Populism and democracy: a reassessment

Abstract

Populism comes in so many forms, both historically and in its contemporary manifestations, that we cannot assess its relationship with democratic institutions as if it were homogeneous. In this article, we reconnect with the history of the first movements that have called themselves populists and draw on an understanding of populism as an egalitarian impulse against oligarchic tendencies, centred on anti-elitism and the defense of a democratic common sense. This genetic approach goes against the dominant definitions which tend to overstretch its range of application while assuming a form of anti-pluralism as part of its common features. Then, we draw attention to the diversity of conceptions of democracy within populist thought and practices and show that the types of democratic institutions favoured by populist movements, and their attitudes towards intermediary bodies, are highly contextual. Finally, we argue that populism’s inherent ambiguities shed some doubt on its capacity to respond to the current challenges faced by representative institutions.

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Populism and Democracy: A Reassessment
Arthur Borriello, Jean-Yves Pranchère & Pierre-Étienne Vandamme
Published in Contemporary Politics, 2023, https://doi.org/10.1080/13569775.2023.2296717
Abstract – Populism comes in so many forms, both historically and in its contemporary
manifestations, that we cannot assess its relationship with democratic institutions and practices
as if it were homogenous. In this article, we reconnect with the history of the first movements
that have called themselves populists and draw on an understanding of populism as an
egalitarian impulse against oligarchic tendencies, centered on anti-elitism and the defense of a
democratic common sense. This genetic approach to populism goes against the dominant
definitions which tend to overstretch its range of application while assuming a form of anti-
pluralism as part of its common features. Then, we draw attention to the diversity of conceptions
of democracy within populist thought and practices and show that, owing to their ideological
plasticity, the types of democratic institutions favored by populist movements, as well as their
attitudes towards representation and intermediary bodies, are highly contextual. The article ends
with a focus on the relationship between populism and democracy in the current context of
disintermediation, in which we argue that populism’s inherent ambiguities shed some doubt on
its capacity to respond to the current challenges faced by representative institutions.
Keywords: populism, democracy, anti-pluralism, oligarchy, representation, participation
1. Introduction
If European political scientists were asked to list the most pressing threats to modern democracy
today, populism would most of the time be included among the suspects. The recent nomination
of a “post-fascist” candidate at the head of the Italian government, one century after the March
on Rome, would probably be cited as an example, just as the invasion of the US Capitol by
Trump’s fanatics would have been mentioned one year and a half earlier. During the past
decades, the (mis)uses of the p-word have grown exponentially. The upward trend became even
steeper in the 2010s, to the point that the Cambridge Dictionary proclaimed it “word of the
year” in 2017. The “populist hype” (De Cleen and Glynos 2021) seemed irresistible; the word
was literally on everyone’s lips.
At some point, the dominant discourse on populism turns into a blunt tautology: the more
populism is defined as today’s main challenge to democracy, the more everything that looks
bad for democracy is mistaken for populism. The perceived severity of the threat, in turn, is
mostly determined by the dubious historical antecedent it is compared to. At best, populism is
mere Bonapartism (Rosanvallon, 2020): the plebiscitary diversion of democracy for autocratic
purposes. At worst, populism is proto-fascist: its rigid and exclusionary definition of a good
people always entails the authoritarian erasure of democratic principles and institutions. In both
cases, the conclusion is similar: populism works against representative democracy and, today,
goes by the names of Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, and Viktor Orbán. As academics
increasingly view the people versus democracy as a credible dichotomy (Mounk, 2019), any
defender of the former becomes suspect with regard to the latter.

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This standard view on populism is predicated upon a dominant academic definition. Highly
contested for decades, the concept of populism is now mostly approached as a ‘thin-centered
ideology’. Populism, in Mudde’s terms, is defined as:
“[…] 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.” (Mudde, 2004).
Mudde’s definition sounds cleverly minimal and carefully neutral. It accounts for the plasticity
of the phenomenon (on which see Taggart 2000) – it covers both its left-wing and right-wing
variants (or “inclusive” and “exclusive”), from Hugo Chávez to Viktor Orbán (Mudde & Rovira
Kaltwasser, 2017) – while remaining seemingly agnostic on its normative value. For these
reasons, it informs most of the current debates and is widely used in empirical studies that
compare populist rhetoric, attitudes and policies. However, Mudde’s approach does not come
without pitfalls. As we cannot detail the many difficulties that arise from this definition, we will
limit ourselves to three points.
Firstly, minimalism leads to conceptual stretching, as it merges into the same category actors
that have very little in common in terms of sociology, ideology and organization. This pitfall is
particularly noticeable when Mudde comes to devalue the relevance of his own concept by
acknowledging “that populism is secondary to most populist parties, and mainly strengthens
the host ideology” (Mudde, 2021).
Secondly, the reference to the notion of "general will" is misleading: from its formulation in
Rousseau (for whom the “general will” and “the will of the majority” are two completely
different things) and throughout the French republican tradition, where it still plays a decisive
role in constitutional law today, the 'general will' has always referred to an 'upright will' which
constitutes a norm of justice because its object is the general interest of all citizens. The political
philosophy of the general will, which is that of the democratic social contract, does not have as
its frame of reference an opposition between the pure people and the corrupt elite, but the ideal
of a society of individuals capable of agreeing on their common interests and of putting the
general interest before particular interests. In Rousseau's view, corruption is not unique to the
elites, the majority’s will can be corrupted (and therefore no longer 'general') when the popular
strata put their own interests before the general interest.
Thirdly, this definition views populism as intrinsically dangerous for democracy, a view that
appears even more explicitly in the work of thinkers such as Jan-Werner Müller (2017), Pierre
Rosanvallon (2020) and Nadia Urbinati (2014, 2019). According to that perspective, populism,
owing to its moralistic conception of an homogeneous people on the one hand, and its
fascination for charismatic leaders (which is not implied by Mudde’s definition) on the other,
jeopardizes the constitutional checks and balances of modern democracy and lives in the
perpetual shadow of a Caesarist derailing. Indeed, the imaginary vision of a homogeneous
people easily leads to denying the importance of social divisions within the population and the
very existence of competing conceptions of the general interest, thereby threatening democratic
pluralism (Abts & Rummens 2006). By the same token, the substitution of political

