Urbinati

THE POPULIST PHENOMENON
Nadia Urbinati
Presses de Sciences Po | « Raisons politiques »
2013/3 N° 51 | pages 137 à 154

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ISBN 9782724633191
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The Populist Phenomenon
Nadia Urbinati
P opulism is an imprecise concept that may be rendered as “bringing

politics to the people” and “the people to politics”. 1 Its intrinsic
vagueness is exacerbated by its usage in everyday politics as a label to
denote a diffuse negative judgment by the people of the performance of
representative democracy, elected politicians and governments. 2 In this
article I will present populism as a phenomenon that is parasitical on
(because internal to) representative democracy, which is its true and radical
target. 3 This rivalry, I argue, does not necessarily produce more demo-
cratic politics, although this is populism’s claim. As for its phenomen-
ology, populism is a certain political style or set of rhetorical tropes and
figures, yet is more than that because it seeks also state power to imple-
ment a political agenda whose main and recognizable character is hostility
against liberalism and the principles of constitutional democracy, in par-
ticular minority rights, division of powers, and party pluralism. Although

“we simply do not have anything like a theory of populism”, 4 in this article
I propose the following generalization from historical experience: a pop-
ulist movement that succeeds in leading the government of a democratic
society tend to move toward institutional forms and a political reorgan-
ization of the state that change, and even shatter constitutional democracy,
like centralization of power, weakening of checks and balances, disregard
of political oppositions, and the transformation of election in a plebiscite
of the leader. Populism’s polarized view of the political community res-
onates with the republican tradition in the Roman format, more than it
does with democracy. I regard this point as crucial (although not studied) 5
1 - Margaret Canovan, “Taking Politics to the People: Populism as the Ideology of Democracy”,
in Democracies and the Populist Challenge, eds. Yves Mény and Yves Surel (Oxford: Palgrave
2002), 26.
2 - Yves Mény and Yves Surel, “The Constitutive Ambiguity of Populism”, in Democracies and
the Populist Challenge, 1-20.
3 - This paper is a synthesis of chapter three of my book manuscript titled, Democracy Disfig-
ured: Opinion, Truth, and the People to be published by Harvard University Press.
4 - Jan-Werner Mueller, “Getting a Grip on Populism”, Dissentmagazine.org, September 23,
2011.
5 - I discuss the differences between republicanism in the Roman tradition and democracy in
“Competing for Liberty: The Republican Critique of Democracy”, American Political Science
Review, 106 (2012), 607–621. Some theorists propose to derive populism from the modern con-
tinental doctrine of popular sovereignty; see for instance Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory
of Freedom and Government (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 202; this interpretation
138 - Nadia Urbinati
in order to grasp the anti-individualistic meaning of the appeal to the people

and the reason of populism’s profound antipathy with the individualist foun-
dation of suffrage, pluralism, dissent, minority views, and the dispersion of
power, which are characteristics that democratic procedures intrinsically pre-
sume and promote. 6
The interpretation I advance is inspired by Norberto Bobbio’s criticism of
populism, Margaret Canovan’s interpretation of it as an ideology, and Ben-
jamin Ariditi’s analysis of its manifestation in the space of politics. Like Bobbio,
I situate populism within representative democracy not simply democracy, and
argue that its critical and sometime dramatic questioning of the procedures
and institutions of representative and constitutional democracy turns out to
be hardly an enrichment of democracy. 7 As with demagoguery for ancient
direct democracy, although is not itself a breach of democracy, populism may,
if successful, open the door to an exit from democracy. Like Canovan, I take
populism to be an ideology of the people that, although in communication
with the democratic language, is in sharp contrast with “practical democracy”,
that is to say the political activity of ordinary citizens. 8 Like Arditi, I read
populism as a permanent possibility within representative democracy because
it is endogenous to the ideological style of politics that elections feed in pro-
moting the struggle for voting and positions. 9 But before developing my argu-
ment, I need to clarify upfront the way in which I use this term in relation to
popular movements.

Popular Movements and Populism
I do not treat populism as the same with “popular movements” or what is

“popular”. Populism is something else and different, and the characteristics I
am going to analyze are meant to show why this is so. As a preview of the
distinction between popular movement and populism, it may be helpful to
consider the two most recent movements in American politics, Occupy Wall
Street and the Tea Party. The Occupy Wall Street slogan “We are the 99%”
fits inside the formal sketch of populist discourse as polarization between the
many and the few and contestation of representative institutions (two impor-
tant components of populism). Yet it does not fit with the populist view of
deserves of course to be explored, although we should recall that the intellectual context of the
doctrine of popular sovereignty (as of republicanism) is the Roman law.
6 - In this paper I will use some of the ideas I proposed in “Democracy and Populism”, Con-
stellations, 5 (1998), 110–124.
7 - By Norberto Bobbio, see: Saggi sulla Scienza Politica in Italia (Bari: Laterza, 1969); Democ-
racy and Dictatorship: The Nature an Limits of State Power, ed. John Keane (Cambridge: Polity
Press, 1989); Autobriografia, ed. Alberto Papuzzi (Roma-Bari: Laterza, 1997).
8 - Margaret Canovan, “Taking Politics to the People”, 39. By Margaret Canovan see also “‘Trust
the People!’ Populism and the two faces of democracy”, Political Studies, 9 (1999), 2–16.
9 - Benjamin Arditi, Politics on the Edge of Liberalism: Difference, Populism, Revolution, Agi-
tation (Edinburg: Edinburg University Press, 2008).
The Populist Phenomenon - 139
democracy I intend to analyze (and criticize) because is headless and not organ-
ized so as to conquer political power at government level. I do realize that
empirical political phenomena operate in a shaky terrain and are refractory to
generalizations; I do not thus disclaim that some fluidity is possible between
popular movement and populism so that clear-cut distinctions may be prob-
lematic. However without the presence of a leader or a centralized leadership
that seeks control of the majority a popular movement that has a populist
rhetoric (i.e. polarization and anti-representative discourse) is not yet popu-
lism. The case of the Tea Party proves this by default. This is a movement that
has many populist components in its ideology and rhetoric, but lacks a vertical
and unified structure which instead, as we shall see, characterizes populism. 10
Yet this lack seems accidental more than premeditated since the Tea Party was
and still is in search of a unifying and representative leader able to conquer
and change the Republican Party and the country. Unlike Occupy Wall Street
thus, since it was born the Tea Party wanted to be more than a movement of
protest.
We may thus say that there is a populist rhetoric yet not populism when
the polarizing and anti-representative discourse is made by a social movement
that wants to be a constituency independent of elected officials, resist becoming
an elected entity, and keep elected officials accountable and under scrutiny:
this is the case of a popular movement of contestation and protest like Occupy
Wall Street. And there is a populist rhetoric and populism when a movement
does not want to be a constituency independent of the elected officials but

