his analysis of the antebellum “Know Nothings” and the post‐Civil War People's Party in the US, and late 19^th century Boulangism in France, Betz (2017, this issue) shows that both populism and nativism are old phenomena. They frequently, but not always go together. The broad temporal scope of Betz’ analysis also reveals two additional important points: First, except for the case of Boulangism, populist mobilization does not seem to require charismatic leaders, but can also take the form of movements. This suggests that populism should indeed be considered an ideology, rather than an organizational feature of parties or movements. Second, populism and nativism are both highly malleable, and compatible with cultural and economic causes. Specifically, nativism can be framed as a remedy both against cultural threat, as well as socioeconomic anxieties. With respect to populism, the findings presented by Ivaldi et al. (2017, this issue) point in a similar direction. While a reference to “the people” is common to all the instances of populism they study, the French Front National and the Italian Lega Nord define “the people” culturally in terms of nationals as opposed to foreigners, while Podemos in Spain and the Movimento Cinque Stelle (M5S, Five Star Movement) in Italy use a broader definition encompassing “the underprivileged” or even simply the “common citizen”. Likewise, Huber and Ruth (2017, this issue) argue that parties’ host‐ideology determines the nature of the antagonism between “the people” and “the elite”.

This does not mean, however, that populism is compatible with, or beneficial to any other form of mobilization. Aguilar and Carlin's (2017, this issue) analysis based on a survey‐experiment shows that even under the favorable conditions provided by the widespread disenchantment with the political class in Chile, historical memories or the extremeness of a candidate in terms of her host ideology may severely limit the effectiveness of populist messages. We might recall that in the case of the radical populist right in Western Europe, abandoning overt racism and instead adopting cultural differentialism or ethno‐pluralism (see Antonio 2000) constituted a necessary condition for these parties’ capacity to mobilize more than marginal shares of the vote (e.g., Carter 2005; Golder 2003; Ignazi 2002; Rydgren 2005). Aguilar and Carlin's call for an effort at theorizing the scope conditions of successful populist mobilization is therefore well put.