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What Is Populism?

If there is one cliché that rules above all others when it comes to the study of populism, it is surely this: the idea that experts cannot, for the life of them, agree on a definition for it. This allegedly insurmountable contestation over the term, and the claims made about its 'meaninglessness', are often (in fact every few years or so) accompanied by calls for it to be withdrawn or thrown on the trash heap of useless concepts. The thinking goes, if specialists on the topic cannot come to an agreement even on what the concept stands for, how on earth is it supposed to be of any use to anyone else?

Like most clichés, this one is only half true. There is actually a fair degree of agreement among academics: most specialists are of the view that populism revolves around a central division between 'the people' and 'the elite'. In other words, there is considerable consensus about the core features of populism. Some authors bring in additional criteria - such as personalist leadership (Weyland 2017), the pronouncement of crisis (Moffitt 2015a; Rooduijn 2014), or the exclusion of dangerous 'others' (Albertazzi and McDonnell 2008a) - but, at a minimum, these definitions tend to hinge on the people-elite divide. Even more, there is significant consensus on central cases of populism: while scholars often use different definitions of populism, they tend to end up labelling pretty much the same leaders, parties or movements as 'populist' (however, as we shall see later in this chapter, there is significant dissension outside these central cases).

What academics do disagree on is the type of phenomenon that populism is. That is, populism scholars do not agree as to whether populism is an ideology, a strategy, a discourse or a mode of political performance. This is nothing new: debates about what kind of phenomenon populism is have been raging for over half a century now, as illustrated by the different definitions put forward in Populism: Its Meanings and National Characteristics (Ionescu and Gellner 1969), a seminal collection that drew together the results of a 1967 conference held at the London School of Economics, 'To Define Populism'. The conference, needless to say, did not achieve its goal. While some scholars have attempted to explain the continuation of these definitional debates around populism as irrelevant or as mere nitpicking - for example, Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser (2018: 1668) argue that, '[a]lthough each of these terms has its own specificities, the differences between them are minor, and irrelevant to many research questions' - the present chapter claims the opposite. These debates matter and have very important ramifications and consequences for studying populism: the kind of phenomenon one thinks populism to be tends to reflect very different ontological, epistemological and methodological approaches to the subject. Such choices inform the kinds of political actors one studies - parties, leaders, movements, citizens or followers; how one studies them - through what they say, through what they do, through what they write, or through something else; and whether one thinks that populism is a binary or gradational concept - that is, is the line between populism and non-populism black and white, or can we can account for some grey in between? Even more, it reflects a central split between those who think that populism is a property or an attribute of a political actor - such as an ideology - and those who think that populism is something that political actors 'do' - such as a discourse.

This chapter breaks down such differences by outlining the key approaches put forward in the literature on populism - the ideational approach, typified by the work of Mudde (2004, 2007, 2017a), Rovira Kaltwasser (Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser 2017), Hawkins (Hawkins and Rovira Kaltwasser 2017a, 2017b) and Müller (2016); the strategic approach, typified by the work of Weyland (2001, 2017), Roberts (1995, 2003) and Jansen (2011); and the discursive-performative approach, typified by the work of Laclau (2005a), Mouffe (2018), Wodak (2015) and Ostiguy (2017) - and outlines their theoretical and methodological differences. In doing so, it pays particular attention to the intellectual lineage of each approach, tracing the methodological influence of the work of Freeden (1996) and Sartori (1970) for the ideational approach and of the work of Sartori (1970), Ragin (2000) and Tilly (2008) for the strategic approach, and the theoretical influence of the work of Laclau and Mouffe (1985) for the discursive-performative approach. It also outlines the epistemological positions that underlie each of these approaches and have tended to remain underexplored in contemporary debates about different conceptual camps. While the chapter obviously does not cover all definitions of populism - there is also a burgeoning body of work in the political communications literature that views populism as a mode of communication or expression (see Aalberg et al. 2017) in a way slightly different from, yet akin to, that of the discursive-performative approach - the ones discussed here represent the central tendencies in the contemporary literature on the topic and should give you a good bearing on where the conceptual debate currently stands.

The Ideational Approach

The ideational approach to populism is, arguably, the most widely used approach to populism in the contemporary academic literature. This approach regards populism as an ideology, as a set of ideas or as a worldview. There are certainly intuitive reasons for seeing populism in this way: it naturally seems that, as a political phenomenon with a name ending in -ism, populism should be set alongside other central political 'isms', which often happen to be ideologies - such as liberalism, socialism, anarchism and so on.

One can trace a fairly clear lineage of scholars who have seen populism as an ideational phenomenon. Mudde (2017a: 27) notes that early studies of the US People's Party (Ferkiss 1957) and of the Russian Narodniks (Pipes 1960) focused on the party's and movement's ideational contents. Shils' mid-twentieth-century work on McCarthyism, meanwhile, identified populism as a 'widespread phenomenon . [that] exists wherever there is an ideology of popular resentment against the order imposed on society by a long-established, differentiated ruling class which is believed to have a monopoly of power, property, breeding and culture' (Shils 1956: 100-1), whereas MacRae (1969) explicitly argued that populism should be conceptualised as an ideology. Canovan's influential work on populism also developed an ideological understanding of populism, her later work referring to it as 'the ideology of democracy' (Canovan 2002: 25).

Today the most commonly cited definition of populism under this approach is that of Mudde: 'a thin-centered ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic camps, "the pure people" versus "the corrupt elite", and which argues that politics should be an expression of the volonté générale (general will) of the people' (Mudde 2004: 543). Similar approaches to populism as a 'thin-centred' ideology have been developed by Stanley (2008), Albertazzi and McDonnell (2008a), and Rooduijn (2014) among others - and, even if they do not precisely refer to it as 'thin', the implication is that populism does not stand alone as an ideology but is rather always combined with other ideologies. These definitions have been put to use most often to understand populist parties in Europe (particularly in Western Europe), although they have been taken up in recent studies of Latin American populism as well (see Hawkins and Rovira Kaltwasser 2017a). This ideational understanding of populism has also been used to measure populist attitudes among populations (Akkerman, Mudde and Zaslove 2014; Hawkins, Rovira Kaltwasser and Andreadis 2018). Müller has developed a similar definition of the phenomenon: while he does not explicitly call populism an ideology, his definition of it as 'a way of perceiving the political world that sets a morally pure and fully unified - but . ultimately fictional - people against elites who are deemed corrupt or in some other way morally inferior' (Müller 2016: 19-20) comes very close to Mudde's definition. Both highlight (a) the divide between 'the people' and 'the elite' and (b) the homogeneity, unification and moral 'purity' of 'the people'.

The work of two central authors informs the broader theoretical assumptions that underlie the ideational approach to populism. The first author is Michael Freeden, whose work is used to define what an ideology is and how it operates. Against Marxian and Gramscian views of ideology as a form of false consciousness, Freeden puts forward what he calls a 'morphological' approach to ideology. He sees ideologies as 'distinctive configurations of political concepts' that 'create specific conceptual patterns from a pool of indeterminate and unlimited combinations' (Freeden 1996: 4). The aim, when studying ideologies in this manner, is to determine how...