wants instead to occupy the representative institutions and win the majority
in order to model the entire society to its ideology: 11 this is the case of the Tea
Party, a movement with a populist project of power.
Thus I would say that for populism to pass from movement to government
it needs an organic polarizing ideology and a leader that wants to transform
popular distress and protest in a strategy for mobilizing the masses toward the
conquest of the democratic government. Without an organizing narrative and
a leadership claiming its people to be the true expression of the people as a
whole, a popular movement remains very much what it is: a sacrosanct move-
ment of protest and contestation against a trend in society that betrays some
basic democratic principles, and in particular equality. Yet populism is more
than populist rhetoric and political protest. Distinction between movement form
and government form is thus essential to analyze populism.
10 - For an excellent, rich and well documented analysis of the Tea Party see Vanessa
Williamson, Theda Skocpol, and John Coggin, “The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican
Conservatism”, Perspectives on Politics, 9/1 (2011), 25–43.
11 - The Tea Party has some clear proposals (from social security to taxation) and seeks to
revitalize or reshape the Republican Party: “... we should regard the Tea Party as a new variant
of conservative mobilization and intra-Republican party factionalism, a dynamic, loosely-knit, and
not easily controlled formation of activists, funders, and media personalities that draws upon
and refocuses longstanding social attitudes about federal social programs, spending, and taxa-
tion;” Vanessa Williamson, Theda Skocpol, and John Coggin, “The Tea Party and the Remaking
of Republican Conservatism”, 37.
In what follows I acknowledge these two levels and direct my attention to

the examination of the characteristics and implications of populism as a con-
ception and a form of power within a representative democracy system. In a
democratic society, a popular movement of protest or criticism should not be
confused or identified with a populist conception of state power. The former
is consistent with the diarchic nature of representative democracy (suffrage as
an authoritative power and opinion as indirect power of influencing decisions
through a broad network of judgment); the latter deems diarchy an obstacle
because it wants to keep the opinion of the people separate from the author-
itative power of the institutions. Populism is a project of power whose aspi-
ration is to make the opinion of the majority identical with the authority of
the sovereign state, in fact to makes its leaders and elected officials use the
state to favor, consolidate and extend their constituency. 12 In this article I will
focus on this specific phenomenon.
An Ambiguous Concept?
Having clarified the limits and the domain in relation to which the term
is used, I can pursue in my argument and sketch first of all the historical
context within which populism was born because this context has been, and
still is, an important variable in evaluating populism. And the distance between
European and American scholars in interpreting it is an important example of
the persisting ambiguity of its meaning.

American historian Michael Kazin considers populism a democratic expres-
sion of political life that is needed from time to time to rebalance the distri-
bution of political power for the benefit of the majority. Through the vehicle
of populism, American citizens “have been able to protest social and economic
inequalities without calling the entire system into question”. 13 Ralph Waldo
Emerson wrote famously in mid-nineteenth century: “March without the
people, and you march into the night.” 14 Consistently with this maxim, the
historians Gordon Wood, Harry S. Stout and Alain Heimert interpreted the
Great Awakening of the mid-eighteenth century as the first example of Amer-
ican democratic populism, a “new form of mass communication” thanks to
which “people were encouraged – even commanded – to speak out”. 15 Jonathan
Edwards’s followers, Heimert explained, translated the abstract language of
both liberal and republican intellectual elites into their own language, one made
up of religious symbols and biblical allegories, against professional theologians
12 - I would like to express my gratitude to Ian Zuckerman for inviting me to reflect upon this
distinction.
13 - Michael Kazin, The Populist Passion. An American History (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 2.
14 - Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Power”, in The Complete Writings (New York: Wise & Co., 1929),
541.
15 - Harry S. Stout, The New England Soul. Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New
England (New York-Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 193–194.
and political leaders as well. 16 Populism was born as a denunciation of the

newly implemented republic, its intellectuals and representative government.
In that early denunciation the basic populist language was de facto coined.
A powerful allegation of that early form of populism was that democracy
(but in fact “popular government” as I shall soon explain) holds an instinctive
anti-intellectualist vocation in so far as it rejects linguistic styles and postures
that are distant from those that the people share and practice in their everyday
life. Intellectualism or indirect language was thus opposed to popular or direct
style of expression. The same dualism was applied to politics as a collective
action that was made either by indirect means (institutions and procedures)
or direct expressions of popular opinions. These dualist couples resurfaced
periodically and became the primum movens of populism. The platform of the
People’s Party of 1892 was forged out of the binary logic opposing the plain
language of crop producers to the sophisticate language of the financiers and
the politicians. 17 Polarization as a simplification of social pluralism into two
broad factions – the popolo and the grandi – was since its inception the main
character of populism, its Roman feature.
American history seems also to show that populism, both as political rhet-
oric and as a political movement, has been seen as a viable form of a collective
expression of resentment against the domestic enemies of “the people”. Its
hidden force was contained in the belief of an alleged purity of the origins of
popular government and its adulteration by the artificial complexity of civili-
zation and the sophisticated institutional organization of the state. 18 As the

