Populism and Civil Society
The Challenge to Constitutional Democracy
ANDREW ARATO AND JEAN L. COHEN
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Arato, Andrew, author. | Cohen, Jean L., author. Title: Populism and civil society : the challenge to constitutional democracy / by Andrew Arato and Jean L. Cohen.
Description: New York : Oxford University Press, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021031185 (print) | LCCN 2021031186 (ebook) | ISBN 9780197526590 (paperback) | ISBN 9780197526583 (hardback) | ISBN 9780197526606 (updf) | ISBN 9780197526613 (epub) | ISBN 9780197526620 (oso) Subjects: LCSH: Populism. | Civil society. | Political culture. Classification: LCC JC 423.A6845 2021 (print) | LCC JC423 (ebook) | DDC 320.56/62—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021031185
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DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197526583.001.0001
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4.
Preface and Acknowledgments
This book was written in 2020—one of the worst years in our history. A global health crisis comparable only to the deadly flu pandemic a century ago, a severe economic downturn seriously exacerbating extreme inequality the likes of which has also not been seen in Western industrialized countries since the American “gilded age,” and the rise of authoritarian (most of them) populists to power globally, including in some supposedly consolidated democracies, were bad enough. Making everything worse was the brazen attempt of a sitting US president to deny the results of a free and fair election which he lost, through the technique of the “big lie,” declaring that the election was riddled with fraud, that he won by a “landslide” (he lost by 7 million votes and a large electoral college defeat), and then exerting pressure on impartial officials in the states to “find him votes” and on courts to find in his favor—i.e., to enable the commission of actual (and not just falsely claimed) fraud. The culmination came very early in 2021 (on January 6), when the defeated, lame duck, president fomented an insurrection to block the peaceful transfer of power, by inviting an armed mob to attack the Capitol building. That mob penetrated into the halls of Congress and threatened the lives of congressional representatives, senators, and the vice president. Five people died in the melee. They interrupted the certification of the election of incoming President Biden, a constitutionally mandated but normally pedestrian process. Happily they failed. The Capitol was cleared of the insurrectionists, and Biden was indeed certified as the next president of the United States that very night. But the damage to our democracy was done. Many used to think that such things as self-coups or “autogolpes” and armed challenges to elections happen somewhere else, not in long-consolidated democracies, and certainly not in the United States—the imagined beacon of the peaceful transition of power and governments. We had better think again and very hard.
That is what this book seeks to do. We take the contemporary challenge of populism to democracy very seriously, even though we situate this challenge within instead of outside the democratic imaginary. We realize that what is needed is analytical clarity, cogent theoretical analysis, political prudence, and good judgment, but also deep commitment to fighting the populist challenge—a fight that can only be won by expanding, not simply restoring, democracy and justice in our societies. We now know that “it”—undermining of democracy and social justice—can indeed happen here, and everywhere. The goal of this book is to make a small contribution to help ensure that this challenge does not succeed.
To be sure, the preparatory work and earlier versions of some of the chapters were done well before 2020. Indeed in that respect the book was long in the making. But because we were both on leave during much of 2020 we were able to complete the manuscript during this fateful year in somewhat peaceful (and yes privileged) isolation from the tumult around us. Nevertheless we of course felt, and still do, deep tension and anxiety for the future caused not only by the pandemic but also by the disastrous political developments that have undermined democracy, East and West, North and South. The contrast with the period in which we wrote and published our first joint book project, Civil Society and Political Theory, couldn’t be greater.1 Having participated in the “new social movements” of the 1960s and 1970s and in the challenge to “really existing” communist dictatorships in Soviet-type societies in Eastern Europe, it seemed then that the democratization of democracy (in the United States and the West generally) and the transition to democracy in the Eastern authoritarian regimes was on the agenda, thanks to civil society led movements and processes in both arenas. Thus, we made an attempt to analyze and foster this project, looking to both the East and the West, in our book. Despite the crisis of welfare states in the 1980s, the embrace of neo-liberalism by right-wing and even some left-wing parties, the increased difficulty of maintaining or expanding social democracy in a context of hyper-globalization, the achievements regarding democratization and social justice that challenged inequality and destabilized illegitimate social hierarchies were real. Hence, our optimism and hope, not without reason or foundation. Indeed, there were many successes: the end of the imperialist venture of the Vietnam war, civil rights improvements, greater equality for women, and even the rise of green parties in the West; and the fall of Soviet type communism, the dismantling of the Soviet empire (aka the Soviet Union) in the East, culminating in autonomy and what looked like transitions to democracy in many of the countries in Central Eastern Europe. We did not believe in any “end of history” but we could assume real progress all the same.
