The ambivalence of populism: threat and corrective for democracy

Abstract

Two images of populism are well-established: it is either labelled as a pathological political phenomenon, or it is regarded as the most authentic form of political representation. In this article I argue that it is more fruitful to categorize populism as an ambivalence that, depending on the case, may constitute a threat to or a corrective for democracy. Unfolding my argument, I offer a roadmap for the understanding of the diverse and usually conflicting approaches to studying the relation between populism and democracy. In particular, three main approaches are identified and discussed: the liberal, the radical and the minimal. I stress that the latter is the most promising of them for the study of the ambivalent relationship between populism and democracy. In fact, the minimal approach does not imply a specific concept of democracy, and facilitates the undertaking of cross-regional comparisons. This helps to recognize that populism interacts differently with the two dimensions of democracy that Robert Dahl distinguished: while populism might well represent a democratic corrective in terms of inclusiveness, it also might become a democratic threat concerning public contestation.

Keywords:

• populism
• democracy
• Latin America
• Europe
• cross-regional research

Acknowledgements

For helpful comments, I thank Martin Beckstein, Nancy Bermeo, Sofia Donoso, John Keane, Sascha Kneip, Alan Knight, Wolfgang Merkel, Cas Mudde, Kurt Weyland and the two anonymous reviewers. All remaining errors are mine alone. This research was made possible by a post-doctoral fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

Notes

Previous versions of this article were presented at Nuffield College, Oxford University (May 7, 2010) and the XXIX International Congress of the Latin American Studies Association, Toronto (October 6–9, 2010).

Sartori, ‘Concept Misformation in Comparative Politics’; Keman, ‘Comparative Research Methods’, 78.

Dahl, Polyarchy.

Mudde, Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe, 4.

Taggart, ‘Populism and the Pathology of Representative Politics’, 69.

Lipset, Political Man.

Ibid., chapter 6.

Ibid., 127.

This thesis can be found in Moore's classic book. See Moore, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy.

Rueschemeyer, Huber Stephens, and Stephens, Capitalist Development and Democracy.

Lipset, Political Man, 175–6.

Germani, Authoritarianism, Fascism, and National Populism, 88.

Conniff, ‘Introduction’.

Michels, Political Parties.

Knight, ‘Populism and Neo-Populism in Latin America’.

Tilly, Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons, 14.

Angell, ‘The Left in Latin America Since c. 1920’, 77–8.

Oxhorn, ‘The Social Foundations of Latin America's Recurrent Populism’, 213–14.

Tanaka, ‘From Crisis to Collapse of the Party’.

Navia and Walker, ‘Political Institutions, Populism, and Democracy in Latin America’.

Decker, Parteien unter Druck; Kriesi, ‘Movements of the Left, Movements of the Right’.

Betz, ‘Rechtspopulismus in Westeuropa’, 258; Norris, Radical Right, 12.

Mudde, Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe, 298.

de Tocqueville, Democracy in America.

Schmidt, Demokratietheorien, 139.

Manin, The Principles of Representative Government, 167.

Hayward, ‘The Populist Challenge to Élitist Democracy in Europe’.

Rosanvallon, Counter-Democracy, 266.

Taggart, ‘Populism and the Pathology of Representative Politics’, 78.

Böckenförde, Verfassung, Demokratie, chapter 4.

Kalyvas, ‘Popular Sovereignty, Democracy, and the Constituent Power’.

For an insightful discussion of the boundary problem, see: Whelan, ‘Prologue: Democratic Theory and the Boundary Problem’.

Canovan, ‘Populism for Political Theorists?’, 248.

Näsström, ‘The Legitimacy of the People’.

See, among many others: Abts and Rummens, ‘Populism versus Democracy’; Betz, ‘Introduction’, 3–4; Pasquino, ‘Populism and Democracy’, 16; Taggart, Populism, 86–8; Rosanvallon, Counter-Democracy.

Tännsjö, Populist Democracy.

Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy.

Ibid.

Marchart, ‘Eine demokratische Gegenhegemonie’, 105.

Nonhoff, ‘Diskurs, radikale Demokratie, Hegemonie’, 12.

Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, 182.

Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, 6–7.

Mouffe, On the Political, 64–9.

Laclau, ‘Populism: What's in a Name?’.

Ibid., 36–7.

Kleis Nielsen, ‘Hegemony, Radical Democracy and Populism’, 89.

Laclau, On Populist Reason, 154.

Arditi, ‘Populism as a Spectre of Democracy’, 139–40.

Canovan, ‘Trust the People!’.

For a similar argument, although applied to the United States and related to the spectral role of the people as both constituent and constituted power, see: Frank, Constituent Moments.

Arditi, ‘Populism as an Internal Periphery’.

For a similar criticism, in the sense of the underlying tension between radical and plural democracy, see: Keenan, Democracy in Question, chapter 3.

Arditi, ‘Populism is Hegemony is Politics?’, 490–1.

Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes, 276–85.

Indeed, this approach is not absolutely value-free. Yet, it is necessary to elaborate empirical studies through which is it possible test the plausibility of theoretical and normative arguments about the ambivalent relationship between populism and democracy.

