ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces the main conceptual novelty of the study: the idea that populism might be more or less legitimate in different countries because of cultural and historical reasons. Every country presents a certain political culture, which in turn legitimizes or stigmatizes different ideas of power. In particular, the collective memory of the fascist past is linked to the legitimacy of the populist idea of power. The chapter is structured as follows. First, it illustrates the concept of cultural opportunity structure and its importance in explaining the cross-country variation in populism’s social acceptability. It then describes a new typology of collective memory and its four different types: culpabilization, heroization, cancellation, and victimization. Each type of collective memory is associated with a certain degree of stigmatization of the fascist past.
