ABSTRACT The mainstreaming of environmental concerns paradoxically obscures their political dimension: as the goals of environmentalism become accepted, they are reduced to administrative problems to be solved in a purely technocratic way. This technocratic environmentalism has fueled a populist backlash that challenges the scientific basis of environmentalism. As a result, contemporary environmentalism appears to be stuck in a depoliticizing opposition between technocracy and populism. A possible way out of this depoliticizing trap consists in recognizing the (...) intrinsic contestability of the core premises on which environmentalism is based, since it is not merely the result of a straightforward application of scientifically provable facts, but also depends on normative principles and value choices. This opens the possibility for an internal pluralization of environmentalism, which shifts emphasis from the depoliticizing struggle between technocratic environmentalism and populist anti-environmentalism to the inherently political rivalry between different types of environmentalism. (shrink)

The recent phase of economic growth in the Republic of Ireland has led to an increase in industrial and infrastructural development across the island. One offshoot of this accelerated growth has been a rise in community based environmental movements, as environmentalists and concerned communities have come to mobilise campaigns to protect local communities and hinterlands. This paper examines the contestation of two forms of environmentalism, institutional ecomodernism versus a grassroots ecopopulism within the context of the ongoing dispute between a (...) local community in the west of Ireland and both multinationals and the state, who are attempting to run gas pipelines from the Atlantic Corrib Field through the rural community's lands. (shrink)

The rise of 'populism', often conflated with authoritarianism, is frequently viewed as being antagonistic to environmental values, where the latter are associated with 'liberal elites'. However, with a less pejorative understanding of populism, we might be able to identify elements within that can be usefully channelled and mobilised towards the urgent rescue of human and non-human life. This paper seeks to illuminate a 'green populism' using Hannah Arendt's analysis of the tension between science and politics. In Arendt's (...) account, Western philosophy and science is predicated on a rejection of the mortal realm of politics, in search of eternal laws of nature. However, the pressing mortality of nature has pushed it back into the political realm, shrinking the distance between science and politics. Where nature itself is defined by its mortality, environmentalism and political action acquire a common logic, which could fuel a participatory, green populism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Pragmatic Environmentalism: Towards a Rhetoric of Eco-Justice by Shane J. RalstonPiers H.G. Stephens (bio)Pragmatic Environmentalism: Towards a Rhetoric of Eco-Justice Shane J. Ralston. Leicester, UK: Troubadour Publishing Ltd, 2013. Xxxv + 146 pages.But no word could protect the doctrine from critics so blind to the nature of the enquiry that, when Dr. Schiller speaks of ideas ‘working’ well, the only thing they think of is their (...) immediate workings in the physical environment, their enabling us to make money, or gain some similar ‘practical’ advantage. Ideas do work thus, of course, immediately or remotely; but they work indefinitely inside the mental world also.(James, 1978: 267)Thus wrote an exasperated William James in The Meaning of Truth in 1910, attempting to refute the persistent misunderstanding of classical American pragmatism as being some form of reductive and technocratic epistemological capitalism. A century on and the misunderstandings rather depressingly continue in new contexts, most notably environmental philosophy, and we must ask “Why?” I suspect that this question has several interconnected answers: the popular non-philosophical associations of the word “pragmatism”; the mistaken tendency to equate pragmatism with runaway subjectivism; poorly informed impressions of the pragmatist criteria of “success” [End Page 123] and “workability”; and the misguided common assumptions, popularized in early environmental ethics work, that pragmatist schemes have no room for noninstrumental values (Leiss 1972; Rolston 1989; Hargrove 1989). The last of these continues despite scholarly refutations (Weston 1992; Minteer 2001; McDonald 2004; Stephens 2009 and 2012), and it is possible that a deeper reason for this obdurate resistance to pragmatist persuasion may lie in the philosophical history of persuasiveness itself. For as Shane Ralston observes in this book’s introduction, there is an intimate relationship between pragmatism and rhetoric, one which clashed with emergent Platonic ideas of truth during the very birth pangs of Western philosophy and may thus have led both to “a philosophical prejudice that rhetorical persuasion is inferior to philosophical logic” (xiv) and a related awareness that “the democratic spirit of rhetoric and its moorings in commonsense, everyday experience make it especially compatible with pragmatism” (xiv). Thus the mistaken tendency to equate philosophical pragmatism with the crassly opportunistic or the crudely populist, and the persistent failure to register pragmatist philosophy’s subtleties may well both have their roots in antique rivalries—Plato’s contrast of truth to mere popular opinion and his related condemnation of the Sophist rhetoricians. Ralston’s response to this problem is first to sensibly orientate his pragmatism to the philosophically sophisticated end of the spectrum and then employ it to enrich contemporary theory of rhetoric. He then attempts to demonstrate the potential of the new pragmatic rhetoric in a series of studies of particular areas of environ-mentalist contestation.Ralston’s variety of pragmatism is one that tries to largely eschew the generic popular associations of the word, and he notes the sensible distinction between the classical or paleo-pragmatism of Peirce, James, and Dewey as against the contemporary neo-pragmatism of Rorty and others. Though Ralston claims to “combine elements of both classical pragmatism and neo-pragmatism to highlight how pragmatism improves discursive practice” (xvii), in practice the most significant influence on the work appears to be Dewey, and this paleo-pragmatist reviewer was pleased to see that Ralston tries to avoid the tendency to play up the managerialist aspects of pragmatism in favor of “philosophical pragmatism’s other rich resources” such as “its fallibilism, experimentalism, and meliorism” (xxv). The aim of connecting up these pragmatist resources to rhetoric is to show that “a deeply pragmatic rhetoric, once introduced into environmental communication, has the potential to transform the way environmental activists speak about their [End Page 124] methods and goals, moving them toward what I call a rhetoric of eco-justice” (xxx), a rhetoric which can displace the current focus on value theory because it “offers a superior route toward advancing an agenda that preserves the natural environment and promotes ecological justice” (xxxi).In attempting to demonstrate these declared goals, the main body of the book is organized into five chapters. In Chapter 1, Ralston outlines and distinguishes two environmental rhetorics: a rhetoric of control and a... (shrink)

