What Is Populism?

by Jan-Werner Müller

I argue that it is a necessary but not sufficient condition to be critical of elites in order to count as a populist.

In addition to being antielitist, populists are always antipluralist.

The claim to exclusive representation is not an empirical one; it is always distinctly moral.

populism is always a form of identity politics (though not all versions of identity politics are populist).

Populist governance exhibits three features: attempts to hijack the state apparatus, corruption and “mass clientelism” (trading material benefits or bureaucratic favors for political support by citizens who become the populists’ “clients”), and efforts systematically to suppress civil society.

one discovers that populism is not a useful corrective for a democracy that somehow has come to be too “elite-driven,” as many observers hold.

Populism, I suggest, is a particular moralistic imagination of politics, a way of perceiving the political world that sets a morally pure and fully unified—but, I shall argue, ultimately fictional—people against elites who are deemed corrupt or in some other way morally inferior.

populists are always antipluralist: populists claim that they, and only they, represent the people.27 Other political competitors are just part of the immoral, corrupt elite, or so populists say, while not having power themselves; when in government, they will not recognize anything like a legitimate opposition.

There can be no populism, in other words, without someone speaking in the name of the people as a whole.

For a political actor or movement to be populist, it must claim that a part of the people is the people—and that only the populist authentically identifies and represents this real or true people.

What they usually suggest is that there is a singular common good, that the people can discern and will it, and that a politician or a party (or, less plausibly, a movement) can unambiguously implement it as policy.

Conspiracy theories are thus not a curious addition to populist rhetoric; they are rooted in and emerge from the very logic of populism itself.

“Democracy inaugurates the experience of an ungraspable, uncontrollable society in which the people will be said to be sovereign, of course, but whose identity will constantly be open to question, whose identity will remain forever latent.”38