believers in the Great Awakening aimed at an emancipation of religion from
the established churches in the name of a religious purity, so the People’s Party
of late nineteenth century claimed the emancipation of the nation from “money
power” (artificial) in the name of property and labor (natural). Directness vs.
indirectness paralleled nature vs. artifice, and popular movements vs. institutional
politics. When and if politics takes indirect modes it risks becoming anti-
popular: in America history, this was, since the beginning of the republic, the
basic message of populist ideology, and the reason of its attraction on demo-
crats. It is interesting to notice that populism as a positive movement of elite
opposition by the people was born within the ideological and institutional
frame of a republic.
This line of thought deserves to be pursued: in this paper I suggest that
populism can be seen as an interpretation of democracy made from within a
republican structure and perspective of government and politics. Popular gov-
ernment is its reference point, rather than democracy. The analysis of the work
16 - Alan Heimert, Religion and the American Mind (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1966), 12–15.
17 - Richard Hofstadter, “North America”, Populism: Its Meaning and National Characteristics,
eds. Ghita Ionescu and Ernest Gellner (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969), 16–18.
18 - Gino Germani, Authoritarianism, Fascism, and National Populism (New Brunswick, NJ:
Transaction Books, 1978); Christopher Lasch, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics
(New York: Norton, 1991).
of theorists who support populism, from Ernesto Laclau to John McCormick,

confirms this interpretation, with which I will conclude this paper.
Based on the American experience scholars have proposed to advance the
idea that the difference between “good” and “bad” populism is one between a
sincere democratic faith and an instrumental faith – like a thermometer pop-
ulism would thus measure the tenor of democracy in a given society. This
scheme returns in the work of the most representative scholars of populism,
supporters and critics as well. Peter Worsley proposes populism and elitism as
the two extreme poles of the continuum of politics, whose democratic tenor
is like a pendulum from the former (more democracy) to the latter (less democ-
racy). 19 Margaret Canovan suggests we read populism as “politics of faith” that
aims at emending normal politics of its unavoidable skeptical and pragmatic
mood. The same insight shapes Ernesto Laclau’s interpretation of populist
movements in Latin America as processes of hegemonic re-balancing within
the power bloc attained through the incorporation of the popular-democratic
ideology of the masses. Laclau, perhaps the scholar who has produced the most
comprehensive theory of populism, goes further and identifies populism not
simply with “political action” or forms of discourse (i.e. an ideological form
of political discourse) but with democracy itself because a political action that
gives the class of ordinary or working people a central role. Populism seems
thus to be a more egalitarian or democratic politics than the one obtained
through representative procedures, which is its true and direct adversary. 20

Political theorists have thus stressed the role of people’s mobilization as a
symptom of political discontent with ordinary politics among ordinary citizens,
regardless of the outcomes it attains, as characteristic of populism. 21 As Newt
Gingrich has said about President Barack Obama and the Democrats, “they
are a government of the elite, for the elite and through the elite”. 22 Protest
against intellectuals, high culture, and college people, attacks against the cos-
mopolitan “trash” of “fat cats” in the name of “the common sense of the
common people” who live by their work and inhabit the narrow space of a
village or a neighborhood are the components of an ideology that is everywhere
recognizable as populist. 23 This has brought Laclau to declare populism a vivid
expression of the democratic imaginary, and moreover a strategy to merge
together the various claims, discontents and demands that political parties
19 - Peter Worsley, “Populism”, The Oxford Companion to Politics of the World, ed. J. Krieger
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 730–731.
20 - Ernesto Laclau, Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory: Capitalism-Fascism-Populism
(London: Verso, 1979), 18. Not so differently from fascism, Peronism was marked by a strong
anti-liberal character, whose populist-nationalist language served as a strategy for empowering
and homogenizing civil society against the existing economic and political oligarchy (182–191),
even though it also made alliances with the military and landlord elites. Yet, see above all Ernesto
Laclau, On Populist Reason (London: Verso, 2005), in particular Part II.
21 - Paul Taggart, Populism (London: Open University Press, 2000) and “Populism and the Path-
ologies of Representative Politics”, in Democracies and the Populist Challenge.
22 - www.politicususa.com/en/gingrich-obama-elite.
23 - Ernest Preston Manning, The New Canada (Toronto: Macmillan, 1992).
fragment and filter instead in the moment they provide for the institutional
personnel, or occupy the state. 24 Canovan has thus advanced the idea that
people’s mobilization works as a redemptive force of democracy because its
meaning is “bringing politics to the people”. 25
In sum, according to this consolidate reading, populism belongs in the
democratic family not merely because it relies upon speech and opinion –
which is certainly the case–but more importantly because of its two structural
characteristics: polarization (the many versus the few), and the alliance with
the democratic side or the many, in fact the incorporation of the vision of
largest majority in one collective actor: the people as a collective united against
another collective (as the many against the few).
This reading is not convincing though because polarization makes the
ideology of the people less inclusive than democratic citizenship. In populism’s
ideology, the concept of the people is endogenously sociological and identified
with a portion of the people or the many or the less affluent or the lower class.
Populism prefigures thus a politics not of inclusion but of exclusion: this is
what polarization is for. It is not by chance that “the people” is its sovereign
core, not the citizen as in a democracy. Incorporation is not the same as iso-
nomic equality (from the Greek word of isonomia, or equality by law as the
condition for political equality or having one’s opinion counted as one), so
that if equal liberty is what characterizes democracy populism is a poorer not
a richer rendering of it.

This critical diagnosis is confirmed by the European political history after
the eighteenth century. Indeed, the extension of American historians’ positive
judgment to European societies and politics would be hardly defensible. Europe
is much a more interesting laboratory of populism, though, because in Europe
this phenomenon was able to clear the floor of all ambiguity and unveil its
most peculiar potentials and characteristics. This was so because in Europe
national or popular unity (a collective whose members were presumed equal,
not merely normatively or as juridical persons) was the pillar upon which
democracy was constructed. In addition, whereas the United States was a dem-
ocratic project since its inception (regardless of the intention of its most rep-
resentative founders, which was not democratic) because it was a political order
that was born out of consent, in European countries democracy sprung from
within a society in which philosophers and political leaders (intellectuals in the
broader sense) tried systematically to stop democratization or tame it by sub-
jecting it to a bureaucratic state and a hierarchical society, in which consent
was to be preferably imposed from above or orchestrated. The political expe-
rience of continental Europe shows two things: that populism was born in the
representative and constitutional age, and that its role was devastating for con-
stitutional democracy.
24 - Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason, 129–156.

