The Socio-Cultural, Relational Approach to Populism


Abstract


The article presents the relational, socio-cultural approach to populism, also referred to by some as "performative". The approach claims phenomenological validity cross-regionally and is complex enough to provide a theory of populism and its subjective logic, while minimal enough to be used handily by other scholars. Populism is not a set of decontesting ideas or "ideology", but a way of being and acting in politics, embodying in discourse and praxis the culturally popular and "from here", in an antagonistic and mobilizational way against its opposite, together with personalism as a concrete mode of authority. Defined in the most synthetic way, populism is the flaunting of what I typologically call the "low". I also argue that civilizational projects of different kinds create a distasteful "unpresentable other"; populists then claim that this Other is nothing less than the true Self of the nation, its "authentic" people, disregarded in that process. Relatedly, the article introduces the general populist scheme of contending forces, present cross-regionally and in left as well as right populisms, with "the people" facing a three-way coalition: a nefarious minority Otherized; global forces strongly playing in favor of it; a government in line with that minority or alliance. Populism extolls the national pleb "as is" and promise to reconcile the nation with itself by making the plebs the whole. The cultural component of populism should be domesticated by political scientists, since it has deep roots in cleavage formation theory, the sociology of distinction, and updated Gramscian and Weberian sociopolitical analyses.

DOI Code: 10.1285/i20356609v13i1p29

Keywords: Civilizing; Performative; Personalistic Leadership; Political Identification; Political Communication; Populism; The People

References


Barr, R. (2009), “Populist, Outsiders and Anti-Establishment Politics”, Party Politics 15 (1): 29-48.

Berlin, I. (1958), Two Concepts of Liberty, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Bourdieu, P. (1979), La Distinction, Paris: Les Editions de Minuit.

Brubaker, R. (2020), “Populism and Nationalism”, Nations and Nationalism 26 (1): 44-66.

Canovan, M. (1999), “Trust the People! Populism and the Two Faces of Democracy”, Political Studies, 47: 2–16.

Collier, R., D. Collier (1991), Shaping the Political Arena: Critical Junctures, the Labor Movement, and Regime Dynamics in Latin America, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

De Cleen, B. (2017), “Populism and Nationalism”, in C. Rovira, P. Taggart, P. Ochoa, and P. Ostiguy (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Populism, Oxford: Oxford University Press: 342-362.

De Cleen, B. (2019), “The populist logic and the analysis of the discursive contruction of ‘the people´and ‘the elite’”, in J. Zienkowski, R. Breeze (eds.), Imagining the Peoples of Europe. Populist discourses across the political spectrum, Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

De Cleen, B., Y. Stavrakakis (2017), “Distinctions and Articulations: A Discourse Theoretical Framework for the Study of Populism and Nationalism”, Javnost – The Public, 24 (1): 301-319.

Elias, N. (1982) [1939], The Civilizing Process, Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Freeden, M. (2003), Ideology: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hawkins, K. (2010), Venezuela´s Chavismo and Populism in Comparative Perspective, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hawkins, K., C. Rovira (2017), “The Ideational Approach to Populism”, In Latin American Research Review, 52 (4): 1-16.

Jagers, J., S. Walgrave (2007), “Populism as political communication style: An empirical study of political parties’ discourse in Belgium”, in European Journal of Political Research, 46: 319-345.

James, D. (1995), “17 y 18 de Octubre de 1945: El peronismo, la protesta de masas y la clase obrera argentina”, in J. C. Torre (ed.), El 17 de Octubre de 1945, Buenos Aires: Arie.

Kitschelt, H. (1994), The Transformation of European Social Democracy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Knight, A. (1998), “Populism and Neo-populism in Latin America, especially Mexico”, Journal of Latin American Studies, 30: 223–248.

Laclau, E. (2005), On Populist Reason, London: Verso.

Lévi-Strauss, C. (1983), The Raw and the Cooked (Mythologiques, Book 1), Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Maslow, A. (1954), Motivation and Personality, New York: Harper and Row.

Moffitt, B. (2016), The Global Rise of Populism: Performance, Political Style, and Representation, Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Mouffe, C. (2018), For a Left Populism, London: Verso.

O`Donnell, G. (1973), Modernization and Bureaucratic-Authoritarianism: Studies in South-American Politics, Berkeley: Institute of International Studies.

Ostiguy, P. (1998). Peronism and Anti-Peronism: Class-Cultural Cleavages and Political Identity in Argentina. Ph.D. dissertation. Department of Political Science, University of California, Berkeley.

Ostiguy, P. (2009), “The high and the low in politics: a two-dimensional political space for comparative analysis and electoral studies”, Kellogg Institute Working Paper #360, Notre Dame: Kellogg Institute for International Studies.

Ostiguy, P. (2014), “Flaunting ‘Low’ Appeals: A Cultural-Relational Approach to Populism”, paper prepared for the conference “A New Critical Juncture? Changing Patterns of Interest Representation and Regime Politics in Contemporary Latin America”, Kellogg Institute of International Studies, University of Notre Dame.

Ostiguy, P. (2017), ‘Populism: a Socio-Cultural Approach’, in C. Rovira., P. Taggart, P. Ochoa and P. Ostiguy (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Populism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 73-97.

Ostiguy, P., M-E. Casullo (2017), “Left versus Right Populism: Antagonism and the Social Other”, paper presented at the Political Studies Association, Glasgow.

Spruyt, B., G. Keepens, and F. van Droogenbroeck (2016), “Who Supports Populism and What Attracts People to It?”, Political Research Quarterly, 69 (2): 335-346.

Taggart, P. (2000), Populism, Buckingham: Open University Press.

Weber, M. (1978) [1956], Economy and Society, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Weyland, K. (1996), “Neopopulism and neoliberalism in Latin America: Unexpected Affinities”, Studies in Comparative International Development 31 (Fall): 3–31.

Weyland, K. (2001), “Clarifying a Contested Concept: Populism in the Study of Latin American Politics”, Comparative Politics, 34(1): 1-22.


Full Text: PDF

Refbacks

  • There are currently no refbacks.
Bookmark and Share


Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribuzione - Non commerciale - Non opere derivate 3.0 Italia License.