Inspired by recent anti-roads protests in Britain, I attempt to articulate a radical environmental ethos and, at the same time, to produce a cogent moral analysis of the dialectic between environmental destruction and protection. In this analysis, voiced in terms of a spatial metaphoric, an “ethics of place,” I seek to subvert the hegemony of modernity’s formal systematization and codification of values whilestill conserving something of modernity’s critical heritage: to reconstitute ethics in order to counter the current enclosure of the (...) moral field within economistic and legal bureaucratic frameworks and institutions. (shrink)

Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView.

This article combines the neo-Hegelian theory of recognition with an analysis of social pathologies to show how the populist formulations of political goals in struggles for recognition are – despite their potential positive motivating force – socially pathological. The concept of recognition, combined with the idea of social pathologies, can thus be used to introduce normative considerations into the populism analysis. In this article it is argued that, although populism is useful in the sense that it aims to (...) ameliorate real experienced lack of recognition through fostering political movements, it is also harmful. The simplified populist representations of collective identities are often guilty of essentializing and reifying identities. Furthermore, populist identities are also harmful for the populists themselves as the simplified view is applied also to oneself. This article claims that these dynamics can be understood as an obstruction of discursive identity-formation. From the perspective developed, populism leads to the lack of genuine mutual recognition between those who struggle to get their identities affirmed. (shrink)

