What Is Populism?

A number of scholars have attempted to deal with populism’s heterogeneous manifestation by defining it broadly. Some conceptualize populism as a “thin-centered” ideology that has little substance other than a few core features such as the juxtaposition of “the pure people” versus “the corrupt elite” (Mudde Reference Mudde2004, 543), whereas others understand it as a particular style of discourse that can serve divergent ideological purposes (Kazin Reference Kazin1995; Moffitt Reference Moffitt2016). Seen from these vantage points, it is not surprising that populism attaches itself to various and even conflicting ideologies and political tendencies such as conservatism, socialism, nationalism, authoritarianism, and grassroots democracy.

This makes sense. When one creates an elastic concept, however, it can be difficult to know how far it can be extended. As Nadia Urbinati points out in Me the People, the binary of the honest many versus the corrupt few is a central refrain in many political traditions, including civic republicanism. Even in “good” democracies, partisan mobilization always involves antagonizing other groups—a strategy that is typically more effective when the line between “us” and “them” is starkly drawn, and the “they” is caricatured as an unredeemable force of evil. Similarly, mistrust of the powerful is an essential feature of liberal democracy, though it may be expressed more intensely by populists. What is the point of the division of power, rule of law, and freedom of the press if not to keep rulers in check? When populism is defined too capaciously, it applies to all politics and thus to nothing specific.

The problem is not just conceptual but normative. Well before populism’s rise prompted a debate about the “deconsolidation” or “crisis” of democracy (Ercan and Gagnon Reference Ercan and Gagnon2014; Foa and Mounk Reference Foa and Mounk2017), scholars issued warnings about the health of democracy, identifying troubling trends such as low turnout, declining trust in government, and citizens’ disaffection with democracy (Nye, Zelikow, and King Reference Nye, Zelikow and King1997; Patterson Reference Patterson2003; Pharr and Putnam Reference Pharr and Putnam2000). Perhaps democracy needed a jolt to reverse deterioration, and populism, despite its perils, may be offering it. Thus, Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser (Reference Mudde, Kaltwasser, Mudde and Kaltwasser2012), for example, declare that populism is a “corrective and threat” to democracy. Populism may be able to help restore democracy, although it is a cure that can be worse than the disease. Others, such as Ernesto Laclau, are not so ambivalent. Laclau (Reference Laclau and Panizza2005, 38) contends that most modern democracies’ “liberal” modus operandi—which centers on competition among organized groups—marginalizes ordinary citizens, and only a “populist rupture” that mobilizes hitherto voiceless people and temporarily suspends liberal pluralism can make a polity truly democratic.

Urbinati, too, is deeply concerned about democracy’s dysfunctions, but she believes that it is profoundly mistaken to turn to populism for a solution. According to Urbinati, ambivalent and favorable assessments of populism are predicated on an incorrect understanding both of democracy and of populism. Those who are sympathetic to populism usually assume that there exists a trade-off between democracy and liberalism. They believe that “liberal” principles such as the guarantee of political and civil liberties, constitutional constraints, institutionalized political competition, and indirect representation, whatever other purposes they may serve, all attenuate democracy, which simply means the (direct) rule by the people.

This is an erroneous belief, Urbinati contends; we cannot separate democracy and liberalism—not without endangering democracy. Urbinati defines democracy as “diarchy” consisting of the two pillars of decision making and opinion formation (pp. 7–8; see also Urbinati Reference Urbinati2014, 16–80). Decision making belongs to the formal political domain where official political activities such as voting and legislation take place, whereas opinion formation occurs more spontaneously in the less structured domain of civil society. There must be active and continuous communication between diarchy’s two domains, but there should exist a dividing wall that preserves “a distance and a difference” (p. 8; emphasis in original) between them, as well as gatekeepers, such as political parties, that filter “the inputs coming from social groups through political proposals and eventually legislation” (p. 72). For Urbinati, what critics regard as liberal features—especially measures that protect representative mechanisms intermediating between citizens and decision-making bodies—safeguard the diarchic structure of democracy, and to that extent, liberalism and democracy constitute an indivisible whole.

