From movement to ideology to political logic

As a political concept, populism suffers from a rather chequered past. The term has been haphazardly used to label a wide array of social and political phenomenon, and more often than not, in a disparaging manner. This has led to the situation in which it has become almost obligatory for basically any contemporary discussion or analysis of populism to begin with a statement regarding the elusive nature of the phenomenon, and the general impossibility of defining it in a satisfactory manner. This is not generally offered as some kind of glib remark, nor is it due to some kind of intellectual laziness spreading amongst political and social theorists - instead, the concept’s ambiguous and diffuse status reflects its practice ‘out there’ in the real world, where it manifests in many different forms. As such, attempts to define populism have often appealed in desperation to intuition, becoming somewhat like the infamously unhelpful definition of obscenity by Justice Potter Stewart: “I know it when I see it” (Jacobellis vs. State of Ohio 1964).

In trying to grasp populism, theorists have been split about the nature of the phenomenon and how to approach it: is it a type of social movement, ideology, or something else? How can we measure it? A brief exploration of the term’s development can help clarify why these delineations have been blurry. Allcock (1971: 372) argues that until the mid-1950s, “‘populism’ was merely a label to identify two separate historical phenomena” and that “there [was] no wider significance attached to the word”. The first phenomena the term referred to were the types of agrarian movements that led to the formation of the The People’s Party in the Southern and Midwestern United States in the 1890s. This party, originally formed to oppose the demonetization of silver, adopted the nickname of ‘Populists’ early on, drawing from the Latin populus (‘the people’). This group stands as the etymological root of the now-familiar term. The second phenomenon it referred to was the Russian narodnichestvo of the 1860s-70s, a movement of Russian intellectuals that believed that the peasants were the revolutionary class that would bring about Russia’s social and political regeneration, and thus considered it their moral imperative to go to ‘the people’ and educate them in order to bring about the revolution.

However, from the mid-50s onwards, the term began to be used to refer to a wide array of phenomena. Panizza (2005) divides approaches to populism that have appeared since this period into three main categories: empirical generalisations, historical accounts, and symptomatic readings. Empirical approaches to populism have typically taken accounts of phenomena that have been labelled as ‘populist’, and then attempted to extract attributes that link them in order to create typologies of ‘standard’ characteristics of populism. Historical accounts have tended to link populism to certain locations, social groups or historical periods. The vast literature on Latin American populism that focuses on multi-class urban alliances under charismatic leaders (Di Tella 1965; Smith 1969) is typical of this approach, as is the work on third-world populist regimes (Shils 1960; Worsley 1964).

Both of these approaches are considerably flawed. Empirical approaches too often accept the term ‘populism’ in an unproblematic fashion: if something is labelled ‘populist’, then it is populist. The typological results of this approach thus often devolve into meaninglessness - the reader is left with lists of things that potentially might be features of populism, but there is no conceptual glue to hold them together. Consequently, the approach becomes purely descriptive, with no attempt to move towards conceptual specificity. Even Margaret Canovan, who herself attempted perhaps one of the best-known approaches to populism of this type, calls it “frustratingly unsystematic” (1982: 552).

The historical approach suffers from its own self-imposed limits. By tying populism to specific historical locations, these readings exclude manifestations of populism in other places and times. These types of readings may be explained by the fact that many early scholars who sought to define populism were area specialists (particularly in US and Latin American studies) rather than political theorists or political scientists, and thus the temptation arose to believe that one’s account of a regionally specific populism can be generalised to account for populism in its totality.

It is the symptomatic approach to populism that attempts to transcend the problematic features of these previous accounts by generalising the concept rather than essentializing it. This approach sees populism as “an anti-status quo discourse that simplifies the political space by symbolically dividing society between ‘the people’ (as the ‘underdogs’) and its ‘other’” (Panizza 2005: 3). Such a view is indebted to the work of Shils (1954, 1956) and Worsley (1969), who both early on argued for the idea of populism as a dimension of political life rather than a political tradition or theory eo ipso, and more recently to Laclau (1977, 1980, 2004), who has highlighted the divisive nature of populism, as well as identified it as a discourse (and as we shall see later, a political logic). So as Panizza (2005: 1) acknowledges, “while there is no scholarly agreement on the meaning of populism, it is possible to identify an analytical core around which there is a significant degree of academic consensus”. This is certainly a fair characterisation of recent literature on the topic, with Westlind (1996), Meny and Surel (2002), Stavrakakis (2004), Laycock (2005), Howarth (2005), Mudde (2004, 2008), and Albertazzi and McDonnell (2008) all advocating similar positions that revolve around the simultaneous construction of ‘the people’ and division of society into two antagonistic groups.

Whilst this kind of approach may be criticized for being too general, if we wish to escape the ‘sins of the past’ when it comes to theorizing populism, we must commit to a non-essentialist theory that posits ‘the people’ as a non-fixed, contingent and open category. The advantages of doing so are numerous. This allows us to focus on the political operation by which one part of the community (plebs) is able to represent itself as the legitimate ‘whole’ community (populus), and how the dichotomisation of the political space occurs through this process. Further, by moving away from the notion of populism as an ‘ism’ or ‘full ideology’ (Freeden 2005) that stands alongside socialism, liberalism, communism and so forth, we are able to investigate how populism more subtly relates and grafts onto other central features of the contemporary political landscape, such as democracy, representation and the media. These have been extremely fruitful moves, as the semi-consensus in the ‘definition wars’ has meant that there has been an expansion beyond a potentially myopic focus on the semantic elements of populism to considerations of its complex empirical political reality.

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