Populist Research Articles

Editor's Introduction to Symposium on Joel Cabrita's The People's Zion

Religious Studies ReviewVolume 49, Issue 1 p. 5-5 Symposium: Agency, History-Making, and Non-Human Actors in South Africa and Beyond—Joel Cabrita's The People's Zion Editor's Introduction to Symposium on Joel Cabrita's The People's Zion Nathanael Homewood, Nathanael Homewood Rice UniversitySearch for more papers by this author Nathanael Homewood, Nathanael Homewood Rice UniversitySearch for more papers by this author First published: 24 April 2023 https://doi.org/10.1111/rsr.16371 Editor’s note: This article is part of the “Symposium: Agency, History-Making, and Non-Human Actors in South Africa and Beyond—Joel Cabrita’s The People’s Zion” in our Special Issue, Unique Approaches to Christianity in Africa and Beyond in volume 49, no. 1 (Spring, 2023) of Religious Studies Review. Other articles in the symposium include: Lauren V. Jarvis’s “Popular Christianity and Populist Politics in Southern Africa,” Retief Müller’s “Reflections on an Important Book and the Ways in which it might be Read—Joel Cabrita’s The People’s Zion,” Isabel Mukonyora’s “Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis Revisited,” and Joel Cabrita’s “Response to Readers.” Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL No abstract is available for this article. Volume49, Issue1Special Issue: Unique Approaches to Christianity in Africa and BeyondMarch 2023Pages 5-5 RelatedInformation

Reflections on an Important Book and the Ways in Which it Might be Read – Joel Cabrita's The People's Zion

Religious Studies ReviewVolume 49, Issue 1 p. 11-14 Symposium: Agency, History-Making, and Non-Human Actors in South Africa and Beyond—Joel Cabrita's The People's Zion Reflections on an Important Book and the Ways in Which it Might be Read – Joel Cabrita's The People's Zion Retief Müller, Retief Müller VID Specialized University StavangerSearch for more papers by this author Retief Müller, Retief Müller VID Specialized University StavangerSearch for more papers by this author First published: 24 April 2023 https://doi.org/10.1111/rsr.16376 [Editor’s note: This article is part of the “Symposium: Agency, History-Making, and Non-Human Actors in South Africa and Beyond—Joel Cabrita’s The People’s Zion” in our Special Issue, Unique Approaches to Christianity in Africa and Beyond in volume 49, no. 1 (Spring, 2023) of Religious Studies Review. Other articles in the symposium include: Editor Nathanael Homewood’s “Introduction,” Lauren V. Jarvis’s “Popular Christianity and Populist Politics in Southern Africa,” Isabel Mukonyora’s “Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis Revisited,” and Joel Cabrita’s “Response to Readers.”] Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Volume49, Issue1Special Issue: Unique Approaches to Christianity in Africa and BeyondMarch 2023Pages 11-14 RelatedInformation