Representative democracy qua diarchy has many virtues, but it has vulnerabilities, too. Because it derives its legitimacy from the authority of “the people”—an abstract entity without fixed substance—the title of the true representative of the people is up for grabs by anyone willing to compete. And populism grows from that ambiguity at the heart of democratic legitimation, Urbinati theorizes, as a “parasite” of representative democracy (p. 15). Populism does not remain forever dependent, however. Once it establishes a toehold, it evolves into a distinct form of representative democracy, threatening to overtake the host from within. Throughout Me the People, Urbinati explicates, with admirable lucidity and erudition, how populism disfigures representative democracy. Populism abolishes the openness of “the people”—the condition of possibility for representative democracy—by recognizing only “the right people” (an exclusionary notion by definition) as the source of legitimation. Populism feeds on and stokes people’s desire to see their righteousness affirmed in “pure” fashion, uninterrupted by the election cycle and undiluted by deliberation. And populism’s pursuit of instantaneous and unfiltered representation ends in personalistic politics in which a leader acts with impunity by claiming that their presence—rather than what they actually do—realizes the right people’s will.

Forceful though it is, Urbinati’s critique is not a wholesale rejection of populism. In keeping with her conceptualization of democracy, Urbinati divides populism into two modes: populist movements and populist power. As long as populism stays in the domain of opinion formation, she writes, it should be viewed as a “sacrosanct democratic movement of protest and contestation” (p. 121; she lists Occupy Wall Street, Italy’s Girontondi, and Spain’s Indignados as examples). It is only when populism enters the official domain of decision-making that it becomes dangerous.

One wonders, though, how well this conceptual line can be guarded. As Urbinati notes, populism’s challenge is not simply institutional. What is equally worrying is that it alters “the tenor of public debate” (p. 168), such that certain public claims are denied their basic political standing by personal and often groundless attacks on the claimants’ race, gender, nationality, religious beliefs, and so on. It is difficult to regard such public discourses as a sacrosanct part of democracy simply because they remain outside the arena of decision-making. In fact, it is not clear what it means to “stay outside” in contemporary politics, in which rumors circulating on internet forums frequently find expression in public officials’ remarks and affect their decision making.

Recognizing the porousness of the line between the outside and the inside of representative democracy creates its own difficulties, however. In her previous book, Democracy Disfigured, Urbinati indicates that some movements prefigure populist power and are thus dangerous even when they technically operate in civil society. Urbinati writes that “for populism to pass from movement to a form of power it needs an organic polarizing ideology and a leader,” discussing the Tea Party as a populist movement that was “in search of a unifying and representative leader” and “since its inception wanted to be more than a popular movement of protest” (Urbinati Reference Urbinati2014, 130). The accuracy of Urbinati’s description of the Tea Party aside, this approach poses a delicate challenge. It pulls us into the thorny business of spotting “bad” populist movements before they turn into full-grown populist powers, leaving us with questions that are exceedingly hard to answer conclusively. What is considered a polarizing ideology? What acts reveal a political movement’s desire to occupy the inside of the representative system and its willingness to submit to a leader? What is the threshold that a political movement must cross to be classified as a germ of populist power?

The difficulties associated with both strategies loom over Urbinati’s account of populism partly because the stakes are high. Within Urbinati’s framework, we do not simply condemn particular aspects of political movements, such as hateful rhetoric, violent tactics, or illicit outside support, but reject their democratic legitimacy in its entirety. Here the coherence with which Urbinati reconstructs populism’s inner logics almost becomes a liability, insofar it creates an impression that all of its democracy-disfiguring tendencies are inextricably interconnected, with each triggering the others. When you forge a political movement (wanting to rule) by pitting the virtuous people against the corrupt elite, you inescapably land in a politics dominated by a dictatorial leader. (Urbinati criticizes other scholars for failing to insist on the necessary link between populism and dictatorial leadership [p. 28].) When you try to dispense with conventional political parties’ intermediary mechanisms and build political organizations that grant citizens more direct access, you are again bound to find yourself in a personalistic politics—an inevitable degeneration that Urbinati sees unfolding in two political parties that, as she acknowledges, otherwise diverge widely: Italy’s Five Star Movement (pp. 182–85) and Spain’s Podemos (pp. 185–88).

