Political Studies
2016, Vol. 64(1S) 88­–104
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DOI: 10.1111/1467-9248.12224
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Is Populism an Ideology? A Refutation and a
New Perspective
Paris Aslanidis
Yale University
The dominant theoretical paradigm originating in the work of Cas Mudde conceives of populism as a thin-centered
ideology that focuses on the antagonism between people and elites against the backdrop of popular sovereignty. While
this framework has contributed significantly to an improved scientific analysis of populism, it is argued in this article
that its ideological connotations are ill-conceived both conceptually and methodologically, and that its normative
implications and failure to acknowledge the graded nature of populist behavior hinder the further evolution of the
field of populism studies. Combining insights from the work of Ernesto Laclau and the proponents of frame theory,
the article suggests dropping the ideological clause and simply conceiving populism as a discursive frame. The article
contends that frame analysis reveals a strong fit between discursive elements and cognitive features of populism,
furnishing solid methodological foundations to conduct empirical research and encouraging cooperation with
neighboring fields of social science.
Keywords: populism; discourse; frame theory; populist frame; content analysis
Ideology is a hotly contested concept in social science. In a systematic and exhaustive
survey of the literature, John Gerring (1997) not only dismisses it as a ‘farflung’ notion but
also concludes that its various conceptualizations usually encompass blatantly contradictory
traits. Hence, to employ the precarious conceptual edifice of ideology as the cornerstone
upon which to establish yet another contested term – ‘populism’ – should not strike us as
a sound idea. Yet this is exactly what has taken place.
The most widely cited definition of populism during the past decade has been formulated
by Cas Mudde (2004, p. 543), who proclaims it to be ‘an ideology that considers
society to be ultimately separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic groups, “the
pure people” versus “the corrupt elite”, and which argues that politics should be an
expression of the volonté générale (general will) of the people’. Populism, Mudde (2004)
stresses, is a ‘thin-centered’ ideology, since the particular ideas under its command are of
limited scope, complexity and ambition when measured against ‘full’ ideologies.
While acknowledging the denotational merits of Mudde’s definition of populism, this
article exposes the false conceptual foundations of the ideological premise and highlights
the detrimental normative implications inserted by this choice of genus. Discourse,
understood through the lens of frame analysis, is put forward as the proper candidate to
replace ideology and contribute a superior analytical and methodological perspective.
Populism as Thin-Centered Ideology
Fortunately, we need not engage in a lengthy overview of the various conceptualizations of
ideology to prove that populism is not a complete ideology by any established measure.1
Most scholars of populism refrain from asserting that their concept stands on a par with
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Is Populism an Ideology? A
Refutation and a New Perspective
Aslanidis	 89
liberalism, socialism or any other fully developed –ism that connotes a series of far-ranging
policy implications and captures the hearts and minds of dedicated partisans around the
world. The staunchest proponents of the ideological clause, Margaret Canovan (2002) first,
and then Mudde (2004),2
have proceeded to relegate populism to a ‘thin-centered’ ideology
status, implicitly or explicitly acknowledging that it basically lacks what Gerring (1997) has
distilled as the single most unchallenged dimension of ideology in the literature: coherence.
Indeed, analysts take great pains to show that much of populism’s power and relevance
lies in its inherently ‘chameleonic’ nature, its ability to change face according to context
and attach itself to full ideologies (Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser, 2013; Taggart, 2000).
This is why we commonly identify as populist such ideologically diverse political phenomena
as the American Populist Party and the Russian Narodniki of the nineteenth
century, Peronism in Argentina and the French Poujadists of the 1950s, and leaders such
as Hugo Chávez, Evo Morales, Marine Le Pen and Geert Wilders.
No trace of ideological coherence can be substantiated across these cases. Arguably,
there is not a single policy area where we could not find two populist actors at loggerheads.
Hans-Georg Betz (1994, p. 107) testifies that ‘populist parties are generally held to lack
grand visions or comprehensive ideological projects’, and, as has repeatedly been stressed,
there is no Populist International, no sacred texts upon which populist disciples can draw
inspiration, no universally revered populist icons, and no acknowledged historical continuity
among populist manifestations (Bale et al., 2011; Moffitt and Tormey, 2014; Stanley,
2008; Worsley, 1969).
Populism quite obviously falls short of the status of ideology.3
Still, many scholars
accentuate the ideological part of Mudde’s (2004) definition, even when, like Luke March
(2007, p. 64), they contradict themselves by stating that ‘defining populism as an ideology
should certainly not imply intellectual robustness or consistency’. Therefore, despite the
obvious errors in their purported relation, there still exists a knee-jerk association of
populism with ideology in the literature, usually predicated upon the invocation of
populism’s peculiar ideological ‘thinness’. This deserves closer scrutiny.
As with Canovan (2002), Mudde’s (2004) ‘thin-centered’ ideological framework for
populism – currently the dominant theoretical paradigm (Moffitt and Tormey, 2014) –
draws its authority entirely from Michael Freeden’s (1996; 1998) ‘morphological approach’
on ideology. Freeden (1998, p. 750) describes a thin-centered ideology as ‘one that
arbitrarily severs itself from wider ideational contexts, by the deliberate removal and
replacement of concepts’, exhibiting ‘a restricted core attached to a narrower range of
political concepts’. Populism’s malleability and tendency to attach itself to other ‘thick’ or
‘thin’ host ideologies such as liberalism, socialism, ecologism and nationalism, are
expounded by Mudde (2004) and Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser (2012a; 2013) specifically
along these lines.
