Populism
Based on Wikipedia: Populism
Here's a word that everyone uses and almost no one can define: populism. Politicians hurl it as an insult. Commentators invoke it to explain everything from Brexit to the rise of strongmen in Latin America. Academics have spent decades arguing about what it actually means. And yet, despite—or perhaps because of—all this attention, populism remains one of the slipperiest concepts in political science.
The confusion is not accidental. It reflects something genuinely strange about populism itself.
A Word in Search of a Meaning
The term first appeared in English in 1858, but not in any political context we'd recognize today. A translator used it simply as the opposite of "aristocratic" while working on a text by the French poet and politician Alphonse de Lamartine. That modest beginning gives no hint of the conceptual chaos to come.
The word's political life began almost simultaneously on two continents, meaning two entirely different things. In the Russian Empire of the 1860s and 1870s, the "narodniki"—whose name translates roughly as "populists"—were left-leaning agrarian reformers who wanted to transfer political power to peasant communes. They dreamed of a radical restructuring of society from the ground up, and some historians see them as intellectual precursors to the revolutionary movements that would eventually topple the Tsarist regime.
Meanwhile, in the American Midwest, farmers were organizing around a very different set of grievances. The People's Party, active from the 1880s through the early 1900s, championed small-scale agriculture against the railroads and banks they saw as exploiting them. They wanted looser monetary policy and easier access to credit. Notably, for their era, they were relatively progressive on women's rights and minority issues.
Both movements got labeled "populist." Both claimed to speak for ordinary people against powerful elites. But beyond that surface similarity, they had little in common. This pattern—the same word applied to movements with wildly different ideologies—would repeat itself throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first.
The Literary Interlude
Before populism became the political buzzword it is today, it took a curious detour through French literature. In the early twentieth century, "populisme" came to describe a genre of novels that sympathetically portrayed working-class life. Léon Lemonnier published a manifesto for this literary movement in 1929, and two years later, Antonine Coullet-Tessier established a prize for the best populist novel.
This literary meaning has largely been forgotten. But it's worth noting because it reminds us how dramatically a term can shift its meaning across time, languages, and contexts. The word that once described sympathetic novels about factory workers and peasants would eventually be used to describe Donald Trump.
The Latin American Laboratory
After World War II, populism found its richest ground in Latin America. The region was transforming rapidly. Millions of people were leaving the countryside for the cities, escaping the old systems of rural patronage and clientelism—including practices like "voto de cabresto," or "halter voting," where rural landlords essentially controlled how their workers voted.
These newly urban populations became the base for a new kind of politics. Charismatic leaders emerged who could mobilize these masses through direct appeals, bypassing traditional political machines. Figures like Juan Perón in Argentina and Getúlio Vargas in Brazil built powerful movements by promising to represent "the people" against entrenched elites.
Here's where things get interesting: in Latin America, unlike in many other contexts, populism often carried a positive connotation. Political leaders openly embraced the label. They weren't embarrassed by it. They saw themselves as champions of democracy, giving voice to ordinary citizens who had been locked out of power.
This positive self-identification sets Latin American populism apart from how the term is typically used in Europe and North America, where calling someone a populist is almost always meant as a criticism.
The Academic Awakening
Until the 1950s, scholars mostly used "populism" narrowly, to describe the historical People's Party in the United States. Then, in 1954, two publications changed everything.
In the United States, sociologist Edward Shils was trying to make sense of McCarthyism—the anti-communist hysteria that had gripped American politics. He proposed using "populism" as a broader term for anti-elite trends in American society. Across the hemisphere, Brazilian political scientist Hélio Jaguaribe published what's considered the first academic text on Latin American populism, analyzing the phenomenon that was then dominating his country's politics.
The floodgates opened. Through the 1960s, American sociologists and historians began reexamining the People's Party through a more critical lens. Richard Hofstadter and Daniel Bell portrayed it not as a noble democratic movement but as an expression of "status anxiety" and irrationalism—a warning sign of the darker impulses lurking in democratic politics.
Meanwhile, Latin American scholars—many influenced by Marxist theory—developed their own analyses, focusing on how populism related to modernization, mass mobilization, and economic development.
In 1967, the London School of Economics convened a major conference, bringing together leading experts to finally hash out a unified definition of populism. They failed. The scholars couldn't agree on what the term meant.
Nearly sixty years later, they still can't.
Why the Confusion Persists
Several factors make populism unusually hard to pin down.
First, unlike socialism or liberalism, populism has never produced a canonical text or a foundational thinker. There's no Populist Manifesto, no Adam Smith or Karl Marx of populism. Self-described populists have never coordinated an international movement with a shared ideology and program.