Today, the context couldn’t be more different. We write during the culmination and the aftermath of four years of a right-wing populist US presidency that engaged in constant norm breaking regarding democratic procedure and liberal constitutionalism. Propaganda techniques were repeatedly used that openly rejected truth, engaged in falsehood, and fostered white nationalism and militia style resistance to the opposition deemed “the enemy” culminating in the insurrection against Congress. We are left with images of a Capitol first desecrated by white supremacist mobs and then surrounded by armed troops that locked down our capital city in order to ensure a safe inauguration of President Biden. The fact that so many believed the lies and still seem to support their perpetrator, indeed his capture of the Republican party (even if the outcome is still unclear), is deeply disturbing and must be analyzed. Things are hardly more encouraging
with regard to the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Instead of further democratization, in most of the former Soviet empire we have the survival or emergence of hybrid forms of regimes with a tendency to become fully authoritarian. Russia and some of the former republics of the USSR are in the lead. In parts of Central and Eastern Europe, real progress in democratization is being eviscerated and basically destroyed by populist governments, most obviously in the case of Hungary, but also in Poland. On the periphery of Europe, in Turkey, President Erdogan surpasses even the Hungarian Orbán in the undermining of democracy. In India, a country previously in the vanguard of democratic constitutionalism, a populist prime minister and his party are challenging impressive historical achievements in the name of ethno-religious nationalism. And yet, at the same time, the outcome of the 2020 US election, an event with obvious international significance, indicates that constitutional democracy can hold and even recover in the face of populist challenge.
We write this book to try to understand the logic of populism (in its left and right versions), its link to authoritarianism despite its democratic pretensions and concessions to liberal democracy, and the underlying causes for its current successes in coming to power. We also write it in search of democratic alternatives, very much needed today. The US drama helps renew our hope that with enough civil society pressure for greater social justice, and more democracy, with the help of actors in political society (parties) who insist on the observance of democratic and constitutionalist norms, and with the help of impartial civil servants in the judiciary and in the state administrations whose professional integrity and commitment to their oaths of office matter more than politics and enable them to resist political pressure, democracy can be preserved and democratized: made more inclusive and responsive to the unmet needs and demands of groups. But given the severity of the existing threats, optimism is uncalled for. It will take a great deal of cogent analysis, political prudence, courage, and hard work to fend off the irresponsible firebrands and political opportunists fueling the populist threat, on all sides of the political spectrum. For us, two conclusions follow. First, it is possible to defend democracy, as the new democratic civil and political society actors have shown in the case of the United States, as has the impressive integrity of many involved in the legal and administrative systems of “the state” and the states. And second, defeats of the populist challenge, with its authoritarian logic, cannot be secure without seriously addressing the democracy, welfare, and cultural deficits of really existing liberal democracies.
We wish to acknowledge and thank those who have helped us bring this work to fruition. The two authors extensively discussed all of the chapters of this book before and after drafts were written. As a result, they were extensively revised. We both are fully responsible for each of the claims, arguments, and conclusions in the book.
We received support for this project, individually and jointly by more people than we can possibly mention here.
Andrew Arato wishes to thank New School colleagues and especially graduate students who have supported him, both domestic and international, and from whom he is learned a lot concerning all aspects of this topic. I learned a great deal from the work of older students, now professors, in the area of populist studies: Carlos de la Torre, Nicolas Lynch, Alberto Olvera, Enrique Peruzzotti, Martin Plot, Margarita Palacios, Claudia Heiss, and Nicolas Figureoa. De la Torre was especially kind to include me in two edited volumes: The Promise and Perils of Populism (2015); and, my article co-authored with Jean L. Cohen on “Civil Society, Populism and Religion” in the Routledge Handbook of Global Populism (2019) In recent years it was from young scholars in particular, from Mexico, Argentina, Turkey, Iran, and India, like Melissa Amezcua, Emanuel Guerisoli, Nuri Can Akin, Bahareh Ebne Alian, Arya Vaghayenegar, and Udeepta Chakravarty that I have learned the most. Among the faculty I would single out Richard Bernstein, Dmitri Nikulin, Andreas Kalyvas, Federico Finchelstein, Chiara Bottici, Omri Boehm, Benoit Challand, Carlos Forment, Eli Zaretsky, and provocative debating partner Nancy Fraser for their support. As to institutions, and their leaders, I am especially grateful to Hector Raul Solis Gadea, rector at the University of Guadalajara for repeatedly inviting me to the Guadalajara Book Fair and to the Center of Social Sciences (2013–2014) he led, along with Jochen Kemner and the CALAS program at the same university and in Costa Rica in 2018 and 2019, who have given me a fellowship and invited me to lecture. I am grateful to Michael Ignatieff and Zoltán Miklósi for inviting me for three lectures at the Central European University in Budapest, 2018, 2019, and 2021, and similarly Paul Blokker and Gábor Attila Tóth at the University of Trento. I thank Gábor Halmai for twice sponsoring me, the second time as a senior Fernand Braudel fellow, at the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence, and allowing me to learn from him in matters constitutional. Finally, I thank Silvia von Steinsdorff and Ertug Tombus for inviting me to a conference at Humboldt University in Berlin in 2018 and the organizers at the Center for the Humanities and Social Change at the same university who invited me as a visiting fellow during the summer of 2019.