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disagreements with a moralized antagonism between pure and corrupt actors leaves little room
for legitimate opposition. As we shall argue in the paper, however, neither the homogeneous
conception of the people, nor the moralistic reduction of politics, and even less blind obedience
to a leader should be considered as defining features of populism.
In this respect, empirical approaches to populism that distinguish people-centrism and anti-
elitism from anti-pluralism and Manichaeism (e.g., Akkerman, Mudde & Zaslove 2014) are
already an improvement on those that simply amalgamate all these features. Yet they remain
attached to the misleading idea that one is more of a populist if one scores high on all of these
dimensions. And as a result, people will be labeled as populist even when their attitudes have
much more to do with authoritarian personalities than with populism as such.
The most common dissident view on populism is provided by the proponents of Laclau’s and
Mouffe’s post-Marxist approach, which conceives it as a purely formal logic of articulation of
heterogeneous, unfulfilled social demands. Both analytically and normatively, however, this
approach does not provide a satisfactory way out of the liberal-elitist aporias. On the one hand,
its excessive formalism leads to the same conceptual stretching: right-wing, left-wing and even
‘radical center’ actors are merged into a unique category as soon as they attempt to construct a
‘people’ out of heterogeneity. On the other hand, it sees populism as necessarily and radically
democratic – insofar as it creates a popular political subject against a power bloc and enhances
politicization against the technocratic administration of things – thereby sliding into another
kind of normative essentialization.
Due to the distance between their most basic assumptions, the discussion between these two
approaches increasingly turns into a dialogue of the deaf (Tarragoni, 2022). This state of
populist studies accounts for the difficulty of appreciating the relationship between the varieties
of populist actors and theories on the one hand, and democratic institutions and practices on the
other.
In this paper, we therefore provide a re-assessment of the relationship between populism and
democracy that avoids the symmetric pitfalls of liberal-elitist and post-Marxist pundits. By
historicizing and contextualizing the nature of this relationship, we reconnect with a long-
lasting intellectual tradition that has always insisted on its fundamentally ambivalent - if not
wholly positive - nature (Germani 1962; Berlin 1968; Canovan 1981; 1999; Frank 2020a).
Based on the comparison between historical examples of populism – the People’s Party in the
US, the Russian narodniki and Peronism in Argentina – and its current manifestations, we argue
that what can meaningfully be called populism always proceeds from an egalitarian, anti-
oligarchic impulse and is predicated upon democratic claims. Its conception of democracy,
however, as well as the sociological content and boundaries of its core subject, the people, vary
considerably depending on the socio-political context in which it operates. In particular, the
nature of state institutions, the pre-existence of a democratic tradition and the degree of
organization of civil society have a crucial influence on populism’s practice and imagination of
democracy. As a result, rather than analyzing the populist wave of the 2010s through the lens
of essentializing and universalizing categories – as if populism carried necessarily with it the
erosion or redemption of democracy – we contend that the democratizing potential of today’s

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specific form of populism should be assessed in light of the slow erosion of intermediary bodies
throughout Western societies and the way it attempts (or not) to address it.
To this end, we start by departing from the dominant contemporary uses of the word populism.
A look backward at the history of the movements that have called themselves populist invites
a reappraisal of the concept (section 2). We also provide explanations for the historical shift in
the meaning of the word. After that, we consider the varieties of ways in which populism, as
we understand it, can relate to democratic institutions (section 3).
2. The Great Semantic Drift
Nowadays, the word “populism” in the media and academia is predominantly used to label
"anti-establishment", illiberal movements that appeal to the people to legitimize the power of
an authoritarian leader (Urbinati 2019). This usage is so massive that we forget how recent and
surprising it is compared to the meaning the word had in the first half of the 20th century, a
meaning that prevailed until the 1970s in the US and France, even if, as we shall see, elements
of the current use began to fall into place in the 1950s, when the history of American populism
was falsely reinterpreted in the light of McCarthyism (Chollet 2020; 2023; Tarragoni 2019).
For authors as eminent as Robert Dahl (1956) or Isaiah Berlin (1968), populism belonged fully
to the field of democracy. In France, in 1982, the article "populism" in the Critical Dictionary
of Marxism defined populism by identifying it with the Russian narodniki, i.e. a movement of
democratic and socialist intellectuals who intended to lend their voice to the oppressed
peasantry. Even today, when she reconstructs the history of the notion of "common sense",
Sophia Rosenfeld (2011) defines populism by the mobilization of a democratic common sense,
so that populism counts among its great intellectual figures Thomas Paine and Hannah Arendt.
As Antoine Chollet (2023) has shown by reconstructing their history, the first critics of
populism as a 'danger to democracy' have projected onto it traits that are not specific to it but
common to all electoral regimes; their narrative, which has been taken up uncritically by
contemporary critics of populism, was based not only on a misguided and misinformed
interpretation of US populism, but on a deep distrust of democracy as such, in which they saw
the danger of the power of the incompetents.
Given populism’s centrality in contemporary debates, however, it seems impossible either to
cancel out the contemporary usage or to ignore the term altogether. As a result, the only option
we are left with is to critically engage with the dominant approach. To be sure, the academic
distrust of populism has to do with the actual ambivalence of certain forms of populism which,
especially in Latin America, have been prey to authoritarian temptations (Pécaut, 1983;
Pranchère, 2020; Collovald 2022). It remains, however, that a rigorous definition of populism
cannot disregard the historical core of its meaning and absolutize, as if they were the essence
of the phenomenon, features specific to contemporary extreme right-wing movements that
borrow only rhetorical devices from populism. The dehistoricized use of the concept that
prevails today leads to imaginary genealogies: the current use is projected onto the past by
replacing real history with fictitious history, as when scholars look for the origin of populism
in Bonapartism rather than in the first movements which called themselves populist

