Critical research on populism: Nine rules of engagement

Abstract

This article formulates precise questions and 'rules of engagement' designed to advance our understanding of the role populism can and should play in the present political conjuncture, with potentially significant implications for critical management and organization studies and beyond. Drawing on the work of Ernesto Laclau and others working within the post-Marxist discourse theory tradition, we defend a concept of populism understood as a form of reason that centres around a claim to represent 'the people', discursively constructed as an underdog in opposition to an illegitimate 'elite'. A formal discursive approach to populism brings with it important advantages. For example, it establishes that a populist logic can be invoked to further very different political goals, from radical left to right, or from progressive to regressive. It sharpens too our grasp of important issues that are otherwise conflated and obfuscated. For instance, it helps us separate out the nativist and populist dimensions in the discourses of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), Trump or the Front National (FN).Our approach to populism, however, also points to the need to engage with the rhetoric about populism, a largely ignored area of critical research. In approaching populism as signifier, not only as a concept, we stress the added need to focus on the uses of the term 'populism' itself: how it is invoked, by whom, and to what purpose and effect. This, we argue, requires that we pay more systematic attention to anti-populism and 'populist hype', and reflect upon academia's own relation to populism and anti-populism.

Populism and health policy: three international case studies of right‐wing populist policy frames

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Swaying to the Extreme: Group Relative Deprivation Predicts Voting for an Extreme Right Party in the French Presidential Election

“…In fact, among 30 most salient populist parties in Europe, only 14 parties (equal to 42%) are further classed as ER (Polk et al, 2017). Populism, the idea that governments are elitist and not serving their citizens rightly, can be found on the ER but also on the extreme left (De Cleen, Glynos & Mondon, 2018). For example, in France, FN can be considered as both populist and ER while parties such as Parti de Gauche (PG), at the time led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, can be classified as both populist but on also on the left of the political spectrum (see Figure S1 in the supplementary materials; https://osf.io/c3k9y/).…”

Getting the Problem Definition Right: The Radical Right, Populism, Nativism and Public Health Comment on "A Scoping Review of Populist Radical Right Parties’ Influence on Welfare Policy and its Implications for Population Health in Europe"

“…All too often, PRR parties are labelled as simply 'populist, ' especially in media coverage and political commentary. 3 There are several problems with this equation between 'populist radical right' and 'populist. ' First of all, it obscures the fact that the ideological core of PRR politics is nativism, and not populism.…”