Formulated as a common conceptual ground for all democracies, Popper's notion of the open society sprang from the mid-20th century context that demonstrated democracy's vulnerability to hijacking through its own electoral mechanisms. Popper's concept may accordingly be considered as a resource for combatting the populist appeal to majority decision and its threat of diminishing individual and minority rights. I examine the affirmative and critical aspects of such a consideration. On the affirmative side, the open-society concept allows room for both majority (...) decision and the rights of individuals and minorities, as well as for particular group identities and class demands, showing that they may all cooperate to facilitate the growth of liberty, knowledge and the quality of life. Democratic institutions are justified from the grounds of this concept. Populism's equation of democracy with majority decision is, thus, incompatible with democracy's essence: decision by majority exists to cater to the vision that justifies that mode of decision making itself and cannot stay legitimate if it scuttles that vision. The more critical interpretation focuses on a detail of the open society's projected development. Popper tasks democracy's institutions with assuring conditions for progress through the expansion of knowledge. Popper expects the same process to modify the civic sphere's scope and content, as political bodies will be increasingly exposed to the expanding insights of scholarship and science. This anticipation involves grading the agents engaged in these two respective spheres, as well as looking forward to the ascendancy of one of them. Accordingly, the open-society concept might validate claims that, when seeking to confine the scope of majority decision through an emphasis on rights and law, constitutionalist and liberal approaches to democracy are subtly elitist. (shrink)

Perceived uncertainty and anger lead people to investigate with respect to the establishment, and politicians who are seen as reckless within society. In this sense, populist discourse paved a way to respond by glorifying one group of people and scapegoating others that emerge as group differentiation. Critical moments especially illustrate mutual constructive identification through the discourse of political actors. This article explores a contextual change in the populist discourse of the Justice and Development Party leaders by observing the successive elections (...) that occurred in 2015. It argues that the leaders mainly expressed an “us–them distinction,” “in-group superiority,” and “the people” populist themes; as well as these themes, the electoral speeches made for the second election presented scapegoating and exclusionary statements even more. (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)

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)

It is a commonplace to observe that we have been living through an extraordinary pan-European and trans-Atlantic populist moment. But do the heterogeneous phenomena lumped under the rubric “populist” in fact belong together? Or is “populism” just a journalistic cliché and political epithet? In the first part of the article, I defend the use of “populism” as an analytic category and the characterization of the last few years as a “populist moment,” and I propose an account of populism as a (...) discursive and stylistic repertoire. In the second part, I specify the structural trends and the conjunctural convergence of a series of crises that jointly explain the clustering in space and time that constitutes the populist moment. The question in my title is thus twofold: it is a question about populism as a term or concept and a question about populism as a phenomenon in the world. The article addresses both the conceptual and the explanatory question, limiting the scope of the explanatory argument to the pan-European and trans-Atlantic populist conjuncture of the last few years. (shrink)

Populism has become one of the most intensely discussed topics in both public debate and academic research. So far there has been no systematic argumentation theoretic analysis of populism, however. This paper is intended to provide first steps towards such an analysis by giving a full argumentation theoretic reconstruction of the political manifesto of the German right-wing populist party “Alternative for Germany” (AfD). This allows to draw preliminary conclusions about the AfD’s argumentative strategy as exemplary for right-wing populism.