Week 2
Populism

SOCI 229

Sakeef M. Karim
Amherst College


FAR RIGHT POPULISTS, TRUMPISM, AND THE SOCIOLOGY OF EXCLUSIONARY POLITICS

Lecture I: September 9^th

A Quick Reminder

Class Syllabus

The most up-to-date version of our class syllabus will always be available at soci229.netlify.app.

What We’ll Cover Today

• What is populism?

• How is populism related to democracy?

• Has populism grown more salient over time?

• Does populism present itself similarly across the world?

• What are the supply and demand sides of populism?

• How can we measure populism at different levels of analytic aggregation?

• How does populism inform, or help animate, the politics of exclusion?

Populism’s Analytic Utility

An Essentially Contested Concept

While no important concept is beyond debate, the discussion about populism concerns not just what it is, but whether it even exists. It truly is an essentially contested concept.
(Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser 2017, 2, EMPHASIS ADDED)

An Essentially Contested Concept

Why?

1. Analytically, populism has been used to describe a wide array of individuals, movements and phenomena that share little in common .

2. “If populism is everywhere … then it is nowhere.”

3. Populism “is a morally and politically charged term, a weapon of political struggle as much as a tool of scholarly analysis.”

(Brubaker 2017, 358–59, EMPHASIS ADDED)

An Essentially Contested Concept

Is It Useful?

Yes.

Well, it can be.

The utility of populism as an analytic category is conditional on how we conceptualize—and in empirical settings, operationalize—the term.

More on that later.

Populism’s Roots and Contemporary Expressions

Possible Origins

French Revolution

Jean Joseph François Tassaert’s Arrest of Robespierre

For a relevant paper, see Rousselière (2021).

Possible Origins

Russia’s Narodniks

Ilya Repin’s Arrest of a Propagandist

For a relevant paper, see Tarragoni (2024).

Possible Origins

American People’s Party

People’s Party convention in 1890. Image can be retrieved here

For a relevant reading, see Kazin (2017).

Modern-Day Examples?

France’s National Rally

Image can be retrieved here

For a relevant paper, see Reynié (2016).

Modern-Day Examples?

South Africa’s Economic Freedom Fighters

Image can be retrieved here

For a relevant reading, see Mbete (2020).

Modern-Day Examples?

The Bernie Sanders Movement

Image can be retrieved here

For a relevant reading, see Macaulay (2019).

Modern-Day Examples?

Trumpism

Image can be retrieved here

For a relevant reading, see Bonikowski (2019).

Modern-Day Examples?

Poland’s Black Protests

Image can be retrieved here

For a relevant paper, see Graff (2020).

Modern-Day Examples?

India’s Cow Vigilantes

Image can be retrieved here

For a relevant paper, see Jaffrey (2021).

Theorizing Populism

What Is It?

• Performative Style
• “Thin-Centred” Ideology
• Discourse

Image retrieved from here

For a relevant book, see Moffitt (2016).

For a relevant reading, see Stanley (2008).

For a relevant reading, see Bonikowski and Gidron (2016).

The Ideational Approach

Beyond the lack of scholarly agreement on the defining attributes of populism, agreement is general that all forms of populism include some kind of appeal to “the people” and a denunciation of “the elite.” Accordingly, it is not overly contentious to state that populism always involves a critique of the establishment and an adulation of the common people.

(Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser 2017, 5, EMPHASIS ADDED)

Three Key Ingredients

(1) People-Centrism

Image can be retrieved here

Three Key Ingredients

(2) Anti-Elitism

Image can be retrieved here

Three Key Ingredients

(3) Manichean Outlook

Birth of Mani

Populism and Democracy

Democracy

The democratic transition swept Western Europe and, over the course of the 20^th century, refashioned most of the world’s governments in its image. Democratization revolutionized authority, transforming subjects into citizens, autocrats into politicians, and barons into employers. Although authoritarian regimes linger, and political democracy has not eliminated inequalities of income and wealth, these changes amount to a remarkable transformation in the exercise of power.