The Heartland: An American History by Kristin L. Hoganson

Reviewed by: The Heartland: An American History by Kristin L. Hoganson Michelle Martindale Kristin L. Hoganson, The Heartland: An American History. New York: Penguin Press, 2019. xxvi, 399 pp. $18.00 (paper). In her new book, The Heartland: An American History, Kristin L. Hoganson continues to examine the American empire, this time focusing on the American Midwest. While the area surrounding Champaign, Illinois, sits at the center of the book, The Heartland travels to the edges of the United States and across the Atlantic to break apart the mythologies of mid-western exceptionalism. Hoganson approaches ideas of the heartland both geographically and metaphorically, revealing a space that was not insulated from nineteenth- and twentieth-century globalization. Rather, it emblematized Americans' quests to integrate themselves into new global markets. To prove that the Midwest was more complex than the insular, exceptional, isolationist, or provincial traits often ascribed to it, Hoganson takes on well-worn midwestern topics such as farming and livestock industries, birding, and hunting. Fans of Hoganson's previous works on gender and race will [End Page 195] not be disappointed as she extends race and gender to midwestern preferences for northern border regions as well as to the unlikely casting of racial stereotypes onto livestock. Foremost, Hoganson attacks the notion of an insular Midwest that somehow protected quintessential American values. By concentrating on agricultural markets in chapters two through five, Hoganson thoroughly details the ways in which Midwesterners concerned themselves with national and global politics. From the transfer of German tiling technology that drained midwestern marshes to the competition of midwestern pork in British markets, Hoganson argues that Midwesterners were anything but static or insular. This point shines brightest in diplomatic histories of chapter four. She deploys trade journals, letters, and government publications to link populist movement agricultural politics to European imperialism. Using the University of Illinois in Urbana, Hoganson reveals the ground-level experiences of students and faculty who found themselves entangled in imperial webs. The faculty, hoping to cultivate imperial relationships to grow the global importance of Illinois agriculture, pulled agricultural knowledge from European colonial experiments. Meanwhile, British colonial subjects attending the university carved out a place of acceptance in an otherwise culturally narrow-minded community in order to gain a world-class agricultural education. In chapters two and three, Hoganson contributes to borderlands history and racial studies through her examination of cattle and Berkshire hog markets. While examining the economic ties of commodities to the British empire, she also reveals the deeply entrenched racism held by many who participated in the American hog and cattle markets. The Heartland reveals how Americans attached racial and gender stereotypes to both cattle and hogs, often seeing the imports from the South with "Mexican" and "African" heritage as inferior, while praising livestock originating from Canada as superior. Because Midwesterners perpetuated and profited from these ideas, Hoganson casts "the Midwest as a place where borderlands converged" (75). Hoganson begins and ends the book with the ideas of settlement and displacement. The Heartland moves beyond popular notions that Europeans pushed Native American groups, specifically the Kickapoo, from the area in order to domesticate, cultivate, and settle the land. Rather, chapter one posits that while settlements formed and White encroachers did push the Kickapoo out of Illinois, the new Champaign population continued to be quite mobile. Throughout the book, Hoganson traces the Kickapoo [End Page 196] through multiple removals by the U.S. government and encroaching newcomers. In her last chapter, we find the Kickapoo in their most recent forced relocation, situated on the U.S.-Mexican border. Here they battled for access to basic human rights, including the ability to move freely across their territory that straddles the Rio Grande River. With these bookends, Hoganson underscores two major currents of imperialism: invasion of a foreign land and the injustices imposed on its inhabitants. With these twin threads, she simultaneously dispels ideas that midwestern "settlers" earned their right to the land through settlement and that the largest threat to American ideals came from foreigners. While the analytical framework of the book is strong, chapter five lacks the tight structure of preceding chapters. Seeking to address popular theoretical analyses of the environment through meteorology...

The perils of national narratives

The perils of national narratives

The Impact of Populism on Scandinavian Labour Law: The Cases of Norway and Sweden

Modern populism has developed in Scandinavia since at least the 1970s, first in Norway and Denmark but more recently also in Sweden. Populist political parties have been well-established in Scandinavian Parliaments for many years. However, from a labour law perspective, the populist impact, if any, has been limited and populist discourse has primarily focused on issues such as migration and the European Union (EU), and to some extent ‘welfare tourism’. This article examines the development of populist movements in Norway and Sweden and analyses the possible impact of populist policies on national labour law. The conclusion is that Nordic industrial relations and labour market regulations, based on strong and representative trade unions and well-organized and responsible employer federations, act as a robust counterweight to populist policies on the labour market. Section 2 of the article consists of a discussion of how we understand the development of modern populism in a Norwegian and Swedish perspective. Section 3 explores the extent to which populist political ideas have directly impacted or indirectly influenced labour market regulations in the two countries. In concluding, section 4 monitors the potency of strong and well-established industrial relations as a countervailing force to populist political movements. Populist Policies, Labour Market Regulation, Scandinavia, Norway, Sweden, Resilience to Populism