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(Rosanvallon 2020). The height of paradox is reached when a regime like Putin's is called
"populist" (Robinson & Milne 2017; Eksi & Wood 2019; Stockemer 2019: 5), while it embodies
all that the Russian populists had fiercely fought against in tsarism.
J.W. Müller (2017) does not hesitate to solve the difficulty by stating that the American populist
party was not populist; yet, no one would accept a definition of "socialism" that would be
produced from the sole experience of Tony Blair's government in the United Kingdom and
would state, as a consequence, that socialism excludes the critique of capitalism and that none
of the historical socialist movements before the 1990s deserve the name of socialist. It is the
same with "populism" as with "socialism" or "liberalism": they are terms that cover distinct
currents; they cannot be defined based on the specific features of some of their varieties only;
their definition must start from their historical source and include the variety of their species
through the history of their development. Any definition of liberalism begins with the study of
Adam Smith and Benjamin Constant; any definition of socialism must situate the very different
doctrines of Saint-Simon, Sismondi, Proudhon, Marx, Durkheim within a shared desire for a
social regulation of capitalism, without projecting onto one of them what another one would
have condemned.
How can we then explain the "semantic drift" (Jäger, 2017) that the word "populism" has
undergone? How come a term that used to designate the People’s Party and the political
experiences that took up its legacy (the Rooseveltian experience in the US, the Popular Front
in France) came to describe the reactionary political projects of today’s autocrats? Historical
distance and forgetfulness may have played a role in the case of the narodniki movement, for
which the main source remains the sum published by Franco Venturi in 1952, but certainly not
in the case of the well-documented People’s Party. Several more plausible causes stand out.
A first moment of the semantic drift is, as already mentioned, the reinterpretations of the
People's Party phenomenon by several political scientists in the 1950s as the prefiguration of
McCarthyism or even fascism (Hofstadter 1955, Lipset 1960). These reinterpretations have
since then been challenged by historians (Saloutos, 1960, Pollack 1962, Goodwyn, 1976, Postel
2007). Many of them now emphasize the profoundly democratic character of American
populism, which aimed to strengthen representative democracy, not undermine it (Chollet 2020,
2023; Jäger 2021, 2022). North American populism was a movement defending liberal
democracy and constitutional guarantees of freedom against oligarchic powers, which is why it
cannot be described as anti-pluralist.
A second, more decisive step contributed at the same time to the change of meaning of the word
by extending its field of reference and by bringing it closer to political movements with
authoritarian features. This is the application of the term populism to Latin American regimes,
the prototype of which was Peronism in Argentina, by authors whose pioneer was Gino
Germani (1962). The term was applied from the outside, since these regimes, unlike the People's
Party and the Russian narodniki, did not call themselves populist. By calling Peronism
"national-populist", Germani wanted to mark the difference between Peronism and, on the one
hand, Italian fascism (which had the sympathy of some Peronist elites), and simple authoritarian

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nationalism, on the other. The introduction of the term populism was justified in that case by
the presence of a truly social egalitarian dimension, linked to the power of the unions. Some
contemporary authors hold to the term "populism" to designate Peronism because they perceive
it as a form of democratization that was imposed by a context of extreme inequality (Rouquié
2016). Yet the paradox is that, while successfully used to single out a democratic dimension
that differentiates Peronism from authoritarianism, the word populism has nonetheless been
associated de facto with Peronism's other features, its nationalistic and authoritarian aspects.
This association with Peronism has notably led to the inclusion, as a decisive feature of
populism, of the presence of a charismatic leader (whereas there was nothing of the sort in the
People's Party and the narodniki), which was further consolidated by Laclau and Mouffe, to
whom it represented a valuable aspect of (left-wing) populism.
A third moment, of greater political magnitude, was that of the 1980s when, in France, Italy
and Austria at first, the extreme right-wing parties won their first major electoral successes on
European soil since WWII and thus started looking for normalization and respectability. These
parties strategically adopted a democratic language and consequently gave up formulating their
xenophobic nationalism in terms of an opposition to parliamentary democracy. This
phenomenon led media commentators to speak of "populism", which was in many ways a
"misnomer" (Collovald 2004). The far right happily took up the term to better legitimize itself
as democratic and to seduce the working class. Today, many figures of the international far
right (Viktor Orbán, Steve Bannon, Eric Zemmour) claim to be "populists", thereby intending
to stand as more democratic than their critics who, by using the p-word as a stigmatizing
weapon, prove their contempt for the people and their adhesion to an elitist or technocratic ideal
which is incompatible with democracy.
We should not underestimate the problem that arises here: by accepting to qualify these
movements with this word, political scientists run the risk of uncritically validating a self-
description that is part of a strategy of legitimization. The fact that the rhetoric of some
contemporary extreme right-wing movements has some populist features (appeal to the people
and anti-elitism) does not mean that they have populist intentions. Their economic proposals,
for instance, are usually at odds with those advocated by historical populisms. Even when taking
seriously the “welfare-chauvinist turn” of several radical right parties, they still bear little
resemblance to the extremely progressive platforms promoted by the populists of the past.
Moreover, it is clear that they are in no way related to the democratization dynamic at play, for
instance, in Latin American populisms.
The European success of the word populism in a sense alien to its history also has much to do
with the absence of populist experiences and traditions in Europe, where the place of populism
has been obstructed by the socialist movements. This absence of historical memory has
facilitated an interpretation of populism based solely on the negative semantic charge of the
"ism" form of the word: much like the word "nationalism", which designates both an
authoritarian sacralization of the nation and a reduction of politics to it, populism came to be
seen as a sacralization of the people and a reduction of politics to the "tyranny of the majority".