(Usmani 2018, 665, EMPHASIS ADDED)

Populism—Democracy Disfigured?

[A]lthough it is an internal transformation of representative democracy, populism can disfigure it by making the principles of democratic legitimacy (the people and the majority) the possession of a part of the people, which a strong leader embodies and mobilizes against other parts (minorities and the political opposition). Populism in power is an extreme majoritarianism.
(Urbinati 2019, 113, EMPHASIS ADDED.)

Populism—Inherent in Democracy’s Promise?

[P]opulism is something internal to democracy. Given that the core concepts of the populist ideology … can be easily used to refer to the gap between democratic ideals and real existing democracies, we should not be surprised at the rise of populist actors who seek to enact the redemptive side of politics, and re-politicise those problems that intentionally or unintentionally are not being addressed by the establishment.
(Rovira Kaltwasser 2014, 484, EMPHASIS ADDED.)

Democracy Has Two “Faces”

Redemptive vs Pragmatic

Democracy is a redemptive vision, kin to the family of modern ideologies that promise salvation through politics. Pragmatically, however, it is a way of coping peacefully with the conflicts of modern societies by means of a highly contingent collection of rules and practices.

(Canovan 1999, 10, EMPHASIS ADDED.)

Democracy Has Two “Faces”

Redemptive vs Pragmatic

The notion of popular power lies at the heart of the redemptive vision: the people are the only source of legitimate authority, and salvation is promised as and when they take charge of their own lives. But from a pragmatic point of view democracy is simply a form of government, a way of running what is always one particular polity amongst others in a complex world.

(Canovan 1999, 10, EMPHASIS ADDED.)

Democracy Has Two “Faces”

Redemptive vs Pragmatic

Pragmatically, democracy means institutions: institutions not just to limit power, but also to constitute it and make it effective. But in redemptive democracy (as in redemptive politics more generally) there is a strong anti-institutional impulse: the romantic impulse to directness, spontaneity and the overcoming of alienation.

(Canovan 1999, 10, EMPHASIS ADDED.)

For a relevant paper, see Kadivar, Usmani and Bradlow (2020).

Implications for Populism?

When too great a gap opens up between haloed democracy and the grubby business of politics, populists tend to move on to the vacant territory, promising in place of the dirty world of party manoeuvring the shining ideal of democracy renewed.

(Canovan 1999, 11, EMPHASIS ADDED)

Populism Over Time

A Populist Zeitgeist?

[P]opulist discourse has become mainstream in the politics of contemporary western democracies. I have called this the populist Zeitgeist. True, most mainstream parties mainly use populist rhetoric, but some also call for populist amendments to the liberal democratic system.
(Mudde 2004, 562, EMPHASIS ADDED)

The Broad View, 1970-2019

*Caveat Emptor — this is a very noisy measure!

Populism’s Disparate Expressions

The Global Portrait

*Caveat Emptor — this is a very noisy measure!

What Explains This Variation?

One Possibility

Karim and Drago’s Democratic Strain and Populist Fervor in India, America and Beyond

What Explains This Variation?

One Possibility

Karim and Drago’s Democratic Strain and Populist Fervor in India, America and Beyond

Group Discussions I

Three Orienting Questions

1. There’s a Presidential Election looming over the horizon. Are either of the presidential candidates populists in your view?
   Why or why not?

2. Are there other political figures, actors or movements that are, in your view, unmistakably populist?

3. More generally, do you believe populism is a useful analytic category? Does it help you make sense of the current political moment in America and beyond?

Lecture II: September 11^th

Temperature Check

How are things going?

A Note on Office Hours

A Note on Office Hours

Tip

You can schedule a meeting here.

Sidebar

Some Thoughts on Anti-Immigrant Sentiment

Anti-immigrant sentiment is being mainstreamed once more.

Some Thoughts on Anti-Immigrant Sentiment

Some Thoughts on Anti-Immigrant Sentiment

What’s Old Is New Again?

From SOCI 231

Back to Populism

What We’ll Cover Today

• What is populism?