Second, populism tends to be defined by its enemies rather than its friends. The term is more often used as an accusation than a self-description—at least outside Latin America. When mainstream politicians and commentators call someone a populist, they're usually warning that this person poses a danger to democracy, to the rule of law, to rational discourse. The word has become almost synonymous with "demagogue."
Third, populism has been applied to movements spanning the entire political spectrum. Left-wing populists like Venezuela's Hugo Chávez and right-wing populists like Hungary's Viktor Orbán get the same label, despite their opposing ideologies. Some scholars argue this makes the term analytically useless—a conceptual garbage can into which we throw any political movement we don't like or don't understand.
The Populist Explosion
Scholars had noticed populism becoming more prominent in Western democracies by the early 1990s. But nothing prepared them for 2016.
That year, Donald Trump won the American presidency and British voters chose to leave the European Union. Both events were widely interpreted as populist eruptions—rebellions by ordinary people against out-of-touch elites. The Cambridge Dictionary named "populism" its Word of the Year for 2017.
The academic response was extraordinary. Between 1950 and 1960, about 160 scholarly publications on populism appeared. From 1990 to 2000, that number rose to over 1,500. But the real explosion came after 2016. In that year alone, 266 academic papers and books mentioned populism in their title or abstract. By 2018, the number had climbed to 615 per year.
This academic boom has done little to resolve the definitional confusion. If anything, it has intensified it. The more scholars study populism, the more disagreements emerge about what exactly they're studying.
The Competing Definitions
Today, scholars approach populism through several different theoretical frameworks. Understanding these frameworks helps explain why experts so often talk past each other.
The Ideational Approach
The most influential contemporary definition comes from political scientists like Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser. They define populism as a "thin-centered ideology"—not a complete worldview like socialism or conservatism, but a set of core ideas that can attach itself to different host ideologies.
What are these core ideas? Three things: First, society is divided into two antagonistic groups—"the pure people" and "the corrupt elite." Second, politics should express the general will of the people. Third, the common sense of ordinary people is superior to the expertise of elites.
This definition draws on Jean-Jacques Rousseau's concept of the "general will" (volonté générale), though Rousseau himself would likely have been horrified by some of its contemporary applications. The idea is that "the people" have a unified, authentic voice that populist leaders claim to channel.
Notice what this definition doesn't include: any specific economic policy, any particular position on social issues, any ideology beyond the basic us-versus-them framework. This is why the same term can apply to both left-wing and right-wing movements. A left populist might define "the elite" as wealthy capitalists; a right populist might define it as cultural elites in universities and the media. Both share the underlying logic of virtuous people versus corrupt elites.
The Class-Based Approach
Latin American scholars, particularly those working in the Marxist tradition, have developed a different interpretation. They see populism as rooted in class dynamics, emerging at specific moments of social transformation.
Thinkers like Gino Germani and sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset focused on how rapid modernization creates conditions for populist movements. As societies industrialize and urbanize, new social groups emerge—people recently displaced from the countryside, workers entering the formal economy for the first time. These groups are politically available but not yet integrated into existing party structures or class organizations. Charismatic leaders can mobilize them through direct, personal appeals.
Marxist analysts like Francisco Weffort, Fernando Henrique Cardoso (who would later become president of Brazil), and Octavio Ianni drew on Marx's analysis of Bonapartism—his attempt to explain how Napoleon III could come to power in France. According to Marx, when the dominant class loses its grip on power but the working class isn't yet strong enough to seize it, a kind of political vacuum opens. A leader can step in, claiming to represent "the people" while actually serving his own interests or those of emerging elites.
These Marxist critics acknowledged that populist regimes often brought real benefits to ordinary people—labor reforms, social welfare programs, political inclusion. But they argued these benefits came at a cost: the subordination of independent working-class organizations to state control. Trade unions were co-opted. Class consciousness was diluted. The revolutionary potential of the working class was neutralized.
Some historians push back against this interpretation, arguing that the so-called populist period in Latin America actually saw growing worker politicization that genuinely threatened established interests.
The Discursive Approach
Argentine political theorist Ernesto Laclau developed perhaps the most sophisticated—and most controversial—approach to populism. For Laclau and his followers at the University of Essex, populism is not an ideology at all. It's a discursive logic—a way of constructing political identity through language and symbols.
The process works like this: Various groups in society have unmet demands. Perhaps workers want higher wages, farmers want agricultural subsidies, environmentalists want climate action. Normally these demands remain separate and fragmented. But sometimes a symbol or a leader emerges that can link these disparate demands together, creating a unified "popular" identity in opposition to the system that failed to meet those demands.
