Understanding Populism: Ideology, Variants, and Impact

In January 2017, the inaugural address of the 45th President of the United States contained a phrase political scientists recognized almost immediately: "The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer."

It was, in essence, the grammar of Franklin Roosevelt's 1936 campaign against "economic royalists." Same populist logic. Same rhetorical construction of a virtuous, overlooked majority against a corrupt and powerful few, redeployed eight decades later by a billionaire real-estate developer.

That this exact formulation showed up seamlessly in both a New Deal Democrat and a nationalist Republican administration tells you something important about populism: it isn't a policy program. It's a political language. And it speaks fluently across ideological boundaries.

Populism's persistence and versatility have made it one of the most discussed, least agreed-upon concepts in contemporary political science. People invoke it to describe Hugo Chávez and Viktor Orbán. Bernie Sanders and Marine Le Pen. Evo Morales and Jair Bolsonaro, a cast of characters who agree on almost nothing when it comes to economics, social policy, or foreign affairs.

What they share isn't a program. It's a particular way of dividing the political world, and a particular claim about who should govern it. Understanding that shared grammar, not the policy content attached to it, is the key to understanding what populism actually is, and why it's reshaping democratic politics worldwide.

The challenge runs deeper than most academic categories, because populism isn't merely an academic category. It's a fighting word. Accusing a politician of populism typically implies demagoguery, irresponsibility, or incipient authoritarianism. Populist movements, meanwhile, rarely accept the label for themselves. They claim, instead, to simply be giving voice to the people.

That normative charge built into the concept means analyzing it requires holding two things at once: the concept has to stay precise enough to be analytically useful, while its emotional and political weight gets recognized and set aside.

"Populism is best defined as a thin-centered ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic groups, 'the pure people' versus 'the corrupt elite,' and which argues that politics should be an expression of the volonte generale (general will) of the people." - Cas Mudde & Cristobal Rovira Kaltwasser, Populism: A Very Short Introduction (2017)

Key Definitions

A handful of terms keep showing up in any serious discussion of populism, and it's worth being precise about what each one actually means before going further.

Start with populism itself. At its core, it's a thin-centered ideology, one that splits society into two antagonistic groups, the pure people and the corrupt elite, and insists that politics should express the people's general will. "Thin-centered" is doing real work in that sentence.

An ideology like liberalism or socialism is thick: it specifies economic systems, theories of rights, a whole comprehensive vision of society. Populism's core is much smaller than that. On its own it can't generate a complete political program, which is exactly why it always ends up attaching itself to something thicker, socialism, say, or nationalism, to fill in the actual policy content.

What populists mean by "the people" isn't every citizen. It's a constructed subject: a morally virtuous, homogeneous majority whose authentic will has supposedly been ignored or stolen by someone else. That someone else is the elite, populism's corrupt antagonist, and who counts as the elite shifts depending on which flavor of populism you're looking at.

Left populism defines it economically, banks, corporations, oligarchs. Right populism defines it culturally instead, educated cosmopolitans, the media, progressive institutions.

Nativism often rides alongside right-wing populism specifically. It's the belief that a state should belong exclusively to its native group, and it tends to be the mechanism that decides who actually gets counted as "the people" in that version of the story.

And one more concept worth knowing: the general will, or volonte generale, Rousseau's term for what people collectively want or need, as distinct from just adding up everyone's individual preferences. Populists claim, often quite explicitly, to know this will and to embody it themselves.

The Academic Debate: What Kind of Thing Is Populism?

Cas Mudde and Cristobal Rovira Kaltwasser's definition is the one you'll run into most often.^[1] In their 2017 primer, they classify populism as a "thin-centered ideology," a term they borrow from political theorist Michael Freeden.

It's a taxonomic point, but it carries weight. Think about a full ideology: liberalism, conservatism, fascism, socialism. Each one contains a comprehensive account of how society should be organized, economic arrangements, rights, historical narratives, a whole theory of human nature. Populism's core is far thinner than that.

It claims society splits between a pure people and a corrupt elite, and that the former's general will should govern. That's it. That's the whole core. Everything else, what economic policy to run, who counts as the nation, how the state should be structured, gets borrowed from whatever thicker ideology populism happens to attach itself to.

That borrowing is exactly what explains its cross-ideological range. Right-wing populism fills the thin core with nationalism, nativism, and authoritarianism. The elite gets defined culturally there, cosmopolitan, educated, progressive, and the people get defined ethnically or nationally.