• How is populism related to democracy?

• Has populism grown more salient over time?

• Does populism present itself similarly across the world?

• What are the supply and demand sides of populism?

• How can we measure populism at different levels of analytic aggregation?

• How does populism inform, or help animate, the politics of exclusion?

Group Discussions II

But First—A Summary From Cas Mudde

Finding Populism in the Wild

In groups of 3-4, discuss how you could use an ideational framework to study populist phenomena. How would you “capture” or “measure” populism? What kind(s) of data would you need to test your assumptions?

Applying the Populist Label

In those same groups, discuss how populist the following people or movements are on a scale from 1 to 10:

• Black Lives Matter
• Tea Party
• Occupy Wall Street

• Hillary Clinton
• Bernie Sanders
• Barack Obama

• Mitt Romney
• George W. Bush
• Donald Trump

Populism at Different
Levels of Analysis

Supply and Demand

Where most accounts focus exclusively on the populist supply, as they define populism as a style or strategy used by the political elite, our approach enables us to also look at the populist demand, i.e., the support for populist ideas at the mass level.

(Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser 2017, 20, EMPHASIS ADDED)

A Question

Think more concretely—what might the supply of populism mean in substantive terms? How about populist demand?

Measuring the Supply Side

Coding Speeches

The Global Populism Database can be accessed here

For a relevant paper, see Hawkins and Rovira Kaltwasser (2018).

Measuring the Supply Side

Computational Text Analysis

Figure 5 from Bonikowski, Luo and Stuhler (2022)

Measuring the Supply Side

Expert Surveys

You can access data from V-Party here

Measuring the Demand Side

Interviews and Ethnographies

Image can be retrieved here

For a relevant paper, see Williamson, Skocpol and Coggin (2011).

Measuring the Demand Side

Experiments

Figure 3 from Dai and Kustov (2023)

Measuring the Demand Side

Traditional Survey Analysis

Figure 1 from Jungkunz, Fahey and Hino (2021)

Challenges of Measurement

A Non-Compensatory Construct

Figure 1 from Wuttke, Schimpf and Schoen (2020)

Challenges of Measurement

A Relational Construct

Figure 3 from Jungkunz and colleagues (2021)

So, What’s the Point?

The Utility of Populism

Put simply, populism—when treated with analytic precision and care—can help us understand mass disaffection in a democratic world.

The Utility of Populism

Image can be retrieved here

See You Monday

References

Note: Scroll to access entire bibliography.

Bonikowski, Bart. 2019. “Trump’s Populism: The Mobilization of Nationalist Cleavages and the Future of US Democracy.” In When Democracy Trumps Populism: European and Latin American Lessons for the United States, edited by Kurt Weyland and Raúl L. Madrid, 110–31. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108692793.006.

Bonikowski, Bart, and Noam Gidron. 2016. “The Populist Style in American Politics: Presidential Campaign Discourse, 1952–1996.” Social Forces 94 (4): 1593–1621. https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/sov120.

Bonikowski, Bart, Yuchen Luo, and Oscar Stuhler. 2022. “Politics as Usual? Measuring Populism, Nationalism, and Authoritarianism in U.S. Presidential Campaigns (1952–2020) with Neural Language Models.” Sociological Methods & Research 51 (4): 1721–87. https://doi.org/10.1177/00491241221122317.

Brubaker, Rogers. 2017. “Why Populism?” Theory and Society 46 (5): 357–85. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-017-9301-7.

Canovan, Margaret. 1999. “Trust the People! Populism and the Two Faces of Democracy.” Political Studies 47 (1): 2–16. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9248.00184.

Dai, Yaoyao, and Alexander Kustov. 2023. “The (in)effectiveness of Populist Rhetoric: A Conjoint Experiment of Campaign Messaging.” Political Science Research and Methods, November, 1–8. https://doi.org/10.1017/psrm.2023.55.