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In this view, populism is necessarily anti-pluralistic as it sees the people as the only source of
truth and legitimate power holder.
As the return to the American and Russian sources of populism teaches, the core of populism
is neither anti-pluralism nor hostility to the representative regime, but a demand for political
and social inclusion of popular sectors. Rather than autarchic and self-referential movements
claiming to be the only legitimate representatives of the people, these canonic populist
formations were intrinsically anti-authoritarian. In fact, the People's Party merged into the
Democratic Party (to which it gave its social positioning), and the narodniki were divided
between a liberal wing (opposed by Lenin in the 1894 libel What the "Friends of the
People"Are) and a socialist wing which, after converting to Marxism (according to Plekhanov
and Vera Zasulich), founded the Russian Social Democracy (within which it fought Lenin).
Both wings remained attached to democratic freedoms.
Populism as such does not require the homogeneity of the people; in its early forms, it admitted
that the people is a plurality whose unity is based on a common desire for freedom that leads to
refusing the domination of oligarchic layers and reaffirming the democratic rights and powers
of ordinary citizens. Even when considered as a merely discursive tool that strategically
oversimplifies the political realm to build collective identification (Miscoiu 2012), the populist
unifying operation presupposes the heterogeneity of the people rather than its homogeneity.
Besides, discursively masking pluralism and internal conflicts to form the broadest possible
coalition and structure it around a single line of divide is a widely appealing electoral strategy
that is not distinctive of populism
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- which is why Laclau viewed populism as “the political
operation par excellence” (Laclau, 2005) - and that in no way entails the suppression of political
pluralism once in power.
Similarly, it is hard to contend that populist movements and thinkers are best defined by the
moralistic reduction of politics between a pure people and a corrupt elite. At best, moral
framings are “a constant in political life” (Katsambekis, 2022) and can thus hardly be used as
one of populism’s distinctive traits
2
. At worst, the opposite is true: as some authors would argue,
based on a socio-cultural approach, populism represents a ‘dirty’ form of politics that performs
the cultural habits of the lower classes into the institutional realm (Ostiguy, 2017).
Against the now dominant view, we argue that what distinguishes populism from other
democratic movements, and socialist movements in particular, consists specifically in two
features:
— Its defensive or reactive dimension: populism reacts to a process of de-democratization or
reacts to oligarchic (or elitist, or technocratic) tendencies; it does not carry the project of a new
society. The People’s Party and the narodniki intend to preserve and deepen what already exists,
1
Think about socialists emphasizing the divide between workers and capitalists, or neoliberals emphasizing the
divide between those who work hard and the “assisted”.
2
Consider again the moral condemnation of the “assisted” who fail to take responsibility for themselves, or
conservatives’ moral battle for the respect for “life” or for family values.

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whether the American democracy or the Russian peasant commune; Peronism fights Marxism
but wants to bring the plebs out of their misery and give them access to political dignity.
— Its confidence in the popular common sense: populism does not produce an articulated
doctrine, and in this sense, it is appropriate to speak of a "thin ideology". It should be
emphasized that this reliance on common sense does not necessarily mean invoking shared
beliefs or a national identity; it rests first and foremost on the conviction that each citizen is
fully competent to judge the policies that concern him or her.
Owing to its ideological plasticity (Taggart 2000), populism’s meaning varies a lot depending
on the nature of the common sense it appeals to and the sociological composition of the people
it mobilizes. Contrary to the much more precise figure of the industrial working class which
prevails in the Marxist tradition, the political subject of populism took different forms
throughout history. It ranges from the alliance of workers, farmers and self-employed adhering
to the ideals of small owners’ and self-made men’s democracy (People's Party), to the
communal peasantry of the Mir (narodniki), to the plebs, the "descamisados" that were
previously excluded from the political sphere (Latin American populisms). The people of
contemporary populist forces in Europe is quite different, too, as it consists of an attempt to
bring together several social classes severely affected by the post-2008 recession: the
impoverished middle class, the highly-qualified youth and the new poor of the urban and
suburban areas, together with the declining industrial working class (Gerbaudo 2017).
However, these movements display the same defensive-reactive dimension as their
predecessors: they react against the dismantling of welfare states and social democracy’s
abandoning of its reformist mission.
The ideological and sociological plasticity of populism thus enables it to take many different
forms, depending on the context. However, it also generates confusion in today’s debates in
media and academia, where radical right parties are called “populist” as soon as they claim to
represent “those who no longer feel represented”, even when their leaders are successful
businessmen fighting against the alleged “cultural hegemony of the Left”. Still, we contend that
the populist label, in light of its history, should be restricted to movements whose program
defends the interests of the popular sectors widely defined and promotes measures of social or
political democratization.
The historical core of populism can therefore be defined as the combination of two elements:
the promotion of the interests of ordinary people against the oligarchy and the valorization of
popular common sense. This core, which we take to be a necessary and sufficient condition for
being classified as populist, can be combined with a diversity of optional characteristics
3
, which
explains the diversity of populist movements and theories throughout history. What this
definition entails, however, is that we should not call “populist” movements (or theories) that
do not feature the core anti-oligarchic aspiration. In that regard, contemporary radical rights’
3
We take inspiration, here, from Mansbridge and Macedo’s (2019) “core-plus” approach to populism, while
deviating from their own definition of the core, which insists on the “moral” aspect of the populist battle against
the elite and leaves the common sense aspect outside of the core.

