By the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century, populists have taken charge in Turkey, India and Israel, all previously heralded as exceptional democracies in difficult regions. This moment offers a unique opportunity to explore populism in power outside Europe and the Americas, in three states shaped by deep social, ethnic and religious divisions. This article locates Turkey, India and Israel within a global wave of electorally successful populist movements. It explores how populism can jeopardize democratic choice in deeply divided societies and whether Erdoğan's capture of democracy in Turkey offers a blueprint for the political strategies employed by Modi and Netanyahu. In unravelling parallels between the three administrations, our analysis uncovers a common populist playbook of neoliberal economic policies, the leveraging of ethnoreligious tensions as well as attempts to denigrate independent news media, by portraying it as the "enemy of the people". Although their position on the spectrum between democracy and authoritarianism differs, our analysis reveals striking continuities in the erosion of democracy in Turkey, India and Israel as a result of these policies, thus highlighting the vulnerability of political systems, particularly those of deeply divided societies, to democratic decay.

President Erdogan and the Justice and Development Party (AKP) fundamentally transformed the Turkish political realm: The AKP was elected in 2002 on promises of economic liberalisation and accession to the European Union (EU). Over sixteen years it steered Turkey from being perceived as a “model” western-style democracy to autocracy. Instrumental for this transformation was Erdogan’s use of a new form of right-wing, religiously legitimated populism that systematically undermined the institutions of democracy by polarising society, capturing the public discourse and disregarding constitutional principles. This article examines the emergence of the AKP’s right-wing, religiously legitimated populism through three analytical lenses: First, the historical development of democracy in Turkey and its shortcomings; second, the antidemocratic effect of Erdogan’s post-coup attempt policies; third, a comparison between the AKP’s brand of populism with political strategies employed by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in India, the Law and Justice Party (PiS) in Poland and Putin’s Russia.

This article untangles competing conceptualisations of nostalgia and identifies a specific form of collective‐restorative nostalgia as politically significant. We argue that the link between resentment and this type of nostalgia emerges from their joint critique of the socio‐political realities of the present. Nostalgia provides spatial and temporal orientations for a group's experiences of resentment through highly selective recollections of the heartland and an idealised golden age. We hypothesize that nostalgia leverages the heartland and the golden age to formulate claims for recognition and restored status on behalf of those who feel left behind by late modernity. Next, the article uses structural equation modelling and the 2019 Belgian National Election Study to reveal how resentment (consisting of ontological insecurity, group relative deprivation, and powerlessness) mediates between structural characteristics and nostalgia. Our findings suggest that each component of resentment individually contributes to explaining the nostalgia of less educated and economically deprived individuals.

Is there such thing as a populist thing? This article tries to answer this question by comparing two iconic populist objects: the Make America Great Again (MAGA) cap and the yellow vest. Despite their centrality to populist politics, there is remarkably little systematic examination of these objects' populist affordances, let alone a comparative study.We propose to address this lacuna by performing a pragmatic analysis of each object's role in the populist politics of the United States and France, respectively. Our comparison uncovers two findings, which, in turn, help us answer our research question. First, our study of the MAGA cap reveals how nationalism and populism can be combined into a powerful political message. Second, the yellow vest exemplifies how populism functions on its own that is, as a way of doing politics that is centred on feelings of resentment.Either in conjunction with other political phenomena (e.g., nationalism) or by itself, populism emerges from our analysis as a logic of action that involves both linguistic claims and physical objects. Things, in this reading, are surprisingly central to how populism operates.

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