The attempt to preserve ideology as populism’s genus by resorting to its alleged thinness
is open to three major lines of criticism. First, the very notion of thinness is conceptually
spurious; second, this position entails significant methodological inconsistencies in the
framework of its proponents; and third, its essentialist connotations erect insurmountable
obstacles with regard to classification and measurement. I will address each of these issues in
turn.
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The Complications of ‘Thinness’
In his influential body of work, Freeden (1996) describes the morphology of ideologies as
a three-tiered structure containing core, adjacent and peripheral concepts, conditioned by
means of elaborate proximities and weights idiosyncratic to each ideological variant. For
instance, liberalism is described as having liberty at its core; human rights, democracy and
equality adjacent to the core; and nationalism on the periphery. Every belief that stems
from an ideology travels along a specific route from core to periphery, acquiring elements
from conceptual nodes along the way. Core concepts are present ‘in all known cases of the
ideology in question’ (Freeden, 2013, p. 125), as with liberty in liberalism. So, a purported
instance of liberalism that lacks liberty at its core would ‘raise profound doubts about
whether that case is indeed a member of the liberal family’ (Freeden, 2013, p. 125).
How do thin-centered ideologies differ from this basic type? Collecting various fragments
from Freeden (1996; 1998; 2001), thin-centered ideologies such as nationalism,
feminism and ecologism4
are seen as ephemeral ‘groupings of political thought’ displaying
a ‘decreased internal integration’ (Freeden, 1996, p. 485), and ‘a restricted core attached to
a narrower range of political concepts’ (Freeden, 1998, p. 750), failing to exhibit ‘the full
or broad range of concepts and political positions normally to be found within the
mainstream ideological families’ (Freeden, 2001, p. 203). A thin-centered ideology is
‘limited in ideational ambitions and scope’ and thus is unable to provide a ‘reasonably
broad, if not comprehensive, range of answers to the political questions that societies
generate’ (Freeden, 1998, p. 750). Moreover, the ‘cohesive intricacy of the ideological
product’ as well as the existence and spread of ‘a unifying system among[,] its ideological
producers’ set a thick ideology apart (Freeden, 1996, pp. 545–6).
Freeden explicitly, but rather unsystematically, assigns a number of attributes to thick
ideologies: (1) substantial internal integration, (2) a rich core attached to a wide range of
political concepts, (3) the capacity to exhibit a broad range of concepts and political
positions, (4) a reasonably broad range of answers to the political questions of society, (5)
far-reaching ideational ambitions and scope, (6) a sufficiently cohesive and intricate
ideological product and (7) unity among ideological producers – these are the ones we can
at least surmise from his texts, absent a definitive checklist. Thin ideologies, while
undoubtedly belonging to the same genus as thick ideologies, exhibit a subordinate
morphology, lacking these necessary attributes.
Freeden is conceptualizing thin-centered ideologies as inferior instances of a superordinate
category, diminished subtypes of an ideal type of ideology, thus actually employing
a radial structure for the concept of ‘ideology’. In radial categories (Collier and
Levitsky, 1997; Collier and Mahon, 1993; Gerring, 2012), the existence of all defining
attributes signifies a full instance of the concept (i.e. thick ideologies), with diminished
subtypes illustrating only a subset of these attributes (i.e. thin ideologies).
To distinguish between full instances and diminished subtypes, defining attributes need
to be clearly stated and operationalized, allowing the execution of valid tests of inclusion
or exclusion. Freeden does not provide a comprehensive set of defining attributes for full
(thick) ideologies; nor does he provide any operationalization. Thus, he never clarifies how
exactly thin ideologies become subordinate. Which ‘range of concepts’ and how wide a
‘scope’ makes for a thick ideology? How is a ‘restricted core’ restricted? Which degree of
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‘integration’, ‘ambition’ and ‘cohesive intricacy’ is required? How many ‘political positions’
and how ‘unified’ a system among ideological producers would be adequate? These
and similar issues are left untouched, rendering us unable to distinguish between thick and
thin ideologies if we are unwilling to rely on arguments from authority. Mathew
Humphrey (2013), for instance, applies the morphological approach to claim that
ecologism can plausibly be perceived as a thick rather than the thin ideology Freeden
asserts. Who is to tell, when all these loose dimensions remain barren? As Humphrey (2013,
p. 436) concludes, the choice is ‘always a matter of emphasis and interpretation’. This is not
an answer of high scientific merit.
There is no way out of the conceptual apparatus that Freeden has concocted: almost any
political notion can acquire the status of a thin-centered ideology as long as it contains an
alleged ‘small’ number of core concepts that the claimant perceives as being unable to
supply a comprehensive package of policy proposals. After all, a ‘small’ set of core attributes
is always necessary in order to define something. Then racism, anti-immigration, xenophobia,
sexism, capitalism, radicalism, multiculturalism, technocracy, cosmopolitanism,
Euroscepticism, neoliberalism, anti-neoliberalism, globalization, anti-globalization, religious
fundamentalism, authoritarianism, antisemitism, militarism, neoconservatism,
Keynesianism and consumerism are all thin-centered ideologies by this criterion; the list
can have no end. We could also claim that populism’s core features – anti-elitism,
people-centrism and popular sovereignty – as posited by Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Rovira
Kaltwasser (2013), are thin ideologies of their own standing. Again, who is to tell? In effect,
and this is the gist of this first point, Freeden professes a conceptual exceptionalism for
ideology that is methodologically unwarranted. No social scientific notion, and populism
in particular, can bear fruit when planted on such slippery conceptual ground.