Steps in Incremental Activism

Steps in Incremental Activism Elizabeth A. Osborne (bio) In early 2022, I published an essay in TDR that advocated for a twenty-first-century Federal Theatre Project. In "The Promise of the Green New Deal: A 21st-Century Federal Theatre Project," I argued that a reimagined Federal Theatre Project (FTP) was a necessary response to the multiple crises faced by the field: 1) ongoing lack of equity in funding across race, gender, and geography; 2) racism, misogyny, ableism, transphobia, and other forms of bias that cause ongoing harm; 3) abusive and exploitative labor practices; and, of course, 4) COVID-19's widespread devastation of the theatre. I suggested we use Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's (D-NY) and Senator Ed Markey's (D-MA) Green New Deal as a catalyst for imagining a new way of practicing the arts in the United States, centering on values of equity, accessibility, sustainability, and inclusion.1 Many others have mirrored my urgency. Collective works, such as We See You, White American Theater and The Living Document of BIPOC Experiences in Bay Area Theatre Companies: BIPOC Equity Action Plan, call attention to field-wide problems and demand dramatic and immediate action (The Ground We Stand On; Living Document). More recently, Dominique Morisseau pulled her play Paradise Blue from what promised to be a successful run at the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles. As she explained, Black womxn on her creative team had been "verbally abused and diminished," and the Geffen, when notified, failed to intervene in an effective way. In her Facebook announcement, Morisseau explained that the Geffen's failures reinforced the field-wide abuses that so many were fighting to change: The Geffen Theatre is a necessary institution in our field. … But it will not be in service to our field until it recognizes the root of what went wrong here. To blame anything but the culture of misogyny and abuse that has been allowed to run rampant in our field for generations, is to lie to themselves and the rest of us.2 Morisseau's statement, like many recent calls for action, points to the need for a foundational reevaluation of the profession's ways of working and systemic change. Deploying a form of crisis rhetoric, my TDR essay provided a historical analysis of two promising FTP structures. It then expanded on those models to create a manifesto for a reimagined twenty-first-century Federal Theatre. Drawing from urgent demands for significant change, my manifesto called for more than a billion dollars in federal funding to create a massive federation of theatres prioritizing BIPOC, women, LGBTQ+, and disabled artists, administrators, and scholars. This federation would center frequently ignored voices in new work and be dedicated to antiracism and equity across race, gender, class, and ability. It would shun the "starving artist" ideal by providing artists with a living wage and benefits and moving away from the gig economy. It would model sustainable practices that combat climate change, train artists to work in frequently underserved communities, and advocate for the place of theatre in US society. Finally, it would serve as a communications resource center for professional, community, and academic theatre, thus enabling us to share information and resources with other theatres and community, religious, and civic organizations. [End Page 45] While I believe our field has reached a moment of reckoning, I also recognize that my manifesto asked for the sun, moon, stars, and neighboring galaxies—particularly in the contemporary US political and social climate. Framing the manifesto within multiple crises shaped my suggestions and their scope. At the same time, operating within a constant state of crisis is unsustainable. In their analysis of crisis rhetoric in right-wing populist politics, Corina Lacatus and Gustav Meibauer argue that a crisis has three primary components: "(perceptions of) threat to key values, institutions and everyday life; the urgency to 'do something' quickly against this (perceived) threat; and pervasive uncertainty about how it evolves and should be handled" (4). "Crises" demand immediate, dramatic change—and in the process, they create a specific narrative that those in power can leverage for their own devices. The moment's urgency justifies the suspension of typical governing procedures. The...

Ideological crystallization: rethinking the alternative-mainstream binary in times of populist politics

This paper assesses if and how alternative news media manifest their counter-hegemonic potential within the current conjuncture of populist politics in Western liberal democracies. Based on the method of critical discourse analysis, it compares the ways in which the yellow vests movement is discursively (re)constructed by two Flemish legacy newspapers and five alternative news media. Analytically, it engages with an agonistic pluralist perspective. Findings show how both newspapers and alternative media reproduce the same discursive constructions that legitimize the yellow vests’ socio-economic and political grievances. What distinguishes alternative from traditional media is not so much their counter-hegemonic potential but their ideological crystallization, as they reproduce only one discursive construction each. With legacy media now also operating as sites of contestation, this paper makes the importance of the role of political context all the clearer in the assessment of the counter-hegemonic potential of alternative news media.