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approach is significantly different from both historical and contemporary forms of populism.
Their appeal to the popular sectors, while usually limited to the most reactionary parts of their
suburban and rural components in fear of social decline, is predicated upon the opposite
principle: they rely on the mobilization of widespread oligarchic affects - an identification with
the winners, not the losers (Savidan 2016) - and aggressively nationalist stances. In the US, the
support for Trump clearly relies on such forms of oligarchic affects, while the continuity with
historical populism is embodied by Bernie Sanders and the left of the Democratic Party (Frank
2020b). In France, the Rassemblement national often pits the hard-working people, in fear of
social decline, against “les assistés” (the beneficiaries of social assistance) - in particular way
during the 2022 presidential campaign, when Eric Zemmour threatened Le Pen on her right
flank (Ivaldi, 2022) - while this dimension was at play in the Yellow Vests movement too,
without being necessarily dominant (Blavier, 2021, Béroud & al., 2022). On the contrary, one
of the most prominent upholders of the populist approach within La France insoumise, François
Ruffin, regularly urges his movement to neutralize these oligarchic affects at play in the popular
constituencies by restaging the political battle as the one against the economic and political
elite.
3. Populism’s democratic ambivalences
When looking retrospectively at the policy achievements of historical populisms, they appear
as a sort of functional equivalent to the welfare state institutions built during the post-WWII
“social-democratic consensus” (Berman, 2006). However, the specific features of populism
compared to the social-democratic tradition - its defensive/reactive attitude and its reliance on
the immediacy of popular common sense - lead to a particularly ambivalent relation to
democracy.
It must be recognized, for instance, that the valorization of "common sense" can easily take an
identitarian, nationalistic and anti-intellectual turn that paves the way for a "right-wing” variant.
Given populism’s indeterminacy, the possibility of ideological slippage remains open. In
Russian populism, there was already a tendency to sacralize the people as an undifferentiated
unit with which everyone must identify (Karsenti 2020). Within the People's Party, the Knights
of Labor were tendentially hostile to Chinese immigration, as they falsely accused Chinese
workers of being unfree “bound” labor (Postel 2019). Arguably, France’s boulangisme (a
movement in which former communards, patriotic republicans and future tenors of the extreme
right, such as Barrès and Maurras, were mixed) could also be viewed as the earliest and most
prominent example of a populism tending towards the right. Populism’s egalitarian impulse can
be “re-coded” in nationalist terms, for example by subordinating social policies to "national
preference". In this scenario, populism is likely to produce policies that restrict the scope of
minority rights, thereby eroding the liberal pillar of modern democracies. Still, we argue that
this regression represents more of a side-effect of populism’s main features (its reliance on
common sense and relative ideological indeterminacy) than an inherent property of populism
as such. What is more, when the anti-oligarchic impetus becomes secondary as it is supplanted
by nationalist and exclusionary tropes, one should consider that populism has simply turned
into something else.

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In addition, the vagueness of populism’s democratic common sense, besides making ideological
shifts all too easy, tends to blur its concrete relation to specific democratic practices and make
it particularly sensitive to contextual variations. This is why we believe that the standard view
on the relationship between populism and democracy - that its inherent anti-pluralism contends
with democratic principles - must be revised. While the urge for democratization is part of the
raison d’être of populist actors, it can take many different forms, not all of which are up to the
demanding standards of modern democracy. The only way to gauge populism’s democratic
prospects is to analyze its concrete proposals on a case-by-case basis and to assess them on the
backdrop of the particular context in which they take place. As we shall see in the following
two subsections, there are about as many visions of (direct and representative) democracy as
populist actors. The intrinsic ambiguities of the populist common sense, in turn, make it a poor
response to the current crisis of political representation across Western societies.
What does “people’s power” mean?
The basic idea that democracy means rule by the people does not say much about the nature of
the popular subject, which, as we have seen, varies considerably across space and time. The
coalition between the impoverished middle class and the highly qualified urban youth that
contemporary populism attempts to bring together barely resembles the cross-class alliances of
the past, articulated respectively around the Midwestern farmers, the Russian rural communities
or the descamisados. Neither is there an obvious democratic form to be endorsed by those, like
populists, who want to empower the people. Depending on the context, almost any form of
government can be favored as long as it ensures popular control: promotion of referenda, call
for a constituent assembly to reorganize institutional balances, revocability of the elected
officials and term limits, etc. Nevertheless, the anti-oligarchic impulse means that some forms
will clearly be excluded. This is the case, for example, of the most elitist understandings of
democracy in which the role of the people is reduced to a choice among competing elites
(Schumpeter 1942). To remain a popular form of government, democracy must either mean
rule by genuine representatives of the people (vs detached elites) or rule by the people without
mediation (or some mix of the two). Let us examine these options in turn and see what kind of
implicit image of the people they carry with them.
Rule by genuine representatives of the people
Populism needs not be hostile to representation. One can be moved by an anti-oligarchic
impulse and yet recognize the need for and the value of political mediation. In contrast with the
widely held assumption that all forms of populism display some degree of hostility towards
intermediary bodies and representation (Rosanvallon 2020; Urbinati 2014; 2019), American
populists embraced representation and wanted the Parliament to regain sovereignty vis-à-vis
both the executive and private actors (Jäger 2021; 2022). They also supported the use of popular
initiatives, referenda and even the recall of federal judges, yet as complementary tools, against
a background of electoral representation, or as “last-ditch efforts to safeguard a programme”

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(Jäger 2021). These instruments of direct democracy which were codified in the early 1900’s
in many US states were not central in their platforms in the 1880’s and 1890’s, in contrast with
the economic policies they were pursuing. Hence, their support for instruments of direct
democracy seemed more circumstantial than ideological.
Contemporary populism is not necessarily anti-representation either. Whereas every populist
force criticizes the deterioration of political representation based on a shared “democratic
common sense”, their actual response varies according to their diagnosis of its main causes. On
the one hand, when they identify the strengthening of the executive branch at the expense of
the legislative as the main issue - as Podemos, La France insoumise, or the left-wing of the
Democratic Party in the US do - populist actors strongly advocate the reinforcement of
legislative assemblies. La France insoumise repeatedly called for the establishment of a 6th
Republic through a constituent process that would get rid of the French “hyper
presidentialism”
4
. Meanwhile, Podemos has always actively supported the extension of the
assemblies’ prerogatives at every level, from the regional to the European (Borriello and Brack,
2019). On the other hand, when the alleged privileges of corrupted political representatives are
the main target of populist criticism - as in the case of the Five Star Movement and the Yellow
Vests, for instance - they may favor measures (term limits, reduction in the number of MPs,
etc.) that actually weaken the assembly in front of the executive, even if they are promoted in
the name of better political representation.
Regardless of the context, there are several reasons why populists may favor representation
over direct democracy. Pragmatically, they may recognize the practical difficulty of a pure form
of direct democracy, or even the fact that citizens may legitimately prefer to be represented than
to have to make most decisions themselves. They may also value the mobilization potential of
democratic representation (Disch 2011). If, for example, they acknowledge that the people is
divided and needs to be unified in support of a common project, they will have reasons to value
representation in general and the mobilizing power of political parties in particular. This is
manifest, for example, in Chantal Mouffe’s plea for a left populism, which she seems to
understand in a strong representative and party-centered sense (see in particular Mouffe 2018:
48 and 55-57).
What pro-representation populists usually want, however, is some guarantees that
representation will not be captured by the elite or the oligarchy. In this respect, they may be in
favor of all sorts of democratic mechanisms allowing citizens to exercise more control over
their representatives (see Vergara 2020a)
5
. One example is the right to recall representatives -
a historical demand of socialist movements (Qvortrup 2020) taken up recently by the Yellow
Vests among others (Abrial et al. 2022). Another, more ambitious, is a kind of Tribunate of the
people, as once existed in the ancient Roman Republic and is now advocated by “plebeian”
thinkers such as John McCormick (2011) or Camila Vergara (2020b: 250-264).
4
On the more ambivalent case of “La France Insoumise”, see Cervera-Marzal, 2021.
5
This may apply more to activist populists and populist theorists than to some cynical citizens who would want
the representative system to “deliver what the people want without them having to pay continual attention to it”
(Stoker & Hay 2017).