Methodological Inconsistencies
The spurious conceptual structure of the ‘thin-centered ideology’ stratagem becomes
evident in Mudde’s attempt to draw opposites for populism. Mudde (2004) and Mudde and
Rovira Kaltwasser (2013) prescribe two direct opposites for populism: elitism and pluralism.
However, rudimentary methodological consistency dictates that when discussing
antithetical concepts, we compare concepts of the same rank, co-existing at the same level
of conceptual hierarchy.5
Since populism is a (thin-centered) ideology, it would entail that
elitism and pluralism are also ideologies, thin-centered or otherwise. But unless we are
willing to stretch concepts to the point of breakdown, this can hardly be the case.
Consequently, Mudde would need to revise populism’s genus to coincide with the one
accounting for elitism and pluralism, whatever that is. Takis S. Pappas (2013, p. 33), to take
one example, is more cognizant of such hierarchical consistency requirements, conceptualizing
populism as democratic illiberalism, ‘the polar opposite of political liberalism’, treating
populism as being on the same level as other ideologies.
Furthermore, the dependence on the ideological genus has forced Mudde and his
associates into one further conceptual sleight of hand. Previously, we mentioned how
Freeden employs thin ideologies as diminished subtypes of a radial concept structure.
Radial categories have been blamed for encouraging conceptual stretching and fostering a
‘pseudo-consensus’ by collapsing different concepts under the same term, thus actually
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perpetuating rather than reducing confusion (Møller and Skaaning, 2010; Weyland, 2001).
While methodologists may agree or disagree with this critique, interestingly, Mudde and
Rovira Kaltwasser (2012a), reiterating Kurt Weyland (2001), also express their skepticism
against applying radial categorizations to the study of populism, criticizing their decreased
conceptual productivity and explicitly opting for a classical categorization as the best way
to foster conceptual clarity and knowledge accumulation. Having earlier assigned their
concept’s genus to thin-centered ideology – the product of a radial categorization – they
have obviously failed to employ consistently high standards across their methodological
decisions.
Betrayed by ‘Degreeism’
Allegiance to ideology is usually perceived as a dichotomous exercise; one subscribes to an
ideology, or refrains from doing so. For most people, there is no sense in speaking of
‘degrees’ of socialism, Marxism or liberalism since the normative political concepts that
undergird such ideologies are of a ‘take it or leave it’ nature. You either acknowledge the
overarching significance of class struggle, or place liberty at the center of your moral
compass, or you do not. When core facets of an ideology are contested, the normal
outcome is the birth of a subtype of the original ideology; you have social liberals,
libertarians, conservative liberals and hundreds of other subtypes of liberalism, but there is
generally no sense in speaking of or measuring degrees of an original liberalism. This is
commensurate with the radial categorization of ideologies that Freeden employs.
Treating populism as ideology reiterates this essentialist perspective. Hence, a political
party or leader can or cannot be populist; there is no grey zone. At best, as Mudde and
Rovira Kaltwasser (2013) advise, we can proceed to naming subtypes of populism such as
neoliberal populism, inclusionary populism, national populism, agrarian populism and so
on; measurement becomes a dichotomous process of classification into populist and
non-populist phenomena. The essentialist ideological perspective inherently abhors
‘degreeism’ and refrains from any quantification of the phenomenon that would expose
intragroup variation; variation can only produce subtypes.
Yet there has recently been a surge of quantitative research which, on the contrary,
clearly acknowledges degrees of populism. Works such as Jagers and Walgrave (2007),
Hawkins (2009), Deegan-Krause and Haughton (2009), Reungoat (2010), Pauwels (2011),
Rooduijn and Pauwels (2011), Gemenis et al. (2012), March (2012), Vasilopoulou et al.
(2014), Rooduijn et al. (2014), Bernhard et al. (2015), Pauwels and Rooduijn (2015) and
Aslanidis (2015) have distilled the necessary dimensions of populism and operationalized
them using various methodologies of text analysis to arrive at interesting conclusions
illustrating variation across the unit of analysis (political parties, leaders, etc.).
As a matter of fact, most of these researchers rely explicitly or implicitly on the
ideological definition provided by Mudde (2004) to choose and operationalize dimensions
that they then apply on discursive artifacts. This is not unexpected at all; denotational
clarity and operationalizability are probably the strongest aspects of Mudde’s (2004)
definition. All three dimensions that Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser (2013) suggest as
necessary and sufficient – the exaltation of a ‘noble people’, the condemnation of ‘corrupt
elites’ and the appeal to the value of popular sovereignty – share two qualities that render
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them ideal for quantitative work. First, if properly operationalized, they can be identified
within discursive data produced by political actors (electoral manifestos, speeches, interviews,
etc.); and second, they are of a continuous rather than dichotomous nature,
measured by the frequency of appearance within given data units – a standard approach in
text analysis (Popping, 2000). Thus, since the necessary dimensions of the concept can
exhibit variation, surely the concept itself can vary accordingly. These realizations have led
the researchers mentioned above to devise innovative coding schemes and dictionaries to
perform manual or automated measurements of populist discourse, reaching encouraging
levels of reliability and validity. Therefore, to decry ‘degreeism’ and insist on a dichotomous
qualitative perspective in light of a convincing body of research that illustrates the
merits of investigating gradations can only be understood as employing an idiosyncratic
cut-off threshold over which inclusion is justified, without ever disclosing the means to
calculate it.