Jean L. Cohen would like to thank Columbia University for its generous leave policy enabling her to research and write this book. I would also like to thank the European University Institute for awarding me a Fernand Braudel Senior Fellowship in 2020 for which I prepared several lectures on populism despite the fact that due to the pandemic I was unable to go to Florence, Italy, to deliver the talks. As I write, the plan is to do so in May 2021, if possible. I am grateful to Rahel Jaeggi for inviting me to be a senior fellow at the Center for the Humanities and Social Change, at Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany, during the summer of
2019, where I delivered lectures and participated in panels on populism in addition to teaching in the summer school. Of course, I am grateful to my students who have participated in my courses on populism over the past five years. Their insights and the high level of discussion that always occurs in both graduate and undergraduate courses at Columbia helped me clarify my own ideas. The same is true of the conferences where I lectured both abroad and in the United States
Again I thank Columbia University for sponsoring several conferences I organized and lectured in on populism. These include the 2017 conference on populism and religion I co-organized with Alexander Stille, for which I thank the Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life (IRCPL), the School of Journalism and the Department of Political Science; the journal Constellations 25th Anniversary Conference Democracy in an Age of Crisis: (co-organized by myself, Andreas Kalyvas, and Amy Allen) for which I also thank the Columbia University Department of Political Science, and the Center for Critical Theory at Columbia Law School and The New School, for co-sponsoring. Amongst the many conferences to which I was invited to speak on populism I would like to thank the organizers of the 2019 panel on populism and religion at Sciences Po in Paris (Julie Saada and Astrid von Busekist); the organizers of the 2019 CSPT (Conference for the Study of Political Thought), “Parties, Partisans and Movements,” held at Yale University for including me amongst the paper givers; Ertug Tombus, Jan Werner Muller, Anna Bettin Kaiser, and Sylvia von Steinsdorff for inviting me to speak on populism and the politics of resentment at the 2018 conference at Humboldt University in Berlin; Andreas Kalyvas for inviting me to speak on the panel “Populism” at The New School in 2017; and Artemy Magun of the European University at St. Petersburg, Russia, for inviting me to the conference Civil Society in the XXI Century in Spring 2017, held at the Smolny Institute, Petersburg, where I spoke on populism, civil society, and religion.
The introduction of this book draws on Andrew Arato, “Political theology and populism,” Social Research: An International Quarterly 80.1 (2013) and our joint article “Civil Society, Populism and Religion,” Constellations 24.3 (2017).
Chapters 1 and 4 draw on Andrew Arato’s “Populism, Constitutional Courts, and Civil Society,” in C. Landfried ed., Judicial Power. How Constitutional Courts Affect Political Transformations (2019) and “How We Got Here? Transition Failures, Their Causes and the Populist Interest in the Constitution,” Philosophy & Social Criticism 45.9–10 (2019). Chapter 2 draws on Jean L. Cohen’s “Hollow Parties and their Movement-ization: The Populist Conundrum,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 45.9–10 (2019). The introduction and Chapter 5 also draw on Jean L. Cohen’s “Populism and the Politics of Resentment,” Jus Cogens 1.1 (2019).
Chapter 3 draws on her “What’s Wrong with the Normative Theory (and the Actual Practice) of Left Populism,” Constellations, 26.3 (2019).
Introduction: Defining Populism
Why publish another book on contemporary populism in an already increasingly crowded scholarly field? As authors of several works on civil society, authoritarian regimes, sovereignty, and democratization, we believe that on many relevant issues we have new things to say, with more grounding theoretically than most works on the subject. Indeed, we think that the tradition of critical theory is not yet represented in the growing literature on contemporary populism, amazingly enough given the early interest in authoritarian forms of the founders of the critical theory tradition, and the later important work of the second generation concerning the public sphere and the changing structure of capitalism. We aim to fill this gap. More importantly, most existing works have paid little attention to the subject of democratic alternatives to populist politics. At best, many have assumed or even argued that the only alternative is to defend liberal democracy as it is or to return to this form as it was. Others like Ernesto Laclau, much more questionably, strongly imply, if never fully claim, that the alternative must be a complete replacement of liberal dimensions of representative democracy. We agree with neither of these options. All our chapters will be concerned with the problem of the democratization of democracy1 and several will consider alternatives under headings such as the expansion of the political role of civil society and the reconstruction of social democracy. As critical theorists, we believe that liberal democracy is by its nature an unfinished and incomplete project. Accordingly, the contemporary halting or even reversal of its democratic expansion plays a key role in opening the terrain to populist challenge in its various forms.
Thus the political reasons for writing our book are distinct. We doubt that, even in the relatively short run, liberal democracy can be successfully defended by a conservative relation to its contemporary forms, i.e., based on a desired return to liberal parliamentarism or presidentialism as they were in the past. Almost everywhere these are under strain, whether because of internal oligarchic tendencies of representative systems, the decline of party representation, or strong external constraints, due to globalized capitalism, on the ability of democratic states to deliver improvements of social welfare or equal life chances to populations.2 We also do not believe that populism in any of its forms can successfully address what we will call three deficits: those of democracy, welfare, and social solidarity. We will argue, and hopefully show, that the very logic of
populism, as we define it and as it exists today in both left and right variants, points to political authoritarianism and inconsistent, arbitrary, poorly thought out, or clientelistic economic and social policies even where, empirically, various tendencies, including populism’s organizational forms that we will note, produce countervailing tendencies.3 Furthermore, as in the case of liberal democracy that we wish to defend through its further democratization, we do not wish to deny that contemporary populism has a point that should be taken seriously. This we see in its critical dimension, especially in the early phase when populism is a movement in civil society. Thus our attitude to both liberal democracy and populism is that of immanent criticism:4 in one case we wish to defend the counterfactual norms against existing forms of institutionalization and in the other the critical dimension against strong authoritarian tendencies that are almost always fully evident when populism achieves political power. Our perspective therefore is to learn from the crises of liberal democracy, of which populism is perhaps the most important if not the only symptom, and to begin to outline alternatives to both liberal conservatism (represented even by many recent forms of social democracy) and populist authoritarianism.