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Rule by the people
The anti-oligarchic impulse, however, can also lead to skepticism about elections’ capacity to
bring to power genuine representatives of the people. If one takes into account, for example,
the inherent aristocratic character of elections (Manin 1997), i.e., their tendency to bring to
power people distinguishing themselves from the masses by some common traits, or the “iron
law” that political parties tend to take an oligarchic form (Michels 1911), there are reasons to
look for more direct ways of empowering the people.
Popular referendums are attractive, in this respect, because they are the most inclusive and
direct form of decision-making. When they are initiated by citizens and binding, in particular,
they appear as interesting instruments for the empowerment of the people. This is why populist
movements will usually have strong reasons to support their use. Populist leaders, in turn, may
value government-initiated referendums to strengthen their own legitimacy and show that their
claim to be genuine representatives of the people is valid. In practice, however, parties
characterized as populists under standard definitions of the term will not necessarily push
strongly for referendums (Gherghina and Pilet 2021) or make more intensive use of
referendums than non-populist actors (Gherghina and Silagadze 2021). This probably reflects
the fact that movements and parties unduly labeled as “populist” mix popular, anti-oligarchic
aspirations with strong, authoritarian leadership. Authoritarian leaders who claim to embody
the will of the people are likely to be reluctant to see their claim rejected in an unsuccessful
referendum (see Taggart 2000: 103-105).
Populist theorists and movements can also be more skeptical about referendums. They may be
aware of the risk of capture of initiatives and referendums by private interest-groups, and
sometimes by parties themselves. Eichenberger, Jaquet and Varone (2022: 349), in a balanced
review of the literature, refer to this as a possible “populist paradox”: whereas in principle direct
democracy mechanisms allow to circumvent captured politics, interest groups can capture
initiative and referendum processes that were meant to empower the people.
Populists may also regret the unreflective or individualistic
6
aspects of popular referendums
and therefore endorse other forms of popular empowerment such as participatory budgeting or
randomly selected citizens’ assemblies.
The case of citizens’ assemblies (also known as deliberative mini-publics) is particularly
interesting insofar as they combine populist and non-populist features, which make them
ambivalent from a populist viewpoint. On the one hand, citizens’ assemblies are clearly popular
and anti-elitist. The fundamental assumption that everyone is equally or at least sufficiently
competent to make political decisions (Rancière 2005) is the antithesis of the elitist (or
“aristocratic”) logic of elections, which were conceived as a way to single out the best rulers
6
Vergara (2020b: 4) claims that initiatives, referendums and recalls are, just like elections, “powers of the
individual, not the many as collective subject”.

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(Manin 1997). Empowered citizens’ assemblies can therefore be seen as a powerful instrument
to counter oligarchic tendencies (McCormick 2011). On the other hand, they empower only a
“mini-populus” (Dahl 1989: 340) - not the whole people, which can only hope to be adequately
represented by chance. What is more, the probabilities to accept the invitation if selected
(Jacquet 2020) and to weigh in deliberations, to have one’s voice heard (Sanders 1997) are
unequally distributed. One risk is therefore to see randomly selected representatives of the
people form a new elite disconnected from the wider public. This potential disconnection
between the mini- and the maxi-populus is seen favorably by deliberative theorists, who count
on inclusive and rational deliberations within the mini-populus to refine public opinion (Fishkin
2009). However, it is met with skepticism by those who want to empower the many, not the
few (Vergara 2020b: 228-231). Sortition offers rule by a mini-populus, not rule by the people.
In addition to this lack of inclusion, some populists are likely to be skeptical about the project
to promote peaceful deliberation. Emphasizing the divide between the people and the oligarchy,
populist theorists tend to picture politics as strongly adversarial, as a fight for power rather than
a process of collective reasoning (Mouffe 2005; 2018). As a result, they may appreciate the
popular feature of sortition, but they will usually dislike the deliberative one. Hence, they might
be more favorably inclined towards adversarial than deliberative uses of citizens’ assemblies.
Adversarial uses include McCormick’s (2011) idea of a Tribunate of the plebs or, to a lesser
extent, Gastil and Wright’s (2019) hybrid bicameral system, where the sortition assembly has
the power to veto legislation by the elected one.
An interesting difference between the two uses of citizens’ assemblies relates to how the people
is pictured. In McCormick’s work and in the way in which some political movements see
sortition, the people is seen as unified or easily unifiable against the elite. The citizens’
assembly is thus conceived as a unified body of largely interchangeable citizens acting as a
popular check on elected actors. Deliberativists, in contrast, tend to picture the people as more
heterogeneous and crossed by a diversity of cleavage lines. Hence, the emphasis will be on
mutual understanding and attempts to overcome disagreement through deliberation rather than
joint action against the elite.
Finally, if populists prefer institutions that empower the larger public instead of mini-publics
but are skeptical about referendum democracy, they may be more attracted by a third
alternative: council democracy. Council democracy is a pyramidal form of assembly
democracy, where the whole people can be gathered locally to make decisions and delegate
revocable representatives to higher ladders of decision-making (Lucardie 2014; Muldoon
2018). It has historically been defended by socialists, anarchists and radical republican
movements and theorists, and it seems to face a renewed interest in the academic literature
(Muldoon 2011; 2018; Vergara 2020b). Such a democratic form requires a break with the idea
of strong leaders - which is in any case not intrinsic to populism as we understand it.
In sum, there is a diversity of ways in which popular power can be promoted to fight oligarchic
tendencies. No single democratic institution is a “natural” ally of populism. Therefore, populist
movements’ and theorists’ institutional demands are likely to be highly dependent on contextual

