ABSTRACT
Populism is a political phenomenon that, as Magaret Canovan so aptly puts it, haunts liberal democracy and other elitist forms of government like a shadow (Canovan 1999). The modern notion of populism first emerged in the late nineteenth century, both in the USA and in the Russian empire. It could be claimed, however, that its earliest forms were already present in Athens (Tucydides called its practitioners “demagogues”) and in the Roman republic with the popularii, and that the Gracchi brothers and Marius were populist leaders. In modern times, the American People’s Party and Russian Narodism were political organizations based on the idea of the people as the source of virtue and good. They divided society into two main camps – that of the people, and that of the people’s enemies. Populist movements reappeared in the mid-1900s, especially in Latin
America but also in Africa, and even in France with the Poujadist movement. As Latin America started its path toward democracy in the 1980s, it seemed that the populist phenomenon had belonged to the past, so much so that the concept all but disappeared from political science literature. Nonetheless, since the 1990s populist parties and movements have once again taken center stage in the political scene. Whether in Europe or in South America, populist parties have been in office, become part of government coalitions, or emerged as an active opposition. Populism is once again one of the most dynamic political phenomena. As a consequence, the topic has been widely addressed by both the mass media and academic literature. Yet it seems that the more the word “populism” is used, the less clear its
definition becomes. Journalists and researchers employ it to designate quite different phenomena, such as Venezuelan Chavismo, Evo Morales’ nativist socialism, Le Pen’s Front National, or the Belgian Vlaams Belang.
In the past the concept referred to the American People’s Party, the Russian Narodniks, Swiss forms of direct democracy, or Argentinian Peronism. In the 1950s and 1960s, mainstream political science considered populism a phenomenon typical of peripheral and semi-peripheral countries that entered modernity relatively late. It was described as the failed normative development of the masses’ political consciousness (Ionescu and Gellner 1969; Di Tella 1977; Germani 1978). However, the emergence of radical right populism in Western Europe in the 1990s forced scholars to rethink the idea of populism as a peripheral pathology or deviation. Conceptual confusion around the notion of populism increases due
to the pejorative connotations of its everyday use by politicians and the media. Both describe as populist any program or discourse that appeals to the “lowest common denominator” and chooses to flatter “the people” instead of looking out for the country’s (or society’s) best interests. The polysemy of this term has brought some scholars to the conclusion
that it should be abandoned, since it does not add to our understanding of the phenomena it encompasses. Others suggest constraining its use to the study of specific political movements, giving up any attempt to find a common ground for all of them. However, describing each populist movement as a singular historical phenomenon does not help to explain why the same term, populism, serves to designate a series of particular, unrelated phenomena. Abandoning the word or limiting its use to refer to a few specific movements hinders our ability to understand a broad variety of political processes. Moreover, the fact that the term is widely used does not mean that its
use is arbitrary. In his article on the social roots of populism, Stewart proposes to classify the different approaches to the populist phenomenon depending on their emphasis on populism as a corpus of ideas, as particular historical events, or as an emergent of certain common social characteristics (Stewart 1969). In the present chapter I develop a discussion of this notion that seeks to bring together the first and third perspectives in order to study a particular case, that is, populism in Israel.
