The Concept of Populism: Towards a More Systematic Approach

The term “populism” has become a buzzword. We can see the increasing attention the phenomenon arouses also in the disciplines of the social sciences, where publications of articles and books regarding populism are continuously increasing. Nevertheless, it should be understood that populism is not a new phenomenon and that the often-discussed disagreement of its meaning is not a new debate in the social sciences. This paper more precisely asks what concepts of populism developed and are used for analysis in the field of empirical social science research. How populism is conceptualized certainly has implications on how it can be analysed, categorized or measured. To entangle the development and uses of different concepts of populism, we use a concept analysis strategy based on ideas of Sartori (1970, 1984), Goertz (2006) and Gerring (2012) as well as impulses of Berenskoetter (2016). This way, we identify at least three prominent and different understandings of populism that can be subsumed under the labels ‘populism as an ideology’, ‘populism as a discourse’ and ‘populism as a strategy’. To analyse these concepts we focus on (1) different definitions of populism regarding the above-mentioned different understandings of the phenomenon, (2) on the concrete concept structures, (3) the semantic field in which populism is respectively embedded, (4) as well as on the methods associated and used to analyse the diverging concepts. We conclude that different ontologies lead to different epistemologies, which again result in different understandings, conclusions and uses of different methods when analysing the same phenomena. The most striking difference between the concepts relates to questions similar debated about the concept of democracy in the 1990s (Collier & Adcock 1999). The key question, therefore, is, if populism should be understood as a dichotomous, categorical concept or a fuzzy, graded one. Whereas the intension of the ideological and discursive understandings of populism look alike, they differ among other aspects on their preferred level of analysis, leading the ideology camp to argue for a categorical perception of populism, especially concerned about the meso- and macro-level (parties and movements) and proponents of the discursive approach for a graded one, often promoting a micro-level analysis (politicians). The understanding of populism as a strategy shares the core characteristics of populism with the other two concepts, but differs further on the intension and refers to characteristics important to populism that call for a thoughtful re-conceptualization of the term for more precise empirical social research.