Left-wing populism fills the identical core with socialism or social democracy. The elite becomes economic, corporations, the wealthy, and the people become the working class and the economically excluded. Both versions are genuinely populist.

Neither one exhausts what the concept actually is.

Not everyone frames it this way, though. Ernesto Laclau took a sharply different route in "On Populist Reason" (2005), and the gap between his approach and Mudde and Kaltwasser's says a lot about why this debate hasn't settled. They're comparative political scientists working empirically. Laclau was a post-structuralist philosopher working in discourse theory, and it shows in everything he argues.

Populism isn't a type of ideology at all for Laclau. It's a universal political logic.^[4] Building any political "we," he argues, any collective subjectivity, requires the same antagonism-building that populism performs. The people aren't some pre-political object sitting there waiting to be represented.

They get constructed through political practice itself, through scattered grievances getting stitched into one unified demand against a named enemy. Populism, in this account, is baked into democracy. It's not a deviation from it.

Then there's Jan-Werner Müller. His slim but influential "What Is Populism?" (2016) stakes out yet another position. He agrees with Mudde and Kaltwasser on the people-versus-elite division. But the truly defining feature, he thinks, is something else: anti-pluralism. The populist's claim that they, and only they, represent the real people.^[2]

Not just rhetoric, Müller insists. Real structural weight. Once a populist leader claims to embody the authentic will of the real people, anyone who opposes them, courts, press, opposition parties, civil society, stops counting as a legitimate competitor. They become an obstacle instead.

A servant of the corrupt elite. An enemy of the people. That logic is what delegitimizes the institutional architecture of liberal democracy itself. Müller's conclusion follows directly. Populism is always, at least potentially, a threat to liberal democratic norms.

Left Populism and Right Populism: The Same Logic, Different Content

Left-wing and right-wing populism come down to ideological content. Not populist form.

Both mobilize the people-versus-elite logic. Both claim to speak for the authentic majority against a corrupt few. Both lean on charismatic leadership and a rhetoric of crisis and betrayal. What differs is the identity of the elite. And the people.

Left populism makes the elite an economic class. Corporations, financial institutions, oligarchs, the politicians they capture. The people become the working class, the economically precarious, the exploited. The policies that follow aim at redistribution, nationalization, labor protection, curtailing financial power.

Hugo Chávez's Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela is probably the clearest 21st-century case. The people reclaiming the country from an oligarchic elite aligned with American imperialism, that was the explicit frame.

Syriza in Greece. Podemos in Spain. Both followed a similar arc, both emerging out of the Eurozone debt crisis as challenges to an international financial establishment seen as imposing austerity on ordinary Europeans.

Even Bernie Sanders fits here, less obviously. The many versus the billionaire class. That message is structurally populist, even though his actual policy program is mainstream social democracy.

Right populism flips the elite to a cultural class instead. Urban professionals, academics, journalists, progressive activists, cosmopolitan internationalists. The people get defined through exclusion: the traditional, the rooted, the religiously observant, the native-born. Through resentment of whoever looks down on them. Nativism fits easily into this frame, since immigrants and minorities get cast as tools or beneficiaries of that cultural elite.

Donald Trump built his version around a "deep state" and "fake news media." Elite enemies of "real Americans."

Viktor Orbán runs a long conflict with George Soros, a figure who functions in his rhetoric as the personification of cosmopolitan financial-liberal elitism.

Jair Bolsonaro took aim at Brazilian educational and media elites. Same logic. And the Brexit movement framed Brussels bureaucrats and metropolitan "Remainers" as enemies of the British people.

The Global Wave: Evidence and Measurement

Populism feels globally ascendant. That's not just a media narrative. Empirical research backs up a real rise. The Team Populism project, led by Kirk Hawkins and colleagues, built holistic grading methods for scoring populist speech in political leaders across the world.

Their coding draws a real line. Genuine populism, a consistent people-versus-elite logic, versus what they call "pluralism," an acknowledgment of diverse legitimate interests. Using that method, researchers found a substantial rise in populist leaders actually holding executive power. Jordan Kyle and Limor Gultchin of the Tony Blair Institute counted roughly 8 populist leaders in power globally in the 1990s. By 2018, that number had climbed to 25.

And this wave hasn't just hit fragile or developing states. It's reached established democracies too. The United States, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, the United Kingdom. All of them have seen significant populist movements either enter mainstream power or seriously challenge it.

The numbers back this up. The V-Dem, or Varieties of Democracy, project's liberal democracy index shows declining scores across multiple countries that have experienced populist governments. Hungary stands out most starkly. Real backsliding is also documented in Poland, Turkey, Brazil, India, and beyond.

