In this conversation with Lorena Drakula, Yannis Stavrakakis – author of the new Research Handbook on Populism and the book Populist Discourse. Recasting Populism Research – discusses the past and future of populism research; analyzes the outdated stereotypes that shape the political role of the ‘populist’ label; and argues for returning passions to the very core of democratic representation.
Yannis Stavrakakis is a Professor of Political Science at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and director of the Laboratory for the Study of Democracy. He was one of the founding co-conveners of the Populism Specialist Group of the Political Studies Association (UK) and also directed the POPULISMUS Observatory.
Lorena Drakula: One of the interesting questions that comes up in a chapter of the Research Handbook which is also referenced to in your book is the populist hype. It is basically a tendency to exaggerate the significance of populism in contemporary politics. How would you analyze the performative effects of this hype, both within academia and in broader society?
Yannis Stavrakakis: There is such a thing as a “populist hype” – there is practically no public debate or newspaper that does not mention populism. Populism is bound to come up at one point or the other. Within academia too, almost all our colleagues in political science have published something, at least one paper, on populism. So, there is some sort of hype around populism. Of course, this has to do with recent developments within politics, and with all the various phenomena we see around us in many different hotspots and geographical areas.
I do not think this is necessarily a problem, depending on the reflexivity and the kind of approach we utilize to understand what is happening.
The problem is not the populist hype per se, but that the understandings of populism which are circulating between politics and academia very often reproduce rather obsolete stereotypes from the Cold War period.
The question is how we could introduce a little bit more reflexivity, historical depth, and a comparative perspective so that we can reach a much more comprehensive understanding.
At any rate, discussions of populism are not the problem. If we need to discuss populism, we will discuss populism. If populism is around us, we have to discuss it.
The other problem which has to do with the populist hype is, however, that we cannot discuss populism alone. Sometimes you have papers that focus on populism without connecting it to the general background: the trajectory of liberal democracy in recent years, the ideological upheavals, and so on. So, we have to discuss populism, we have to discuss it reflexively, but we also have to situate it within broader debates within political science and other social sciences. Sometimes this is done; but usually, populism is analyzed through debates around extremism, or debates around far-right exclusively, especially in Europe. I think we have to extract this topic from such exclusive associations and try to see it in the context of a much broader field. Sometimes populism connects with extremism, sometimes it connects with the far right, but not always and certainly not exclusively.
We have to situate populism within the broader trajectory of democratic politics, within modernity, within the rubric of representation.
I think representation is very useful in trying to understand what populism is about. So, we need to study populism, but we need to situate it also within these broader debates, and that will allow a much more reflexive orientation to emerge within the study of this phenomenon.
LD: In your work, you highlight the tendency to label any popular mobilization as “populist,” often with a negative connotation, illuminating the anti-populist bias in much of contemporary populism research as well as public discourse. Could you elaborate on how this labeling occurs and its implications for our understanding of what constitutes “normal, rational, and professional politics”?
YS: This has to do with the need to situate everything within a broader field of democratic representative politics, as was mentioned earlier.
Representation also requires disagreement, political antagonism, and sometimes even polarization, which is not always pernicious.
We can have polarization that negatively affects the representative system, but we can have an agonistic ideological polarization that benefits a system that has stagnated and needs some new energy.
Antagonism may introduce this energy and, eventually, you can have a positive outcome. This has happened in many cases. The problem is that because we often have such a very antagonistic political climate, it is also bound to influence academic discourse as well – academics are also citizens, after all. They have their own sensibilities. No one, I think, can claim that they come to the study of populism from some sort of neutral position and without any political sensibilities or political orientation. This has greatly influenced the way populism has been theorized.
Margaret Canovan, who has been a very important theorist of populism, especially in former years, has highlighted that contemporary democracy has many different aspects. It has a pragmatic aspect: there is this technocratic idea that we need to reach a consensus, and we need to entertain solutions that are technocratically well prepared. But this does not exhaust democratic politics. Margaret Canovan points out that democracy also has a redemptive dimension. You are in the democratic game to achieve something. You have desires that come into play. This is also related to what Chantal Mouffe has theorized as the need to have a passionate dimension within politics. Politics is not only a technocratic game, citizens have to be encouraged and inspired to go to vote.
