In January 2017, the inaugural address of the 45th President of the United States contained a phrase that 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" — the same populist logic, the 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 particular formulation appeared seamlessly in both a New Deal Democrat and a nationalist Republican administration tells you something important about populism: it is not a policy program. It is a political language, and it speaks fluently across ideological boundaries.
Populism's persistence and versatility have made it one of the most discussed and least agreed-upon concepts in contemporary political science. It is invoked 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 regarding economics, social policy, or foreign affairs. What they share is a particular way of dividing the political world and a particular claim about who should govern it. Understanding that shared grammar, rather than the policy content attached to it, is the key to understanding what populism actually is — and why it is reshaping democratic politics across the world.
The challenge is compounded because populism is not merely an academic category. It is a fighting word. Accusing a politician of populism typically implies demagoguery, irresponsibility, or incipient authoritarianism. Conversely, populist movements rarely accept the label for themselves — they claim, instead, simply to be giving voice to the people. This normative charge embedded in the concept means that analyzing it requires holding two things simultaneously: the concept must be precise enough to be analytically useful, while its emotional and political freight must be 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
Populism: A thin-centered ideology that divides society into two antagonistic groups — the pure people and the corrupt elite — and holds that politics should express the general will of the people.
Thin-centered ideology: An ideology with a limited core of ideas that does not generate a complete political program on its own, and therefore always attaches to thicker ideologies (socialism, nationalism, etc.) to fill in policy content.
The people: In populist discourse, not all citizens but a constructed subject — a morally virtuous, homogeneous majority whose authentic will has been ignored or stolen by elites.
The elite: The corrupt antagonist of populist discourse; defined economically in left populism (banks, corporations, oligarchs) and culturally in right populism (educated cosmopolitans, media, progressive institutions).
Nativism: The belief that the state should be inhabited exclusively by the native group; frequently combined with right-wing populism to define who counts as "the people."
Thin vs. thick ideology: Liberalism and socialism are thick — they specify economic systems, theories of rights, and comprehensive visions of society. Populism is thin — its core claims are few, which is why it attaches so readily to such different programs.
General will (volonte generale): Rousseau's concept of what the people collectively want or need, as distinct from the sum of individual preferences. Populists claim to know and embody this will.
The Academic Debate: What Kind of Thing Is Populism?
The most influential contemporary definition of populism comes from Cas Mudde and Cristobal Rovira Kaltwasser. In their 2017 primer, they classify it as a "thin-centered ideology" — a term borrowed from political theorist Michael Freeden. The insight here is taxonomic but consequential. A full ideology — liberalism, conservatism, fascism, socialism — contains a comprehensive account of how society should be organized: economic arrangements, rights, historical narratives, conceptions of human nature. Populism's core is far thinner: it claims that society is divided between a pure people and a corrupt elite, and that the general will of the former should govern. That is the whole of it. Everything else — what economic policy to pursue, who the nation is, how the state should be structured — gets filled in by the thicker ideology to which populism attaches.
This explains the phenomenon's remarkable cross-ideological range. Right-wing populism fills in the thin core with nationalism, nativism, and authoritarianism: the elite is culturally defined (cosmopolitan, educated, progressive), and the people are defined ethnically or nationally. Left-wing populism fills in the same core with socialism or social democracy: the elite is economically defined (corporations, the wealthy), and the people are the working class and the economically excluded. Both constructions are genuinely populist, and neither exhausts the concept.
A quite different theoretical framework comes from Ernesto Laclau's "On Populist Reason" (2005). Where Mudde and Kaltwasser are empiricists working from comparative political science, Laclau is a post-structuralist philosopher working from discourse theory. For Laclau, populism is not a type of ideology but a universal political logic. All political subjectivity — the construction of any collective "we" — requires the kind of antagonism-building that populism performs. The people is not a pre-political object waiting to be represented; it is constructed through political practice, through the articulation of disparate grievances into a unified demand against an identified enemy. In Laclau's account, populism is intrinsic to democracy, not a deviation from it.