For Laclau, this is neither inherently good nor bad. It's simply how politics works. All political identities are constructed through some version of this us-versus-them logic. Populism just makes this logic explicit.
This approach has proven particularly influential among left-wing political strategists. The late political theorist Chantal Mouffe, Laclau's longtime collaborator, worked directly with left-populist movements in Europe, including Spain's Podemos party. From this perspective, progressives shouldn't shy away from populism—they should embrace it, constructing a "popular" identity around demands for economic justice, environmental protection, and democratic participation.
The Democratic Paradox
At the heart of debates about populism lies a fundamental tension with democracy itself.
On one hand, populism claims to be hyper-democratic. It insists that power should belong to "the people" rather than to elites, experts, or institutions that have become disconnected from popular sentiment. It favors direct forms of decision-making—referendums, plebiscites—over the slow deliberations of representative democracy. It treats the common sense of ordinary people as superior to technocratic expertise.
On the other hand, populism can threaten the very foundations of democratic governance. When populist leaders claim to embody the authentic will of the people, they often treat opposition as illegitimate. If you represent "the real people," then your opponents must represent something else—foreign interests, corrupt elites, enemies of the nation. This logic can justify attacks on the institutions designed to check executive power: independent courts, free media, opposition parties, civil society organizations.
Political scientists have documented how this works in practice. Populist leaders often enjoy genuine popular support. They use that support to justify expanding executive power at the expense of other institutions. Courts are packed with loyalists or stripped of authority. Media outlets are pressured, bought out, or shut down. Electoral rules are changed to favor incumbents. The process is often gradual enough that it's hard to point to a single moment when democracy ended—but the cumulative effect is what scholars call "democratic backsliding."
Hungary under Viktor Orbán is frequently cited as an example. Orbán came to power through free elections and retains genuine popular support. But his government has systematically weakened judicial independence, press freedom, and electoral fairness. He himself has described his project as building an "illiberal democracy"—keeping the forms of democratic rule while hollowing out its substance.
Yet the relationship between populism and democracy is not always so troubling. Scholars note that populist movements, especially when operating in opposition rather than in power, can serve important democratic functions. They can mobilize citizens who feel excluded from political decision-making. They can force established parties to pay attention to grievances they had been ignoring. They can hold elites accountable.
The challenge is that the same features that make populism democratically useful in opposition—its direct appeals to the people, its skepticism of institutions, its moral certainty—can become dangerous once populists hold power.
The Problem of Definition
Given all this complexity, some scholars have thrown up their hands and proposed abandoning "populism" as an analytical category altogether. They argue the term has become so vague and contested that it obscures more than it illuminates.
Critics raise several concerns. The ideational approach, for instance, establishes a definition in advance and then goes looking for cases that fit—a procedure that risks imposing assumptions that don't hold in all contexts. If applied too broadly, the term could potentially encompass almost any political discourse, since appeals to "the people" are ubiquitous in democratic politics.
There's also the problem of euphemism. When commentators call far-right movements "populist," are they accurately describing a political phenomenon—or are they providing a more respectable-sounding label for racism, xenophobia, and authoritarianism? Critics worry that conflating populism with far-right nativism both misrepresents the historical legacy of self-described populists (many of whom were on the left) and gives cover to political actors who might more accurately be called fascist or white nationalist.
Defenders of the concept counter that abandoning it entirely would mean losing a useful tool for understanding a genuine political phenomenon. The key, they argue, is to define the term clearly and apply it consistently. Political movements operating on the margins of mainstream politics often do share certain features—the us-versus-them framing, the appeals to an authentic popular will, the suspicion of elite institutions—that the concept of populism can help us analyze.
The View from Today
Nearly 170 years after the word first appeared in English, we're no closer to a consensus on what populism means. And yet, something is clearly happening in democracies around the world that the term, however imprecisely, seems to capture.
Trust in political institutions has declined across most Western democracies. Economic inequality has increased dramatically since the 1980s. Globalization has produced winners and losers, with many communities feeling left behind. Social media has disrupted traditional gatekeepers and enabled new forms of political mobilization. Cultural conflicts over immigration, religion, and identity have intensified.
In this context, political movements that claim to speak for "the people" against corrupt or out-of-touch elites have found fertile ground. Whether we call these movements populist—and whether we view them as democratic renewal or democratic danger—depends on our theoretical framework, our political values, and our assessment of the specific context.
Perhaps the confusion surrounding populism is itself instructive. It reminds us that political concepts are not neutral tools of analysis. They are themselves contested terrain, shaped by the interests and perspectives of those who use them. The struggle over what "populism" means is inseparable from the struggle over what kind of democracy we want.
One thing seems clear: the phenomenon the word attempts to describe—whatever we call it—is not going away anytime soon.