Why do we have so much abstention in recent elections? People have to be energized somehow. They have to develop this desire and they have to understand that when you vote and when you participate in politics it really affects your life. It is important to have passionate identifications, to have this other dimension, which usually gets sidestepped in the normalized, rational, technocratic, pragmatic operation of politics. Sometimes people who espouse such a technocratic pragmatic dimension become anti-populists and people who want to reintroduce passion and real alternatives into politics are in turn branded populists. So, the distinction between populism and anti-populism has a lot of relevance for this understanding of democracy.
As a result, in systemic, technocratic, pragmatic, rationalist discourses, populism becomes this monster, this form of contamination that somehow corrupts democratic politics.
But we have known since ancient Athens, for the last three thousand years or so, that politics is also an antagonistic game in which you need to have passion, you need to have different alternatives, opportunities, and different orientations within politics. Populism, then, often becomes the vehicle through which this passionate, really political element enters the field. This does not mean, of course, that populism is always benign, that populism is always progressive, or always productive.
If we study the canon from the 19th century up until today, arguably the majority of populist phenomena were rather egalitarian, progressive, pro-democratic, renewing and enriching democracy to a certain extent.
But, of course, you also have phenomena that claim to speak on behalf of the people, in the name of the people, but actually prioritize xenophobic, far-right, anti-democratic perspectives. So, we need to be very clear about the multiplicity and the variability of the populist phenomenon.
In general, that applies also to anti-populist discourses. You can have an anti-populist discourse that becomes anti-populist because it faces an anti-democratic populism. But you can also have anti-populist discourses that become anti-populist because they do not pay enough attention to popular sovereignty and the people as an active political subject in politics; and we should not forget that popular sovereignty is the foundation on which our liberal democratic representative system has been based. So, this cannot be removed from the picture.
LD: Many scholars in the field advocate for a clearer demarcation between right and left populism. Is there an added benefit then of creating these labels of populism or anti-populism, instead of just talking about conservatism or socialism, et cetera? Does this practice not, once again, legitimize liberalism as the only game in town?
YS: Populism may not be an ideology in the sense of classic left-wing or right-wing ideologies. It is a discourse in my view – this is the argument of my monograph, which continues the work by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. Discourse is not merely a rhetorical move; it is not merely something linguistic. Discourse is a trope, a pattern; it is a particular way in which political meaning is articulated. The citizens, the voters, identify with it on a variety of levels, which may be linguistic, non-linguistic, emotional, affective, and all sorts of other things. There is a certain dynamic involved here.
Now, this particular way of organizing and performing politics is always, of course, articulated through particular ideologies – left-wing, right-wing, centrist. We also have centrist populism. If we study the various ideologies that have been historically articulated in connection with a populist type of politics, the canon is probably democratic and participatory. This can be seen by going back to the first populists, the American People’s Party in the 1890s and the Russian populists, but also in the 20th century.
Populism cannot be restricted to some sort of egalitarian, participatory, pro-democratic orientation, because anybody can speak in the name of the people. There is no way to restrict it in that way.
This is my main answer – I am against any kind of normative restriction. It is not a question of some very intelligent analyst pointing to the one thing that is populism. The idea may be very intelligent, but when you get into politics, populism is used in all sorts of different ways.
Now, especially within Europe, populism has acquired a very pejorative and negative meaning. Sometimes, it does not really matter if there is populism or not. It is chosen as a weapon to discredit, to delegitimize an opponent who may not be populist at all. He/she may not even refer to the people. So, it is most important to introduce proper criteria that will give the opportunity, both to academics and to citizens, to understand what we are talking about.
From my point of view, the main criteria to determine whether something we have in front of us is populist or not is whether it talks about the people, whether it talks about popular sovereignty, and whether it wants to advance popular empowerment. We will see later on whether it does it correctly or incorrectly, whether it does it in an appropriate way or not, and how exactly, with reference to what ideology. However, the first criterion concerns the location of the people and popular sovereignty, the popular will.
The second criterion is whether you have a strong antagonistic dimension in the discourse under examination. Populism creates this dichotomic, antagonistic space within politics. You need both these two criteria to be able to more or less determine that something that we have in front of us is populist. Then, of course, it could be right-wing populist or left-wing populist. It could be all sorts of different types of populism, so, you will have to introduce a typology – typologies are extremely important.
