ABSTRACT
The theory elaborated by political scientists Yves Mény and Yves Surel emerged as an attempt to understand the neo-populist wave that they witnessed in Europe in the 1990s. Mény and Surel started from the central role played by the concept of popular sovereignty in the populist phenomenon. Like others, they acknowledged the intrinsic ambiguity of the concept of populism; however, they linked it to the equally ambivalent role that popular sovereignty can acquire in democratic regimes, both as a source of legitimacy for the institutional structure and as a delegitimizing force. Mény and Surel are also credited for highlighting the relationship between contemporary neo-populism and the profound changes of the nation states produced by globalization processes. Mény and Surel identified three typologies of imagined community "as three analytically isolatable universes that however often merge in practice": the people-sovereign at a purely political level, the people-class in a purely economic sense, and the people-nation from a more cultural perspective.
