ABSTRACT
This introduction identifies and maps key issues, problems, and opportunities in the scholarly study of populism across academic disciplines. In so doing, it frames the collection by establishing the importance of populism as an academic area of study and by highlighting key re-occurring themes including the meaning of the people, the relationship between populism and pluralism, the conditions of possibility for populist mobilizations, the troubled binary identification unifying populists against elites, and methodological considerations when studying populism from insider and outsider perspectives.
