The Verbal Smoke Surrounding Populism

Neopopulism and neocorporatism are regular entries in our political lexicon, yet the meaning assigned to the prefix ‘neo’ is not as clear in the former as it is in the latter. The rather unambiguous meaning of neocorporatism derives from the conceptual stability of its classical referent in the mainstream literature of political science. In the case of neopopulism, the prefix has not fared so well, partly due to the contested status of populism as such.

There has been a cluster of meanings associated with the term populism. The account offered by the sociology of modernization prevailed throughout the 1960s, at least in the developing world. A classical exponent of this approach is Germani (1969), who sees populist mobilization as a deviation in the standard path from traditional to modern society. Di Tella proposes a modified yet equally functionalist interpretation. He conceives populism as the result of the convergence of two anti-status-quo forces, the dispossessed masses available for mobilization and an educated yet impoverished elite that resents its status incongruence – the gap between rising expectations and job satisfaction – and broods on ways of changing the current state of things (Di Tella 1965: 49–50). Other theoretical interpretations move away from this view of populism as an alternative road to modernize class-divided, traditional societies. Lasch (1995) sees it as a response to the crisis of modernity. In his initial neo-Gramscian approach, Laclau (1977) conceives populism as a dimension of the popular-democratic imaginary and argues that its class-nature varies in accordance with contending discursive articulations of the concept.