Urbinati’s theorization of populism thus creates a dilemma. Given populism’s destructive implications, we would be ill advised to overlook its seeds in civil society. But when we set out to pull populist weeds, we get mired in the impossible task of distinguishing weeds from seedlings and risk ruining the entire democratic garden by rooting out all radical challenges to democracy’s entrenched forms. Urbinati’s focus on populism’s inner logics, moreover, leaves unexplained unique volatilities and contradictions that characterize contemporary populism. Why do people support individuals whose “populist” policies actually go against their material interest and benefit the very elite they excoriate? Why is people’s resentment toward “the establishment” so often redirected at the most vulnerable members of society? These questions—which Arlie Russell Hochschild (Reference Hochschild2016) recently explored in the US context—cannot be addressed without attending to the historical conditions under which populism emerges. In Me the People, Urbinati states that she “presumes” some of those conditions—citing economic inequality and the eclipse of national sovereignty as two main ones—and that she “does not intend to study why populism grew, or why it continues to grow” (p. 5). But what if those conditions do not simply spur the growth of populism from outside but also directly shape populism’s characteristics and operation?

How Did We Get Here?

In Anti-Pluralism, William A. Galston attends to some of the conditions that lead to populism’s rise and, in doing so, offers insights that complement Urbinati’s. In particular, Galston highlights two broad historical trends, one in the economy and the other in demography. Concerning the economy, Galston argues that the Great Recession ended the long period of sustained economic growth that lasted from the end of World War II until the turn of the twentieth century. As he writes, “Between 1949 and 2000, the economy grew at an average rate of 3.6 percent annually. Since then, growth has averaged 1.8 percent—only half as fast” (p. 86). The stalling of economic growth fundamentally destabilizes liberal democracy, because according to Galston, popular support for liberal democracy has long been secured by a “bargain” in which citizens defer to political elites in return for continued economic growth and rising living standards (p. 14). It is the elites’ failure to hold up their end of that bargain that opens the door to populism, and so we must find a way to accelerate economic growth again to stem populism’s rise.

With regard to demography, Galston highlights increases in immigration over the past half-century. In the early twentieth century, Galston observes, the share of first-generation immigrants reached 15% of the US population, and it triggered a nativist reaction, culminating in the Immigration Act of 1924 that drastically reduced the first-generation share over the next four decades. The restrictive immigration regime ended in 1965; since then America has experienced a “demographic revolution” (p. 70). Today, the share of first-generation immigrants again has increased, accounting for about 14% of the population. Stating that “one may speculate that any country (including a self-styled nation of immigrants) has a finite capacity to absorb new arrivals,” Galston muses that “some adjustments are necessary and defensible” under the current circumstances (p. 96). More specifically, Galston endorses a shift “away from family reunification and toward economic contribution as the main criterion for immigration” and “an increased focus on the acquisition of English fluency and a working knowledge of American history and civic institutions” (p. 96).

Although Galston does not explicitly pursue it, his attention to these trends hints at a different way of thinking about populism. For example, Galston notes, drawing on Mabel Berezin’s research, that populists’ success may be attributable to the fact that they “provide a collective political voice for feelings of vulnerability” (p. 43). Urbinati’s analysis, which focuses on populism’s inner structure and leaders, does not give its constituents enough attention. This is partly because, as noted, Urbinati believes that the question of why people support populism concerns only populism’s growth and not its nature. But the reasons that people are drawn to populism may be crucial to understanding what populism is. Urbinati posits that populism is driven by a distinct animating force (the antiestablishment spirit) and tends inexorably toward a particular form of politics (direct representation). One could argue, however, that populism eludes such a logically identifiable path. Emotions that fuel populism may be directionless: people’s deep anxiety about their own socioeconomic and cultural standing can turn into resentment toward the elite or admiration of the powerful, into cruelty toward the even more vulnerable or sympathy for and solidarity with the weak. Insofar as populism is propelled by such volatile emotions, it may resist crystallizing into a single political form.