This article offers a new understanding of populism. The argument unfolds as follows: first, the populist literature is reviewed and two main approaches are identified: ontic and logic-oriented, the more important of which is the Schmitt-Laclau logic of enmity. While the authors broadly agree with Laclau’s criticism of ontic approaches, they endorse neither his ontological understanding of enmity, nor his claim that populism is politics, and enmity is the logic of populism. Next, the origins of populism (...) are located in a paradox at the heart of democracy. Democracy defines itself as a community of inclusion, yet exclusion is constitutive of inclusion, including therefore democratic inclusion. Then is discussed what the authors believe to be the true logic of populism: resentment. Unlike enmity, which functions in Laclau’s populist theory as an ontology of non-identity, resentment operates within a rivalrous framework, which presupposes identification between the parts and refers to a set of normative commitments. Finally, the article concludes by presenting an understanding of populism as a specific logic of political action. (shrink)

This collection of papers challenges the notion that we are living in post-ideological age. It offers a theoretical framework for exploring some of the new manifestations of ideologies, and combines this with a series of case-studies relating to recent ideational phenomena, such as populism, environmentalism and Islamic fundamentalism. It reassesses some typologies, such as the left-right axis, as an explanatory device." "The purpose of the essays is to revitalize the scholarly understanding of ideology as central to the concerns (...) of political science. Recent political movements are reinterpreted through using new approaches to the analysis of ideology. In so doing we seek to bridge the gap between empirical and theoretical research in the field."--Jacket. (shrink)

ABSTRACT An intellectually charitable understanding of populism might begin by recognizing that, since populist citizens tend to be politically uninformed and lacking in higher education, populist ideas are likely to be inarticulate reproductions of the tacit assumptions undergirding non-populist or “mainstream” culture rather than stemming from explicit theoretical constructs, such as an apotheosis of the unity or the will of “the people.” What features of our ambient culture, then, could explain the simplistic and combative approach that populists seem to (...) take to politics and policy, their impatience with political debate and deliberation, their willingness to set aside democratic legal forms and political norms, their nationalism, their personalization of politics, their inclination toward conspiracy theorizing, their fondness for fringe sources of information, and their suspicion of political, scientific, and media elites? Using focus group and survey data, we can understand these populist traits as reflections of the culture of “democratic technocracy”: a regime in which we, the people, are assumed capable of rendering sound judgments about how to solve our social and economic problems. Whether or not this assumption is warranted, its cultural dominance seems likely to generate the ideas that populist citizens apparently take for granted. (shrink)

This paper analyses populism as a layered system with three levels: the political/institutional, the social/interactional, and the psychological/intrapsychic. Each level is theorized using a specif...

The article aims at demonstrating that a spike in populist narratives in Western societies leads to the legitimization of a new type of racism, xenoracism. Societies belonging to the so-called Western culture in the second half of the 20th century were attached to the liberal values where every sign of racism was negatively perceived as pejorative and attempts were made at eradicating it. In the 21st century, in turn, various economic and social crises caused by, inter alia, globalizing processes, were (...) attributed to liberal values which contributed to doing politics through fear management towards the Other. The difference between racism and xenoracism lies in the fact that the former was an ideology focused on biological differences while xenoracism abandoned such differences in favour of socially and culturally imbuing them with objective and unalterable character. Populist narratives evoking fear of the Other question that behaviours triggered by this fear result from racism despite the fact that these actions are virtually identical to the ones motivated by the ideology of racism. Therefore, such behaviours and activities are more commonly perceived as positive and not pejorative and as in effect acceptable. (shrink)

“Populism and Civil Society” is a rich book full of insights. I see three crucial overarching points the book drives home: one about the character of current populism, one about the causes, and one about the consequences. First, they define populism in a way that goes beyond the prevailing juxtaposition of the people and the elite. Instead, the definition involves elements of the ideas about a good order, including the central role of popular sovereignty, the symbolic representation (...) and embodiment of the whole of the people, the strict borders between in and out, and a focus on electoral competition. Second, Arato and Cohen provide an explanation of populism that focuses on politics and democratic tensions. Third, the book points to “strong authoritarian tendencies that are almost always fully evident when populism achieves political power.” These propositions are right on target and very convincingly developed. In fact, they are very much in line with an attempt to account for “authoritarian populism” that Armin Schäfer and I have provided. Against this backdrop, I want to comment on the core messages by raising some questions about the details of these issues. It will become evident that this commentary is a case of sympathizing criticism. (shrink)