Graff, Agnieszka. 2020. “Angry Women: Poland’s Black Protests as ‘Populist Feminism’.” In Right-Wing Populism and Gender, edited by Gabriele Dietze and Julia Roth, 231–50. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag.

Hawkins, Kirk A., and Kaltwasser Cristóbal Rovira. 2018. “Measuring Populist Discourse in the United States and Beyond.” Nature Human Behaviour 2 (4): 241–42. https://doi.org/http://dx.doi.org.proxy3.library.mcgill.ca/10.1038/s41562-018-0339-y.

Jaffrey, Sana. 2021. “Right-Wing Populism and Vigilante Violence in Asia.” Studies in Comparative International Development 56 (2): 223–49. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12116-021-09336-7.

Jungkunz, Sebastian, Robert A. Fahey, and Airo Hino. 2021. “How Populist Attitudes Scales Fail to Capture Support for Populists in Power.” PLOS ONE 16 (12): e0261658. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0261658.

Kadivar, Mohammad Ali, Adaner Usmani, and Benjamin H. Bradlow. 2020. “The Long March: Deep Democracy in Cross-National Perspective.” Social Forces 98 (3): 1311–38. https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soz050.

Kazin, Michael. 2017. The Populist Persuasion: An American History. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/255/monograph/book/56726.

Macaulay, Marcia. 2019. “Bernie and the Donald: A Comparison of Left- and Right-Wing Populist Discourse.” In Populist Discourse: International Perspectives, edited by Marcia Macaulay, 165–95. Cham: Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97388-3_6.

Mbete, Sithembile. 2020. “Populism in Global Perspective: A Performative and Discursive Approach.” In Out With the Old, In With the New?: The ANC and EFF’s Battle to Represent the South African “People”, edited by Pierre Ostiguy, Francisco Panizza, and Benjamin Moffitt, 240–54. New York: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003110149-14.

Moffitt, Benjamin. 2016. The Global Rise of Populism: Performance, Political Style, and Representation. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. http://stanford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.11126/stanford/9780804796132.001.0001/upso-9780804796132.

Mudde, Cas. 2004. “The Populist Zeitgeist.” Government and Opposition 39 (4): 541–63. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1477-7053.2004.00135.x.

Mudde, Cas, and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser. 2017. Populism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/actrade/9780190234874.001.0001.

Reynié, Dominique. 2016. “The Specter Haunting Europe: ‘Heritage Populism’ and France’s National Front.” Journal of Democracy 27 (4): 47–57. https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/article/633751.

Rousselière, Geneviève. 2021. “Can Popular Sovereignty Be Represented? Jacobinism from Radical Democracy to Populism.” American Journal of Political Science 65 (3): 670–82. https://doi.org/10.1111/ajps.12600.

Rovira Kaltwasser, Cristóbal. 2014. “The Responses of Populism to Dahl’s Democratic Dilemmas.” Political Studies 62 (3): 470–87. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9248.12038.

Stanley, Ben. 2008. “The Thin Ideology of Populism.” Journal of Political Ideologies 13 (1): 95–110. https://doi.org/10.1080/13569310701822289.

Tarragoni, Federico. 2024. “Populism, an Ideology Without History? A New Genetic Approach.” Journal of Political Ideologies 29 (1): 42–63. https://doi.org/10.1080/13569317.2021.1979130.

Urbinati, Nadia. 2019. “Political Theory of Populism.” Annual Review of Political Science 22 (1): 111–27. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-polisci-050317-070753.

Usmani, Adaner. 2018. “Democracy and the Class Struggle.” American Journal of Sociology 124 (3): 664–704. https://doi.org/10.1086/700235.

Williamson, Vanessa, Theda Skocpol, and John Coggin. 2011. “The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism.” Perspectives on Politics 9 (1): 25–43. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41622724.

Wuttke, Alexander, Christian Schimpf, and Harald Schoen. 2020. “When the Whole Is Greater Than the Sum of Its Parts: On the Conceptualization and Measurement of Populist Attitudes and Other Multidimensional Constructs.” American Political Science Review 114 (2): 356–74. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055419000807.