What is Populism? | Political Science – Stanford University

Abstract

Anti-elitism is a necessary, but not a sufficient criterion for understanding politicians, parties, or movements as populist. These actors also need to be anti-pluralist, and they need to frame politics predominantly in moral terms. When in opposition, populist actors claim to be the only genuine representative of a non-institutionalized, homogeneous, authentic, and, most importantly, moral people. This claim to exclusive representation is what I call the populist core claim. It is a necessary feature of populism.

Populists can govern and there can be distinctly populist regimes. The view that populist parties are always protest parties and that, by definition, protest cannot govern, is erroneous. Populist regimes are characterized by mass clientelism and discriminatory legalism; moreover, they construe their policies as if the people as whole had given them an imperative mandate. Other regimes can exhibit such features, too; what is distinctive about populist regimes is that they practice clientelism and discriminatory legalism with a clean conscience, so to speak: only those who properly belong to the people as defined by populists should benefit from the regime. Finally, populist regimes attempt to bring into existence the homogeneous people in whose name they had been speaking all along (that is to say, when populist actors were in opposition or just ascending to power): this explains the tendency of these regimes to crack down on civil society and restrict media freedom.

Populism, then, is neither a well-defined doctrine nor a unique institutional configuration. But it does have an inner logic, which takes distinctive forms in the logic of how populist claims are articulated and in the inner logic of actual populist rule.

Biography

Jan-Werner Mueller's research interests include the history of modern political thought, liberalism and its critics, constitutionalism, religion and politics, and the normative dimensions of European integration.

He is the author of Constitutional Patriotism (Princeton UP, 2007; German, Chinese, Turkish, Korean, Japanese, and Serbian translations), A Dangerous Mind: Carl Schmitt in Post-War European Thought (Yale University Press, 2003; German, French, Japanese, Greek, Serbian, and Chinese translations) and Another Country: German Intellectuals, Unification and National Identity (Yale University Press, 2000; Chinese translation). In addition, he has edited German Ideologies since 1945: Studies in the Political Thought and Culture of the Bonn Republic (Palgrave, 2003) and Memory and Power in Post-War Europe: Studies in the Presence of the Past (Cambridge UP, 2002).

In 2011 Yale University Press published Contesting Democracy: Political Ideas in Twentieth Century Europe. (German, French, Italian, Russian, Chinese, Polish, and Serbian translations).

Professor Mueller has been a fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, the Collegium Budapest Institute for Advanced Study, the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, the Center for European Studies, Harvard University, the Remarque Institute, NYU, and the European University Institute, Florence; he has also been a Member of the Institute of Advanced Study Princeton. He has taught as a visiting professor at the EHESS, Paris, and Sciences Po, Paris. In 2011 he delivered the Carlyle Lectures in the History of Political Thought at Oxford University. He is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

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What is Populism? | Political Science - Stanford University