Despite the fact that US presidential candidates commonly position themselves as Washington outsiders, this broadly populist positioning has thus far been significantly undertheorized. On the one hand, scholars of political representation have explored how politicians connect with political audiences; on the other, populism research has focused on the construction, mainstreaming and appeal of populist performances. A detailed theorization of the paradoxical performative operation by which self-styled political outsiders come to be more effective in connecting with political audiences than accomplished (...) politicians has yet to be undertaken. This article explores the performativity of outsider positioning, paying particular attention to its effect on perceptions of legitimacy. The article investigates legitimacy as a complex and paradoxical performative phenomenon that involves multiple competing sources of agency. The case is made that, by discouraging the perception of the political system as a unified whole, populist-style performances by mainstream politicians undermine institutional legitimacy. In a way that is at odds at odds with the cooperative demands inherent in the US federal government, these performances encourage the perception that the self-styled outsider is engaged in a strictly competitive zero-sum game with the institutional structure and its representatives. (shrink)

Populism is discussed here in terms of the larger global systemic matrix in which it occurs. It is suggested that it is not, as has been claimed so often, recently, somehow related to what is labelled as right-wing extremism. It is an expression of an aspiration to sovereignty, control over one’s conditions of existence and its links to either left or right are based on that aspiration. And, of course, right and left are themselves terms that have shifted or (...) even been inverted over the past 30 years. The core argument is that populism and cosmopolitanism form a complementary opposition that has emerged as a product of the hegemonic decline of the West. (shrink)

This study focuses on the concept of people developed by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe in the context of radical theories of democracy and populism. People is defined as a subjectivity established as a contingency in the conflictual environment of politics. The construction of the people is a condition of the existence of populist politics as a form of subject that enables the division of politics and social into two camps in the form of friend/enemy and the formation of (...) antagonisms. The article seeks to answer the question of how to create a political order in Laclau and Mouffe's conception of the people in a pluralistic society, in order to cleanse politics from antagonistic (struggle between enemies) relations and transform it into agonistic (struggle between adversaries) relations, despite the danger of eliminating each other through a friend-enemy relationship. In this study, it will be discussed whether the antagonism that constitutes the foundation of politics and society is indestructible and whether it is a subject figure in which the people is organized as a counter-hegemonic subject against certain kinds of antagonisms and whether those who are partners can come together agonistically. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article explores how neoliberal and populist elements were initially fused in US political talk to legitimize the expansion of corporate power and socioeconomic inequality that has occurred over recent decades. Applying neo-Gramscian critical semiotic analysis to speeches, news texts and legislative statements about the 1981 Reagan economic plan, I illustrate how a distinctive neoliberal-populist discourse articulates signs of ‘the American people’ with signs of market individualism, and further connects these signs to the neoliberal political project’s policy moves to roll (...) back state protections and deliver large tax cuts. Neoliberal populism is a paradigmatic instance of what Stuart Hall has termed the ‘trans-coding’ of distinct semantic elements to form a new hegemonic discourse. Through neoliberal-populist signifying processes, people who are deemed unable or unwilling to inhabit market-centric subjectivities, or to promote policies defined as ‘free market,’ are ideologically drawn outside the perimeters of social esteem and political legitimacy. These processes have created obstacles to imagining a unified, politically effective opposition to the neoliberal project in the United States. Moreover, by ideologically constructing ‘the American people’ as anti-statists in the realm of economic and social welfare policy, neoliberal-populist discourse makes it difficult to articulate democratic values and practices with the state as a mechanism through which greater economic equality and substantive democracy could be realized. My analysis illuminates the immediate historical roots of a public discourse with deep anchors in popular common sense which continues to pervade official US policy talk. The cultural resonance and political influence of neoliberal-populist discourse help to explain the persistence of the neoliberal project in the USA. (shrink)