Cardoso and Faletto, Dependencia y desarrollo en América Latina.

Dornbusch and Edwards, The Macroeconomics of Populism in Latin America.

Betz, Radical Right-wing Populism in Western Europe; Betz, ‘Introduction’; Kitschelt and McGann, The Radical Right in Western Europe.

Weyland, ‘Neopopulism and Neoliberalism in Latin America’, 5.

Roberts, ‘Neoliberalism and the Transformation of Populism in Latin America’.

Schamis, ‘Populism, Socialism and Democratic Institutions’.

Weyland, ‘Clarifying a Contested Concept’, 13.

Auyero, Poor People's Politics.

de la Torre, ‘The Resurgence of Radical Populism in Latin America’, 393; Roberts, ‘Populism, Political Conflict, and Grass-Roots Organization’, 130.

See, among many others: Decker, ‘Die populistische Herausforderung’; Mair, ‘Populist Democracy vs Party Democracy’.

Plattner, ‘Populism, Pluralism, and Liberal Democracy’.

Mény and Surel, ‘The Constitutive Ambiguity of Populism’, 7–11.

A good example of this consensus and the difficult balance between both pillars – popular will and constitutionalism – can be found in a recent book of Adam Przeworski. His standpoint is illustrated by the following formulation: ‘I have sympathy for the position according to which fundamental rights should be monitored by specialized bodies, but in the end the laws and public policies must be decided by majoritarian procedures. This issue has been warped by an ideological formulation that juxtaposes rule of the majority to “the rule of law”, as if the law could be something independent of the will of the majority structured within the institutional framework’. Przeworski, Democracy and the Limits of Self-Government, 170.

Papadopoulos, ‘Populism, the Democratic Question, and Contemporary Governance’, 55.

Albertazzi and McDonnell, ‘Populism and Twenty-First Century Western European Democracy’.

Mair, ‘Ruling the Void’, 34–45.

Mudde, ‘The Populist Zeitgeist’.

Ibid., 543. It is worth noting that Kirk Hawkins proposes a similar concept for the analysis of Latin American populism, and offers an interesting methodology to measure populism through the speeches of chief executives. See Hawkins, ‘Is Chávez Populist?’; Hawkins, Venezuela's Chavismo and Populism in Comparative Perspective.

Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory; Freeden, Ideology.

Stanley, ‘The Thin Ideology of Populism’, 99–100.

Mudde, ‘The Populist Zeitgeist’, 545.

Näsström, ‘The Legitimacy of the People’, 628.

Kalyvas, ‘Popular Sovereignty, Democracy, and the Constituent Power’; Frank, Constituent Moments.

Sartori, ‘Concept Misformation in Comparative Politics’; Keman, ‘Comparative Research Methods’, 78.

On these two subtypes of populism, see: Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser, ‘Voices of the People’.

See, among many others: Tilly, Democracy.

I would like to thank Kurt Weyland for directing my attention to the link between Robert Dahl's framework and the minimal approach to studying populism vis-à-vis democracy.

Dahl, Polyarchy.

This argument has been developed and discussed extensively by Whitehead, Democratization.

These are the following: (1) freedom to form and join organizations; (2) freedom of expression; (3) right to vote; (4) right of political leaders to compete for support; (5) eligibility for public office; (6) alternative sources of information; (7) free and fair elections; (8) institutions for making government policies depend on vote and other expressions of preference.

Dahl, Polyarchy, 4.

Ibid.

Ibid., 82. See also Przeworski, Democracy and the Limits of Self-Government, chapter 4.

Dahl, On Political Equality, 50–5.

Dahl, Polyarchy, 130–1.

Collier and Collier, Shaping the Political Arena.

Roberts, ‘Neoliberalism and the Transformation of Populism in Latin America’; Roberts, ‘Populism, Political Conflict, and Grass-Roots Organization in Latin America’.

Weyland, ‘Neopopulism and Neoliberalism in Latin America’; Weyland, ‘Clarifying a Contested Concept’.

See, among many others: Filgueira and Luna, ‘The Left Turns as Multiple Paradigmatic Crises’.

de la Torre, Populist Seduction in Latin America, 129.

One of the few current examples of European populism, which is clearly left-wing and does not have a xenophobic agenda, is the so-called ‘Die Linke’ (the Left) in Germany. Walter, ‘Die Linkspartei zwischen Populismus und Konservatismus’; Decker, ‘Germany: Right-wing Populist Failures and Left-wing Successes’; Hough and Koß, ‘Populism Personified or Reinvigorated Reformers?’.

Mudde, Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe.

Mastropaolo, ‘Politics against Democracy’; Rydgren, ‘Is Extreme Right-Wing Populism Contagious?’.

Madrid, ‘The Rise of Ethnopopulism in Latin America’, 485.

Mudde, Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe; Mudde, ‘The Populist Zeitgeist’.

Weyland, ‘Neopopulism and Neoliberalism in Latin America’; Weyland, ‘Clarifying a Contested Concept’.

Dahl, Polyarchy.