On a more general note, Giovanni Sartori’s supposed insistence on the perils of
‘degreeism’, widely cited as reason enough to stick with dichotomous concepts, is but an
enduring myth. In reality, Sartori welcomes variations in degree. ‘Classes’, he argues, ‘do
not impute “real sameness”, but similarity. The objects that fall into a same class are more
similar among themselves – with respect to the criterion of the sorting – than to the objects
that fall into other classes’ (Sartori, 1991, p. 246). He then explains: ‘Any class, no matter
how minute, allows for intra-class variations (at least of degree); and it is up to the classifier
to decide how much his classes are to be inclusive (broad) or discriminating (narrow)’
(Sartori, 1991, p. 246). Regarding the concept of ‘democracy’, Sartori (1987, p. 185;
emphasis in original) explicitly declares that ‘What is (democracy)? and How much (democracy)?
are both rightful and complementary, not mutually exclusive, questions’. When
unfavorably referring to degreeism, what Sartori takes issue with is the ‘abuse (uncritical
use) of the maxim that differences in kind are best conceived as differences of degree, and
that dichotomous treatments are invariably best replaced by continuous ones’ (Sartori,
1991, p. 248). The empirical research on measuring populism has already provided ample
evidence that no abuse is at work in the employment of degrees.
Undoubtedly, the debate over the dichotomous or graded nature of political concepts
is not new. This same contention has unfolded at length regarding degrees of democracy
(see Collier and Adcock, 1999). However, political scientists have devised sophisticated
indices of democracy such as Freedom House and Polity IV, and numerous quantitative
analyses have drawn from these datasets.6
These efforts have their own problems, but one
cannot see why corresponding indices for populism are illegitimate, when its allegedly
dichotomous nature has repeatedly been overruled by empirical studies. The burden of
proof is now squarely on the shoulders of those who deny the merits of quantification.
Why Does This Debate Matter?
The resounding success in measuring populism has led some researchers to call the debate
over the genus of populism a moot point (Van Kessel, 2014). To accept this would require
that we, as scientists, for ‘practical reasons’, give up on our most revered scientific duty –
the falsification of deficient theories – a rather ignominious compromise. But practical
reasons are also at stake here. The misclassification of populism as ideology raises significant
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problems for the proper analysis of populist phenomena, due to the normative elements
that essentialist accounts force on their study.
Portraying populism as ideology swells the scope and purported impact of the phenomenon
and forces analysts to take sides in favor of or against it. The normative implications
of populism have plagued the literature and crippled its evolution into a respected theory.
More often than not, scholars of populism tend to write as if they are loyal opponents or
supporters of a political cause, rather than objective observers. As Jan-Werner Müller
(2014, p. 484) acknowledges, ‘evocations of populism often only seem to serve the purpose
of criticizing something else’. This, of course, is no mere accident, since populism was
(re)introduced preloaded with normative baggage. As J.B. Allcock (1971) testifies, it was
Edward Shils who first recoined the term in 1954, in such a way as to portray populism as
an ideological phenomenon which consists of a threat to the rule of law, a threat to
democracy. These normative connotations linger on to this day, nudging scholars to lean
towards this side or the other when asked to classify political phenomena.
Since the study of populism frequently reflects ‘anxieties both by liberals about democracy
and by democrats about liberalism’ (Müller, 2014), contemporary scholarship has
roughly become divided into two main camps, according to the normative valence
assigned to the term. The first camp comprises liberal-minded researchers emphasizing –
with varying intensity – the negative effects of populism on liberal democracy. Populism,
left and right, is accused of corroding democratic institutions, undermining checks and
balances, paving the way to some form of authoritarianism. The opposite camp is populated
by scholars more to the left, themselves divided into two smaller groups: the first
group, influenced by mainstream liberal literature, has internalized the pejorative connotations,
but strives to safeguard esteemed left-wing populist projects, claiming that the
populist label should only be used for radical right-wing phenomena; the second group,
predominantly comprised of post-Marxists, reverses the normative sign and upholds
populism as an originally progressive political outlook rather than an accusation, refusing
the legitimacy of using it to characterize right-wing episodes. As always, there is a large
gray zone, plus a few on the left who insist that populism is nothing more than a Cold
War-era insult employed to reinforce the ‘theory of the two extremes’, the equation of
communism with fascism (D’Eramo, 2013). Consequently, academic production during
the past decades tends to dovetail with political trends.
Scholarly opinion on two recent social movements in the United States – the Tea Party
and Occupy Wall Street – provides an interesting case in point. Analysts who do not
sympathize with populism tend to apply the term to the movement they dislike, and
protect their favorite from the ominous association. On the contrary, supporters of
populism as a progressive notion happily assign its label to the movement they feel to be
endearing and refuse its bestowal on ‘reactionary’ ones. In both cases, ad hoc dimensions are
inserted to justify these choices.