Following a previous article where I defined how a concept becomes a weapon of ideological wars, this article seeks to clarify why there are semantic connections of the actual concept of ‘populism’ with the semantics of the concept of crisis. My key argument is to focus on how actors use the concept of populism on the public sphere with the goal to inspire fear instead of allowing citizens and theorists to understand what is behind our present political–economic crisis. (...) In my view, both theorists and politicians should be aware how a concept that lacks any precision does not help us to understand our present moment of crisis. We must use other tools and the help of historians to understand why has neo-liberal politics unleashed this present crisis. (shrink)

Introduction : the rise of populism and the environmental question -- The limits of the existing research on populism and the environment -- A framework for the populist logic on the environment -- Methodology -- Right-wing and pro-environment in France : RN's nationalistic green localism -- Right-wing and anti-environment in the US : Trump's 'America first' populism -- Left-wing and pro-environment in Spain : Podemos's bottom-up agenda -- Left-wing and anti-environment in Venezuela : Chávez's and Maduro's anti-capitalist (...) resource nationalism -- Reflections on the populist approach to the environment : present and futures. (shrink)

Former Prime Minister Koizumi's surprising victory within the Liberal Democratic Party in 2001 and his subsequent popularity as prime minister led to increased interest in the study of populism in Japan. In addition to Ōtake Hideo's prominent contributions, several others have also employed populism as a prism to study Japanese politics. Compared to the major debates on populism and particularly on the populist radical right in Western Europe over the last two decades, however, the study of Japanese (...) populism seems to be at a less mature stage. Lessons may be learned from the European literature for the community studying Japanese populism. This paper first summarizes the studies on Japanese populism. Then, the main discussions and arguments presented in the academic literature on the PRR in Europe are discussed. Next, this study evaluates how arguments found in studies of European populism can be exploited in further research on populist politicians and parties in Japan. The author recommends further studies on conceptual definitions, on the classifications of politicians and parties, and on explaining the emergence and persistence of these parties and politicians. The findings in this paper encourage and support further research on populism in the Japanese political system. (shrink)

This chapter argues that a virtue-theoretic account of argumentation can enhance our understanding of the phenomenon of populism and offer some lines of response. Virtue theories of argumentation emphasize the role of arguers in the conduct and evaluation of arguments and lay particular stress on arguers’ acquired dispositions of character, otherwise known as intellectual virtues and vices. One variety of argumentation of particular relevance to democratic decision-making is group deliberation. There are both theoretical and empirical reasons for maintaining that (...) intellectual humility is pivotal to the practice of group deliberation. Several factors to which the rise of populism has been attributed may be understood as failures of the virtues of argumentation in general, and intellectual humility in particular. (shrink)

This article re-examines current definitions of populism, which portray it as either a powerful corrective to or the nemesis of liberal democracy. It does so by exploring a crucial but often neglected dimension of populism: its redemptive character. Populism is here understood to function according to the logic of resentment, which involves both socio-political indignation at injustice and envy or ressentiment. Populism promises redemption through regaining possession: of a lower status, a wounded identity, a diminished or (...) lost control. Highly moralized images of the past – historical or archetypal – are mobilized by populist leaders to castigate the present and accelerate the urgency of change in it. The argument is illustrated with Caesar’s Column, a futuristic novel written by the Minnesota populist leader Ignatius Donnelly. The complex and ambivalent structure of this dystopian novel – a textual source for the Populist Party manifesto in the 1890s, which stands in contrast with agrarian populism as everyday utopia – enables us to move beyond the polarized positions dominating the current debate. Reading Caesar’s Column ultimately shows that populism can be both a corrective and a danger to democracy, but not for the reasons usually stated in the literature. (shrink)