Jan-Werner Müller, in his slim but influential "What Is Populism?" (2016), stakes out a third position. Müller agrees with Mudde and Kaltwasser that populism involves a people-versus-elite division. But he argues that the truly defining feature is anti-pluralism: the populist's claim that they, and only they, represent the real people. This move, Müller contends, is not merely rhetorical — it has structural implications. If the populist leader embodies the authentic will of the real people, then opponents — courts, press, opposition parties, civil society — are not legitimate competitors but obstacles: servants of the corrupt elite, enemies of the people. This logic delegitimizes the institutional architecture of liberal democracy. Müller concludes that populism is always, at least potentially, a threat to liberal democratic norms.
Left Populism and Right Populism: The Same Logic, Different Content
The distinction between left-wing and right-wing populism is one of 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 typically feature charismatic leadership and a rhetoric of crisis and betrayal. What differs is the identity of the elite and the people.
Left populism identifies the elite as an economic class: corporations, financial institutions, oligarchs, and the politicians they capture. The people are the working class, the economically precarious, and the exploited. This frame generates policies aimed at redistribution, nationalization, labor protection, and curtailment of financial power. The most prominent 21st-century examples include Hugo Chávez's Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela, which explicitly framed its program as the people reclaiming Venezuela from an oligarchic elite aligned with American imperialism; Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain, which emerged from the Eurozone debt crisis as challenges to an international financial establishment perceived as imposing austerity on ordinary Europeans; and the political campaigns of Bernie Sanders in the United States, whose consistent message of the many versus the billionaire class is structurally populist even if his policy program is mainstream social democracy.
Right populism identifies the elite as a cultural class: urban professionals, academics, journalists, progressive activists, cosmopolitan internationalists. The people are defined through exclusion — they are the traditional, the rooted, the religiously observant, the native-born — and through resentment of those who look down on them. This frame combines easily with nativism, since immigrants and minorities can be cast as tools or beneficiaries of the cultural elite. Examples include Donald Trump's construction of a "deep state" and "fake news media" as elite enemies of "real Americans"; Viktor Orbán's ongoing conflict with George Soros (a figure who functions in his rhetoric as the personification of cosmopolitan financial-liberal elitism); Jair Bolsonaro's campaign against Brazilian educational and media elites; and the Brexit movement's construction of Brussels bureaucrats and metropolitan "Remainers" as enemies of the British people.
| Feature | Left Populism | Right Populism |
|---|---|---|
| Elite defined as | Economic class (corporations, banks) | Cultural class (media, academics, cosmopolitans) |
| People defined as | Working class, economically marginalized | Native population, traditionalists, "ordinary folk" |
| Common policy direction | Redistribution, nationalization, labor rights | Immigration restriction, cultural restoration, protectionism |
| Examples | Chávez, Podemos, Syriza, Sanders | Trump, Orbán, Bolsonaro, Farage |
| Frequent companion ideology | Socialism, social democracy | Nationalism, nativism |
The Global Wave: Evidence and Measurement
The perception that populism is globally ascendant is not merely a media narrative. Empirical research supports a significant rise. The Team Populism project, led by Kirk Hawkins and colleagues, developed holistic grading methods for populist speech in political leaders globally. Their coding distinguishes genuine populism (consistent people-versus-elite logic) from what they call "pluralism" (acknowledgment of diverse legitimate interests). Using this method, researchers documented a substantial increase in populist leaders holding executive power: Jordan Kyle and Limor Gultchin of the Tony Blair Institute counted roughly 8 populist leaders in power globally in the 1990s and 25 by 2018.
Crucially, this wave has affected established democracies, not only fragile or developing states. The United States, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the United Kingdom have all seen significant populist movements enter or challenge mainstream power. The V-Dem (Varieties of Democracy) project's liberal democracy index shows declining scores in multiple countries that experienced populist governments — Hungary most starkly, with backsliding also documented in Poland, Turkey, Brazil, India, and elsewhere.
