Populism and representative politics in contemporary Europe

Abstract

In this paper I apply the definition of populism that I laid out in P. Taggart, Populism (Buckingham: Open University Press, 2000) and argue that recent developments in Europe provide a fertile ground for the emergence of populism. Europe is taken to in its widest sense to include the European Union as well as the ‘wider Europe’. The argument of the paper is that populism will emerge (and has already appeared) in many different forms and will appear as a series of fractured instances. Combined with the self‐limiting effects of populism this means that populism will not amount to a wider ‘European’ force but its appearance does highlight dilemmas of representative politics in Europe.

Notes

This article is based on a paper presented at the Biannual Conference of the European Union Studies Association, Nashville Tennessee, March 2003. The author would like to thank the organisers of the panel at that conference, Catherine Fieschi and Erik Jones as well as the discussant Mitchell P. Smith for useful comments on the paper.

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