As part of the Common Knowledge symposium “Antipolitics” — which concerns the present confrontation and confusion of democracy and populism — this essay begins from the observation that populism is a word of Latin, not Greek, derivation. The Roman populus did not have the independent democratic power of the Athenian demos, though both words can be translated as “people.” Whereas today, in representative democracies, the conflict of populism and democracy can and does do serious damage to the (...) latter, under the regime of ancient Greek direct-democracy populism was more a demon fantasy, conjured by its diehard, oligarchic opponents, such as Plato, than a real, viable alternative mode of doing democratic politics. Thus, ancient Greek political history has its limits as a guide through our present troubles. (shrink)

Populism is widely thought to be in tension with liberal democracy. This article clarifies what exactly is problematic about populism from a liberal–democratic point of view and goes on to develop normative standards that allow us to distinguish between more and less legitimate forms of populism. The point of this exercise is not to dismiss populism in toto; the article strives for a more subtle result, namely, to show that liberal democracy can accommodate populism provided (...) that the latter conforms to particular discursive norms. What the article calls a ‘liberal ethics of populism’ turns out to be closely bound up with a broader ethics of peoplehood, understood as a way of articulating who ‘the people’ are in a way that is compatible with liberal–democratic principles of political justification. Such an ethics, concludes the article, inevitably has a much wider audience than populist political actors: its addressees are all those who seek legitimately to exercise power in the name of the people. (shrink)

Within the scope of the POPULISMUS research project, we have engaged in a methodological cross-fertilization between Essex School-inspired methods of analysis and computer-assisted text analysis. In this chapter, emphasis is placed on the Greek case and the material analyzed involves newspaper articles from the 2014–5 period. In particular, the analysis focuses on the antagonistic language games developed around representations of ‘the people’ and ‘populism’. Highlighting the need to study anti-populism together with populism, something that has not attracted (...) much attention in the relevant bibliography, and focusing on their mutual constitution from a discourse-theoretical as well as lexicometric perspective, we articulate a comprehensive analysis of the populist and anti-populist press in Greece, with broader implications for populism research globally. (shrink)

Gender and populism have been extensively theorized separately, but there has not been sufficient study of the way that gender undergirds populism, strengthening its diverse manifestations. Focusing on the cases of Vladimir Putin and Recep T. Erdoğan, we argue that their political performance allows them to project a right-wing populism that hides much of its political program in an ostentatious masculine posturing that has the virtue of being relatively malleable. This political masculinity allows them to position themselves (...) at different points in time as outsiders yet insiders, bad boys yet good fathers. In their early years Putin and Erdogan established themselves as transgressive outsiders who developed a profile of power by building up their masculine, working-class biographies. As their power became consolidated, they turned to a more paternal role, fostering a conservative gender order while attacking the masculinity of their opponents and casting them as outsiders. In this way over the years they have combined political performances that have both breached the conventional gender norms and also upheld and reinforced them. The result is a Janus-faced masculinity of outsiders-yet-insiders, bad-boys-yet-good-fathers, which establishes that the leader is both the same as other men and also different from them, standing above the citizenry, mediating and fostering a conservative political order. Understanding this gender performance also helps to explain the paradox of “electoral authoritarianism” (Levitsky and Way Journal of Democracy, 13(2), 51–65, 2002; Schedler 2006), demonstrating how performed political masculinity can support and connect the cult of a popularly elected leader with conservative social and political gender norms. (shrink)

