Populismo

DRAFT—PLEASE CITE ONLY WITH PERMISSION
Prepared for the conference
“Populism of the Twenty-First Century”
Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars
Washington, D.C.
October 8, 2009
What do we talk about when we talk about populism?
“Más populista será tu abuela!”
Francisco Panizza
London School of Economics
The title of this article alludes to seemingly never ending debates aboutthe definition
of populism and to the strong negative connotations associated with the term. I am neither
ignoring different views on populism or seeking to settle the debate but I would like to
suggest that there is a considerable corpus of work that argues that populism is primarily
characterized by the discursive constitution of a relation of political antagonism between “the
people” andsome kind of oppressive power structure or collective actor. Margaret Canovan
(1999, 2) stresses the systemic nature of the enemies of the people when she defines
populism as “an appeal to “the people” against both the established structure of power and
the dominant ideas and values,” while Carlos de la Torre (2009, 24) highlights the actors in
conflict when he defines it as the constructionof a Manichean and moral discourse that
positions the “pueblo” in antagonistic opposition to the ‘'oligarchy’ in the pursuit of greater
political participation and inclusion (see also Laclau 1977, 2005a, 2005b ; Panizza 2005,
Peruzzotti 2008). Crucial for this notion of populism is its linguistic or discursive nature
(Laclau 1997, 2005a). In his book “The Populist Persuasion. An Americanhistory” Michael
Kazin (1995, 5) defines it “as persistent yet mutable style of political rhetoric.” He traces the

history of populism throughout America’s political life, as its changes the mutually
constructed identity of the people and of their oppressors and morphs its political colors by
being hegemonized by progressive radicals and right wing conservatives at different points
in time.There are of course other definitions of populism and many questions left unsettled
by this minimalist definition, including whether populism refers to leaders, movements or
political regimes, about the links between leaders and followers and above all, about its
democratic or anti-democratic effects (For definitions of populism that while stressing its
political nature take into considerationother elements, see Freidenberg 2008; Knight 1998;
Roberts 2005, 2007; Weyland 2001. For a discussion of the relations between populism and
democracy see Abts and Rummens 2007, Arditi 2004, Panizza 2005; Panizza and Miorelli
2009). In this paper I take the discursive notion of populism as my starting point and
deconstruct it in order to argue that: 1) An understanding of populism needs to takeinto
account its rhetorical, representational, political and normative dimensions and the relations
between them. 2) If populism is a political discourse or, as Kazin (1995, 3) puts it, “a flexible
mode of persuasion”, it makes more sense to talk about “populist interventions” rather than
about populist actors or regimes 3) The stress placed by some studies of populism on the
antagonisticnature of its political appeal underscores its normative elements, or what
Margaret Canovan (1999) calls its “redemptive” dimension. 4) While normative judgments
about populism are inevitable, the relationship between populism and democracy cannot be
established in abstract terms but should be assessed in relation to the political context in
which they emerge.
In the following sections I look ateach of the above dimensions of populism and
conclude by suggesting that different varieties of populist intervention have context-

dependent relations with democratic institutions and that it important to make explicit their
normative implications.
Talking and looking “like the people”
I start this section with a political story that encapsulates many of the issues as well as
the...