25 - Margaret Canovan, “Taking Politics to the People”, 26–28.
Napoleon was the first leader to “manufacture” consent through public

opinion, to use the means of opinion formation and propaganda that his society
offered to mobilize the people on his behalf, with an increasing number of
printed materials and political clubs. 26 Napoleon, facing the opposition of the
public (the presses and the acculturated few) to his imperial ambitions and
politics of reconciliation with Catholic clergy, excited people’s anti-elite senti-
ments to condemn intellectuals as “ideologues” and “doctrinaires”. 27
Napoleon’s demagogic strategy has been recurrent in Europe. Just to focus on
the Italian case (which is far from unique), Benito Mussolini exploited
post-WWI economic distress of the middle class and the impoverishment of
the already poor in order to polarize political life and transform Italy’s liberal
government in a mass regime against the political minorities. Although he
never suspended the constitutional charter of the liberal state, Mussolini cre-
ated a populist regime that made regular appeals to the people and used prop-
aganda to mobilize the many and mold their opinions, while repressing
pluralism and the opposition. 28 As for recent history, new versions of populism
have been exemplified in Italy by the secessionist movement led by the
Northern League and Silvio Berlusconi’s Caesarist politics. Their main rhetor-
ical strategy consists once again in portraying their respective movements as a
“true” alternative to both the existing political parties and parliamentary
democracy. They attack parliamentary politics as elitist and anti-democratic
because of its distance from common people’s opinion. Moreover, they make
a systematic use of propaganda – and in some cases own half of the national

television stations and printing industry – in order to create a uniform way of
thinking and talking in public. New populists exploit doxa and seem to be able
to make it their creation rather than the citizens’. 29
To end this brief parallel between American and European experiences of
populism, I would argue that European populism, in its recurrent resurrec-
tions, has more ordinarily followed right-wing kinds of politics, or a politics
that did not aim at implementing the promises of constitutional democracy
but disfigured them instead. However, populist forms of mobilization can
occur, and in Europe have recently occurred, also within the left-wing part of
26 - “In the spring of 1804, the officer corps and the troops they commanded set up an insistent
clamor for the designation of Napoleon Bonaparte as emperor...The petition that poured into
Paris from the military make the proclamation of the Empire seen as an irresistible proposition.
It is difficult to reconstruct with exactitude how this campaign of pen and ink was orchestrated,
but a few markers survived in the archives;” Isser Woloch, “From Consulate to Empire: Impetus
and Resistance”, in Dictatorship in History and Theory: Bonapartism, Caesarism, and Totalitar-
ianism, ed. Peter Baehr and Melvin Richter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 29
and 45.
27 - Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge, trans.
L. Wirth and E. Shils (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1964), 74.
28 - On the total unity of leader and the people in Italian fascism the more recent study is that
of Jan-Werner Mueller, Contesting Democracy: Political Ideas in Twentieth-Century Europe (New
Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2011), 117.
29 - For an analysis of the various forms of populist strategies that emerged in the years after
the collapse of traditional political parties in Italy see Alessandro Lanni, Avanti popoli! Piazze,
tv, web: dove va l’Italia senza partiti (Venice: Marsilio, 2011).
political opinion. All in all, although the symptom of a malaise in representative

democracy and economics, and although its regular appeal to more popular
politics, populism represents a contestation of constitutional politics, and con-
stitutional democracy in particular, and the politics of rights it entails. 30
This allows me to advance the following comment on the ambiguity and
vagueness of the term: although populism has not acquired the status of an
uncontroversial clarity, it is not a neutral political phenomenon. Any attempt
to treat it as such clashes with the bare fact that it is a radical contestation of
representative and parliamentary politics in the name of direct or collective
affirmation of the will of the people, wherein this will is not assessed through
certain criteria but declared by some charismatic orators or leaders. The
opinion of a mass of people comes to be identified with the will of the people,
outside procedures and institutions that detect and regulate the assessment of
that will. Populists presume that the voice of the people is identical with that
of a large majority and of the leader who impersonates it.
A Radical Critique of Representative Democracy
Populism is to representative democracy what demagoguery was to direct

democracy: internal to it and parasitical on it. The parallel between ancient
and modern forms of democracy is important to increase our clarity on the
populist phenomenon. According to Aristotle’s pivotal analysis, demagoguery

within democracy is: a) a permanent possibility insofar as it relies upon the
public use of speech and opinion; b) a more intense use of the principle of the
majority so as to make it almost absolute or a form of power more than a
method for making decisions (populism is the rule of the majority rather than
a politics that uses majority rule); and c) a waiting room for a possible tyran-
nical regime. As Benjamin Arditi wrote aptly, populism flourishes as a fellow
traveler of democracy, as a radical form of democratic action in times of social
strife and economic duress; its outcome may be risky to democracy. The rela-
tionship of populism with democracy is thus an issue of contention rather than
compatibility.
These observations suggest we add a further characteristic to populism,
namely that it is not a revolutionary movement because it does not create
people’s sovereignty but intervenes once people’s sovereignty exists and its
values and rules are written in a constitution. 31 Populism represents an appeal
to the people in a political order in which the people is formally already the
sovereign. It would be wrong thus to employ it in order to describe a demo-
cratic revolution – the French and the American revolutions were not populist
30 - For the view of populism as “malaise” and “pathology” of democracy see Pierre-André
Taguieff, Le Retour du populisme: Un défi pour les démocraties européennes (Paris, Encyclo-
pedia Universalis, 2004). An invaluable resource is the mentioned collection edited by Ghita
Ionescu and Ernest Gellner, Populism: Its Meaning and National Characteristics, 4–33.
31 - “Under autocratic rule the mass of the people are completely excluded from power;”
Margaret Canovan, “Taking Politics to the People”, 26.
although could not exist without people’s mobilization. Populism does not
create democracy. To resume Aristotle’s distinction between a people leader
and a demagogue, while Solon and Cleisthenes were “leaders of the people”
because helped the Athenians to acquire political liberty, Pisistratus was a “bad”
leader or a demagogue because in acting from within an existing democracy
he subverted it. 32 Populism can be seen as a movement that expresses the
ambition of a new leader to quickly get into power without waiting for political
temporality that democratic procedures regulate. It grows inside an existing
democracy and questions the way in which it works yet with no certainty it
will make it more democratic.
Yet although historical and political context is an important variable, pop-
ulism is more than a historically contingent phenomenon; it pertains to the
interpretation of democracy itself. Both the character and the practice of pop-
ulism underline, and more or less consciously derive from, a vision of democ-
racy that can become deeply inimical to political liberty insofar as it defers the
political dialectics among citizens and groups, revokes the mediation of polit-
ical institutions, and maintains an organic notion of the body politic that is
allergic to minorities and rights. The ideology of populism displaces equality
for unity, and thus opposes social and political pluralism. Its extreme conse-
quence is to transform a political community in a corporate-like entity, where
class and ideological differences are denied and mastered in the attempt to
fulfill the myth of a comprehensive totality of state and society. Hence, in spite
of its vociferous antagonism against the existing political order and the elite,