Galston’s attempt to understand populism in light of broad historical conditions is promising. His actual analysis of those conditions, however, is partial and sometimes misleadingly so. In his account of the economy, Galston tends to draw on selectively chosen evidence to make sweeping claims. He writes, for example, that “median household income rose by nearly nine thousand dollars—more than 18 percent” between 1983 and 1999, declaring that “there is no postwar parallel for the stagnation Americans have experienced during the past generation” (p. 68). Galston clearly suggests that the economic engine that the United States ran on in the 1980s and the 1990s is superior to the one in place since.Footnote ¹ Galston portrays the Clinton years (1993–99) in particularly rosy terms, implying that the political-economic regime during that time is a model of “inclusive growth” (p. xix; emphasis in original) that he prescribes as an antidote to populism: “The second half of the 1990s was the last time that economic groups from top to bottom progressed together at roughly the same rate. It is no coincidence that during this period the labor market reached and then sustained full employment, improving workers’ bargaining power and bringing previously neglected individuals back into the workforce” (p. 87).

Even if we set aside the debate about how much of the growth in the late 1990s is attributable to the real health of the economy as opposed to the stock market bubble and the attendant rise in private debt (Brenner Reference Brenner2002), Galston’s claim that the economic growth of that period redounded to all citizens’ economic well-being is open to serious question. To begin with, it is misleading to use household income as an exclusive measure of economic welfare. Household incomes can increase even when real wages stagnate or decline (which was the case during this period, as is discussed shortly) when, for example, more members of a household work. In the 1980s and the 1990s, household incomes received a boost from women’s rapidly growing participation in the labor force. (Women’s labor force participation grew by more than 16 million between 1983 and 1999 and only about 8 million in the next 16 years, from 2000 to 2016 [Women’s Bureau 2019].) Women’s contributions to household incomes should be measured carefully, however, because additional earnings they brought in were offset by significant increases in expenses. The cost of childcare, for example, has dramatically increased since the mid-1980s, far outstripping inflation, with highly disproportionate impacts on low-income families (Laughlin Reference Laughlin2013).

More broadly, Galston’s singular focus on household income obscures the structural transformation of the political-economic regime in the 1980s and the 1990s, which undermined most workers’ economic security and welfare. During that time, what is now known as neoliberalism took shape, dismantling the post–World War II regime—which rested on the balancing act between the (limited) regulatory and welfare state, corporations, and unionized labor—and tilting power relations heavily in favor of business. The contours of the neoliberal regime are well known. Under the imperative of “shareholder value maximization,” corporations moved plants offshore, outsourced their operations, and downsized. In consequence, as “good jobs” became increasingly scarce, more workers were employed on a contingent basis (which typically entailed reductions in salary, benefits, and protection) and driven to precarious and dead-end jobs in the growing service sector (Fligstein and Shin Reference Fligstein, Shin and Neckerman2004; Kalleberg Reference Kalleberg2001). Labor unions sharply declined; the unionization rate declined from 20.1% to 13.9% between 1983 and 1999 (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics 2019). In the meantime, businesses engaged in aggressive political organization and lobbying, shaping and deterring government action to their advantage (Hacker and Pierson Reference Hacker and Pierson2010). Reflecting this changing balance of power, income was concentrated at the very top of the income ladder—the top 10, 1, 0.1, 0.01%—during this period (Piketty and Saez Reference Piketty and Saez2001), even as real wages stagnated (Desilver Reference Desilver2018) and the real value of the minimum wage declined—from $8.45 to $7.76, adjusted to the value of 2018 dollars (Kurtz, Yellin, and Houp Reference Kurtz, Yellin and Houp2019). All these trends continued under the Clinton administration—and they largely continue today.