The first question you need to ask is who exactly belongs to these people? There you will have many different answers. There are populist discourses in which only people who have a particular type of blood, belong to a particular race, or belong to a particular nation, are true members of the people. That would be exclusionary. This is a very useful concept which Cas Mudde and Cristobal Rovira Kaltwasser introduced. So, you can have exclusionary populism along this line, you can have far-right populism; but you also have other populisms in which anybody can be a member of the people. Immigrants can be members of the people, people belonging to different nations or different races can be members. In that case, you will probably have an inclusionary type of populism, maybe left-wing or egalitarian populism. Then, the second question within this typology is how exactly is the antagonism formulated? How is the antagonism articulated?
All populisms have a very strong antagonistic dimension, but not all antagonisms are the same. There are predominantly vertical antagonisms and there are predominantly horizontal antagonisms.
Horizontal antagonisms are formulated along the lines of the in-group/out-group distinction, and then you have the nation, you have race, etc. Predominantly vertical distinctions have to do with the political elite, the economic elite, and the disenfranchised people, whose voices cannot be heard, and who feel that they are not part of the political game. They need their voice to be heard. In that second example, you would probably have inclusionary populism, left-wing populism.
As I tried to argue at the beginning, populism is not an ideology. It is a way of articulating politics, political meaning, and political practices. It gets articulated with ideologies, one way or the other, and then we need clear criteria: who is a populist? Who is not a populist? We need typologies to understand who these people are who are talked about, what is the antagonism, and how is this antagonism articulated. If we have a particular case, and if we apply this line of questioning, we can really create a more or less accurate mapping of what is this field in front of us.
Maybe we have non-populist discourses, maybe we have a variety of different populist discourses, maybe we have left-wing populism and right-wing populism, maybe we have many varieties of left-wing populism or many varieties of right-wing populism. In each case, we have to study them very carefully to understand what is really at stake.
LD: You also discuss the ambivalent relationship between populism and democracy, suggesting that this tension has been a persistent challenge in scholarship. How do you navigate this complexity, and what insights can you offer into understanding populism within democratic frameworks?
YS: In my view, populism usually emerges only within representative democratic systems. If we go back in history, go back to the very beginning, we can learn from the examples of American populism and Russian populism in the 19th century. In the American case, you have a new party, people who are very frustrated with the political system in the United States, which does not represent the interests, demands, and desires of the common people, of farmers and workers. They think that the Democratic and the Republican parties, which were already present in the 19th century, are not providing an adequate representation of these social strata, and they put forward an alternative, something that attempts to rejuvenate democracy, to deepen democracy, to enrich democracy. Their populism was not an anti-democratic project.
Of course, the Russian case was a little bit different because you had the tsar and a very different system in the 19th century. Then again, the Russian populists campaigned for the introduction of democratic institutions. So, already from the beginning, populism was very attached to the problems, or the frustrations emerging within representative democratic systems, or on the way towards one. Populism basically involved an effort to reframe these systems, to enrich and amend them. I think this continues into the 20th century and the 21st.
The division, for example, between populism and anti-populism may indicate different models of democracy which are accepted and put forward by different strata and different people, different parties. I think both anti-populists and populists are democratic in most cases. There are a few populist phenomena that can be called anti-democratic. There are also anti-populists who move in an anti-democratic direction – definitely post-democratic, but also anti-democratic. Nevertheless, I would say that the majority of both populists and anti-populists are in favor of some type of democracy – we just have to accept that there are different understandings of democracy.
The problem emerges because, in most cases, democratic systems have developed in a way that they now more or less accept what we usually call democratic elitism. You can go back to Schumpeter or to other authors prioritizing consensus…
Excluding antagonism from political life, excluding the passions and leading into a very rationalist understanding of politics makes it very difficult for citizens to relate, to engage, to identify, to take part in this game.
Particular strata feel that their interests have been neglected, their voice cannot be heard. It is a legitimate demand to have your voice heard. It is a legitimate demand to call for participation in the political game. So, in most of these cases, populism reintroduces into the representative democratic system some sort of more participatory understanding of democracy, a more radical understanding of democracy. In most cases, it is therefore a struggle and a choice between different models of democracy.
LD: Both books are very much oriented toward researchers of populism, trying to complicate issues that have been taken for granted in mainstream scholarship. But Populist Discourse goes in depth as your individual contribution and proposes a “reflexive reorientation of populism studies.” Could you discuss how your alternative approach, influenced by Laclau and Mouffe, expands upon or diverges from existing theoretical frameworks in the field?