What explains the timing and location of the populist surge? Sergei Guriev and Elias Papaioannou's 2022 survey in the Journal of Economic Literature synthesizes the empirical literature and identifies a set of precipitants: economic crises (particularly the slow recovery from 2008 in the West), rapid immigration, high-profile corruption scandals, and changes in media ecosystems. Television, and later social media, reduced the gatekeeping power of establishment media and party organizations, allowing populist entrepreneurs to reach voters directly and cheaply. Each of these precipitants increases the salience of the "corrupt elite" narrative and the appeal of those who promise to sweep it away.
Demand and Supply: Why Do Voters Choose Populism?
Much of the research on populism's rise addresses the demand side — what conditions in voters' lives and psychologies make them receptive to populist appeals. Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart's "Cultural Backlash" thesis is the most developed demand-side account. Their argument is that postmaterialist value change — the rise of feminist, multicultural, and cosmopolitan values among younger, educated populations — triggered a values backlash among communities whose traditional identities and status were perceived to be under attack. Critically, they find that cultural insecurity is a stronger predictor of populist right support than economic grievance alone; it is not primarily the poorest voters who support right populism, but those who feel culturally displaced.
Roger Eatwell and Matthew Goodwin's "National Populism" (2018) provides a complementary framework through what they call the four Ds: distrust (of mainstream political institutions, which are seen as captured and unresponsive), destruction (of perceived traditional fairness — the sense that the system is rigged), deprivation (both economic and cultural — the sense of being left behind in both material and status terms), and dealignment (the collapse of traditional party loyalties that kept voters anchored to mainstream parties even when dissatisfied). 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 a complementary perspective through the lens of social integration. They argue that the key driver of populist support is not economic deprivation per se but social marginalization — the subjective sense of not being respected, of mattering less, of belonging to a group that others look down on. This dignity-based account aligns with psychological research: 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 activate and channel.
The supply side is equally important but receives less attention. Guriev and Papaioannou document that the same social conditions can produce very different political outcomes depending on whether entrepreneurial populist leaders emerge to exploit them. Institutional factors matter: proportional representation systems allow new populist parties to enter parliaments more easily than winner-take-all systems; weak party identification leaves voters more available for mobilization; and media structures either amplify or dampen populist messaging. A populist zeitgeist — the widespread feeling that something is fundamentally rotten in the establishment — is necessary but not sufficient. Someone must also 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, and it resists simple answers. At the analytical level, Mudde and Kaltwasser are careful to note that populism contains a democratic core — its insistence that the people should govern, that elites should be accountable, that excluded majorities deserve representation. In contexts where elites have genuinely captured institutions and ignored popular majorities, populist pressure can force democratic corrections. Chávez's initial expansion of political participation among Venezuela's poor, or the way Podemos forced established Spanish parties to engage with austerity's human costs, can be read through this lens.
But Müller's anti-pluralism critique cuts to the heart of why populism is also potentially corrosive. Liberal democracy requires more than majority rule — it requires pluralism, the protection of minority rights, independent courts, a free press, and the institutional space for opposition to contest and eventually replace incumbents. Populism's logic, which holds that the authentic people's will is singular and that the populist leader embodies it, leads directly to the delegitimization of these institutional features. Courts that rule against the populist government are dismissed as elite conspiracies. Press that criticizes is condemned as fake or corrupt. Opposition parties are accused of representing foreign or oligarchic interests rather than genuine constituencies. Minorities who do not fit the constructed image of the people are excluded from its protection.
This pattern is well documented empirically. Yascha Mounk and Roberto Foa's research using World Values Survey data showed that democratic commitment — particularly among younger generations — declined significantly in several established democracies in the years before the populist wave. Anna Grzymala-Busse and other scholars of Central Eastern Europe documented how Poland and Hungary used democratic mandates to systematically dismantle judicial independence, electoral fairness, and press freedom. The populist threat to democracy is not typically a coup but a gradual institutional erosion — what Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way call "competitive authoritarianism."
