These documents include lecture notes for the course Democracies, Autocracies & Transitions in the second year studies of Political Science at the UvA. It includes theoretical and empirical contributions to the discussion on democracies, autocracies and what drives democratic backsliding or democra...
Defining populism
- 2017 word of the year by Cambridge University Press
- Cambridge Dictionary: political ideas and activities that are intended to get the support of
ordinary people by giving them what they want
- Muddes: Cambridge conflates the term with nativism
- ‘Populism’ as buzzword
- Matthijs Rooduijn: why is populism suddenly all the rage?
- It’s a classification act and there are cases that are uncontroversial and some
cases that are borderline
- The ‘danger’ of populism
- The manner in which populism is treated is often as a danger, pathology, disease
or a deterioration of politics
- A lot of big words are thrown around
- Defining ‘populism’
- It’s really difficult to find the perfect fit
- How can you look empirically at populist movements in the past and then find a
common core (US, Latin America, agrarian movement)
- What is the common core if there is any
- Cas Mudde: populism is “a thin-centred ideology that considers society to be
ultimately separated into two homogenous and antagonistic groups, ‘the pure
people’ and ‘the corrupt elite’, and which argues that politics should be an
expression of the general will of the people
- The first component: the thin-centred ideology
- Thick ideology would be something like socialism
- An ideology that encompasses many factors of public life
- These are ideologies that guide people
- Thin ideology is like an empty vessel that touches on very broad
and abstract
- Needs to be filled with a host ideology
- Populism in and of itself isn’t enough to guide someone’s ideology
- The second component: ‘pure people’ and ‘corrupt elite’
- People-centered: populist speak for the people as opposed to the
elite
- People are pure in the sense that there’s good in them and
the elite are corrupt or bad
- Doesn’t say which elites (that’s where the host ideology
comes to play)
- The third component: general will of the people
- The more unmediated the connection between the people and
politics the better
- Populists are usually very skeptical about any sort of intermediary
that might add noise to the channel
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