So what actually explains the timing and location of this surge? Sergei Guriev and Elias Papaioannou's 2022 survey in the Journal of Economic Literature pulls together the empirical literature and names a set of precipitants. Economic crises, particularly the slow recovery from 2008 across the West. Rapid immigration. High-profile corruption scandals. Real shifts in the media ecosystem.^[5]

Television, and later social media, cut into the gatekeeping power establishment media and party organizations once held. That let populist entrepreneurs reach voters directly and cheaply. Each precipitant raises the salience of the "corrupt elite" narrative. And the appeal of whoever promises to sweep it away.

Demand and Supply: Why Do Voters Choose Populism?

Much of the research on populism's rise focuses on the demand side. What conditions in voters' lives and psychologies actually make them receptive to populist appeals in the first place? Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart's "Cultural Backlash" thesis is the most developed demand-side account out there.^[3]

Their argument: postmaterialist value change, the rise of feminist, multicultural, and cosmopolitan values among younger, educated populations, triggered a real backlash. Communities whose traditional identities and status felt under attack pushed back. Critically, cultural insecurity predicts right-populist support more strongly than economic grievance alone. It isn't primarily the poorest voters supporting right populism. It's those who feel culturally displaced.

Roger Eatwell and Matthew Goodwin's "National Populism" (2018) offers a complementary framework. The four Ds. Distrust: mainstream political institutions seen as captured and unresponsive. Destruction: the sense that the system is rigged, that traditional fairness has broken down.

Deprivation: both economic and cultural, the feeling of being left behind in material terms and in status. Dealignment: the collapse of traditional party loyalties that once kept voters anchored to mainstream parties even when they were dissatisfied.^[7] All four have intensified across Western democracies over the past thirty years.

Noam Gidron and Peter Hall's 2020 research in Comparative Political Studies offers yet another angle. Social integration.^[6] The key driver isn't economic deprivation on its own, they argue. It's social marginalization.

The subjective sense of not being respected. Of mattering less. Of belonging to a group others look down on. This dignity-based account lines up with psychological research too: Right-Wing Authoritarianism and Social Dominance Orientation both predict right-populist support across countries, pointing to underlying orientations toward authority, order, and group hierarchy that populist movements know how to activate and channel.

The supply side matters just as much. It just gets less attention. Guriev and Papaioannou document that the same social conditions can produce very different political outcomes, depending on whether an entrepreneurial populist leader actually emerges to exploit them. Institutional factors shape this too.

Proportional representation systems let new populist parties enter parliaments more easily than winner-take-all systems do. Weak party identification leaves voters more available for mobilization. Media structures can either amplify or dampen populist messaging, depending on how they're built.

A populist zeitgeist, the widespread feeling that something is fundamentally rotten in the establishment, is necessary. Not sufficient. Someone still has to build the political vehicle. And drive it.

Populism and Democracy: Correction or Corrosion?

The relationship between populism and democracy is the most contested question in the literature. No simple answer here.

Mudde and Kaltwasser note, at the analytical level, that populism actually contains a democratic core. The people should govern. Elites should be accountable. Excluded majorities deserve representation.

Where elites have genuinely captured institutions and ignored popular majorities, populist pressure can force real democratic corrections. Chávez's initial expansion of political participation among Venezuela's poor fits this lens. So does the way Podemos forced established Spanish parties to actually engage with austerity's human costs.

But Müller's anti-pluralism critique cuts to the heart of why populism can turn corrosive too. Liberal democracy needs more than majority rule. It needs pluralism. The protection of minority rights.

Independent courts. A free press. Institutional space for opposition to contest and eventually replace whoever's in power. Populism's logic holds that the authentic people's will is singular, and that the populist leader embodies it. That logic leads straight to delegitimizing these institutional features.

Courts that rule against the populist government get dismissed as elite conspiracies. A press that criticizes gets condemned as fake or corrupt. Opposition parties get accused of representing foreign or oligarchic interests, not genuine constituencies. Minorities who don't fit the constructed image of the people get excluded from its protection. Entirely.

This pattern is well documented empirically. Yascha Mounk and Roberto Foa's research using World Values Survey data found that democratic commitment, particularly among younger generations, declined significantly in several established democracies in the years before the populist wave even hit. Anna Grzymala-Busse and other scholars of Central Eastern Europe documented something similar.

Poland and Hungary used their democratic mandates to systematically dismantle judicial independence, electoral fairness, and press freedom.