Medical populism, as a political style of handling the challenges of a public health crisis, has primarily been analyzed in terms of its influence on the efficacy of governmental efforts to meet the challenges of the current pandemic (such as those related to testing, vaccination, and community restrictions). As these efforts have moral consequences (they, for instance, will affect people’s wellbeing and may lead to suffering, loss of opportunities, and unfair distributions), an analysis of the ethics of medical (...) class='Hi'>populism is much needed. In this essay, we address the need to analyze the moral dimension of medical populism by relating it to issues in healthcare ethics. Specifically, we identify the moral significance of medical populism by demonstrating how it contributes to the failure of governments to discharge their moral duty to provide for the healthcare needs of their people, and, correlatively, to the violation of the people’s moral right to healthcare. We argue that with medical populism, governments tend to mishandle the constraints that would morally justify their shortcomings in fulfilling such duty. We identify such constraints as mainly referring to the governments’ given (economic and institutional) capacities and the relative degree of incumbency of their competing duties. (shrink)

Aristotle’s Politics offers both a broad diagnosis of the hazards of contemporary populism and a broad characterization of actionable remedies, and it does so in conjunction with an ideal of political societies as properly partnerships in living well, characterized by voluntary cooperation, mutual advantage, and civic friendship. The task of this paper is to explain the diagnosis, remedies, and ideals more fully and to illustrate their currency and value in contemporary political analysis. It addresses Aristotle’s views on demagogues and (...) civic friendship, the nature and circumstances of populism in the U.S., and the Aristotelian remedies that may be helpful in strengthening civic friendship today. (shrink)

Populist representation is the process by which a body or set of bodies become the signifier of a powerful act of political transgression of the social order. We call this specific type of representative linkage ‘synecdochal representation’. In it, the leader’s body performs three key functions: it mirrors certain popular traits that are characterized as ‘low’, it displays marks of exceptionality, and it appropriates symbols of institutional power. These tasks are performed through particular ways of acting, dressing, talking, eating, and (...) the like, in public. Social media has become a key locus for bodily self-presentation because it is used to create the appearance of intimacy and spontaneity through the distribution of ‘candid’ pictures and videos. This paper will analyze how the self-presentation of populist and non-populist leaders are established through Twitter, what images they choose to disseminate, and how they are re-signified by the audience. To do so, we will focus on the two Latin American politicians: Cristina Fernández (with a populist style) and Mauricio Macri (with a technocratic one). (shrink)

Populism, as I shall understand the term here, is a style of political rhetoric that posits a Manichean conflict between the people and corrupt elites. In the present decade, populism has played a particularly salient role in the politics of the United States and Europe. Moreover, populism is commonly associated with a kind of skepticism about expertise, on which the opinions of non- experts are to be preferred to any expert consensus. In light of all this, populist (...) expertise skepticism appears to be a kind of pathology of excessive intellectual autonomy. I shall argue, however, that this connection between populism and intellectual autonomy is mere appearance: populist expertise skepticism does not involve excessive intellectual autonomy, because it does not involve a disposition for non-deferential belief, but rather a disposition for deference to “alternative” sources of information. (shrink)

The ascendance of populism to power in various liberal democracies around the world triggered vigorous public debates. More often than not, scholars, politicians and analysts warn of the dangers populism poses to democracy and its institutions, expecting populism to turn authoritarian once in government. Viewing populism as a feature of the opposition alone, others argue that populism in government is not meant to last - but rather consolidated into the mainstream of political and party systems. (...) This chapter provides a critical overview of the literature on populism in power, putting into scrutiny dominant theoretical paradigms in the field of so-called populism studies. It discusses the multi-faceted trajectories populist actors globally may take in their transition from opposition to power. It concludes that distinct types of populist actors have distinct implications on democracy depending on factors such as ideology and context. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Most critics of the U.S.-Mexico border wall assume that it represents the xenophobic nationalism typical of right populism. However, the populist message of exclusion is directed not at migrants but at the liberal democrats who compose the traditional mainstream of politics. The wall’s populist message is meant to expose a contradiction: liberal democrats do not know how to reconcile borders with their official commitment to universal inclusion. Right populism and left populism, too exploit this contradiction. Liberal (...) democracy could effectively respond to the populist challenge, however, by using the wall’s symbolic connection to geography and the environment. (shrink)