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factors such as their perception of the functioning of elections, parties or referendums in a given
political context.
In that perspective, contemporary populism is not to be understood as a reaction against
representative democracy as such, but against the dysfunction of representation in liberal
democracies with oligarchic tendencies and technocratic orientations. As we shall see in the
next subsection, the fact that this reaction can sometimes take the form of hostility towards
intermediary bodies (public representatives, political parties, trade unions, etc.) is more
indicative of the current state of party democracy and of the loss of credibility of its main actors
than of the anti-pluralist “essence” of populism.
Populism in disintermediated democracies
Given its plasticity, populism has given many forms to the popular subject and the expression
of its will throughout history. Such diversity should warn us against the temptation to assess
the democratic credentials of populism in abstracto, as if it were by essence against the rule of
law, constitutional checks and balances and/or political representation. The common
denominator behind past and present forms of populism - the defense of a broad popular
coalition against oligarchic interests - is too loose to provide us with a specifically populist
“democratic road map” on the basis of which we could evaluate it.
This comes with at least two major consequences. Firstly, the openness and inclusivity of “the
people”, and the procedures by which populism gives voice to it, is not a pre-given but a matter
of contention between contradictory forces that shape the movements from within. For instance,
the American Populists were torn between vertical and horizontal practices, reductionary and
expansionary conceptions of the contours of the people (Grattan, 2016), and the Yellow Vests
movement only progressively got rid of the antisemitic and xenophobic components that were
initially visible within its ranks. Secondly, and more importantly for our purpose, populism’s
plasticity makes it particularly sensitive to external conditions, thus calling for a context-based
assessment of its democratic potential. The extent to which populism can be a threat to
democracy’s constitutional pillar or a corrective for its most elitist tendencies is hardly
separable from the context in which it arises. When criticizing the most authoritarian features
of the Peronist regime, for instance, to what extent are we evaluating its populist nature or, say,
the absence of a preexisting democratic culture of alternance and the incomplete autonomy of
state structures in postwar Argentina?
The same contextual warning holds for contemporary populism, which displays a fundamental
difference from its predecessors: whereas historical populism went hand-in-hand with the
development of mass politics, today’s populist breakthroughs in Europe are predicated upon its
decline. For the populists of the past, a flourishing civil society was key to the democratic
revival they were invoking, as it was the best lever to open up the political institutions to the
masses. Be it under the form of cooperatives, associations or trade unions, the activities of the
party were part of a much wider network of emancipatory practices (Grattan 2016, Jäger 2021).
By contrast, the recent populist upsurge in Europe took place in a wholly different
configuration, marked by the slow demise of party democracy and its acceleration in the wake

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of the 2008 economic crisis. The decline of the intermediary bodies (parties, churches, unions,
clubs, associations, etc.) that used to bind together specific groups and voice their claims have
created social atomization and widespread feelings of underrepresentation (Mair, 2013). The
reaction of mainstream parties, which have sought to insulate themselves by retreating into the
national and European institutions (Katz and Mair 1995, Bickerton 2012), has only fed the
democratic disenchantment further. On top of that, the perceived consensus of center-right and
center-left parties around austerity during the crisis of the eurozone has proved deleterious. By
widening the gap even more between citizens and institutions, and completing the crumbling
of the old mass parties, especially on the left, it paved the way for the emergence of populist
formations.
Given the loss of credibility that plagues the intermediation structures of party democracy, most
calls for better representation in the current context tend to be tinged with hostility towards
those structures. Here lies probably one of the most serious accusations against contemporary
populism, whose reliance on strong leadership and vertical forms of organization are said to
undermine the intermediary layers and actors that, at least since Tocqueville, are considered as
the true cornerstones of modern democracy (see for instance Müller 2021 and Osborne 2021).
Today’s populist forces, in fact, usually display an uneasy relationship - to say the least - with
other parties, trade unions and civil society organizations, which they view as bureaucratic
machines directly or indirectly responsible for the loss of popular control over political
decision-making. This, in turn, puts a serious limit on populism’s claims for a democratic
revival in step with the times. Owing to its “commonsensical” and “reactive” nature, populism
is keen to adopt simplistic and intuitive solutions that barely respond to the magnitude of the
democratic crisis it diagnoses.
Most populist actors have translated their promise of democratic revival into their own
organizational setting: in one way or another, they have taken their distance with the traditional
form of political parties. Calling themselves ‘movements’, they have adopted a light structure
and resorted to online decision-making procedures to bypass intermediary layers of
organization and create a direct relationship between a ‘hyperleader’ and his inner circle, on the
one hand, and a connected ‘superbase’, on the other (Gerbaudo, 2018). This anti-party approach
was often predicated upon the sacralization of the Internet as a democratic panacea. In so doing,
however, populists rarely fulfill their promises. Research has repeatedly shown that their
participatory tools often turn out to be merely plebiscitary and pseudo-participatory settings
(Biancalana and Vittori, 2021) and that hierarchies among members, supposedly kicked out of
the door, tend to come back through the window (Gomez and Ramiro 2019). Their
organizational setup often leads to a split between superficial and volatile forms of involvement
for the many, and more intense and perennial engagement for the few - usually the activists
who enjoy higher levels of social capital. The old mass parties, notwithstanding their
sociological flaws as bureaucratic structures oriented towards self-conservation, were at least
aiming at the construction of a micro-society (with its own culture, worldview, and solidarity
networks) that could also work as a vector of popular emancipation. Finally, the populist
crusade against ‘politics as usual’ might prove deleterious as it further weakens the already