This introduction consists of five sections. First, we will consider the methodological tools needed to define the phenomenon of populism. Next, we generate a preliminary definition of the topos through an immanent critique of Ernest’s Laclau’s theory of the same. This will be followed by an attempted correction of the first results through ideal typical construction using three empirically derived criteria: reliance on elections, orientation to constitutional politics, and the utilization of “host ideologies” that are present in virtually all contemporary populisms if they become politically relevant or successful. After having produced an expanded middle-range definition, that in our view leads to the distinct populist logic, we consider four organization forms populism can take that should not be seen as an inevitable stage model: mobilization, party, government, and regime. We end the introduction with our plan for the five chapters of the book.
What Is Populism? How to Define the Phenomenon
Almost everyone acknowledges that populism is a contested and often polemical concept and given the many historical and now ideological forms that have been listed under this term, the great difficulty involved in coming up with a definition that includes neither too much nor too little. There is today a certain convergence among attempts to minimally identify the phenomenon, but this in itself does not produce sufficient conceptual clarity.
In previous writings, we have relied on two methodologies to help define populism: immanent critique and ideal typical construction. As for the first, following above all Marx’s critique of political economy, we select the best affirmative or ideological theory of a social phenomenon and try to use its main components to develop a new theory that both uncovers dimensions suppressed by the original (“defetishization”) or confronts their normative assumptions with their false realization (“immanent critique of ideology”). Here we have an easier time than Marx, since in his case there were many significant theories of the emerging capitalist economy among which he had to choose the best, according to his judgment and background historical knowledge. In our case populism, whether of the right or the left, seems to have lacked many significant affirmative theorists.5 Fortunately, Ernesto Laclau’s work,6 and the related but different studies of Margaret Canovan and Chantal Mouffe, fill this theoretical or ideological lacuna.
It is important for us, insofar as we have always been very critical of populism in light of its supposed authoritarian tendencies, that Laclau, Mouffe, and Canovan all affirm populist politics, if in three different ways, as a significant radical democratic alternative. Our study too is committed to the values of democratic politics, and we study populism with the background assumption, based on cases, that it represents a challenge and even a danger to these very values. We do not however wish to presuppose authoritarianism on a definitional level. Building our definition on elements derived from Ernesto Laclau first and foremost, should protect us against the charge of tautology based on normative commitments. Only if our critical treatment can uncover, on the level of argumentation, the presence of an authoritarian logic that can be demonstrated in terms of most relevant cases, will we be justified in rejecting the democratic claims these authors repeatedly make.
Especially Laclau and Mouffe, but also Canovan, open themselves to a critique resembling defetishization, by systematically suppressing the key dimension of populism in governmental power, which must be recovered to understand the telos or “the logic” of the phenomenon better and more deeply. When this is done, the way is open to the critique of ideology. The democratic norms of populist theorists, which seem to be implicit in their critique of really existing liberal democracies, can and should be confronted with the strongly authoritarian tendencies of populist governments and regimes, already decipherable in populist movements.
The second methodological move we undertake is more dependent on Max Weber than Karl Marx. Like Weber, we do not endorse Marx’s Hegelian confidence in grasping the essence of the phenomenon in a relatively few developmental elements. Aided by the historical experience of many cases, and their best
recent analyses, we can both re-emphasize those elements from the criticized ideologies that yield a coherent picture of the phenomenon and add to them if it turns out that the immanent criticism of populist theory and ideology left out important dimensions of the phenomenon. Such omissions are likely because Laclau, being mainly a philosopher, has neglected social scientific as well as historical treatments of the phenomenon.7 The resulting combination then must again be tested against both theoretical explorations of origins and causes, as well as the history and tendencies of significant contemporary phenomena often referred to as “populist.”
We know, as did Weber, that empirical cases cannot be understood at all without the construction of ideal typical concepts of interpretation, but also that historical experience will rarely fully correspond to the conceptual type. Nevertheless, we do not believe that the selection of cases so interpreted can take place in a value-free manner. For us, the value that guides our effort is a commitment to political democracy, to liberal democracy as a developmental form, leading us to select those cases where this value has become an important stake in the struggle, whether electoral or on the level of opposing social movements in civil society. It is this relation to value (Weber’s Wertbeziehung) combined with historical knowledge of different contexts that will be essential if the set of types we construct is not to have so few elements as to include too many cases8 and thus risk losing the distinction between populist and popular politics, nor too many and thus exclude important ones where democracy is under challenge.
