Populism

Populism is most often defined, following political scientist Cas Mudde's influential ideational approach, as a thin-centered ideology holding that society is ultimately separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic groups, the pure people and the corrupt elite, and that politics should above all express the general will of the people. Because it makes no independent claim about the proper scope of the state, the market or moral life, this thin ideology typically attaches itself to a fuller host ideology of the left or right, producing left-wing and right-wing populisms that otherwise share little beyond the people-versus-elite frame and an appeal to a single, unified popular will against pluralist and institutional constraints. Two rival scholarly traditions define the same word differently. A political-strategic approach, associated with Kurt Weyland, instead defines populism as a strategy through which a personalistic leader seeks or exercises government power based on direct, unmediated and de-institutionalized support from a large number of mostly unorganized followers, treating organizational form rather than professed ideas as the defining trait. A discursive approach, associated with Ernesto Laclau, treats populism not as a species of ideology or strategy at all but as a political logic that constructs the very category of the people by chaining together otherwise unrelated social demands against a common adversary, present in principle in movements across the ideological spectrum.