In his account of immigration, Galston tends to assume, rather than actually show, that broad demographic shifts produced anti-immigration sentiments and that immigration naturally became a salient political issue as a result. He writes that the “ongoing demographic shift has triggered palpable anxiety among many native-born Americans” who believe, “understandably in light of their experience, that they are the rightful owners of the country and that new entrants threaten their control” (p. 71). Based on this observation, Galston advises against “denouncing citizens concerned about immigration as ignorant and bigoted” (p. xviii). Although Galston recognizes that immigration was not nearly as salient in 2012 as it was in 2016 (p. 76), he does not examine how citizens’ views on immigration are formed and how those views are politicized. Recent research suggests that what appears to be spontaneous individual or local reaction to immigration is actually shaped by national politics, and that elite speech plays a crucial role in mobilizing prejudices as a political force (Hopkins Reference Hopkins2011; Newman et al. Reference Newman, Merolla, Shah, Lemi, Collingwood and Ramakrishnan2020).Footnote ² I know of no one who denounces general concerns about immigration. If anything is denounced, it is the political elite’s inflammatory rhetoric (often based on distorted facts, if not falsehoods) that labels people of certain nationalities as criminals and potential terrorists—rhetoric that may well create and skew people’s perceptions.

Where Do We Go from Here?

For Galston, liberal democracy’s challenge is to effectively address these external problems, promoting inclusive economic growth and reasserting national sovereignty in issues such as trade and immigration. The successful navigation of that challenge, Galson suggests, requires “wise, concerted leadership”—the model of which was provided by leaders who “turned the tumult of the late 1980s and early 1990s to the advantage of liberal democracy” (p. xxi). Urbinati, in contrast, believes that populism’s rise indicates a fundamental internal transformation of democracy. She suggests that populism’s ascendance reflects the transition from “party democracy” to “audience democracy,” which Bernard Manin identified in his influential 1997 book. In audience democracy, political parties decline, and the connective tissues of democratic politics—leadership; a multilayered organization comprising party bureaucrats, activists, and ordinary members; and partisan loyalty as the source of political bonds—disintegrate along with them. As “the people” become amorphous groups of unattached voters whose views constantly shift under the influence of mass media, individual politicians create their electoral base via catchy slogans and arresting images, rather than responding to established cleavages with substantive policies and long-term vision. The material conditions of audience democracy, in other words, already animate personalistic politics; all of us are compelled to be populists now, more or less. Urbinati professes not to despair over this trend, but not surprisingly in light of her open admiration for party democracy, her account of audience democracy ends on a note that is both uncertain and uneasy.

In Power and Humility, John Keane offers a more optimistic assessment of democracy’s transformation. Like Urbinati, Keane pays close attention to the new mode of communication as one of contemporary democracy’s defining conditions. Keane observes that democracy in our times is “tied closely to the growth of multi-media-saturated societies” and operates “within a new media galaxy defined by the ethos of communicative abundance” (p. 103). And he, too, believes that the still unfolding communications revolution gives rise to a new type of democracy. Pace Urbinati, however, Keane contends that we are witnessing the rise of a distinctly horizontal and ubiquitous democracy that reduces domination and empowers ordinary citizens. This is what Keane calls “monitory democracy”: a “‘post-electoral’ politics and government defined by the rapid growth of many different kinds of extraparliamentary, power-scrutinizing mechanisms” (p. 105). Although monitory democracy does not entirely replace electoral and legislative politics, Keane writes, it greatly expands the scope of democratic politics, making democracy “a way of life and a mode of governing in which power is subject to checks and balances—at any time, in any place—such that nobody is entitled to rule arbitrarily” (p. 116).

For Keane, the rising prevalence of monitory democracy compels us to think beyond democratic theory’s traditional conceptual framework. Doing so, he believes, will put us in a better position to meet a broader set of challenges facing democracies today. Keane suggests, for example, that proliferating monitory institutions “point to a world where the old rule of ‘one person, one vote, one representative’ is replaced with the new principle of monitory democracy: One person, many interests, many votes, and chosen representatives” (p. 110). This new principle unsettles some of the well-established boundaries of democratic theory. For one, the nation-state no longer appears as a prerequisite of democracy; we can come to terms with numerous forms of transnational relations, interactions, and solidarity unencumbered by our territorial imagination. We do not have to look away from the violence perpetrated against indigenous peoples during the formation of “the people” as a case that precedes the founding of democracy and thus falls outside its jurisdiction. We can guard against our anthropocentrism and extend political representation to include the biosphere. In Power and Humility, Keane explores these new conceptual horizons—and many others—in a remarkably wide-ranging discussion.

