Sociology of Populism

By the mid-2010s, 'populism' had become one of the most discussed and most contested terms in political and social science. The election of Donald Trump in 2016, the Brexit referendum the same year, the rise of the Alternative for Germany, France's National Rally, Italy's Five Star Movement and Brothers of Italy, Hungary's Fidesz, Poland's Law and Justice, Turkey's AKP, India's BJP, the Philippines' Rodrigo Duterte, and Brazil's Bolsonaro — a wave of politically diverse movements — were united by a family resemblance that scholars struggled to specify precisely.

The most influential minimal definition, developed by Cas Mudde in The Populist Zeitgeist (2004), treats populism as a thin ideology that divides society into two morally homogeneous and antagonistic camps — a pure people and a corrupt elite — and claims that politics should be an expression of the general will of the people. Because the thin ideology is itself thin, it attaches easily to thicker ideologies: left-populism to socialism (Syriza, Podemos, Bernie Sanders), right-populism to nativism and authoritarianism (Trump, Le Pen, Orbán). Populism can be economically redistributive or austerity-minded depending on which thicker ideology it attaches to.

Rogers Brubaker's Why Populism? (2017) argued that populism is best understood as a discursive and stylistic repertoire rather than a free-standing ideology. Populists share rhetorical moves: claiming to speak for the authentic people against cosmopolitan elites and threatening outsiders; dramatizing a crisis requiring strong leadership; performing transgressive informality against establishment manners; positioning the leader as an unmediated voice of popular will over against parties, courts, media, and civil service. These moves can be combined with varied substantive agendas, which is why the category usefully covers left- and right-wing variants despite their substantive differences.

Populist movements typically threaten liberal-democratic institutions even when they win democratic elections. Jan-Werner Müller's What Is Populism? (2016) emphasized populism's anti-pluralist core: the populist claim that the leader or movement uniquely represents 'the real people' denies legitimate opposition and tends toward delegitimizing election losses, courts, independent media, and minority rights. The empirical record — Fidesz's systematic hollowing of Hungarian democracy, Law and Justice's assault on Polish courts, Trump's 2021 electoral challenge — has largely confirmed this institutional concern. Sociology's task has been to explain not only what populism is but why particular populations have found populist movements attractive.