Populism, Nationalism, and Their Overlap
Because right-wing populism so frequently combines with nationalism, the two concepts are routinely conflated. The distinction matters analytically and practically. Nationalism is a full ideology about the proper relation between political and national units — the belief that each nation deserves its own state and that 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, as a thin ideology, makes no inherent claims about nationhood at all.
The conflation is understandable because right-wing populism in Europe and America almost always attaches nativism — the belief that the state should be inhabited by the native group — to the populist core. Trump's construction of the American people explicitly excluded immigrants, Muslims, and cosmopolitan elites. Orbán's construction of the Hungarian people explicitly excludes Soros-influenced NGOs, Muslim refugees, and European federalists. But the same populist grammar, applied through a left-wing ideological lens, produces something entirely different: Evo Morales's construction of "the people" in Bolivia centered on indigenous identity and the colonial economic elite, while Podemos in Spain constructed a cross-class people against a political-financial caste. Neither is nationalist in the right-wing sense.
Understanding this distinction matters for political practice: opposing populism effectively requires addressing its actual core — the perception of elite corruption and popular exclusion — rather than simply opposing the ideological content that attaches to it in a particular 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 from pure populism to pure pluralism. Kirk Hawkins and Bruno Castanho Silva have also developed automated text-analysis tools that can process large speech corpora to produce populism scores. The CLEA (Comparative Legislative Election Archive) provides electoral data that researchers combine with populism codings to analyze electoral performance. The V-Dem liberal democracy index provides outcome measures against which populist governments can be assessed.
These measures allow researchers to 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 — confirming Müller's analytical concern with empirical data. They also find that economic underperformance of populist governments is common over medium-term horizons, though populists are often elected during economic crises created by their predecessors.
Why Populism's Grammar Persists
What the opening anecdote about Roosevelt and Trump reveals is that populism's grammar is not a product of a particular historical moment but a recurring feature of democratic politics. Wherever political institutions become sufficiently unresponsive, wherever economic inequality becomes sufficiently visible, wherever cultural change moves sufficiently fast, the conditions for populist mobilization emerge. The specific content — who the people are, who the elite are, what restoration means — changes with context. But the underlying logic of a unified, betrayed people demanding to reclaim its sovereign will from corrupt hands is as old as democracy itself.
This does not mean 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 can all reduce the demand for populist movements. And some degree of populist pressure — the permanent possibility that excluded majorities might mobilize — may be necessary to keep elite accountability functioning. The challenge for democratic theory and practice is to distinguish between the democratic corrective that populism can offer and the anti-pluralist corrosion that it frequently delivers once in power.
For cross-reference on democratic failure patterns, see why-democracies-fail. For the relationship between national identity and populist politics, see what-is-nationalism. For how media ecosystems accelerate polarization and populist messaging, see why-political-polarization-increases.
References
- Mudde, C., & Kaltwasser, C. R. (2017). Populism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press.
- Muller, J.-W. (2016). What Is Populism? University of Pennsylvania Press.
- Norris, P., & Inglehart, R. (2019). Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism. Cambridge University Press.
- Laclau, E. (2005). On Populist Reason. Verso.
- Guriev, S., & Papaioannou, E. (2022). The political economy of populism. Journal of Economic Literature, 60(3), 753-832. https://doi.org/10.1257/jel.20201452
- Gidron, N., & Hall, P. A. (2020). Populism as a problem of social integration. Comparative Political Studies, 53(7), 1027-1059. https://doi.org/10.1177/0010414019879947
- Eatwell, R., & Goodwin, M. (2018). National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy. Pelican.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is populism — how do political scientists define it?