Nadia Urbinati (2014, p. 130), while acknowledging that both movements employ
populist discourse, claims that Occupy is not populist while the Tea Party is, since populism
requires a leader, a ‘vertical and unified structure’. Even though both movements lack clear
hierarchical features, Urbinati claims that Tea Partiers are actually in active search of a
leader through whom to take over the Republican Party. The Tea Party wants to be more
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than merely a protest movement; Occupy apparently does not. Thus, the Tea Party is a
populist movement and Occupy is a ‘popular’ movement. For Charles Postel (2012a), on
the contrary, Occupy is a ‘most strikingly populist response to the present crisis ... old
Populists would be proud of’; at the same time, the Tea Party is refused the label since Tea
Partiers are simply conservatives whose ‘moral center is the market and the supposed
freedom of the marketplace’ (Postel, 2012b, p. 33), with their anti-elitism directed only
against elites with whom they disagree.
Of course this was an extreme example of contradiction originating in normative
evaluations. But the elevation of populism into an ideology and the ample opportunity for
subjective reasoning that go with this allow us to argue in favor of or against the populist
nature of a phenomenon with seemingly equal validity. Only a more nuanced approach
that is grounded in measurable artifacts can help overcome such inconsistencies or else we
will continue talking past one another. Efforts such as the one made recently by Mudde and
Rovira Kaltwasser (2012b) to provide a more balanced assessment of the impact of
populism on democracy across regions are welcome developments. However, the notion
of populism-as-ideology and its essentialist connotations leaves qualitative classificatory
exercises open to debate since cases of populist politics are by definition pushed to the one
or the other extreme, left or right, instead of assuming positions along a continuum.
Hence, Gemenis et al. (2012, p. 3) rightly complain that ‘the term populist is used so
often and in a derogatory way that its empirical measurement has largely escaped scholarly
attention’; this is equally true for appreciative assessments. Shifting away from essentialism,
and acknowledging the continuous nature of populism, we can mitigate
normative biases, and this is why this debate matters. A graded approach will reveal a
more subtle and refined political landscape, where political parties are not easily classified
as either populist or non-populist; it will demonstrate the fact that populist discursive
elements are scattered across the ideological spectrum and that their intensity varies with
time. This will undermine normative and ideological arguments on both sides since
populist discourse will become a contingent trait of both ‘friends’ and ‘enemies’ of
(liberal) democracy.
If Not an Ideology, What?
The theoretical framework of populism as thin-centered ideology has been scrutinized and
found to suffer from three major misconceptions that severely undermine its usability.
However, the question remains: if populism is not a (thin-centered) ideology, what is it?
During its life as a concept, populism has been associated with various characteristics. For
instance, before the 1990s, populism was routinely associated with fiscally ‘irresponsible’
policies of deficit spending. Unexpectedly, the appearance of ‘neoliberal’ populist leaders in
Latin America such as Alberto Fujimori, Carlos Menem and Fernando Collor de Mello
during the early 1990s necessitated a paradigm shift, driving influential scholars to remove
economic policies from the set of necessary dimensions for identifying populism (Roberts,
1995; Weyland, 1996). Later instances of openly pro-market populist parties in Europe and
elsewhere have confirmed the soundness of this decision. Economic policy is now widely
considered a contingent but not a necessary factor in the classification of populist parties
(Hawkins, 2010; Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser, 2013).
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The same holds true for another contested dimension that gradually lost its currency:
charismatic leadership. While populist figures such as Juan Perón and Jean-Marie Le Pen
had accentuated the role of charisma, the contested nature of the concept and various
empirical developments have also relegated this feature to a facilitating, rather than a
necessary variable (Hawkins, 2010; Mudde, 2004). However interesting this debate on
obsolete dimensions may be, here we focus on locating the genus of populism rather than
its denotational features. Therefore, we focus on the two main contenders found in the
literature: populism as strategy, and populism as discourse. In what follows, I briefly discuss
why the first option does not amount to an analytically useful genus, and subsequently
elaborate on discourse as the most plausible choice.
Weyland (1996; 2001, p. 14) has repeatedly emphasized that populism is best seen as
strategy, or more precisely, ‘a political strategy through which a personalistic leader seeks
or exercises government power based on direct, unmediated, uninstitutionalized support
from large numbers of mostly unorganized followers’. Betz (2002, p. 198) concurs,
claiming that ‘populism is primarily a political strategy, whose political rhetoric is the
evocation of latent grievances and the appeal to emotions provoked by them, rather than
an ideology’. Nevertheless, whether a political agent truly believes in politics as a struggle
between an overwhelming majority of people and a minority of elites, or whether this
discourse is employed as a cynically opportunistic strategy in order to reap electoral
benefits, this is largely an empirical issue which, as Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser (2012a,
p. 9) hold, ‘is often almost impossible to answer conclusively (without getting into the
populist’s head)’. After all, strategy is inherent in political activity. One could rightfully
claim that each and every political action is strategic rather than ideological or straightforwardly
technocratic since political agents are rational actors aiming to maximize political
returns for their decisions.
While the strategic dimension can indeed uncover interesting facets of the conduct of
populist agents, it cannot provide the conceptual depth we are looking for since it sits at
too distant a position in the conceptual hierarchy to be of immediate use. If we simply
lump together every type of political behavior under ‘strategy’, we sacrifice conceptual
refinement and equate populism with demagoguery, the tendency to overpromise and ‘say
what the people want to hear’. If we are to uphold the analytical utility of the concept of
populism for political science, we need to acknowledge that it stands for a behavior that
fulfills a specific political function which can then be either employed strategically or
asserted as a matter of conviction, i.e. put on the mantle of ideology.
