Abstract

Populism is currently one of the most studied socio-political topics. However, no shared definition is present at the moment. Fortunately, common features are emerging in recent studies, so that the possibility to devise a comprehensive concept of populism does not seem illusory anymore. In this article I evaluate whether an ontological determination of the concept is conceivable, according to a critical and dynamical perspective. This means that epistemological questions are considered as fundamental, and ontology looks at dynamical systems theories in order to conceptually organize the outcomes of scientific researches. Taking advantage of ontological and system theoretic categories, I try to delineate some not obvious issues in the current approaches to populism.