populism, when acquires state power, has a deeply statist vocation; it is impa-
tient with government by discussion because it longs for limitless decisionism,
which the ideology of the people legitimizes. 33
Polarization, Caesarism, and the Populus
We may say thus that populism denotes a way of being of a political move-
ment or a party that is characterized by a recognizable set of ideas: a) the
exaltation of the sovereignty of the people as a condition for a politics of
sincerity or transparency or purity against the quotidian practice of compro-
mise and bargaining that politicians pursue; b) the appeal to, or affirmation
of the correctness and even the right of the majority against any minority,
political or otherwise (in Europe, populism feeds strong discriminatory ideol-
ogies against cultural, gender, religious and linguistic minorities); c) the idea
32 - Aristotle made an important innovation in the analysis of the transformations of democracy

when he broke down Plato’s identification between the demagogue and the tyrant; Aristotle, The
Constitution of Athens, trans. J. M. Moore, in Aristotle and Xenophon on Democracy and Oligarchy
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986), XLI, 2; see also Aristotle, Politics,
ed. T. A. Sinclair (London: Penguin Books, 1992), IV, 4.
33 - For an eloquent (and frightening) application of decisionist rendering of democracy as pleb-
iscitarian and populist leadership that bypasses liberal legalism and constitutionalism in order
to rely on opinion instead, see Eric A. Posner and Adrian Vermeule, The Executive Unbound:
After the Madisonian Republic (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).
that politics entails oppositional identity or the construction of a “we” against

a “them”; and d) the sanctification of the unity and homogeneity of the people
versus any parts of it.
Populism treats pluralism of interests and ideas as litigious claims that
should be simplified so as to create a polarized scenario that makes the people
immediately know how to judge and with whom to side. Simplification and
polarization are in the view of achieving a deeper unification of the masses
against the existing elites and under an organic narrative that most of the time
a leader embodies. Populism can hardly be conceived without a politics of
personality. Hence, I would propose to identify it with two intertwined political
processes: one that goes toward polarization of the citizenry in two organic
classes (the many and the few), and the other that goes toward a verticalization
of the political system. Polarization and Caesarism go hand in hand and both
of them constitute a radical challenge to representative democracy.
Populists do actually acknowledge political conflict since, following Carl
Schmitt, 34 they conceive politics in bipolar terms, as an arena in which friends
and enemies clash. But they regard conflict as a means for or a cathartic
moment in the creation of a thorough unification of the people. Populism thus
prizes polarization more than pluralism. Indeed, it uses political conflict and
electoral procedures for the sake of an overwhelming victory and as instru-
mental to the mobilization of one part of the people against the other, in view
of making the winner the catalyst of the many fractions or parties, whose

endless litigiousness–it is thought–weakens social unity. Populism holds the
multi-party system in great suspicion; hence, it is a denial of electoral repre-
sentation, which is the main institution or set of institutions through which
procedural democracy is implemented. 35 It depicts and theorizes democracy
as hegemonic conflict for the domination of the popular sentiment and opinion
over its components. In Robert Dahl’s words, it gives the demos “total” and
“final control” over the political order, which means empirically the control
of the majority. 36
This unifying project makes politics into a work of simplification that nar-
rows the possibility of a space of communication open to all equally insofar as
it does not belong to anybody. Although Laclau claims that the populist occu-
pation of the place of power is “partial” or never complete, the impression one
has is that its impartiality and incompleteness are more a limit that the human
practice of consent formation cannot avoid or overcome than a normative
principle. Populism makes opinion public in the sense that it makes it belong
only to one public.
34 - Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (Chicago and London:
The University of Chicago Press, 1996).
35 - A good overview of the main characteristics of the complex phenomenon of populism is
the mentioned volume edited by Yves Mény and Yves Surel, Democracies and the Populist
Challenge.
36 - Robert A. Dahl, Democracy and Its Critics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989),
112–115.
The author who foresaw better the populist risk contained within the gov-
ernment of opinion (namely representative democracy) was Claude Lefort, who
not by chance ended up by describing totalitarianism in the attempt to grasp
the extreme implication of a project that, while opposing pluralism, aims at
materializing the sovereign collective as if it were a homogenous actor. Lefort
described this process as “condensation... between the sphere of power, the
sphere of law and the sphere of knowledge”. 37 Populism produces concentra-
tion of power and does so in the attempt to resolve the “paradox of politics” 38
which is “determining who constitutes the people”. 39 Thus whereas the pro-
ceduralist approach leaves this question always open, populism wants to close
it, or, as Laclau argued in correcting Lefort’s idea that while proceduralization
of politics makes the place of power in democracies empty, populism wants to
fill out that empty space by turning politics in the production of the emptiness
through an hegemonic work of ideological realignment of social forces.
Populism’s goal consists in emptying the place of power in order to reoc-
cupy it. 40 This entails eroding the symbolic domain and substituting it with
the materiality of power. In other words, it entails that the conflicts of interests
and between classes take place no longer in the language of institutions and
procedures, but as the direct expression of social power that makes the state
its instrument. From the recognition that the symbolic framework of power is
that which sustains a political regime, populism deduces its mission, which
consists in occupying and conquering that symbolic framework. From plu-
ralism of opinions to the production of a dominant narrative: this is the main

