Discoursing Populism: Types, Typologies and Contexts

Although the idea of populism is as old as Phaleas of Chalcedon, it has gained a new currency in the aftermath of the 2008 global economic meltdown. For Phaleas, if the right to private property and democracy were the pillars of vox populi, the current wave of populist politics areplagued by what Yochai Benkler et al. call an “epistemic crisis in media and politics that threatens the integrity of democratic processes, erodes trust in public institutions, and exacerbates social divisions” (2018, n.p.). Even if the very term ‘populism’“carries associations of crowd-pleasing and cheap emotionalism” (2011, 100), as the South African anthropologist Jean Comaroff argues, “a certain populist radicalism –an opposition to the dictatorship and doxa of elites […] is a necessary, if not sufficient condition of mass transformative movements in all times and places” (104; emphasis original). Reaffirming this view, Chantal Mouffe (2018) has called for a radical reframing of populist politics that would not only counteract the politics of exclusion or polarization, but also preserve the existing social collectivesand institutions (e.g. Podemos of Spain, the Zapatistas of Mexico). It is the very paradox of populism’s dystopic disruptions and utopic desiresthat form the basis for the essays featured in this special issue. […]