Right-Wing Populism and the Deconstruction of Labour Laws in the Americas: Old Wine into New Wineskins

The surprising recent success of populist politics has been framed as a sharp break from the neoliberal world order that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union. This article explores how right-wing populist leaders from Argentina, Brazil, and the United States in the 1990s and 2010s have implemented policies that aimed to liberalize labour market regulations and weaken workers’ protections, despite their ‘common people’ rhetoric. Relying upon the theoretical frameworks of Kurt Weyland as well as Thomás Zicman de Barros and Miguel Lago, this article examines the ‘neoliberalization’ of populism in the 1990s in Argentina and Brazil, which had been traditionally associated with inward-looking and nationalist economic policies. Similarly, it explores the reactionary right-wing populism of Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro, which resulted in neoliberal labour policies that followed a conservative tradition. To shed light on how these policies have reshaped labour laws, this article first explores the experiences in Argentina and Brazil during the 1990s, in which neo-populist governments, heavily influenced by the Washington Consensus, reformed labour regulations to deconstruct traditional individual labour laws and to undermine the role of social partners. Second, this article studies the development of reactionary right-wing populism in the Americas in the late 2010s, particularly in Brazil and the United States, with a focus on the adoption of neoliberal policies that aim to deconstruct protective labour regulations. Despite the recent electoral defeats of both Trump and Bolsonaro, the incidence of rightwing populism has not disappeared in the Americas, which became an established major actor in the political arena. The risk seems to be even more concrete in Argentina where the centre-right party, pushed by far-right libertarian candidates, is adamant about implementing a major reform to liberalize labour laws if elected in the next general election in October 2023. The article concludes that even though right-wing populists portrayed themselves as champions of the working class during both earlier periods, they implemented traditional neoliberal labour law policies, which pursued the liberalization of labour market regulations, shunted aside social partners, resulting in the dramatic undermining of workers’ rights. Populism, Neoliberalism, Neopopulism, Argentina, Brazil, United States, Trump, Bolsonaro, Labour Reform, Latin America

Populism in Taiwan: Rethinking the Neo-liberalism–Populism Nexus

Contemporary scholarship on populism, albeit involving divergent approaches and polarised diagnoses of populism’s political impacts, commonly attributes the recent populist surge to the peril of neo-liberal encroachment. However, such a neo-liberal–populist proposition encounters discrepant experiences when applied in non-Western contexts, including in East Asia. To recalibrate the conceptual framework, this article employs Gramsci-inspired scholarship on hegemony and populism – the notion of “the integral state” and non-reductionist class politics in particular – and utilises Taiwan as a case to expound upon the entanglement of democratisation, neo-liberalisation, and various forms of populist politics. Situating the post-2000 surge of multiple popular movements in Taiwan’s hegemonic restructuring since the 1980s, this article identifies a course of bifurcated development between “liberal populism of the bourgeois hegemony” and the “neo-liberal populism of the multitude” that embodies various ways in which neo-liberalism intersects with populist politics. Highlighting the constant boundary-redrawing of the integral state and its associated class politics along the hegemonic restructuring processes, Taiwan’s case exemplifies a critical approach to rethinking the over-determined relations between populism and neo-liberalism for other East Asian states and beyond.

Conceptualising the emancipatory potential of populism: A typology and analysis

A central claim common to all populist movements is that they are committed to giving voice and power to those who have been forgotten, maligned, or marginalised by the status quo. However, consensus holds that they rarely – if ever –fulfil this commitment. And yet, there is a gap in our understanding of why. This article provides an original conceptual distinction between vanguardist and devolutionary populism. While the former is concerned with accessing and wielding power within the existing spaces of politics, the latter is concerned with provoking and enabling popular reimaginings of the very spaces in which politics is constituted. Using the case of South Africa, we demonstrate how our novel method can help determine where a movement might sit on the continuum between vanguardist and devolutionary populism. We make a populist campaign legible by combining detailed archival work to understand the movement's background with cutting edge cartographic techniques to map its spread and reception in digital spaces. Our conceptual distinction and methods create space to consider whether, and in what circumstances, populists might reinvigorate politics or, alternatively, compound the cynicism, divisions and tensions manifest within contemporary global politics.

Young Masculinities and Right-Wing Populism in Australia

This paper offers insights into the nexus of youth, masculinity, and right-wing populism in Australia. Here, we make reference to a wide body of international literature that suggests some affinity between disenfranchised (white) working-class young men and radical right ideas. Survey data were collected for a project on masculinity and the far right in Australia. A total of 203 young male informants worked primarily in ‘blue collar’ sectors of the Australian labour force. Some survey responses located them partly or potentially within the field of the populist right-wing, with many expressing anti-government sentiments and the discourse of white male victimhood. The majority were nostalgic for stereotypical masculinity. While right-wing populist movements across the world certainly differ, they often share a discourse promoting traditional gender roles.