What Is Populism: Immanent Critique
Everyone will agree with the statement that populism is a political phenomenon. Yet how to distinguish it from other political projects? The literature seems to suggest four types of answers: as a strategy, as a style, as a set of organized ideas, or as a discourse, in each version leading to a political logic, whether authoritarian or democratic in the view of specific analysts.9 Immanent critique is methodologically linked to discourses, and it is here that we must therefore begin. It is discursive elements that are stressed by Laclau and the so-called Essex School. Following Laclau, we must understand discourse as involving both language and action, the predominance of one or the other depending on context and populist actors. We note that populists can but often do not call themselves by this name, and can self-define according to other ideological borrowings (such host ideologies are discussed further later in the chapter).
Our critique of Laclau’s text and its theoretical foundations in the work of Carl Schmitt has been carried out elsewhere,10 thus here we can restrict ourselves to the list of the main elements of populism derived from Laclau’s and partially Canovan’s complementary work:
1. An appeal to popular sovereignty as the fundamental norm violated by existing institutions whether liberal democratic or authoritarian.11
2. The rhetorical or ideologically thin construction of the empty signifier of the people in such a way as to construct chains of imagined “equivalence” among a wide heterogeneity of demands, grievances, and constituencies.12
3. The symbolic representation13 of the whole of this construct by a mobilized part 14
4. The embodiment even of this part in a single charismatic leader, with whom the mobilized part of the population has a highly emotional relationship.15
5. The construction of a friend–enemy dichotomy16 (“the frontier of antagonism”17) between the people so defined and its “other” that is seen as the establishment in power along with its beneficiaries and allies, both internal and external.18
6. The insistence on a strong notion of politics or “the political” along with a disinterest in mere “ordinary” politics or policy; this understanding of politics, often articulated in terms of the constituent (vs. “constituted”) power, is based on will rather than social process as rationally understood.
We should stress from the outset, that each of these elements may and do appear in other political projects. It is the combination that is populist, in Laclau’s understanding, and, as we will try to show, authoritarian in its logic.19 He has strong though hardly incontrovertible arguments linking the six dimensions. Popular sovereignty (element 1) as the fundamental norm cannot be politically relevant without the construction first and identification second of the subject whose sovereignty is at stake, “the people.” Given societal plurality and heterogeneity, the subject can be only discursively constructed, by a rhetorical chain that equalizes various demands and injuries, a chain of equivalences (element 2). Mere rhetoric focusing on equality is however too weak to unify “the friend” without the simultaneous construction (and “demonization”) of the antagonist, “the enemy,” and of “the frontier of antagonism” (element 5). Only then by a combination of inclusion and exclusion can the subject, the genuine people, be identified. By its very nature given prior heterogeneity and new antagonism it will only be a part of the population (element 3). Even that part will be too large to speak and to act in a unified manner spontaneously. Thus
embodiment in a leader is needed (element 4), a single one if disunity is not to re-appear in a collegium on top, and a charismatic one if it is to be able to gain recognition from “the bottom,” the mobilized grassroots of the part. Finally, fundamental antagonism is not only to enemy actors but to the system created and dominated by them, often called “the establishment.” Thus (element 6), the stress on the political (le politique), the foundational, or the constituent power follows from the rest, dominated by the imagery of the united people led by and embodied in a charismatic leader. Admittedly, it does not follow that populists should be as disinterested in ordinary politics (la politique) as is Laclau, but if so interested it would have to be for instrumental reasons. But it does follow that the constituent power should not be a one-time act exhausted by a constitution, but a permanent possibility often exercised even under a new constitution.20
It is important for theoretical reasons to stress the combination of the elements in the definition. In our view some of them can exist apart from populism under alternative interpretations. Meeting one or two of the criteria here, like the related stresses on popular sovereignty (1) and the constituent power (6), may be positive characteristics of democratic politics in other respects strongly opposed to populism, charismatic embodiment, and friend–enemy antagonism. Almost all versions of constitutional democracy allow and even promote popular (vs. populist) leadership and leave room for the constituent power of citizens, which can however be exercised in highly democratic ways involving pluralism and self-limitation.21 Even the very common discourse referring to “the people” (2) can be harmless or rhetorically productive if understood as a plurality rather than a unified subject. It is its being combined with (3), (4), and (5), representation of the whole by a part, embodiment in a charismatic leader, and friend–enemy relations that leads to the populist interpretation of these dimensions, which are capable of alternative democratic interpretations.
Probably, many relevant cases will miss one of the elements: (1) and (6) are the most likely candidates, based on empirical experience, though some argue that charismatic leadership can also be dispensed with.22 It is the combination of (3) part for the whole dialectic, (4) embodiment, and (5) friend–enemy juxtaposition that is most central, and for some it may be enough for a “minimal definition”23 usable for today’s main cases. But, logically, they need the scaffolding of a “thin ideology” rooted in the deep-seated imaginary of the democratic age to be persuasive, and, at the very least when radically challenging the existing system, the idea of re-foundation or appeal to the constituent power is almost always implied.24 Certainly the logic of populism is inherent in this combination. There is however also the question of which elements are stressed in a given case, and this will vary depending in particular on whether
the examined phase of populism is that of a movement, government, or regime. Thus element 1, leading to a critique of existing democracies, will be strongest in the movement phase, while the insistence on foundation and re-foundation may be the strongest when a populist government encounters or discovers the need to form a new regime.