Based on the above, we consider ‘discourse’ as much better suited to characterize the
conceptual genus of populism. If we do away with the unnecessary ideological clause in
Mudde’s (2004) formulation, we are left with a purely discursive definition: populism
modestly becomes a discourse, invoking the supremacy of popular sovereignty to claim
that corrupt elites are defrauding ‘the People’ of their rightful political authority. It
becomes an anti-elite discourse in the name of the sovereign People. This is, more or less, how
the concept has been operationalized in the growing quantitative literature mentioned
earlier. The methodological implications of operationalization expose the discursive nature
of populism since even researchers who abide by Mudde’s ideological clause rely on purely
non-ideological dimensions to seize their object. They do not operationalize programmatic
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commitments, organizational structures, stances on immigration, economy, welfare,
foreign affairs, human rights, environmental practices and other indicators of ideological
disposition as, for instance, researchers of the Comparative Manifesto Project would do
(see Budge et al., 2001). To seize and measure populism, it has been found sufficient to
meticulously analyze the discourse of political actors and see if discursive elements of
exalting the ‘noble People’ and condemning ‘corrupt elites’ in the name of popular
sovereignty are there, and how much of them.
Many would reject this perspective as overly behavioristic, but the fact remains that
populism is a systematically recurring political phenomenon empirically located within
political discourse. On the contrary, ideological, or even strategic claims, purport to have
glimpsed inside the ‘populist’s head’ and to have discovered an ulterior motive for this type
of behavior. And even if methods such as elite interviews could be employed to prove this
(and they are not), they would be restricted to those political actors who are still around
and willing to supply such insights sincerely. Evidently, the burden of proof of the
ideological nature of populism lies with those who stand by such strong claims.
The discursive strand in populist scholarship has been active at least since Ernesto
Laclau’s (1977) first take on populism, further elaborated in Laclau (2005a) and Laclau
(2005b). This post-structuralist corpus is not for the faint of heart, but is nonetheless very
rewarding. Laclau pioneered efforts to discard nonessential dimensions (economic, social,
etc.) that contaminated the literature and focused on the discursive construction of populist
appeals. Rather reasonably, the scholarly drift towards acknowledging the discursive nature
of populism has led his disciples to celebrate Laclau’s eventual vindication (e.g. Stavrakakis
and Katsambekis, 2014).
Nevertheless, subscribing to a discursive populism does not entail a wholesale commitment
to the Laclauian theoretical edifice or the methodology of the Essex School of
discourse analysis, which is but one school of thought among numerous other perspectives
on analyzing political discourse. On the contrary, for all its merits, Laclau’s
approach exhibits several limitations that inhibit its expansion outside post-structuralist
circles. Apart from its outdated Marxist overtones (Stavrakakis, 2004), a significant shortcoming
with respect to the objectives of this article is its purely qualitative and binary
toolbox. Discourse-analytic applications purport to identify populist projects by discovering
manifestations of Laclau’s two criteria: ‘a central reference to “the people” and an
equivalential, antagonistic discursive logic’ (Stavrakakis, 2004, p. 259). Even if one does
not side with Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser’s (2012a, p. 7) unjust dismissal of Laclau’s
theory as ‘extremely abstract’, its applications frequently rely on highly interpretive narrative.
Hence, while the Essex School methodological paradigm can contribute to holistic
case-study appraisals of populist projects, it fails to provide objective comparative
methodological instruments, remaining indifferent towards any quantitative valuations.
Laclau (2005b, p. 47) explicitly defines populism as a graded concept, but never provides
concrete means of operationalizing indicators to reveal variation in some detail; he only
vaguely states that the degree of populism ‘will depend on the depth of the chasm
separating political alternatives’.
Despite this line of criticism, Laclau’s contribution to the theory of populism has been
widely under-estimated thus far. From early on, Laclau stressed the need to focus on
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ubiquitous discursive patterns and warned against mistaking particularities of populist
instances in different regions for essential characteristics, as several other analysts did at the
time. As he exclaimed, ‘a movement is not populist because in its politics or ideology it
presents actual contents identifiable as populistic, but because it shows a particular logic of
articulation of those contents – whatever those contents are’ (Laclau, 2005b, p. 33). This
‘displacement of the conceptualization, from contents to form’ (Laclau, 2005b, p. 44)
remains his most formidable contribution. The populist form pits a certain ‘People’ against
a certain ‘power bloc’, but both subjectivities are ‘empty signifiers’, symbolic vessels filled
with particular content depending on the specifics of the political context within which
they are invoked and the cultural toolbox at work (Laclau, 2005a; 2005b). It is those formal
components of populist discourse that account for the – almost instinctive – affinity we
perceive among the varying phenomena collected under the populist umbrella, while the
flexibility of their contents explains the diversity of this ecosystem.
As many analysts have pointed out (e.g. Hawkins, 2009; Rooduijn et al., 2014), formal
discursive elements are implicit in Mudde’s (2004) ideological definition. Structural qualities
of populist discourse are successfully exploited by quantitative researchers in pursuance
of valid traces of the phenomenon. To capitalize on the progress made so far, and to direct
Laclau’s and Mudde’s insights towards a more positivist outlook accounting for variation
among cases, I suggest the introduction of the notion of the ‘populist frame’. As I argue in
the next section, frame analysis is a more productive methodological vantage point than
discourse analysis, as it is geared firmly towards quantitative work and devoid of any
normative complications.