Nationalism and populist politics: the migrant-citizen conundrum in Assam

ABSTRACT The article explores the far-reaching repercussions of British colonialism in producing hierarchical identities around religion, identity, and ethnicity in the northeastern state of Assam in India. The trajectory of people’s mobility across the border, due to political and economic reasons, has led to contention around legality, demography, and electoral outcomes. The article elucidates how nationalism, populism and the politics of insecurity have been played out whereby perceived collective threats are framed and acted upon. Traversing from past to present and apprehending the lurking dystopia, the article explains how the populist politics of othering residents in the borderland state of Assam has initiated various statist initiatives to differentiate natives from migrants, and citizens from residents. It grapples with the shifting meaning of a ‘native’ that qualifies or disqualifies populations from their citizenship, and examines how populist governance uses a migrant figure to seek legitimacy of its exclusionary citizenship policies and practices. It explores the dialogic functioning of a Hindu nationalist governance at the centre and an ethno-nationalist governance in Assam in a right-wing populist milieu. In the context in which migration is framed as a threat to the people, the article engages with the politics of insecurity, anxiety, and grievance.

Understanding Populism.

The diversity of features attributed to populism - and, as a result, the variety of critiques leveled at it - are remarkable. It sometimes seems as though people are using the same terms to address very different phenomena. Is there any distinctive meaning to populism? Is populism inherently anti-democratic or, on the contrary, is it the epitome of democratic practice? What should an engagement with populist movements mean for the theory and practice of democracy? This paper seeks to map the discursive ecosystem that populism determines. It canvasses the phenomena often associated with populism, proposes an interrelated set of concerns that is distinctive to populism, suggests how populism intersects with propensities and affinities with which it is often associated, emphasises the role of growing economic inequality, and suggests responses to populist movements that are grounded in a truly democratic constitutionalism.

Utopia in Late Modernity: Literary Critiques of the ‘Neapolitan Renaissance’

Abstract Naples in the 1990s enjoyed an extraordinary period of urban and cultural renewal known as the ‘Neapolitan Renaissance’. This article addresses two novels – Giuseppe Montesano’s Di questa vita menzognera (2003) and Ruggero Cappuccio’s Fuoco su Napoli (2010) – which alert us to the utopianism of the cultural and ‘symbolic politics’ of the Neapolitan Renaissance and its vulnerability to exploitation. Lending credence to the idea that utopian fantasies grow out of the societies to which they are a response, both works envisage post-apocalyptic events leading to the reconstruction of Naples as a theme park, on the part of organized crime. They interrogate the imbrication of the Neapolitan Renaissance with the criminalization of global capital and the populist politics of Berlusconi at the national level. In so doing, they exemplify Ruth Levitas’s distinction between utopia as product and utopia as process, while exploring utopia’s contemporary manifestation as postmodern pastiche or retrotopian romance.

A typology of right-wing populism in Europe: Intersections of gender, religion and secularity

This study attempts to advance our understanding of the role gender plays in populist politics by proposing a typology of gendered populism. Our argument is that populist parties' discursive construction of “the people” against “elites” and “non-people” is a gendered process, in which gender operates as a constitutive element for determining who is included in or excluded from “the people”. We also argue that the gendered construction of “the people” intersects with parties' configurations of religion and secularism. We propose that this intersection forms a four dimensional space of gendered populism composed of inclusionary or exclusionary and religious or secular populisms. Our analysis comparatively examines the discourses and policies of the right wing populist parties (RWPPs) and their leaders in France, Sweden and Turkey. Despite sharing an exclusionary understanding of “the people”, the selected RWPPs represent a variegated gendered populism because of their diverging approaches to gender, religion and secularity. Our comparative analysis approaches national-institutional backgrounds concerning the legal status of secularism, political and socio-cultural secularization as possible explanatory factors for the formation of religious and secular exclusionary populism in the four dimensional space. We believe, a four dimensional approach to populism sheds light on our understanding of gendered populism and proposes a fruitful avenue for future comparative studies of populism.

Jurisdictional Relationships: Democracy and the Administrative State Through the Lens of Caring Society v Canada

This paper draws on theorists of jurisdiction to make visible how democratic self-government and the rule of law take effect in the modern administrative state. Through the lens of Caring Society v Canada, a Canadian human rights case about the funding of social services for Indigenous children, I explore an idea of jurisdictional justice that is inherently connected to the quality of democratic engagement and focuses attention on political, legal and human relationships. I argue that in the face of challenges posed by populist politics and the colonial administrative state, this relational understanding of jurisdiction provides resources for building a sense of legality that can sustain shared public meaning and promote practices of political accountability.

