What Is Populism? Quotes

“populism is strong in places with weak party systems. Where previously coherent and entrenched party systems broke down, chances for populists clearly increased”
― Jan-Werner Müller, What Is Populism?

“Many populist victors continue to behave like victims; majorities act like mistreated minorities.”
― Jan-Werner Müller, What Is Populism?

“In short, the problem is never the populist’s imperfect capacity to represent the people’s will; rather, it’s always the institutions that somehow produce the wrong outcomes. So even if they look properly democratic, there must be something going on behind the scenes that allows corrupt elites to continue to betray the people. Conspiracy theories are thus not a curious addition to populist rhetoric; they are rooted in and emerge from the very logic of populism itself.”
― Jan-Werner Müller, What Is Populism?

“In addition to being antielitist, populists are always antipluralist. Populists claim that they, and they alone, represent the people.”
― Jan-Werner Müller, What Is Populism?

“… egy PiS-kormány vagy egy Fidesz-kormány nem csupán egy PiS-államot vagy egy Fidesz-államot alakít ki; arra törekszik, hogy létrehozza a PiS-népet, illetve a Fidesz-népet (gyakran valamiféle ezzel megbízott, kormányközeli civil társadalom segédletével). A populisták megteremtik azt a homogén népet, aminek mindig is a nevében beszéltek.”
― Jan-Werner Müller, What Is Populism?

“Populists, by contrast, will persist with their representative claim no matter what; because their claim is of moral and symbolic- not an empirical- nature, it cannot be disproven.”
― Jan-Werner Müller, What Is Populism?

“Principled antipluralism and the commitment to “direct representation” explain another feature of populist politics”
― Jan-Werner Muller, What Is Populism?

“What follows from this understanding of populism as an exclusionary form of identity politics is that populism tends to pose a danger to democracy. For democracy requires pluralism and the recognition that we need to find fair terms of living together as free”
― Jan-Werner Müller, What Is Populism?

“Populist constitutions are designed to limit the power of nonpopulists, even when the latter form the government. Conflict then becomes inevitable. The constitution ceases to be a framework for politics and instead is treated as a purely partisan instrument to capture the polity.”
― Jan-Werner Müller, What Is Populism?

“Populists are, after all, often deemed to be heirs of the Jacobins.”
― Jan-Werner Müller, What Is Populism?

“populists are not generally “against institutions,” and they are not destined to self-destruct once in power. They only oppose those institutions that, in their view, fail to produce the morally (as opposed to empirically) correct political outcomes. And that happens only when they are in opposition. Populists in power are fine with institutions—which is to say, their institutions.”
― Jan-Werner Müller, What Is Populism?

“populism is inherently hostile to the mechanisms and, ultimately, the values commonly associated with constitutionalism: constraints on the will of the majority, checks and balances, protections for minorities, and even fundamental rights.”
― Jan-Werner Müller, What Is Populism?

“The game is being rigged, but it is not impossible—yet—to win an election on the basis of criticizing the populists in power. Perhaps, then, a designation like “defective democracy” would be more appropriate. Democracy has been damaged and is in need of serious repair, but it would be misleading and premature to speak of dictatorship.”
― Jan-Werner Müller, What Is Populism?

“...even if ballots are not stuffed by the ruling party on the day of the election, a vote can be undemocratic if the opposition can never make its case properly and journalists are prevented from reporting a government’s failures.”
― Jan-Werner Müller, What Is Populism?

“We have to distinguish illiberal societies from places where freedom of speech and assembly, media pluralism, and the protection of minorities are under attack. These political rights are not just about liberalism (or the rule of law); they are constitutive of democracy as such.”
― Jan-Werner Müller, What Is Populism?

“Even for the most minimal definitions of democracy—as a mechanism to ensure peaceful turnovers in power after a process of popular will-formation —it is crucial that citizens be well informed about politics; otherwise, governments can hardly be held accountable.”
― Jan-Werner Müller, What Is Populism?

“The danger to democracies today is not some comprehensive ideology that systematically denies democratic ideals. The danger is populism—a degraded form of democracy that promises to make good on democracy’s highest ideals (“Let the people rule!”). The danger comes, in other words, from within the democratic world—the political actors posing the danger speak the language of democratic values.”
― Jan-Werner Müller, What Is Populism?

“A “crisis” is not an objective state of affairs but a matter of interpretation. Populist will often eagerly frame a situation as a crisis, calling it an existential threat, because such a crisis then serves to legitimate populist governance.”
― Jan-Werner Müller, What Is Populism?

“Contrary to what liberals like to believe sometimes, not everything populists say is necessarily demagogic or mendacious—but, ultimately, their self-presentations is based on one big lie: that there is a singular people of which they are the only representatives. To fight them, one needs to understand, and undermine, that core claim.”
― Jan-Werner Müller, What Is Populism?

“It can often seem that populists claim to represent the common good as willed by the people. On closer inspection, it turns out that what matters for populists is less the product of a genuine process of will-formation or a common good that anyone with common sense can glean than a symbolic representation of the “real people” from which the correct policy is then deduced. This renders the political position of a populist immune to empirical refutation. Populists can always play off the “real people” or “silent majority” against elected representatives and the official outcome of a vote.”
― Jan-Werner Müller, What Is Populism?

“Not everyone who criticizes elites is a populist. In addition to being antielitist, populists are antipluralist. They claim that they and they alone represent the people. All other political competitors are essentially illegitimate, and anyone who does not support them is not properly part of the people. When in opposition, populists will necessarily insist that elites are immoral, whereas the people are a moral, homogeneous entity whose will cannot err.”
― Jan-Werner Müller, What Is Populism?