The populist threat to democracy isn't usually a coup. It's gradual institutional erosion. What Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way call "competitive authoritarianism."

Populism, Nationalism, and Their Overlap

Right-wing populism combines with nationalism so often that people routinely conflate the two concepts. The distinction still matters. Analytically and practically.

Nationalism is a full ideology about the proper relation between political and national units. Each nation deserves its own state. Political loyalty should be nationally based. It can be civic, defined by citizenship and shared institutions. Or ethnic, defined by descent, language, and culture. Populism makes no inherent claims about nationhood at all. It's too thin an ideology for that.

The conflation happens for a reason though. Right-wing populism in Europe and America almost always attaches nativism, the belief that the state should be inhabited by the native group, to its populist core. Trump's construction of the American people explicitly excluded immigrants, Muslims, and cosmopolitan elites. Orbán's construction of the Hungarian people does the same: Soros-influenced NGOs, Muslim refugees, European federalists, all excluded.

Run that same populist grammar through a left-wing lens, though, and you get something entirely different. Evo Morales's construction of "the people" in Bolivia centered on indigenous identity and the colonial economic elite. Podemos in Spain constructed a cross-class people against a political-financial caste instead. Neither version is nationalist in the right-wing sense.

This distinction matters for political practice. Opposing populism effectively means addressing its actual core: the perception of elite corruption and popular exclusion. Not whatever ideological content happens to attach to it in a given context. Dismissing populist voters as simply nationalist or authoritarian misses the democratic grievance that populism also genuinely expresses.

Measuring Populism Across Cases

Political scientists have developed several methods for identifying and measuring populism empirically. The Team Populism project uses expert coders applying holistic grading to political speeches and texts, rating them on a scale running from pure populism to pure pluralism. Kirk Hawkins and Bruno Castanho Silva have also built automated text-analysis tools that can process large speech corpora to produce populism scores.

The CLEA, or Comparative Legislative Election Archive, provides electoral data that researchers combine with populism codings to analyze electoral performance. The V-Dem liberal democracy index supplies outcome measures against which populist governments can be assessed.

These measures let researchers actually test claims empirically. Guriev and Papaioannou's 2022 review finds that populist governments in office are associated with democratic backsliding, increased executive power concentration, and reduced judicial independence. That confirms Müller's analytical concern with real empirical data.

They also find that economic underperformance among populist governments is common over medium-term horizons. Though populists are often elected during economic crises their predecessors created in the first place.

Why Populism's Grammar Persists

What the opening anecdote about Roosevelt and Trump reveals is simple. Populism's grammar isn't a product of some particular historical moment. It's a recurring feature of democratic politics.

Wherever political institutions become unresponsive enough. Wherever economic inequality becomes visible enough. Wherever cultural change moves fast enough. The conditions for populist mobilization show up. The specific content shifts with context: who the people are, who the elite are, what restoration actually means. But the underlying logic is as old as democracy itself. A unified, betrayed people demanding to reclaim its sovereign will from corrupt hands.

None of this means populism is inevitable. Or uniformly dangerous. Strong democratic institutions, responsive political parties, economic policies that distribute gains broadly, and political cultures that take social dignity seriously, all of that can reduce the demand for populist movements in the first place. And some degree of populist pressure may be necessary just to keep elite accountability functioning at all. The permanent possibility that excluded majorities might mobilize.

The real challenge for democratic theory and practice is distinguishing between the democratic corrective populism can offer and the anti-pluralist corrosion it frequently delivers once in power.

Related reading: why-democracies-fail covers the broader failure patterns. what-is-nationalism digs into the national-identity side specifically. And why-political-polarization-increases looks at how media ecosystems feed into all of this.

Sources & Further Reading

1. Mudde, C., & Kaltwasser, C. R. (2017). Populism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press.
2. Muller, J.-W. (2016). What Is Populism? University of Pennsylvania Press.
3. Norris, P., & Inglehart, R. (2019). Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism. Cambridge University Press.
4. Laclau, E. (2005). On Populist Reason. Verso.
5. Guriev, S., & Papaioannou, E. (2022). The political economy of populism. Journal of Economic Literature, 60(3), 753-832. DOI: 10.1257/jel.20201452
6. Gidron, N., & Hall, P. A. (2020). Populism as a problem of social integration. Comparative Political Studies, 53(7), 1027-1059. DOI: 10.1177/0010414019879947
7. Eatwell, R., & Goodwin, M. (2018). National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy. Pelican.