What Is Populism: Construction of the Ideal Type
Even if the six elements derived from Laclau have internal relations more common to structural analyses, they also yield an ideal typical construction. As such they raise two methodological questions from the point of view of empirical social science: are there too many elements here to include all relevant cases today and in history, and conversely are there very important regularities that are not yet included? The first objection represents the point of view of Cas Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser, who strongly advocate a minimal definition,25 and is implicitly present in many interpreters own attempts, whether they stress discourse, ideology, or strategy as the key to populism. These interpreters are not entirely wrong, a construct with too many components would include too few cases, tendentially only a single historical case.26 Social science, unlike historiography, needs to be comparative and must analyze both the similarities and differences of many cases. At the same time, there are strong theoretical and normative-political objections to the proposal of minimalism. By excluding the leader embodying the whole and the part/whole problem, Mudde and Kaltwasser neglect the deep internal connection of these elements to what they stress, namely to fundamental antagonism and speaking in the name of the general will. Furthermore, too few criteria would necessarily lead to the inclusion of too many cases, thus compromising the important differences between what has been called pre-populism, classical, and contemporary forms. More importantly, on the level of politics many grassroots democratic forms would be included, thus losing the possibility of distinguishing between the popular and the populist. Yes, it may be necessary to distinguish (if possible) within populisms of grassroots vs. top down origins,27 but even then it takes a consideration of other criteria beyond what minimalism can provide to discover the different and even contrary logics between populism from below and non-populist democratic mobilizations in civil society.28
This brings us to the second possible objection to some definitions, namely of leaving out too much that may be fundamental. Here alternative minimalist explanations speak against one another, and necessarily so. Since some focus on discourse generally or ideology and even style more narrowly, while others on
strategy and practice, we have the right to ask whether any of these dimensions should be neglected by either side, and why a combination of discourse, ideology, style, strategy, and logic should not be preferable. This is also an objection against Laclau and our list of elements derived from him, because even if his notion of discourse includes practice, it does not include strategy of coming to power.29 All politics whether “normal” or “extraordinary” (“the political”)30 has a strategic dimension, aiming at the weakening of the hold of rivals on power and/or displacing them. The strategic dimension of populism has been defined variously. According to Kurt Weyland, populism is best defined “as a political strategy through which a personalistic leader seeks or exercises government power based on direct, unmediated, un-institutionalized support from a large number of mostly unorganized followers.”31 This too is a fairly minimal definition, whose most important component is mobilization in the service of attaining or keeping power. Yet, by excluding this dimension, the question of populism installed in power does not even come up for Laclau, strangely enough, in spite of his documented interest in advising and supporting populists in power, whether the Kirchners or Chavez.32 The strategic dimension will be important for us in three forms of power: party, government, and regime.33 Yet, minimal definitions based on strategy or insistence on style34 may occlude the difference between populism and other political forms: fascism in the case of strategy and mass cultural democracy in the case of (media) style. Thus advocates of the strategic conception, like Kenneth Roberts, criticize minimalist self-limitation for blurring the distinction between populism and other forms of social and political mobilization. His own definition (or one of them) of populism as an “appeal to popular sovereignty where political authority is widely deemed to be detached, unrepresentative or unaccountable to the common people”35 is itself fairly minimal even if complemented elsewhere by focusing on mobilization achieved through an antielite, anti-establishment discourse. Nevertheless, the introduction of versions of the strategic conception in a field dominated by discursive and ideational models points us well beyond any version of minimalism.36
Thus the second objection, applicable to our own scheme derived from Laclau, of leaving out too much, can only be answered by a full survey of the literature that we cannot undertake, given its exponential growth even as we write. So we focus on two additions, both related to the strategic dimension, that at the very least can be seen as ultimately instrumental.37 One is the electoral aspect linked also to constitutional politics, the other is the need for what has been called host ideologies. Together these allow the differentiation of populism from authoritarian doctrines of the past (and possibly the future). The stress on host ideologies will also help to conceptualize the internal differences among populisms.
Undoubtedly, the insistence of contemporary populisms on competitive elections as roads to power and as a practice in power is one key element and sign that differentiates these from classical forms of authoritarian politics. While it may be possible to derive the electoral demand from the notion of popular sovereignty, we have to stress that the latter notion together with charismatic embodiment, friend–enemy relations, and part–whole representation (that could take symbolic rather than accountable forms) may do without electoral claims and justifications. Laclau indeed adopts the notion of symbolic representation from Hanna Pitkin’s list and nowhere stresses leaders exposing themselves to tests (Manin’s “retrospective judgment”), or in her language “giving account.”38 Nevertheless, Federico Finchelstein is right, along with several others, in claiming that the major distinction of populism from fascism since Peron at least lies in this dimension.39 In his historical reconstruction, Finchelstein rightly attributes populist self-differentiation to the strong post–World War II international taboos against fascist extreme violence. Thus, according to him, leaders and parties with clearly fascist origins, like Peron in Argentina and the Front National in France, were able to redefine themselves in more benign terms by insisting on replacing (at least partially!) collective violence by electoral competition.