task of a political process whose goal is to merge the plurality of publics that
constitutes what we call public opinion in a democratic society.
Populism competes with representative democracy on the meaning and prac-
tice of representation since it aims at a more genuine identification between the
represented and the representatives. It does so by making representation essen-
tially a process of people’s unification, not also one of advocacy and the expression
of citizens’ opinions and interests. Populism regards representation as a strategy
for the constitution of the political order above the society and through the
expulsion of social interests from politics, hence also conflicts. As Schmitt claimed,
thus giving populism an important argument, representation is political insofar
as it repels the liberal calls of control, monitoring and the relationship between
society and politics and narrows the distance between the elected leader and the
electors by incorporating society within the state. Caesarism is thus its destiny.
37 - Claude Lefort, “The Question of Democracy”, in Democracy and Political Theory

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 13, 19–20.
38 - I derive the term “paradox of politics” from Bonnie Honig, “Between Deliberation and Deci-
sion: Political Paradox in Democratic Theory”, American Political Science Review, 101 (2007),
17–44.
39 - Jason Frank, Constituent Moments: Enacting the People in Postrevolutionary America
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2010).
40 - Claude Lefort, “The Question of Democracy”, 13–20; Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason,
164–168.
People unification versus pluralism is the structural trope in modern pop-

ulism as it was in ancient demagoguery. We need just to mention Schmitt’s
argument in favor of presidentialism against parliamentarianism. The latter,
Schmitt explained, is an assemblage of elected who represent interests, parties
and social classes, while the “President is elected by the entire German people”.
In the latter case only elections are a strategy for unity rather than disunity
and representation is truly a visual reproduction of the entire nation at the
symbolic and institutional level, not the expression of some portions of it or
a strategy for social interests’ infiltration in the state. The President embodied
Schmitt’s Catholic vision of representation as making visible (through the pope)
the invisible divinity who was in his mind the People. Clearly, since represen-
tation was a synthesis of identity and the presence of the sovereign, party
pluralism and parliamentary competition were anathema to Schmitt, a mortal
sin in his political theology because the equivalent of religious schism. “The
President, by contrast [to the fragmentation of parliamentary grouping] has
the confidence of the entire people not mediated by the medium of a parlia-
ment splintered into parties. This confidence, rather, is directly united in his
person.” 41 According to populist democracy, representative institutions have
essentially an instrumental value. It is the people directly – but in fact its
majority–that legitimizes institutions with no other mediation than its actual
and expressive will. “Against the will of the people”, wrote Schmitt, “especially
an institution based on discussion by independent representatives has no
autonomous justification for its existence”. 42 Populism denies autonomy to

political institutions, but in particular to the legislative branch; for this reason
it has a strong anti-parliamentary vocation. 43 This brings us once again to
Caesarism, a category we should briefly explore.
Laclau revives Schmitt’s main themes in his theory of populist democracy.
Aware of the problem of Caesarism and the dictatorial leadership, he argues
that although it may take personalist forms and sometimes has been even
identified with the name of a leader (Mussolini, Peron, Chavez), it is not per-
sonalization that qualifies populist politics. What qualifies it instead is the kind
of thought it puts in motion: “through dichotomies such as the people versus
the oligarchy, toiling masses versus exploiters, and so on”. 44 Populism would
thus be not simply “political action” but a democratic kind of political action
because it gives the working class or the poor or the ordinary people central
stage in the forum. Populism is the same as politics and moreover the same
as a more egalitarian or democratic politics. Thus if personalization is in play,
Laclau infers, this is not what makes populist politics what it is; identification
41 - Carl Schmitt, Constitutional Theory, trans. Jeffrey Seitzer (Durham and London: Duke Uni-
versity Press, 2008), 370.
42 - Carl Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, trans. Hellen Kennedy (Cambridge,
Mass.: The MIT Press, 1994), 15.
43 - Peter Worsley, “The Concept of Populism”, in Populism: Its Meaning and National Char-
acteristics, 244.
44 - Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason, 18.
of the movement under a leader is a means that populist politics may find
convenient in order to make polarization succeed. Yet amending personaliza-
tion with polarization does not help making populism the same as democratic
politics as we have seen above, not even when coupled with Antonio Gramsci’s
notion of hegemony.
Laclau relays on Gramsci’s notion of ideology as a unifying narrative for
collective identity constitution. But Gramsci was explicit in bringing to the
floor the risks that the politics of hegemony contains. He thought for instance
that unless it was anchored on a party organization with a collective leadership
and entrenched in a conception of history and social progress that did not
leave any interpreter the liberty of making it into a rhetorical tool of persuasion,
hegemonic politics would be dangerously prone to become a vehicle for a
reactionary Caesarism that uses populism to make itself victorious. In his Notes
on Machiavelli, in which he analysis the two forms Caesarism can take, Gramsci
revised classical Marxist doctrine in which all forms of government figured de
facto as dictatorship of the dominant class. Gramsci’s articulation of Caesarism
is an interesting reformulation of Aristotle’s analysis of the emergence of dem-
agogical leadership.
Gramsci reinterpreted Marx’s category of Bonapartism so as to make sense
of a progressive function of leader politics (i.e. the case of Caesar and Napoleon
I) in a revolutionary scenario. Given a social deadlock or “catastrophic equi-
librium” (equilibrio catastrofico) 45 which prepared for a revolution, a Caesarist