Populism as a Discursive Frame
Post-structuralists understand discourse in an inflated sense, as an ‘ensemble of the phenomena
in and through which social production of meaning takes place’ (Laclau, 1980, p.
86) – a formulation encompassing the near totality of social experience. This is an overly
broad scope of analysis, and even though secondary elements such as gesture, dress and
performative repertoires arguably contribute to the overall meaning a political actor
conveys,7
by ‘discourse’ I here simply refer to language, textual data, written or spoken –
in other words, the standard material of text analysis (Popping, 2000). This material is
sufficient to identify a political practice as populist; if populist elements cannot be located
within a political actor’s textual production, their discovery within other areas of symbolic
action is highly unlikely. I argue that the formal elements of populist discourse are better
conceptualized as a discursive frame, rather than an ideology. Thinking of populism as a
discursive frame exhibits two advantages: it resonates better with the cognitive aspects of
the populist message; and it provides a solid methodological framework for empirical
research.
Frames, as introduced in social science by Erving Goffman, are ‘schemata of interpretation’
that allow their users ‘to locate, perceive, identify, and label’ complex events taking
place in daily life (Goffman, 1974, p. 21). In their influential work, David Snow and his
associates have employed Goffman’s insights to analyze the importance of frames for social
mobilization. As they explain, collective action frames are employed to provide meaning
to events and occurrences out there, ‘to organize experience and guide action’ (Snow et al.,
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1986, p. 464). Frames may not comprise elaborate and comprehensive structures like
ideologies, but they can nevertheless convey coherent meaning in certain situations. As
Sidney Tarrow (1992, p. 190) claims, ‘frames are more flexible and situationally influenced
constructs than formal ideological systems and are more easily and rapidly communicated
to target groups, adapted to change, and extended to blend with other frames’. Since reality
can be presented and comprehended in a variety of ways, frames enable the selection of a
specific perspective to interpret experience. Hence, ‘to frame is to actively construct the
meaning of the reality in question’ (Hänggli and Kriesi, 2010, p. 142). The impact of
framing on influencing individual judgement has been repeatedly proven empirically in the
aftermath of the Nobel Prize-winning work of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky
(1984) in cognitive science, and political primers have been published to take advantage of
properly framing issues in political communication (e.g. Lakoff, 2004; Luntz, 2007).
David Snow and Robert Benford (1988, p. 199) have further analyzed the core framing
tasks at work. Frames provide a diagnosis by identifying ‘some event or aspect of social life
as problematic and in need of alteration’, then proceed to suggest a prognosis, ‘a proposed
solution to the diagnosed problem that specifies what needs to be done’ and conclude by
circulating a motivational urgency to take corrective action. This theoretical framework has
found extensive application in social movement studies, but also resonates strongly with
populist logic. Populist discourse can equally be perceived as the systematic dissemination
of a frame that diagnoses reality as problematic because ‘corrupt elites’ have unjustly
usurped the sovereign authority of the ‘noble People’ and maintains that the solution to the
problem resides in the righteous political mobilization of the latter in order to regain
power. This, therefore, can be labelled the ‘populist frame’ – the ‘subatomic matter’ that
constitutes populist discourse.
This framework for the study of populism can accommodate all contesting perspectives.
Populist frames, as formal vessels of meaning, readily contain ideational elements that have
been mistaken for constituting ideology. As William Gamson (1995) explains, collective
action frames are both adversarial and aggregative in their demonstration of a collective
‘we’ in opposition to some ‘they’; this quality explains the largely accepted Manichean
nature of populism. The fact that frames are straightforward communicative forms, bereft
of the nuances and intricacies of ideologies, indicates that the simplistic and Manichean
nature of the populist message fits better with frames rather than ideologies. Moreover, the
diagnostic function of the populist frame explains why populism has been frequently
associated with a sense of crisis (Moffitt, 2014; Taggart, 2000) since political urgency is
required to successfully portray a situation as gravely problematic during the diagnostic
stage.
Passing from frames-as-forms to framing as a deliberate activity (Benford, 1997), we see
that the conscious dissemination of frames accounts for the strategic implications that many
authors have discerned in populist politics. As Benford and Snow (2000) explain, political
entrepreneurs engage in strategic framing in order to persuade audiences to tune into their
own representation of reality – something that reverberates strongly with Michael Kazin’s
(1995, p. 3) understanding of populism as a ‘flexible mode of persuasion’ and Laclau’s
(2005b, p. 41) insistence that ‘antagonistic political strategies would be based on different
ways of creating political frontiers’. Successful framing strategies manage to rearticulate the
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current state of affairs by tapping into existing values, skillfully employing elements of the
‘cultural toolkit’ (Swidler, 1986) which audiences readily recognize. Thus, the importance
of agency is acknowledged, but strategic intent is freed from normative implications of
‘opportunism’ since framing is a sine qua non of political conduct. Populist framing is just
another tool of persuasion in the arsenal of political agents.
