ABSTRACT
Spatial models of competition provide analytical leverage to assess how different types of populist leaders and movements reconfigure the competitive alignments of a given democratic order. This chapter draws from the literature on parties and party systems to differentiate left- and right-wing forms of programmatic or "positional" populist competition, and identifies the specific types of representational deficiencies to which they respond. It distinguishes between orthogonal and "outflanking" variants of positional competition that occur along distinct issue dimensions. The different ways of structuring political competition will be illustrated through references to paradigmatic examples like the nationalist right in Europe and the United States under Donald Trump, leftist movements like Spain's Podemos and Bolivia's Movement Towards Socialism (MAS), and Italy's Five Star Movement as a form of valence competition. Positional populist competition need not entail the politicization of a new issue dimension that is orthogonal to the left-right economic axis.