YS: The two books are obviously related because they deal with the same topic, but they do it in a very different way. The Research Handbook – and the research part is very important here – attempts to map the field of populism research in general, but it is an exercise in mapping that gives priority to methodological questions that have emerged in the last few years. I think we are experiencing a very important modification of populism research currently, if not a paradigm shift. Maybe I am a little too optimistic, but I think that a lot of new methods are emerging. A lot of newer social scientific orientations become interested in populism, for example, anthropology. We also live in a new, digital age, which is important when we discuss populism. We have the gender issue – what is the relationship between gender and populism? It is not one-directional. If we do comparative research, you get variability and need reflexivity. It becomes a very complex field. We have tried with Giorgios Katsambekis, my co-editor, to select very challenging and stimulating new orientations and methods in a total of 46 chapters to provide the young researcher – the person who starts doing a PhD on populism right now, for example – with some sort of methodological pluralism, and a much bigger choice, a much broader choice of scientific tools to articulate her or his own research.
Now the monograph Populist Discourse is much more programmatic. The aim is not such an overall mapping, although it does offer historical contextualization, an analysis of the main perspectives populist research, and a critique of those perspectives. However, it tries to present this knowledge – and, centrally, the emphasis on discourse – in a much more organized way, so that it can be used as a toolkit by new researchers. The forward-looking research orientation is thus a commonality between the two books.
My monograph then builds on the perspective which was first developed by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe; I am trying to reorganize and present it in a much more accessible and appealing way. There are also attempts to combine it with other theories. I already mentioned Margaret Canovan who is very important for a more comprehensive analysis of populism, but I also use historical perspectives, E. P. Thompson, for example, psychoanalysis to a certain extent, and other approaches that can allow us to formulate a more reflexive understanding of politics. This is a priority because you need to understand politics in a particular way.
You need to understand that collective identification is important, that voters are not merely individuals that will vote once every four or five years, and then sit on their couches and do nothing.
People have affects, passions, grievances, demands, which they have to express somehow, and they often call for participation. These are aspects that I am trying to put together persuasively, using a variety of analytical tools that have been very rarely used within populism research. The book is multidisciplinary. In addition, it places a lot of importance on a performative, sociocultural orientation because it is very compatible with discourse theory.
I am also trying to formulate certain issues that have not been adequately covered by a discursive approach in a more challenging and persuasive way. For example, the relationship between the linguistic and the non-linguistic. Even though Laclau and Mouffe do stress that relationship, most research which has been produced from a discursive perspective has given priority to textual materials, speeches, manifestos, electoral materials, and so on. Usually, this non-linguistic aspect, the aspect of passionate attachment, the aspect of collective identification, and enjoyment is missing. Enjoyment is supposed to be part of politics. Politics is not a merely rational choice between one, two, three, or four options. It has to do with how exactly we see our lives developing. So, I am trying to provide a little bit more detail on some of these issues, the issue of materialism, the issue of enjoyment, the issue of class…
What is the relationship with class? There is the notion that Laclau and Mouffe disregard class because they want to move into a different perspective with their focus on identity. This is not entirely the case, but we need to see how exactly we can reintroduce class into a more comprehensive analysis.
Yet, I do not want to spoil the satisfaction of the reader. I have tried to frame the whole monograph in an appealing way. For example, I am very proud of the cover. I would like very much to thank William Kentridge, the artist whose work is reproduced there, and the Kentridge studio for giving us permission to do so. It is a cover that will hopefully make a lot of people open the book – not buy the book, open the book. And when you open the book, you will see that there is a particular type of articulation. You have certain arguments that are put in bullet points and in bold. Somebody who is not an expert on populism, who does not want to further work on populism, can start from those. If you are more interested, you will go into the actual argumentation. There are also a lot of footnotes, which are addressed to the person who is very much into populism studies. When I was writing the book, I had different readers in mind.
If you read the introduction, you will also discover a particular line of questioning: I am trying to show that there is a lot more to understand about populism than what is usually discussed in this connection. There is a questioning of existing approaches and the broader rhetoric that we usually get from the media, within politics, and so forth. Hopefully, this line of questioning will stimulate the readers to go through the other chapters as well.
In cooperation with Ferenc Laczó.
