Taking stock of the field of populism research

Are ideational approaches ‘moralistic’ and post-foundational discursive approaches ‘normative

Bibliographic Data

ID6353271
AuthorsSeongcheol Kim (0000-0001-6703-4465)
Year2022
Volume42
Issue4
Pages492-504
Publication date2022-11-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenuePolitics (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0032-3268 • E-ISSN: 1467-9256
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/02633957211007053
OpenAlexW3158717532
LanguageEN
Citations received13
References cited31

This article sets out to examine two claims that have increasingly come to define the dividing lines between the ideational and the post-foundational discursive approaches to populism: namely, that the former is moralistic and the latter is normative in orientation. The article considers the conceptual merits of both critiques while using them to further examine some of the implicit assumptions and pitfalls within Cas Mudde’s and Ernesto Laclau’s paradigmatic conceptualizations of populism. It is argued that ideational scholars’ attribution of a moralistic particularity to populism runs the risk of pathologizing the latter for characteristics that are arguably constitutive of all politics, while the danger of a certain crypto-normativity can be seen in Laclau’s tendency to equate populism with the political and simultaneously emphasize its emancipatory effects. The key difference between the two approaches ultimately consists in the location that they assign to populism within the wider topography of politics itself

Attribution · Epistemology · Field (mathematics · Normative · Political science · Politics · Populism · Sociology · German legal, social, and political studies · Hate Speech and Cyberbullying Detection · Law · Philosophy · Populism, Right-Wing Movements · Psychology · Social Psychology

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