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weakened mediation structures
7
. By rejecting the classic party form, populists often throw the
baby out with the bath water, mistaking one of the symptoms of the current democratic malaise
for its cause. Or, to put it differently, they tend to reject party organization in general rather
than simply resisting the process of cartelization.
At best, therefore, populism fails to address one of the key democratic issues of our time: “How
to revitalize a moribund civil society and empower the popular sectors that feel increasingly
alienated from politics?” At worst, its organizational expedients tend to further accelerate the
process of disintermediation and social atomization that plague Western societies. To be sure,
populism is hardly the only factor to blame for the current fading away of mediation structures.
“Men resemble their times more than they do their fathers”, as the proverb goes. Just as the
American Populists belonged to the post-Civil War era (Postel 2007), today’s populism is the
reflection of the particular environment in which it arises: an increasingly disintermediated form
of democracy. In that regard, the anti-party feelings are in no way specific to populism as such,
but are shared by almost all the new competitors to mainstream parties. This category includes
the radical right forces, but also the new centrist leaders who push their liberal-reformist agenda
through anti-establishment rhetoric and “start-up” electoral platforms (Macron’s Renaissance,
Renzi’s Italia Viva, Rivera’s Ciudadanos) and which, for these very reasons, are often
mistakenly described as populists, too (Fougère and Barthold 2020). This, in turn, should warn
us even more against overstretching the concept - given the family resemblances between those
actors, which simply stem from the structural context in which they arise, we might end up
seeing populists everywhere - and allocating the blame too quickly, since populism is hardly
the only actor involved in the current democratic impasse.
All in all, therefore, the main threat that populism poses to modern democracy might be slightly
different from what is often claimed. Given the variety of populism’s conceptions of who is the
people and how it should exercise its sovereignty, it is hard to find a Manichean and anti-
pluralist “essence” of populism, universal and timeless, that would threaten the constitutional
pillar of democracy. However, if one adopts a more exacting conception of democracy based
on its postwar developments in Western societies - in which parties give life to a truly “organic”
form of democracy - populism appears as helpless at best, and deleterious at worst. Its
ideological and organizational limits preclude it from proposing a credible solution to the
decline of party democracy, and might even deepen the widespread malaise that this decline
engenders. While it is certainly unfair to blame populism - at least in the way this paper proposes
to define it - for all the current democratic flaws, it should also be clear that a force that cannot
fulfill its promise to ensure popular participation and contain the spiral of political apathy and
resentment, in the long run, does not deserve to carry the flag of democratic regeneration either.
7
One could even argue that the more established actors are discredited, the more populist forces are tempted by a
radically anti-political approach that adds fuel to a fire. The Italian Five Star Movement stands as a perfect example
of this tendency.

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4. Conclusion
This article was meant to explore in more depth what we see as a complex and varying
relationship between populism and democracy. Our argument can be summarized in five main
claims. First, populism comes in many guises, both historically and today. Second, what unifies
the diversity of populist movements and parties from their origin up until now is neither the
claim that politics should reflect the general will of the people, nor mere anti-elitism, nor anti-
pluralism, nor fascination for charismatic leaders. It is a popular reaction to oligarchic
tendencies in the name of democracy. Third, the egalitarian impulse of populist forces is mainly
defensive-reactive in nature and rooted in a democratic commonsense, rather than in a fully-
fledged ideological worldview aiming at the establishment of a radically new social order. The
next two claims stem from the latter: on the one hand, there is no “natural” institutional
translation of populist aspirations, no single institutional formula protecting against oligarchic
tendencies; on the other, populist movements’ and authors’ visions of democracy,
representation and intermediary bodies are highly context-dependent. Therefore, we contend
that any serious appraisal of populism’s true democratic potential should analyze its interaction
with the context in which it arises and thrives.
Despite the strong contextual differences between the populist experiences on the American
continent and in Russia between the late 19th century and the mid-20th - while representative
democracy was already on the rise in the USA, it still was little more than a mirage in Russia
and Argentina - they occur in the period that saw the irruption of the popular masses on the
political scene. By contrast, recent populist movements have emerged in a context of
disintermediation and “demassification” occurring across Western societies. The discrediting
of political parties and other intermediary bodies that ensued largely explains the evolution
from a highly organized populism embedded in party democracy to anti-party forms of
populism relying on vertical and digital shortcuts. What has changed in the meantime is the
status of representative democracy - and party democracy in particular - in the collective
imaginary. Along the way, populism has followed the general evolution from a sort of
Durkheimian, corporatist democracy to a more Schumpeterian conception where elites compete
for people’s unenthusiastic support through simplistic media rhetoric and targeted electoral
marketing.
This new dominant democratic form appears to us as poorly emancipatory and insufficiently
addressed by existing populist challengers, who often turn out to be the most enthusiastic
gravediggers of party democracy. At least three major pitfalls have been highlighted in this
paper. First, the commonsensical appraisal of “the people”, if not accompanied by strong
ideological keystones, is too vague to prevent shifts towards anti-pluralist, exclusive,
nationalistic and xenophobic interpretations. Second, the diagnosis of a crisis of political
representation, if not rooted in a careful analysis of its nature and its causes, can easily turn into
a simplistic rejection of representation in its principle. Finally, the reliance of today’s populism
on online communication and organizational shortcuts circumvents the crucial issue of mass
mobilization and organization in times of disintermediation, which any seriously pro-
democratic force should take up courageously. Although populism should not bear alone the

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responsibility for the last two issues - which have more to do with the present state of democratic
politics than with intrinsic features of populism – even the most progressive among its current
avatars have so far failed to address them convincingly.
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