Political scientists define populism not as a single ideology with fixed policy positions but as a political logic or what Cas Mudde and Cristobal Rovira Kaltwasser call a 'thin-centered ideology.' In their 2017 work, they describe populism as dividing society into two homogeneous and antagonistic groups: 'the pure people' and 'the corrupt elite.' The key claim of populism is that politics should be an expression of the general will of the people — that authentic democratic representation has been stolen or blocked by a corrupt establishment. Because populism is 'thin-centered,' it attaches to other, thicker ideologies: to left-wing socialism or to right-wing nationalism, depending on context. Ernesto Laclau's discursive theory in 'On Populist Reason' (2005) goes further, arguing that populism is not a pathology but rather a constitutive feature of politics — the process by which disparate grievances are unified into a political subject called 'the people' through the construction of antagonism. What distinguishes populism from mere critique of elites is its claim to exclusive ownership of popular legitimacy: the populist leader or movement presents itself as the only authentic voice of the real people, and therefore treats all opponents as not merely wrong but illegitimate.
What is the difference between left-wing and right-wing populism?
The core difference lies in how each defines the 'corrupt elite' and who counts as 'the pure people.' Left-wing populism defines the elite in primarily economic terms — corporations, oligarchs, financial institutions, the 'one percent' — and constructs the people as the working class and economically marginalized. Examples include Hugo Chávez's Bolivarian movement in Venezuela, Podemos in Spain, Syriza in Greece, and Bernie Sanders' political project in the United States. The enemy is economic power concentrated unjustly. Right-wing populism, by contrast, defines the elite in primarily cultural terms: the educated metropolitan class, media, academics, cosmopolitan progressives, and often ethnic or religious minorities who are accused of benefiting from or imposing a cultural agenda. Examples include Donald Trump in the United States, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, and the Brexit movement led by Nigel Farage in the United Kingdom. Right populism is frequently combined with nativism — the ideology that the state should be inhabited exclusively by the 'native' group — which Mudde and Kaltwasser argue distinguishes it structurally from its left-wing counterpart. Both variants share the same populist logic of people-versus-elite antagonism, but the ideological content attached to that logic differs substantially.
Is populism a threat to democracy or a correction of it?
This question divides scholars significantly, and the answer may depend on context. Mudde and Kaltwasser argue that populism can serve a democratic corrective function when elites genuinely have captured institutions and ignored majority preferences — in that case, populist pressure can force accountability. However, they also acknowledge that populism becomes a threat when populists attack checks and balances, minority rights, and the institutional pluralism that protects democratic competition. Jan-Werner Müller, in 'What Is Populism?' (2016), takes a stronger position: he argues that anti-pluralism is the defining feature of populism, and that populism is therefore structurally incompatible with liberal democracy. When a populist leader claims to represent 'the real people,' all opposition — courts, free press, opposition parties — is delegitimized as serving corrupt or foreign interests. This logic, Müller argues, is inherently authoritarian regardless of whether the populist is left or right. Kurt Weyland similarly argues that populism's personalistic and plebiscitary character tends to corrode the institutional architecture of liberal democracy over time. The empirical record supports this concern: Hungary under Orbán, Turkey under Erdogan, and Venezuela under Chávez all began with democratic mandates and moved toward illiberal consolidation of power.
Why is populism rising globally in the 21st century?
Scholars identify both demand-side and supply-side factors. On the demand side, Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart's 'Cultural Backlash' thesis (2019) argues that postmaterialist value change — the rise of feminist, cosmopolitan, and socially liberal values among younger educated populations — has produced a values backlash among traditionalist communities who feel their status and way of life are under attack. Roger Eatwell and Matthew Goodwin's 'National Populism' (2018) identifies four Ds: distrust of mainstream institutions, destruction of perceived fairness, deprivation (both economic and cultural), and dealignment from traditional party loyalties. Sergei Guriev and Elias Papaioannou's 2022 survey of the economics literature finds empirical support for specific triggers: economic crises (especially slow recovery from 2008), immigration increases, high-profile corruption scandals, and media fragmentation — particularly the rise of television and social media that allow populist entrepreneurs to bypass traditional gatekeepers. The Team Populism database compiled by Kirk Hawkins and colleagues tracked populist speech in leaders globally and found a dramatic rise: Kyle and Gultchin (Tony Blair Institute, 2018) counted 25 populist leaders in power in 2018 versus roughly 8 in the 1990s. Crucially, this rise occurred in established democracies — the United States, France, Italy, the Netherlands — not only in weak states.
