ABSTRACT
This chapter takes its cue from Francis Fukuyama’s pithy observation that “populism is a label that political elites attach to policies supported by ordinary citizens that they don’t like” (Fukuyama 2016, 58). The chapter proceeds by identifying what is core to the literature on populism. It finds that there are two dominant approaches – one favoured by Ernesto Laclau and his followers that insists that populism is a function of democratic discourse, the other favoured by most other writers on the topic that insists that populism is in some sense a departure from and probably a threat to democracy. The presence of Laclau’s definition gives the overall debate on the nature of populism a healthy glow, whereas as I seek to demonstrate, it hampers us from seeing the ideological character of populism as a concept. Populism proceeds from the inductive assembling of traits and characteristics that are said together to characterize populist regimes and movements. Yet none of these traits are of themselves unique to populism, and indeed a number of them are descriptive of forms and styles of politics shared across the political spectrum. Taken together these traits are said to help us identify a new political phenomenon, but in doing so important ideological differences between movements of the left and right are ignored or passed over as secondary. Populism is therefore a way of containing legitimate radical democratic movements through association with nativist, far right and authoritarian movements. Fukuyama is quite right: populism is best understand as a response of elites faced with political demands that exceed their capacity to act upon them.
