The populist cat-dog: applying the concept of populism to contemporary European party systems

Abstract

Populism is a frequently used yet problematic concept; the term is often ill-defined and randomly applied. While these problems have been widely acknowledged, this paper argues that there are still issues with the way populism tends to be used, even if a sound definition is provided. This relates to the fact that it is often not clear whether populism is used to refer to an ideological feature of an exclusive category of political parties or whether populism is seen as a type of discourse which can be expressed by any political actor. In order to illustrate the difficulties with regard to the application of the term populism, several 'hard' cases of populism across Europe are discussed. The paper argues that in order to stimulate a more accurate use of the term, observers should be explicit not only about the meaning of populism, but also about the form in which it manifest itself.Key Words: Populism, Party Families, Concept Formation, Europe. 2 The populist cat-dog. Applying the concept of populism to contemporary European party systems. IntroductionPopulism is a concept which has frequently emerged in recent scholarly contributions and which has also attracted much attention outside of academia. Although the term has been used extensively, the concept is problematic due to the unsystematic (pejorative) use and the fact that populism is often ill defined.1 The term is regularly used to denote anti-incumbent rhetoric or to describe politicians who pander to public opinion, but definitional precision tends to be lacking. Yet, as this paper will show, also when a clear definition is provided, there are problems related to the way the concept is applied in order to describe political phenomena. Since the term has been used so widely, it is necessary to stimulate a more accurate use of the concept. This paper takes the view that this is even more important since (the surge of) populism can be seen as an indicator for the legitimacy of a political regime and the state of representative democracy in general. 2 The surge of populism is a sign that a democratically elected regime is seen to be unresponsive to the demands of a certain segment of the population.Even though the term populism is used randomly, and even though the concept can certainly be considered to be an 'essentially contested' concept, 3 Giovanni Sartori calls, a cat-dog. 5 The term is used to describe political actors that in fact cannot be placed in a single category.Starting out from a minimal definition of populism, this paper first aims to point out the difficulties of using populism in a meaningful way in order to discriminate between political actors. Specifically, using the words of Allan Sikk, the paper shows that it is hard to distinguish between populism as a 'classifier', which refers to a circumscribed universe of populist actors, and populism as a 'descriptor', which denotes (more fleeting) expressions of populist discourse in political systems. 6 Secondly, the paper seeks to investigate whether the cat-dog problem can be tack...

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