leader could play a progressive role when his victory unintentionally helped
the victory of the progressive force, while at the same time striking a compro-
mise with the regressive force. The outcome, Gramsci thought, could be the
exit from a “catastrophic equilibrium” that would open a political scenario
that might help the progressive force to fulfill its agenda in the future. 46 As
Benedetto Fontana acutely observes, Gramsci’s method is dyadic or shaped by
antinomy, as for instance civil society as opposite of political society, consent
as opposite of coercion and hegemony opposite of violent revolution but also
dictatorial or coercive power. 47 In Gramsci’s work, thus, Caesarism was primed
to break out in a revolutionary situation, not a situation that he defined as
“war of position”, in which not Caesarism but hegemony would be needed to
advance a gradual social and political change. To transplant Gramsci’s reflec-
tion on Caesarism (“war of movement” or revolution), which does not need
the politics of hegemony because the social situation is already ripe for change,
into a situation in which gradual or molecular change (“war of position”) is
45 - Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, ed. Valentino Gerratana (Turin: Einaudi, 1975), 1604,
1618–1622.
46 - Ibid., 1194–1195.
47 - Benedetto Fontana, “The Concept of Caesarism in Gramsci”, in Dictatiorship in History and
Theory, 177. On the conservative and radical interpretation of plebiscitarian or Caesaristic leader
in the age of WW1 see Luisa Mangoni, “Cesarismo, bonapartismo, fascismo”, Studi storici, 3
(1976), 41–61; for the birth of the myth of Caesar and of Caesarism in the nineteenth century
see Peter Baehr, Caesar and the Fading of the Roman World: A Study in Republicanism and
Caesarism (New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publisher, 1998), 89–164.
needed is wrong: where the politics of hegemony is in place, Caesarism is out

of place and vice versa (although in moments of crisis, a party leader in a
parliamentary system can succeed in unifying a large coalition under his rep-
resentative figure). 48
We can at this point appreciate the sense of linking populism to the repub-
lican as Roman vision of politics and government. Populists think that beyond
politics made of electoral campaigns, organization, ideological platforms, rep-
resentatives, and publicly debated issues, there is a substance called “the People”
which is made–in the words of Jeffrey Edward Green–of “the mass of ordinary,
non-office-holding citizens taken in their collective capacity”, and consisting
in a spectatorial participation similar in kind to the populace in Rome’s
contio. 49 It is Laclau himself who confirms, quite appropriately, populism’s
genealogy in the Roman tradition when he writes that “the people” as a political
category envisions the return of the populus, and in particular, the populus of
the Roman Forum, not of the voting assemblies. 50 What was the people of the
Roman Forum and the contio, and how different was it from the people of the
comitia?
The populus in the forum was an audience in a reactive relationship with
political leaders, who performed before the crowd to seek support to their
power plans. It was not the people in the moment of voting, or when the
citizens gathered to speak by means and through voting procedures so as to
give promulgation to the proposals coming from the Senate. The populus in

the forum was made of citizens who gathered at their please and acted out-
side the institutions and procedures because they were not meant to decide;
it consisted of the Roman citizens (mostly those who resided in the city of
Rome) or visitors and travellers coming from far away, people who spent
some of their daily time in the forum in order to attend to the show per-
formed by political candidates and rhetoricians. It was not the people in the
function of decision making, but the people in the act of cheering or booing
those who competed for a political post or tried to conquer people’s support
for their cause. Opposite to that populist gathering was the Senate, whose
building was located at the end of the forum so as to physically mark the
other pole of sovereignty. Contrary to the people, the Senate was always
structured and a visible body and place, and its members did not mix with
the crowd in the forum. As two distinct components of the republic, their
visibility was essential to the political life of the Roman state, which did not
acknowledge individuals or isotes like Athenian democracy, but cives who
acted always within one of the two predetermined groups. 51 This dualistic
48 - Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni, 1195.

49 - Jeffrey Edward Green, The Eyes of the People: Democracy in the Age of Spectatorship (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 38.
50 - Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason, 81.
51 - The awareness of the difference between republicanism and democracy is the right
approach to avoid merging the latter with “popular” and “populist” politics. This difference has
been explored by, among others, Samuel Edward Finer who rendered it as follows: “The Forum
and polarized paradigm was an essential feature of both the Roman style of
politics and republicanism through the centuries: non-institutionalized
people en mass versus institutionalized magistrates; the organized few versus
the crowded many; inclusion within polarized institutional domains versus
an equal chance to participate in the process of political decision or compete
for magistracies. 52
To populist theorists too society is made of two parts, and this is the reason
they are skeptical toward the idea of political equality. Indeed, they accuse a
notion of democracy that is based on the Bill of Rights and the procedural
model of doing a poor job in expressing people’s power because constitution-
alism presumes something that does not actually exist in society: a polity made
of equal individual citizens, whereas society is made of poor or ordinary and
the few rich or powerful. 53 The norm, it seems, must follow facticity rather
than amend or regulate it: this is the rational of populism.
Comparison with the populus of the Forum allows us to complete the
understanding of populism as a system of power, not simply a popular move-
ment. Now, because populist politics disdains procedures and considers the
crowd rather than a regulated assembly as the site of popular power, its most
congenial method of selection seems to be the investiture of the leader, rather
than election. Indeed its expressive language is acclamation more than dis-
cussion; hence the overlapping of populism with plebiscitarianism. A populist
leader is not properly elected, it is acclaimed. Consequently, Schmitt (who

followed the Roman tradition in a very distinctive way) forcefully wrote that
the “will of the people” is the same whether it is expressed in the ballot or
by acclamation, “[e]verything depends on how the will of the people
is formed”.
Populism blurs the constitutional and representative democracy because it
opposes the idea that the authoritative will and the informal opinion are and
ought to remain two different forms of legitimacy that should never be iden-
tified and confused. Thus Schmitt, after he claimed that everything depends
on the people, added promptly that “the will of the people can be expressed
just as well and perhaps better through acclamation, through something taken
from granted, an obvious and unchallenged presence, that through the
polity, though not necessarily democratic, is ‘popular’: that is, authority is conferred on the rulers
from below”: The History of Government, vol. 1: Ancient Monarchies and Empire (Oxford and
New York: Oxford University Press, 1997) I, 43.
52 - This populist oriented structure of the Roman “untrammelled” populace was the object of
Cicero’s heavy criticism of popular government as “the force of the mob” in which “passions
exercise powerful control over thoughts”: Marcus Tullius Cicero, On the Laws, in On the
Commonwealth and On the Laws, ed. James G. Zetzel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2008), 163; Fergus Millar, The Crowd in Rome in the Late Republic (Ann Arbor: The University
of Michigan Press, 2005), 34–53. The problem is, however, that the crowd and mob were the
result of an institutional organization of the popular presence in the Roman republic, not of
democracy (Millar, The Crowd, 197–226).
53 - John McCormick, Machiavellian Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2011), 179–187.
statistical apparatus” of voting counting. 54 This serves to justify the strong