The stress on the importance of elections for populism in acquiring and staying in power, should be complemented by an even more surprising insistence on constitutional politics, whether in the form of writing, amending, or interpreting written constitutions. The stress is surprising, given the great emphasis of populists on popular sovereignty, embodied in a leader or a government, and the general hostility to constitutional restraints and limitations. It is however logically clear that elections with some competitive elements, even referenda, require prior rules for their procedures, even if they may be violated in practice. Such rules presuppose constitutions at least in the minimal sense that can be provided by statutes or executive decrees. In general however the legitimacy of elections and referenda, both domestic and international, requires written constitutional and (materially constitutional!) electoral rules also under populist governments. Here the difference to fascism is most striking,40 but populists are also very different from communist regimes to whom constitutions were a mere façade, hiding rather than revealing the actual maps of power.41 Populist constitutions are real power maps, “nominal constitutions” with the proviso that ultimately they leave a great deal of discretionary space to the popular will embodied in the government that can easily change or by-pass the formal rules in either emergencies or episodes of constitution amending or replacement.
Populism need not break with all the characteristics of fascism, but there must be a break that has visible marks or characteristics. Constitutional politics represents one such visible break. As we have seen, Finchelstein stresses the
rejection of extreme violence as complementary to the affirmation of elections, in principle non-violent forms of attaining and keeping power. Given the history of communist state terrorism and repression and the reduction of elections to empty rituals, the same can be said, in our view, concerning the difference with communism. The shift goes both ways. We need to understand the two “totalitarian” forms as different from populisms in spite of their anticipations of several of the dimensions of the conception we rely on: charismatic leadership, friend–enemy relations, part–whole dialectic, and the implicit though not explicit reliance on constituent power. Yes, even their forms of discourse often sounded very populist indeed, as can be explicitly seen in the case of Mao.42 The fiction of the nation could be said to be a substitute for that of the people and class could be explicitly complemented by references to the working people, sometimes just “the people.”43 Both fascism and communism have used electoral competition and tactics under the protections of inherited constitutions before coming to power, which however always involved revolutionary or regime changing results if not legal ruptures. Yet populisms too often claim to have come to power in “legal” revolutions (Orbán’s revolution of the voting booth; Chavez’s Bolivarian revolution) a term that is also relevant to the rise of Mussolini and Hitler to power.44 While in the case of the Communists revolutionary breaks or coups d’état were required, if we can speak of coups in the populist victories, these are generally hidden by formal rule following or at least validation by apex courts (Peron and Fujimori represent exceptions). What is important here however is that both fascism and communism, once in power, completely eliminate genuine electoral competition. Populisms on the other hand not only maintain, almost without exception, the institution of at least partially competitive elections but have in many cases dramatically increased their frequency in several forms, ordinary and extraordinary, including but not limited to plebiscites and referenda.45
Not only possibly reluctant rejections of fascism and communism or concessions to liberal democracy are involved. Here the reference to a particular interpretation of popular sovereignty, in terms of embodiment of the people’s will in the leader, may be helpful. As Max Weber has insisted, charisma is a highly vulnerable form of legitimacy, but can be shored up under modern conditions by plebiscitary acclamation that represents a sort of asymmetric dialogue between leaders and followers. Coupled with popular sovereignty claims, the followers have to be expanded to a sufficiently large number to be able to plausibly speak in the name of the people. Even demonstrations have limits in terms of numbers. Here is the origin and reason of the populist preference for plebiscites and referenda, where a numerical popular majority can be achieved. Populisms are always majoritarian, as they have to be in divided and plural societies where there is neither unity nor a single voice of the people.46 Yet
populisms are also monist insofar as the people and their will is perforce unified and embodied in a leader (charismatic or not) who incarnates their supposed unity. Elections, even ordinary ones, are the solution to the apparent contradiction. They turn the voice of the majority, however structured, into plebiscites on individual leaders, rather than votes on alternative programs or past performance, allowing those leaders to claim their identity with the people and their will.47 Populism in other words does not abolish but decisively transforms elections.
