Abstract
Although the study of populism has traditionally been the domain of Latin Americanists, research here has become increasingly comparative. One of the most important payoffs of this comparative work is conceptual. Rather than defining populism in structuralist, economic, or political-strategic terms, a growing number of scholars around the world are using an ideational conceptualization that draws heavily from earlier discursive theories. By employing the ideational approach, scholars have been able to provide empirical measures of populist discourse. In this article we explain and show the advantages of this ideational approach to a Latin American audience by presenting a new historical dataset measuring the discourse of Argentine, Chilean, and Peruvian presidents across the twentieth century. Our main intent is to clarify the ideational approach as well as to enliven the conceptual debate. While we are critical of alternative definitions, we acknowledge and reassess their theoretical insights.
Highlights
For decades the study of populism was the domain of Latin Americanists
Out of the new comparative research is emerging an argument that populism should be defined in ideational terms very similar to the discursive definition used among some Latin Americanists
The ideational approach to populism stays in close contact with the work of the Argentine political theorist Ernesto Laclau, who was a pioneer in the study of Latin American populism (Laclau 1977) and later elaborated a sophisticated political theory on populism (Laclau 2005), but it moves beyond his work in important ways
Summary
The study of populism has traditionally been the domain of Latin Americanists, research here has become increasingly comparative. This definition reduces populism to a common, minimal core, seeing it as a political discourse that posits a cosmic struggle between a reified “will of the people” and a conspiring elite. A number of scholars have applied techniques of textual analysis and survey research to the measurement of populist ideas, not just in one or two countries (Armony and Armony 2005; Jagers and Walgrave 2007) but in regional and cross-regional studies (Akkerman, Mudde, and Zaslove 2014; Hawkins 2009; Rooduijn and Pauwels 2011) These works are beginning to examine the causes and consequences of populism, including its impact on policy and democratic institutions (Hawkins 2010; Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser 2012; Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser 2013; Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser 2017). In the latter half of the article we provide this critique, and in the conclusion we revisit these definitions and show how they point us to important directions for future research
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