The cognitive fit between frame theory and populism is one aspect of the value of
our thesis. The other useful aspect is the way in which this understanding can foster
empirical work. Frame analysis has been employed in diverse scientific fields with tremendous
success. Its application has reinvigorated social movement studies (Snow et al.,
2014), as well as media and political communication studies (De Vreese, 2012), producing
an immense body of qualitative and quantitative work. Unfortunately, frame
theory has scarcely been applied to populism, and existing efforts have remained disconnected
from a broader research agenda. Lee (2006) and Tsatsanis (2011) have produced
qualitative papers, while Jagers and Walgrave (2007), Ruzza and Fella (2011) and
Vasilopoulou et al. (2014) have partially used frames for quantitative work. However,
there are some more promising attempts. Caiani and Della Porta (2011) – both social
movement scholars – employ frame theory to perform a content analysis of populist
discourse in German and Italian right-wing political organizations, yielding interesting
results. Problems with intercoder reliability and index considerations have been
addressed in Aslanidis (2015), where a detailed method of measuring populist frames in
political texts is described, using semantic text analysis to build an index of populist
content in social movement manifestos. These applications have proven the viability of
a frame theoretical approach, vindicating discourse as the entirely appropriate field to
study populist phenomena.
Frame analysis can reinvigorate populism theory into a quantitative direction in the
same way it has fostered research in other scientific subdisciplines. A research program
that operationalizes populism as a discursive frame can encourage comparative work,
facilitate cooperation with neighboring fields, shed light on borderline cases of populism
and enable the construction of large datasets to analyze systematically the impact of
populism as an independent variable. Besides, the majority of existing quantitative
approaches to populism already implicitly analyze populism as a discursive phenomenon,
remaining indifferent towards ideological or other implications, as explained previously.
Employing the populist frame as a coding unit in text analysis projects provides an
improved analytical ground for empirical applications and enhances reliability and validity
in measuring populism.
Conclusion
This article should not be interpreted as a dismissal of the merits of the dominant
theoretical framework for populism, originating in the influential work of Cas Mudde. On
the contrary, it is acknowledged that his perspective has considerably improved the analysis
of the populist phenomenon, providing conceptual refinement by discarding superfluous
attributes and preserving only core characteristics. Through its capacity to travel both
temporally and spatially, his framework has underpinned significant comparative projects
(e.g. Kriesi and Pappas, 2015; Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser, 2012b) and its operational
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virtues have unintentionally facilitated the production of a substantial body of quantitative
research.
Nevertheless, there is considerable room for improvement. In order to contribute
towards this goal, I have raised concerns regarding the justification of assigning populism’s
genus to ideology. The inadequate conceptual foundations of the notion of ‘thincenteredness’
in Freeden’s work, the methodological contradictions that the ideological
claim has inflicted on Mudde’s framework and the incapacity to account for the graded
nature of populism have severely undermined the validity of conceptualizing populism
as an ideology. Moreover, I have argued extensively that the wrong choice of genus has
produced the unintended consequence of ushering an unneeded amount of normative
baggage into the study of populist phenomena, entrenching scholars behind ideological
barricades and sharply impairing standards of objectivity in the literature.
In place of ideology, and in light of developments in the quantitative application of
Mudde’s (2004) definition, it is suggested that populism is better conceptualized as a
discourse. Referring to the work of Laclau, I have underscored the benefits of a formal
approach to populism, in which structural elements of populist discourse account for
perceived patterns among populist instances, with differences explained by the circumstantial
content of the constructed subjectivities of the ‘People’ and the ‘elites’.
However, a discursive conceptualization of populism does not entail a full surrender
to Laclau’s theoretical intricacies and the interpretive methodology of the Essex School.
On the contrary, I argued that its deficiencies with regard to the objectives of this article
can be overcome by applying a frame theoretical perspective on studying populist
discourse. The introduction of the notion of the ‘populist frame’ successfully
addresses cognitive aspects of populist argumentation and stresses the significance of
agency without bearing normative implications. Applying frame analysis to populism can
stimulate empirical work, and quantitative analyses in particular, opening avenues for
collaboration with neighboring literatures within a broad interdisciplinary research
project.
(Accepted: 2 June 2015)
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Apostolos Doxiadis, Zsolt Enyedi, Kirk Hawkins,
Hanspeter Kriesi, Nikos Marantzidis, Duncan McDonnell, Takis S. Pappas and three
anonymous reviewers and the Managing Editor of this journal for their valuable feedback
at various stages leading to the conclusion of this article. The research for the article was
funded by a scholarship from the Alexander S. Onassis Public Benefit Foundation.
Notes
1 For the concept of ‘ideology’, see also an introduction by Eagleton (1991) and a review by Knight (2006).
2 See also Abts and Rummens (2007) and Stanley (2008).
3 See also Fieschi (2004).
4 Freeden never mentions populism as a thin-centered ideology in his numerous publications.
5 For instance, Sartori (1987, p. 185) examines democracy’s opposites by analyzing a class of concepts containing the following
political systems: tyranny, despotism, autocracy, absolutism, dictatorship, authoritarianism and totalitarianism.
6 See Munck and Verkuilen (2002) for an evaluation of extant indices.
7 See Moffitt and Tormey (2014) for an interesting discussion on populist style.
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About the Author
Paris Aslanidis is a Lecturer at the Hellenic Studies Program, MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies,
Yale University. He received his PhD from the University of Macedonia, Greece, where he investigated the nexus
between populism and the movements of the Great Recession in a comparative perspective. Paris Aslanidis, Hellenic
Studies Program, Yale University, Henry R. Luce Hall, 34 Hillhouse Avenue, P. O. Box 208206, New Haven, CT
06520-8206, USA; email: paris.aslanidis@yale.edu
IS POPULISM AN IDEOLOGY? 17
© 2015 The Author. Political Studies © 2015 Political Studies Association
POLITICAL STUDIES: 2015