“In Italy, it is not Beppe Grillo’s complaints about Italy’s la casta that should lead one to worry about him as a populist but his assertion that his movement wants (and deserves) nothing less than 100 percent of the seats in parliament, because all other contenders are supposedly corrupt and immoral.”
― Jan-Werner Müller, What Is Populism?

“The major differences between democracy and populism should have become clear by now: one enables majorities to authorize representatives whose actions may or may not turn out to conform to what a majority of citizens expected or would have wished for; the other pretends that no action of a populist government can be questioned, because “the people” have willed it so. The one assumes fallible, contestable judgments by changing majorities; the other imagines a homogeneous entity outside all institutions whose identity and ideas can be fully represented. The one assumes, if anything, a people of individuals, so that in the end only numbers (in elections) count; the other takes for granted a more or less mysterious “substance” and the fact that even large numbers of individuals (even majorities) can fail to express that substance properly. The one presumes that decisions made after democratic procedures have been followed are not “moral” in such a way that all opposition must be considered immoral; the other postulates one properly moral decision even in circumstances of deep disagreement about morality (and policy). Finally—and most importantly—the one takes it that “the people” can never appear in a noninstitutionalized manner and, in particular, accepts that a majority (and even an “overwhelming majority,” a beloved term of Vladimir Putin) in parliament is not “the people” and cannot speak in the name of the people; the other presumes precisely the opposite.”
― Jan-Werner Müller, What Is Populism?

“It is almost a cliché to point out that many constitutions have evolved because of struggles for inclusion and because ordinary “citizen interpreters” of the constitution have sought to redeem previously unrealized moral claims contained in a founding document.36 The not-so-trivial point is that those fighting for inclusion have rarely claimed “We and only we are the people.” On the contrary, they have usually claimed “We are also the people” (with attendant claims of “we also represent the people” by various leaders). Constitutions with democratic principles allow for an open-ended contestation of what those principles might mean in any given period; they allow new publics to come into being on the basis of a novel claim to representation. Citizens who never thought of themselves as having much in common can respond to an unsuspected appeal to being represented and all of a sudden see themselves as a collective actor—as individuals capable of acting in concert”
― Jan-Werner Müller, What Is Populism?

“The claim for an unconstrained popular will is plausible for populists when they are in opposition; after all, they aim to pit an authentic expression of the populus as uninstitutionalized, nonproceduralized corpus mysticum against the actual results of an existing political system. In such circumstances, it is also plausible for them to say that the vox populi is one—and that checks and balances, divisions of power, and so on, cannot allow the singular, homogeneous will of the singular, homogeneous people to emerge clearly. Yet when in power, populists tend to be much less skeptical about constitutionalism as a means of creating constraints on what they interpret to be the popular will—except that the popular will (never given empirically, but always construed morally) has first to be ascertained by populists, and then appropriately constitutionalized. Or, picking up a distinction developed by Martin Loughlin, positive, or constructive, constitutionalism is followed by negative, or restraining, constitutionalism.20 Populists will seek to perpetuate what they regard as the proper image of the morally pure people (the proper constitutional identity, if you will) and then constitutionalize policies that supposedly conform to their image of the people. Hence populist constitutionalism will not necessarily privilege popular participation, nor will populists always try somehow to “constitutionalize the charisma” of a popular leader in the way that Bruce Ackerman has suggested.”
― Jan-Werner Müller, What Is Populism?

“What the “old establishment” or “corrupt, immoral elites” supposedly have always done, the populists will also end up doing—only, one would have thought, without guilt and with a supposedly democratic justification.”
― Jan-Werner Müller, What Is Populism?

“The notion that populists in power are bound to fail one way or another is comforting. It’s also an illusion. For one thing, while populist parties do indeed protest against elites, this does not mean that populism in government will become contradictory. First of all, all failures of populists in government can still be blamed on elites acting behind the scenes, whether at home or abroad (here we see again the not-so-accidental connection between populism and conspiracy theories). Many populist victors continue to behave like victims; majorities act like mistreated minorities.”
― Jan-Werner Müller, What Is Populism?

“What distinguishes democratic politicians from populists is that the former make representative claims in the form of something like hypotheses that can be empirically disproven on the basis of the actual results of regular procedures and institutions like elections.67 Or, as Paulina Ochoa Espejo has argued, democrats make claims about the people that are self-limiting and are conceived of as fallible.68 In some sense, they’d have to subscribe to Beckett’s famous words in Worstward Ho: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” Populists, by contrast, will persist with their representative claim no matter what; because their claim is of a moral and symbolic—not an empirical—nature, it cannot be disproven. When in opposition, populists are bound to cast doubt on the institutions that produce the “morally wrong” outcomes. Hence they can accurately be described as “enemies of institutions”—although not of institutions in general. They are merely the enemies of mechanisms of representation that fail to vindicate their claim to excusive moral representation.”
― Jan-Werner Müller, What Is Populism?

“populist parties are particularly prone to internal authoritarianism. If there is only one common good and only one way to represent it faithfully (as opposed to a self-consciously partisan but also self-consciously fallible interpretation of what the common good might be), then disagreement within the party that claims to be the sole legitimate representative of the common good obviously cannot be permissible.61 And if there is only one “symbolically correct” representation of the real people—the understanding on which populists always fall back, as we have seen—then there’s also not much point in debating that.”
― Jan-Werner Müller, What Is Populism?

“populists have no problem with representation as long as they are the representatives; similarly, they are fine with elites as long as they are the elites leading the people.”
― Jan-Werner Müller, What Is Populism?