Introduction: conceptualizing populism

The ontology of populism seems as elusive as the futile effort to hold a moonbeam in the palm of one's hand. Operationalization of the term in the scholarly literature is as ambiguous as it is diverse in struggling to capture the essence of a phenomenon that resembles the fabled phoenix, rising inexplicably from the cinders to disrupt the political environment periodically and then vanishing into obscurity. Ironically, as Ernesto Laclau suggests, “We know to what we are referring when we call a movement or an ideology populist, but we have the greatest difficulty in translating the intuition into concepts.” It follows, as one scholar noted, that it is “a cliché to start writing on populism by lamenting the lack of clarity about the concept and casting doubts about its usefulness for political analysis.”

The central problem is that theoretical constructs of populism tend to be “comprehensive but too vague, or else they are clear but too narrow.” The term has been used to different ends with definitions so broad that they fail to distinguish between types of movements that may be democratic or anti-democratic in nature. Populism has been utilized as a pejorative term to disparage some movements, particularly on the Right, and sound the alarm of authoritarianism, bigotry, and xenophobia.At the same time, populist leadership has been acclaimed for the potential to restore civic virtue, inclusion, and equality as a fundamental component of American political culture that accentuates vigilance against powerful elites. The discordant understandings of the essence of populism reflect the dilemma of cobbling together a definition from rather different academic literatures that span time, space, and geography from Europe and Latin America to the United States.