reservation I suggest on the democratic character of populism.
Conclusion
The impossibility of considering populism a political system or regime of

its own has brought scholars to conclude that precisely because the “populist
‘dimension’” is “neither democratic nor anti-democratic”, it can be compat-
ible with democracy insofar as it serves to make sure that the rights of the
majority are not “ignored”. 55 Yet, if populism can play a democratizing role
by mobilizing the excluded majority to criticize the existent forms of political
representation and to demand further participation and better forms of rep-
resentation, it can have negative effects on democracy because its criticism
translates into plebiscitarian forms of participation, the paradox being that
the people end up by playing more the role of an audience than of a political
actor. 56 In effect, as Norberto Bobbio and Pierre Rosanvallon argued con-
vincingly, populism is the most devastating corruption of democracy because
it radically overturns representative institutions (notably elections and party
pluralism) and transforms the negative power of judgment or opinion from
one that controls and monitors politically elected leaders to one that rejects
their electoral legitimacy in the name of a deeper unity between the leaders
and the people; it opposes ideological legitimacy against the constitutional
and procedural one. 57 Thus, despite the democratic intention of reversing the

passivity of ordinary citizens, populist mobilization does not deliver what it
promises. When an audience populist leader declares to be the true represen-
tative of people’s will beyond and outside the electoral mandate, he puts in
motion the destructive power of judgment and calls into question not simply
a bad or corrupt performance of state institutions but electoral politics itself,
its advocacy character. From this point of view, populism is a way for new
elites to acquire power quickly, without waiting for increasing popularity
through times and electoral competitions; in its strategy for power, the people
play mostly the role of being just an instrument for support, like the plebs
in the declining years of the Roman republic. The attainment of strong
authority by an elite seems to be the hidden logic of the rhetoric of the masses,
in spite of the populists’ appeal to the common people as the true protagonist
of politics.
54 - Carl Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, 16–17.

55 - Peter Worsley, “The Concept of Populism”, 247; Margaret Canovan, “Taking Politics to the
People”, 25–44.
56 - Jeffrey Edward Green, The Eyes of the People, 109–112; Arditi, Politics on the Edges of
Liberalism, 51–52.
57 - Concerning Norberto Bobbio see footnote n. 7; Pierre Rosanvallon, La contre-démocratie.
La politique à l’âge de la défiance (Paris: Seuil, 2006), 276.
NADIA URBINATI
Nadia Urbinati is Kyriakos Tsakopoulos Professor of Political Theory at the Department
of Political Science of Columbia University. She is the author of several books and articles,
among others, Representative Democracy: Principles and Ideology (University of Chicago
Press, 2006), Liberi e uguali (Laterza, 2011, forthcoming in English by Yale University Press),
La mutazione antiegualitaria (Laterza, 2013, forthcoming in English by Columbia University
Press), and Democracy Disfigured: Opinion, Truth, and the People (forthcoming, Harvard
University Press).
ABSTRACT
The populist phenomenon
The paper advances an analytical rendering of populism and argues that the components
that make it a recognizable phenomenon are simplification and polarization of political
divisions in the view of achieving a deeper unification of the masses against the existing
elites and under an organic narrative that most of the time a leader embodies. Populism
is thus internal to and a challenge of representative democracy; it competes with it on the
meaning and practice of representation since aims at a more genuine identification
between the represented and the representatives. After a premise on the distinction
between a popular movement and populism, the paper argues that to better understand
this phenomenon we should situate it within the republican as Roman tradition.
RÉSUMÉ
Le phénomène populiste

Cet article propose un compte-rendu analytique du populisme. Il soutient que les compo-
sants qui en font un phénomène identifiable sont une simplification et une polarisation des
divisions politiques afin de renforcer l’unification des masses contre les élites existantes,
suivant un fil narratif incarné la plupart du temps par un leader. Le populisme est, par
conséquent, à la fois interne à la démocratie représentative et un défi à celle-ci ; il rivalise
avec elle sur le terrain de la signification et de la mise en pratique de la représentation
puisqu’il vise à une identification plus authentique entre représentés et représentants.
Après un préambule sur la distinction entre le mouvement populaire et le populisme, cet
article défend l’idée que, pour mieux comprendre ce phénomène, il est nécessaire de le
replacer au sein de la tradition romaine et républicaine.

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THE POPULIST PHENOMENON

Presses de Sciences Po | « Raisons politiques »

2013/3 N° 51 | pages 137 à 154

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P opulism is an imprecise concept that may be rendered as “bringing

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in order to grasp the anti-individualistic meaning of the appeal to the people

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I do not treat populism as the same with “popular movements” or what is

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In what follows I acknowledge these two levels and direct my attention to

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and political leaders as well. 16 Populism was born as a denunciation of the

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of theorists who support populism, from Ernesto Laclau to John McCormick,

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24 - Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason, 129–156.

Napoleon was the first leader to “manufacture” consent through public

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political opinion. All in all, although the symptom of a malaise in representative

A Radical Critique of Representative Democracy

Populism is to representative democracy what demagoguery was to direct

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Polarization, Caesarism, and the Populus

32 - Aristotle made an important innovation in the analysis of the transformations of democracy

that politics entails oppositional identity or the construction of a “we” against

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37 - Claude Lefort, “The Question of Democracy”, in Democracy and Political Theory

People unification versus pluralism is the structural trope in modern pop-

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needed is wrong: where the politics of hegemony is in place, Caesarism is out

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48 - Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni, 1195.

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statistical apparatus” of voting counting. 54 This serves to justify the strong

The impossibility of considering populism a political system or regime of

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54 - Carl Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, 16–17.

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