There is of course a risk. Completely free and fair elections can be lost, even by a popular and charismatic leader, as Indira Gandhi found out in 1977 against her expectations. There are however ways to diminish the risk, by limiting competing parties, reducing the freedom of the press, attacking civil society institutions, manipulating electoral rules to produce incumbent advantage, controlling electoral commissions and eliminating exit polling, and even (as in Turkey recently) changing the constitution from a parliamentary to a presidential one, since direct elections of the head of state and government increases the plebiscitary dimension. While all populist incumbents engage in some of these tactics, it may be difficult to find the threshold where elections are no longer competitive. Even the term competitive authoritarianism refers to such a hybrid situation, with the genus being authoritarian, and the differentia competitive.48 What is certain is that populism, whether emerging from below, or much more likely from above,49 seeks to develop and maintain what has been called “plebiscitary linkage” at the expense of genuine political competition that is however difficult to eliminate, because plebiscitary legitimacy itself requires constant testing and refurbishing. It is however generally easier to prevail in elections than to produce the results that plebiscitary leaders almost always promise, generally without the ability to deliver. Elections thus can be ways of avoiding rather than testing accountability. Therefore, stress on competitive elections, absent in the neo-Bolshevik vision of Laclau, but present in the work of Mouffe, should be added to the criteria developed here, as the seventh defining feature.50
Thus while historically and at times biographically related (e.g., in the cases of Peron and Le Pen), once in power populism and fascism and populism and communism can be differentiated most visibly by the electoral criterion. Given that all these political forms can use elections to come to power, even more important in our view is the ideological difference. In our definition the construction of a chain of equivalence reliant on embodiment and intense antagonism yields only what has been called a “thin ideology.”51 Fascism and communism possess well-developed, “thick” ideologies linked to normative visions of the good society, philosophies of history, sociological strata, and geo-political threats. Here lies one reason for their mobilizational potential in their movement phase that is not compromised by lost elections, nor does it require elections at all in the
governmental phase. The asymmetrical dialogue between leader and led is not only charismatic but also ideological. Populism, to compensate, not only needs electoral success but, as it has been well shown by Mudde and Kaltwasser, ideological alliances, host ideologies, without however transforming itself into purely ideological movement or ideocratic rule. Being able to flexibly draw on host ideologies, switching between them, even eclectically combining them is an important advantage of populist leaders and politics.
The conception of host ideologies also helps us differentiate among populisms, those on the left, the right, and even those that deny the distinction and eclectically draw on both traditions. Left and right populisms can of course be distinguished under our criterion 5, according to who is defined as the enemy: the country’s elites (“establishment”; oligarchy) only or also an underclass, racial, religious, ethnic, or immigrant. But to exclude any of the latter from the people is difficult to justify under an empty signifier, constructed by a chain of supposed equivalences, in other words a thin ideology. Thus the idea of a host ideology is an important contribution to both the internal differentiation of populisms and the understanding of their motivational power.52 Here too the historical link to fascism and authoritarian socialism again becomes evident, since ethno or cultural nationalism on the right and state socialism on the left are the most important host ideologies, at least so far. But these are not the only hosts possible. Religion too can play this role, mostly on the right, but sometimes on the left,53 and as Chantal Mouffe’s recent work reveals, so can imaginably liberal democracy understood as an ideology, rather than a set of political procedures or even the enactment of enforceable civil or social rights.54 Social democracy and neo-liberalism too can become hosts as we have seen in Latin America after World War II, for the first, and in the 1990s for the second. As these examples indicate, there are always possible tensions between host and parasite, most obvious in the case of populist attempts to rely on liberal democracy, which lead to serious internal contradictions with the whole ideal type derived from Laclau.55
The need to rely on host ideologies, some of which are evidently well developed and “thick,” does not vitiate the consequences of ideological thinness. Assuming that there is always a need for a host, something Laclau does not explicitly admit, he is very clear,56 clearer than most populists, that it is relatively easy to “float” in effect from one host to another. This is his very important theory of the floating signifier that asserts the instability of a name like “the people” or “the revolution” or even “the nation” allowing political shifts from one political leadership to another, from one construction of the enemy to another, as his example of the relation of communist electorate to the supporters of the Front National in France (renamed in June 2018 as the Rassemblement Nationale by
Marine le Pen) indicates. Populism has no developed normative theory, no philosophy of history, no strong sociological anchoring in a class, and thus Laclau is forced to imply that it will be highly contingent factors like charisma and rhetoric (and perhaps the psychology of disappointment?) that will decide whether there is floating or not in societies where there are many actual or potential political actors. If his intention in developing the notion of the floating signifier was to promote floating from right to left, or to block the reverse, he conspicuously fails to provide a theory for how either is to be accomplished.
We are ready to present a second version of our ideal typical definition of populism, the first having been the result of our immanent critique of Laclau’s reconstruction of the populist construct of the people. Here that version is supplemented by three key additions: the stress on a common strategic dimension, the inclusion of the need for host ideologies, and the need for electoral selfjustification. Accordingly, in a somewhat reduced version:
1. Populism is a strategy of political mobilization for attaining or retaining, or at the very least strongly influencing, governmental power, by an appeal to popular sovereignty as the fundamental norm said to be violated by existing or previous institutions whether liberal democratic or authoritarian;
2. By the rhetorical or ideologically thin construction of the empty signifier of the people in such a way as to construct “chains” of imagined “equivalence” among a wide heterogeneity of demands, grievances, and constituencies— to succeed, reliance on almost any available “thick” ideology as “host,” whether nationalism, socialism, religion or neo-liberalism is required.
3. By the symbolic representation of the whole of “the people” by a mobilized part
4. By the embodiment even of this part, typically in a single charismatic leader with whom the mobilized part of the population has a highly emotional relationship and interaction.
5. By the construction of a friend–enemy dichotomy57 (“the frontier of antagonism”58) between the people so defined and its “other” seen as the establishment in power along with its beneficiaries and allies, internal and external.59
6. By insistence on a strong notion of politics, or “the political,” and a disinterest in mere “ordinary” politics or policy, which understanding of politics, often articulated in terms of the constituent (vs. “constituted”) power, is based on will rather than social process as rationally understood.
7. By valorizing and maintaining electoral competition (elections, referenda, plebiscites) or its plausible appearance.