What is 'thin-centered ideology' and why does it matter for understanding populism?
The concept of thin-centered ideology was developed by Michael Freeden and applied to populism by Cas Mudde. A thick or full ideology — like liberalism, conservatism, or socialism — contains a comprehensive account of political organization: who holds rights, how resources should be distributed, what the state should do, what history means, and where society is headed. A thin-centered ideology, by contrast, has a limited core of ideas that does not on its own generate a complete political program. Populism's core claims — that society is divided between pure people and corrupt elite, that politics should express the people's general will — say nothing about economic policy, foreign policy, rights, or history. This is why populism always appears in combination with other ideologies that fill in those gaps. Right-wing populism is populism plus nationalism (and often nativism and authoritarianism). Left-wing populism is populism plus socialism or social democracy. This understanding is important for several reasons. First, it explains why populism is such an elastic phenomenon — it adapts to very different contexts. Second, it explains why populist movements can shift ideologically, borrowing from left and right simultaneously (Trump's protectionism and social spending promises alongside his nativism). Third, it cautions against treating populism as a synonym for fascism, demagoguery, or any specific policy set — it is better understood as a political style and logic that can attach to many different programs.
What psychological factors drive support for populist movements?
Research identifies a cluster of psychological and sociological factors that reliably predict populist support. Ronald Inglehart's postmaterialism research and his work with Norris show that cultural insecurity — the perception that one's values and status are being displaced by progressive social change — is a stronger predictor of right populist support than economic deprivation alone. Noam Gidron and Peter Hall's 2020 work in Comparative Political Studies frames this as a problem of social integration: people who feel socially marginalized — who feel they are not respected, that their kind of people no longer matter — are drawn to movements that promise to restore their dignity and centrality. Classical personality psychology adds further predictors: Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) and Social Dominance Orientation (SDO) both significantly predict right populist support across countries. RWA reflects a preference for order, conformity, and deference to authority; SDO reflects comfort with hierarchy and outgroup domination. Populist movements offer a coherent narrative that resolves cognitive and emotional dissonance — it provides identified enemies, simple causation, and the promise of restoration. The populist leader also plays a role: research on charismatic authority (following Weber) shows that certain leadership styles can manufacture a sense of crisis and a corresponding need for a savior figure, independent of underlying social conditions.
How is populism different from nationalism?
Populism and nationalism are distinct concepts that frequently overlap but are analytically separable. Nationalism is a thick ideology centered on the belief that the political and the national unit should be congruent — that each nation should have its own state, and that state loyalty should align with national identity. Nationalism makes claims about who constitutes a people in ethnic, cultural, or civic terms. Populism, by contrast, makes no inherent claims about nationhood; it is defined by the people-versus-elite distinction, not by national identity claims. Left-wing populist movements in Bolivia (Evo Morales), Spain (Podemos), or the United States (Sanders) are not nationalist in any conventional sense, yet they are straightforwardly populist. The frequent confusion arises because right-wing populism typically combines the populist logic with nationalism and nativism — so that 'the corrupt elite' is defined in part as those who betray or disparage the nation, and 'the pure people' is defined in national or ethnic terms. This combination — which Mudde calls 'populist radical right' — is the dominant form of populism in contemporary European and American politics. But the combination is contingent, not definitional: one can be a nationalist without being a populist (traditional conservative parties often are), and one can be a populist without being a nationalist (the Latin American left demonstrates this regularly).