Sociologie

Populism is not restricted to right-wing politicians like Pim Fortuyn or Geert Wilders. In Latin America, populism is the provenance of left-wing leaders. Social movements like Anonymous and Occupy, too, espouse populism, even though they renounce leadership. And we can also observe populist styles and sentiments outside politics, from the arts to advertising. How can we identify, understand and explain these different expressions of populism? This introduction argues for a relational approach to the study of populism. If we understand populist styles and sentiments as emergent attributes of relations rather than fixed properties of actors or ideologies, we can begin the task of dissecting, understanding and explaining populism.

A dominant presence in the literature on populism in the Netherlands are studies that attempt to explain the rise of populism from changing voter behaviour and political participation. The researchers who produce these studies are inspired on the behaviouralist en pluralist tradition of 1940s and 1950s. The criticisms of this tradition that have been voiced in recent decades, seem to have been forgotten, or have not been taken on board. The thesis of this paper is that this has resulted in an imbalanced and incorrect representation of the emergence of populism in the Netherlands, where the formative role of events, politics and ideology – in other words, the continuous struggle over the perception of social problems and events – are not sufficiently recognised and studied. This criticism is illustrated by an in-depth revision of the study Diplomademocracy. This critique is voiced, not only out of epistemological concerns, but also on account of the concrete political implications of the chain of causality advanced in these studies.

Populism is popular. But scholarly attention seems to focus exclusively on the political aspects of populism. Informed by a Luhmannian systems-theoretical approach, this article conceptualises some general systemic characteristics of populism. These characteristics operate as a specific mechanism in social systems, as system populism. This conceptualization permits an investigation of, and comparison between, populism in mass media, arts and sciences in the Netherlands. This article shows how populist mechanisms operate in various social systems and that populism is not just a political phenomenon.

The social analysis of European populism lacks ethnographic attention to agency and to the symbolic meaning of populist constructions in people’s everyday lives. This paper offers an ethnographic analysis, starting with an understanding of populism as a perspective on the world: frames or schemas for perceiving, interpreting and classifying society. The paper focuses on the perspectives of ‘autochthonous’ (native, white) residents in a socially and ethnically mixed neighbourhood in Amsterdam New West. I show how plans for the demolition and restructuring of the neighbourhood opened up the symbolic space for the articulation of a discourse of displacement in which people construed and articulated a ‘self-understanding’ in antagonistic relations with ‘others’: elites and sometimes (post)migrants. The analysis of this local discourse of displacement offers insight into the crisis of representation and voice in a postfordist society, and therefore into the deeper structures of Dutch populism.

Polarising the political field, ethnopopulism shows high correlations between ethnocentrism and political cynicism. Yet little research is done on its genesis and the way both tendencies cluster. Relying on in-depth interviews with voters from the far-right ‘Vlaams Belang’ in Antwerp (Belgium), we analytically reconstruct the process in which people become alienated from the multicultural city, drift away from traditional parties and gradually sympathise with the dissident VB. Opposing inferior migrants on the other hand and the superior political establishment on the other, the protest of individual voters aligns itself with the only remaining party and since this is done by many, the idea emerges that all represent ‘the people’. Accordingly a benign axis is constructed by a fierce antagonism towards the axis of evil where politics and migrants plot against the ‘demos’ in undemocratic ways. Hence a circumstantial alliance or chain of equivalence is forged between the VB and diverse voters, while ideological extremism seems less binding.

Populism is usually studied by looking at the electoral and rhetorical strategies of parties considered to be populist. In this paper populism is approached as a thin ideology the kernel of which is the conviction that ‘ordinary people’ have a more lucid perception of the real nature of societal problems and what to do about them than does the elite. On the basis of a survey of the Dutch speaking population of Belgium in which populism was measured, it is concluded that this thin ideology is widespread among contemporary voters. A populist attitude turns out not to be directly influenced by a weak or uncertain economic position, by dissatisfaction with personal life or feelings of anomie. It appears foremost as a consequence of a very negative view of the evolution of society – ‘declinism’ – of the feeling of belonging to a group of people that is unfairly treated by society, and of membership in interpretative communities that combine low levels of education with a strong preference for popular media and programmes.

The article opens with the thesis that the populist representation of political space is founded on three master terms, i.e. ‘people’, ‘leader’, and ‘political elite’. Within the so-called populist triangle, the people and the leader constitute the base line, and are united in their struggle against the political establishment. Three particular variants of populism are further discussed – ethnopopulism, civic populism, and social-economic populism. After some brief remarks on the principal tensions between populist politics and representative democracy, the article argues for a broader contextualization of populism. M. Canovan already related the recurrent waves of populism to the structural tension between ‘the two faces of democracy’, or the difference between a ‘pragmatic politics’ and a ‘redemptive’ politics that strives for the restoration of ‘the power of the people’. This distinction is linked to Max Weber’s ideal-types of a politics based respectively on an ‘ethic of responsibility’ and an ‘ethic of principled conviction’ which corresponds with his more general distinction between goal-rational and value-rational action. However, the process of goal rationalization unavoidably results in a growing domination of political bureaucracy and responsible political action. According to Weber, this tendency should be countered by strong political leaders who commit themselves to clear values but are also able to combine this attitude with a more pragmatic stance. Weber’s plea for a so-called ‘leadership democracy’, which was inspired by the American presidential regime, is further put into perspective by A. Kalyvas’ notion of extraordinary politics. Populism is then discussed as a particular form of extraordinary politics within the context of so-called ‘audience democracy’ (B. Manin), in which mass media create an environment that favours populist leaders and their discourse. The article closes with a discussion, illustrated by recent tendencies within European politics, of the chances of combining populist leadership and daily governance.

In this article we examine the discursive reactions to the rise of populist parties. It has been argued that populism is not necessarily the prerogative of populist parties; it has been adopted by mainstream parties as well. This article investigates whether populism is contagious. On the basis of the results of a content analysis of election manifestos of parties in five Western European countries (France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom), we conclude that the discourse of mainstream parties has not become more populist in recent years. We also find no evidence that mainstream parties change their discourse when confronted with electoral losses or successful populist challengers. Yet we do find that populist parties change their discourse when they have been successful: their initial success makes them tone down their populism.