ABSTRACT
Margaret Canovan became renowned for her definition of populism as "the shadow of democracy", a powerful metaphor which she used to refer to the deep mechanisms of democratic systems. Rather than reducing populism to a pre-fixed label or locking it into a category, Canovan preferred to adopt a multiple approach to the understanding of populisms. Canovan resorted to Ludwig Wittgenstein's theory of "family resemblance", arguing that there exists a family of populisms, each of them possessing different traits according to the social and historical context. In the Agrarian populism category, Canovan included both the US Farmers' radicalism and the Eastern European Peasant movements, especially Russian populism. The first type of political populism identified by Canovan is Populist dictatorship, of which she provided two paradigmatic examples: the Argentine Juan Domingo Peron and the American Huey P. Long. Populist democracy is the second type of political populism. Politicians' populism is the last of the political populisms in Canovan's classification.