In Skeptical Environmentalism, Robert Kirkman raises doubts about the speculative tendencies elaborated in environmental ethics, deep ecology, social ecology, postmodern ecology, ecofeminism, and environmental pragmatism. Drawing on skeptical principles introduced by David Hume, Kirkman takes issue with key tenets of speculative environmentalism, namely that the natural world is fundamentally relational, that humans have a moral obligation to protect the order of nature, and that understanding the relationship between nature and humankind holds the key to solving the environmental crisis. (...) Engaging the work of Kant, Hegel, Descartes, Rousseau, and Heidegger, among others, Kirkman reveals the relational worldview as an unreliable basis for knowledge and truth claims, and, more dangerously, as harmful to the intellectual sources from which it takes inspiration. Exploring such themes as the way knowledge about nature is formulated, what characterizes an ecological worldview, how environmental worldviews become established, and how we find our place in nature, Skeptical Environmentalism advocates a shift away from the philosopher’s privileged position as truth seeker toward a more practical thinking that balances conflicts between values and worldviews. (shrink)

According to the authors of Populism and Civil Society, ‘populism is situated within the democratic imaginary’ but its logic is authoritarian. This article agrees with the first but challenges the second argument by focussing on the question of representation. In the case of ‘populism as government’ the tensions between bottom-up and top-down articulations seem to be more or less resolved by the repression of bottom-up organization, but in so doing, so the argument of this article, populism (...) is mutating into something else. Furthermore, ‘populist dictatorship’ seems to be closer to a dictatorship strategically using populist tools than to an intrinsic populist logic. While I agree with the authors on the authoritarian cases of populism in government, my argument diverges from the book when it comes to populism as government and introduces a discussion about the nature of populism. To this purpose, I first propose a complex definition of populism which understands populism not as the essence, but as one component of hybrid authoritarian formations, thus enabling the disentanglement of populism, authoritarianism, and totalitarianism. Second, I examine two components of populism that Arato and Cohen lay out in the book: the specific representation pars pro toto and embodiment. Building on Lefort, I argue that these components are not populist but totalitarian and that the empirical manifestations of populism are always hybrid, mixing populist and authoritarian or even totalitarian components. (shrink)

To study how populist sentiments have increasingly influenced businesses in society, we examine how German and Swedish corporations addressed the refugee situation in their 2015 and 2016 annual reports. We find that corporations changed their communication once refugee migration became subjected to populist political sentiments, but that they did so without subscribing to those sentiments. Although populism is based on such sharp oppositions as welcoming refugees or closing borders, our analysis shows that corporations have found ways to communicate about (...) the refugee migration beyond these oppositions. Rather than taking a political stance, the corporations studied have primarily articulated the refugee situation as it pertains to their business operations. We identify four modes of articulation: the refugee as someone needing international aid, as a factor for economic analysis, as a benefit recipient, or as a potential stakeholder. These findings help nuance our understanding of how corporations navigate contested political issues. (shrink)

Although populism is an ideologically fluid political vehicle, it is not one that is intrinsically anti-business. Indeed, different varieties of populist parties may encourage business activity for utilitarian ends, but with their own ideas on what businesses should be doing. This reality implies that initiatives not related to national greatness or priorities as defined by the populist leadership may be viewed as redundant. Key among such initiatives would be corporate social responsibility (CSR). In a populist environment, it is possible (...) that firms may divert resources away from broad-based CSR under pressure from populist governments. This article explores the relationship between populist governance and CSR with an econometric examination of over a thousand firms in 13 countries under both pro- and anti-business populist governments at varying times from 2012 to 2020. Using dynamic panel data methods, we find strong evidence that firms substitute away significantly from CSR under populism. This effect grows significantly larger under anti-business populists. (shrink)