Populism in Focus

Traditionally, populism used to be conceived as politics alien and inimical to liberal democracy. In the recent decades an attitude has slightly shifted towards seeing populism more as a phenomenon, in one way or another, pertaining to democracy: as its ‘inextricable companion’, its shadow, its pathology, or an eternal possibility within it. Before offering our preferred definition of populism, various approaches need to be mentioned here at least in passing.

Against the backdrop of rather authoritarian rule exercised by some ‘classical’ populists in Latin America in the middle of the 20^th century, pop­ulism used to be defined resorting to cumulative generalisations drawn from 1) the contents of (social and economic) policies of populists, 2) social composition of constituencies supporting them (namely multi-class coali­tions), and, 3) the way populist leaders appealed to those constituencies. Populism was presented as an authoritarian anti-western politics engaged in statist and redistributive socio-economic policies (‘socialism’) and as a direct appeal to the heterogeneous masses in an attempt to attract popular support across various societal and class divides.

Cumulative as they were, such approaches often produced all-encom­passing definitions trying to cover all traits of populist politics. Those con­cepts largely failed the test of empirical reality when, for example, some populist leaders in the 1980s and 1990s adopted neo-liberal economic meas­ures. In direct opposition to economic interventionism of the classic pop­ulists of the 1950s, neo-populists successfully combined neo-liberalism with populist appeals to masses.

Efforts to define populism leaning against policies and social demogra­phy survived the shift of the focus of populist studies from Latin America to the West European radical right. While the ‘old’ spirit often persisted, the change of the focus also entailed a shift in the outlook. Originally, also the radical right populism had been primarily characterised in terms of poli­cies and social support; the whole industry has been build around the analy­sis of ‘demand’ and ‘supply’ aspects of the radical right parties’ emergence and success.

Research into the western radical right, however, stimulated theorising on populism as such - preferably without being preoccupied with policies and political demography. The endeavour has yielded, inter alia, conceptu­al returns which resigned on global ambitions, hence localised their defini­tional efforts in the context of modern liberal democracies of the West. These studies seem to have inspired the consensus on that populism has pri­marily something to do with (or has something against) democracy which is commonly referred to as liberal and representative. Marked by notewor­thy inroads into social theory and theory of democracy³, some of the new conceptualizations apparently reacted to the seemingly vanishing conclu­siveness of the policy- and social support-based definitions.

Given the notable differences in the policies and the social support between the Latin American and West European populists, the shift also reinforced the belief that the workable way of conceptualizing populism should mainly rely on the analysis of the way populists address the people.

Hence, characteristics of populism as a political style and a “set of dis­tinct arguments” (Blokker 2005, 378) came to define the area of populist studies. Blokker summarised the arguments at issue as following: “The dis­tinctive set of populist arguments includes an absolute prioritization of the people, its political participation (however defined) and its sovereign will, anti-elitism and an antiestablishment attitude, a claim for radical freedom and ‘direct democracy’, a reenchantment of the alienated people (an alien­ation which is deemed the result of the artificial constructions of legal-rational institutions) through the unification of the people with political power, combined with a disdain of formal institutions and pluralist repre­sentative democracy, and an organic and undivided vision of the ‘people’” (Blokker 2005, 378).

Rather than rejection of democracy, or its pathology, populism is then to be seen, in line with this reasoning, as democracy’s distinct reinterpre­tation - a “particular style of argumentation” (Blokker 2005, 386-7). It is assumed to rest on a “rather one-sided and particular view of democracy, emphasising its emancipatory, redemptive features” (Blokker 2005, 379) related to the popular sovereignty heart of democracy.⁴

In this view, populism is not an ideology in itself. Event though it may be able to provide the “core superstructural, politico-philosophical premis­es”, it fails “to include the ‘translation’ of the latter into a set of institu­tions, such as those found in liberalism as a political doctrine and its insti­tutional derivations” (Blokker 2005, 378).

Accentuation of ‘impracticality’ of populism as ideology constitutes a major difference relative to the most recent thought within the studies on populism, which has expressed itself in concepts that unlike previous ‘glob­al’ definitions, or populism-as-political-style arguments, seek to define the phenomenon in a ‘restricted’ way. They see it simply as the distinct inter­pretation of the political, and, thus, as a distinct political ideology, and only then as a complex socio-political phenomenon of a multifaceted nature with numerous characteristics.

The above-mentioned Mudde’s definition falls into this tradition along with a bit more elaborated argument by Stanley (2006). Stanley considers populism to be “an ideology characterised by four core concepts the interac­tion of which delineates a distinct interpretation of the political”. These are concepts as follows: “The existence of two homogeneous units of analysis: ‘the people’ and ‘the elite’ (the units of the political); the antagonistic rela­tionship between the people and the elite (the structure of the political); the idea of popular sovereignty (the normative justification for preferring the interests of the people over the elite)”, and “the positive valorisation of ‘the people’ and denigration of ‘the elite’ (the moral justification for this prefer­ence)”.

The author holds that “populism should be regarded as a distinct ideol­ogy in that it conveys a particular way of construing the political” (Stanley 2006, 1).

Under this approach, populism, being so-called ‘thin-centred’ ideology with a small number of core concepts, is an easily combinable set of ideas. It is typically encountered in ideological appeals of the populists in combi­nation with other ‘thin’ ideologies (e.g. nationalism) or more complex ones such as socialism or conservatism. Due to its restricted class of core con­cepts, populism is not what one would refer to as a practical ideology capa­ble of providing a complex political programme for contemporary polities (should one choose to address Blokker’s doubts above).

Even though for some it may come as a bit of disappointment to define populism as ‘merely’ ideology, not very dominant one into the bargain, the research undertaken within this school, however scant so far, seems to sug­gest noteworthy advantages. For example, it naturally expects populist ide­ology to be identified in party messages in a combination with elements of other ideologies. Thus, in term of analysis, it does away with both a need to spot ‘pure’ and ‘true’ populist parties and with a drive to cumulate all possible characteristics of populist politics under one heading.

In practical terms, treating populism as a distinct ideology means trying to recognise the presence of its core concepts in the messages of parties and leaders; identifying the manifold forms those concepts may assume; and finally, disentangling their interplay with components of other ideologies present in those messages.

Put otherwise, identification of the core concepts facilitates analytical treatment of diversity within populism. Variety which the core concepts themselves may manifest gives a promise of successfully accounting for an array of real-life cases of populism. While all ‘populisms’ have to be sim­ilar in sharing the four basic concepts, they may (and indeed will) differ in their manifestations and relative weight. Populist arguments are at variance as to how they define the people and elite (who belongs to it, who does not, and why so) and what is the exact form of their antagonistic relation­ship (how elites may harm people). Being far from complete, the list of possible distinctions should also include the means to be used to restore the primacy of people in the political realm. All of above metamorphoses of the populist core concepts are to be found in ‘real-life populisms’ combined with ideological elements of other ideologies, into the bargain.

Even though better conceptualizations may arise in times to come, this one seems to be particularly well equipped for carrying on case and com­parative studies needed to cope with the proliferation of ‘populisms’ in post-Communist world.⁵

As we have seen, the populist radical right proved to be too exclusive a concept to embrace the empirical wealth of post-Communist national pop­ulism in Slovakia. As it will be showed later, populism, in turn, is too inclu­sive to meet the task.⁶ Therefore, the next territory to be explored is that of nationalism.

Дата добавления: 2015-07-10