Keane’s aim is to highlight a variety of issues that can be productively approached through the lens of monitory democracy, and his account is intended as an invitation for further research and debate, rather than as a full-fledged analysis. Still, given Keane’s wide application of the concept of monitory democracy, one wonders how it might (or should) work alongside traditional forms of democratic politics. For example, Keane writes that monitory institutions promote a “minoritarian” form of democracy: “regardless of the outcome of elections, and sometimes in direct opposition to the principle of majority rule, monitors give a voice to the losers and provide independent representation for minorities” (p. 109). It is not clear, however, if monitory mechanisms would always function to the benefit of the oppressed and the powerless. As noted earlier, business has been far more successful in organizing extraparliamentary power than other social groups over the past 40 years, shaping the nation’s economic policies in line with their interests as a “minority,” largely regardless of electoral results. Insofar as monitory democracy is used or easily co-opted by powerful minorities to circumvent and even override the majority principle, it can neutralize the minimum condition of democracy: the rotation of power (Przeworski Reference Przeworski, Shapiro and Hacker-Cordon1999).

Keane briefly notes that monitory democracy may be at least partly responsible for widespread political disaffection and the ascendance of populism, writing that “there are signs that monitory democracy suffers from auto-immune diseases” (p. 15). This observation, then, points to the need for a closer examination of monitory democracy’s potential side effects and perils. The wide dispersal of power that Keane approvingly associates with monitory democracy, for example, has recently come under scrutiny by a number of scholars. Frances McCall Rosenbluth and Ian Shapiro (Reference Rosenbluth and Shapiro2018) argue that the efforts to weaken political parties’ internal hierarchy in favor of citizens’ direct control since the 1960s had the perverse effect of alienating ordinary voters and producing policies that contradicted their long-term interests. As we saw, Urbinati shares this concern, although her focus is on democracy’s normative and institutional pillars that political parties embody. Galston, too, makes a similar point with reference to leaders and representative institutions. Pointing to the desire to curb arbitrary rule—which Keane hails as the spirit of monitory democracy—Galston argues that it “gives rise to an ever more elaborate system of rules, regulations, and review procedures. The result is not to eliminate discretion but to tie major institutions in knots, making them less and less able to make needed judgments and to do the people’s business” (p. 114). So far, new communication technologies have proven to be more successful at dissolving traditional hierarchies than at fostering coherent leadership, reflective deliberation, and mutual responsibility. How democracy should respond to those tendencies is not so clear.

Overall, the three books reviewed here are welcome additions to the growing literature on populism and other challenges facing liberal democracies today. Yet some of the authors’ arguments, as well as their disagreements, raise questions that call for more scholarly attention. How can liberal democracy revitalize economic growth while simultaneously restricting globalization, which, for better or worse, has been the dominant animating force of economic growth? More fundamentally, can liberal democracy continue to rely for its legitimacy on the elusive promise that everyone’s bottom line will perpetually rise? If populism represents a dangerous mutation of representative democracy, how can we counter it? Should we shore up representative institutions by increasing the autonomy of leaders and political parties vis-à-vis ordinary citizens? Or should we accept that party politics has outlived its usefulness and reinvent representative democracy for the age of “communicative abundance”? Should the new version of representative democracy maintain a diarchic structure, or should it embrace polymorphous, widely distributed, and intersecting forms of representation? How can we keep such decentralization of political authority from being exploited by powerful interests, impeding effective and prudent decision making, and destroying the common world that houses “the people”? Future scholarship can fruitfully pursue the wide array of questions raised by these three thought provoking works.