The Multisided Threat to Free Trade: Protectionism and Fair Trade During Increasing Populism

The standard embedded liberalism argument for increasing free trade after World War II is that countries have compensated those hurt by trade and, therefore, have reduced opposition to free trade policies. This argument relies on opposition to trade being motivated by personal economic effects of trade; however, recent work has increasingly found other motivations for protectionism, calling into question the sustainability of embedded liberalism. This article argues that this threat to embedded liberalism will grow worse as populism increases, which leads to both more nationalistic and more economic opposition to trade, which is only partially offset by other non-economic opposition (most notably, fair trade) decreasing. This article offers a conceptual framework for the different types of opposition to trade and how increasing populism influences its composition. The framework is supported by descriptive statistics of public opinion on trade policy in the US over the past two decades, encompassing trade opinions before and during the global financial crisis, as well as during the rise of global populist movements starting around 2016. We conclude the article with policy implications regarding the multi-sided threat to free trade and how policymakers can confront the evolving challenges to embedded liberalism.

Femme populism: Vulnerability and desire in Argentine political aesthetics

AbstractThis article focuses on the role of vulnerability and desire in populist politics. I examine the political aesthetics of Argentine populism by analyzing media and supporters’ representations of Argentine politician Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. The populist leader tends to conjure the image of the strongman who is either an avuncular man of the people or a muscular, industrious worker. In contrast, Kirchner's followers focus on her sexual appeal and her emotional vulnerability. Drawing on Lacanian notions of love and desire, I argue that Cristinistas’ sustained focus on their leader's appearance and emotional state reveals the libidinal dimensions of populist politics. Moreover, the fetishization of Cristina as incomparably beautiful and bereaved indicates a deeply phallocentric conception of sovereignty. While Cristina's supporters tout her femininity as a departure from the political status quo, their focus on her image and persona reinforces phallocentric conceptions of sovereignty.

Taming the wild: Attracting capital through populist mobilization in the urban landscapes of Istanbul

AbstractUrban transformation in Turkey, ranging in scale from gigantic infrastructural investments to small property‐redevelopment ventures, has posed one of the most puzzling questions for scholars and activists: Why do the urban poor, despite being the most vulnerable to such projects, continue to partake in the populist mobilization around the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP)? Grounded in an analysis of how neoliberal assemblages are entangled with urban land markets at the margins of Istanbul, I argue that neoliberal policies are not necessarily implicated in the prevalence of depoliticized individuals, conceptually framed as homo oeconomicus, but can also serve to create a fertile environment for populist mobilization. The partisans and sympathizers of the AKP find that their social and political activities, from neighborhood organizations to single‐party hegemony in the parliament, are inherently inseparable from economic values. At this nexus between populist politics and economic forces, global capital emerges as a salient interlocutor that interfaces with political developments and social characteristics, having various predispositions and predilections—an actor whose miraculous powers can be unleashed and destructive tendencies controlled only through collective political mobilization.

Political constitutionalism and populism

AbstractCriticisms of political constitutionalism's relationship to populism point in two opposed directions. Legal constitutionalists consider it too open to, and even as legitimating, populist politics, whereas radical democrats consider it too closed to popular participation, prompting an anti‐system politics of a populist character. I dispute both these views. Underlying these contrasting assessments are differing conceptions of populism and constitutionalism. This article distinguishes right‐ from left‐wing populism, and limited government from non‐arbitrary rule, as constitutional ideals. Legal constitutionalism typically embraces the first ideal. However, that can be a driver of both right‐ and left‐wing populism, and allow types of arbitrary rule that democratic backsliding and illiberal regimes can (and do) exploit. By contrast, political constitutionalism involves the second ideal and is antithetical to right‐wing populism while potentially friendly to the legitimate demands of left‐wing populism. Nevertheless, the practical reality of political constitutionalism in the United Kingdom (and elsewhere) often falls short of its ideal theoretical potential. Addressing these shortcomings, however, requires strengthening democracy rather than the legal constitution, not least through electoral reform.