There cannot be ‘one true’ approach to the study of populism

Interview by Giorgos Venizelos

From Populism Newsletter #3, February 2021, pp. 4-6.

This is not the first time you participate in events organised by the Populism Specialist Group but it is the first time you are the keynote speaker. What are your general impressions?

The field of populism studies is having an amazing moment. More people are interested in the phenomenon than ever before, and the quality (not to mention the quantity) of the production being published is simply outstanding. When I started researching populism for my  dissertation in 2005, I was advised to choose a “more mainstream” topic; that would be unthinkable today.

To be able to participate in the PSA Populism Specialist Group has been a career-changing event for me. I found a space where a variety of perspectives and approaches were able to interact, and where the dialogue proceeded in an open minded manner. There are people there studying the five continents, using a variety of methods, and that allowed me to really embrace my own somewhat heterodox line of research. I felt I had found an intellectual community.

In your work you combine two approaches which, although very prominent, were for long rather marginalised within the field of ‘populism studies’. You use the theory of Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe and ‘the Essex School’ who perceive populism as  a discursive logic, as well as a Bourdieu-inspired socio-cultural approach, with which scholars such Pierre Ostiguy and Benjamin Moffitt work as well, that stresses the performative side of populism. Why those two? What can they offer more than the ideational or the strategic approaches, for example?

I have given up on the idea that there must be a “one true” approach to populism studies. Populism is multiform, proteic, and hard to pin down per se, so I do not think that there ever will be “one true definition to rule us all”. This is rooted in what we are studying, and in the methods that we use. The study of populism operates inductively: they work from the cases to the theory, and not the other way round. This is understandable, since there cannot be a normative theory of populism. We can discuss what democracy should be, but populism is not a normative concept. The strategic approach, for instance, is very valuable when one is looking at the impact of populist leadership on party systems and party structures. The ideational approach is focused on party or movement ideology rather than on the characteristics of the leadership, largely because it mainly focuses on European populism, which is party based. My own way in to populism studies has focused on the Latin American experience, in which leaders take precedence over parties and ideology,  so my own research is no doubt informed by that (although I take efforts in trying to broaden the scope  of my case comparisons, and I am satisfied that my own approach has held on beyond Latin America.)

I have long been fascinated by populist discourse. Populist representation seems to be uniquely based on talking, persuasion, and the public use of the spoken word. Populist leaders often enter the public space with very little besides their own discursive inventiveness: they cannot rely on tradition, or the law, or any preconceived authority invested on them: they must persuade a bunch of people to follow them. And they do so! Isn’t that a distillation of what politics is about? So that is what I wanted to understand. However, I hesitate to say that I use the Essex School approach, because I operate at a lower degree of abstraction. I found the notion of repertoires or genres to be a useful middle-range mediation between Laclau’s concept of an impersonal social discourse and the strategic deployment of tropes by the individual leader. As I was analysing the discourses of presidents, I found  that certain narrative templates, figures of speech, and bodily performances kept showing up: a narrative based on damage, the presentation of the leader as redeemer, the presence of a dual adversary, the creation of bodily synecdoque through self-presentation. So I chose to focus on that.

Performativity, you stress, is key in understanding the formation of popular identities. You view ‘the body’ as one of the most effective instruments of representation. Gestures, ways of talking and behaving in public, one’s habitus so to speak, are important in the mobilisation of affects and the institution of collective identifications. These features of politics are often neglected by mainstream political science but, as you argue, they are central as to why populism works. Could you expand on that?

My interest in the body was born out of a serendipitous moment. When I was putting together the corpus of presidential speeches that I analysed for my book, I opened a document with photos of the populist presidents whose speeches I wanted to analyse. And it struck me how different they looked. Hugo Chávez, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, Evo Morales: all of them were in possession of bodies that marked them as unusual, as out of the mainstream. Even those populist leaders that had the advantage of inhabiting the body of a white, cis, middle class man, like Rafael Correa and Néstor Kirchner, went to great lengths to perform something different through their clothes and stances. And that naturally led to thinking about populist representation in terms of a public performance, which is my current project.

How can politicians present themselves as one with ‘the people’ when they clearly constitute part of ‘the political establishment’? Donald Trump and Silvio Berlusconi are good examples of millionaires or billionaires who have arguably more to share with ‘the elite’ than ‘the people’. Yet, they were voted by millions of common people and became cult-like figures in their countries.

This is, I think, a common misconception. That is one of the reasons why I think one should always have some actual empirical dimension to the study of  populism. Because one thing that became very clear to me after analysing presidential speeches is that all populists present themselves like outsiders and they all designate an adversary as the establishment or the elite. All of them do that. True outsiders like Evo Morales did it, but also consummate insiders like Néstor Kirchner did the same. Two things, I believe, are central to studying populism: first, to remember that people and leaders co-constitute one another. The second one is to let go of the question whether the statements of populist discourse are true or false. They are always true, because they use pieces of factual information; and they are always false, because their goal is to make sense and explain a certain aspect of the world in a way that creates a perspective for action, not to write a scientific treaty of reality. Again, this brings us back to the notion of performance. ‘Outsiderism’ and ‘anti-elitism’ make sense insofar they are performed: the performance itself creates outsiderism, regardless of the ‘objective’ provenance of the leader. By performing anti-elitism the leader (or the leader/movement) designates who is the adversary, and thus creates it. That is why I chose to focus on the notion of “populist myth”,because myths are neither true nor false, or they are both things at once.

Your spatial distinctions between ‘upward-punching’ and ‘downward-punching’, as well as between ‘forward-looking’ and ‘backward-looking’ populisms are central in your understanding of populism. How do they relate with the left and right typologies of populism? are they supplementary or contradictory? 

I have long felt uncomfortable using the right and left populism terminology, because one of the core features of all populisms is that they mix and combine ideological elements that once were thought to be ideologically incompatible. Right populism can push for greater welfare expenditures, or for curtailing globalisation, while some Latin American populists have embraced some socially conservative positions, like Ecuador’s Rafael Correa stance on abortion. If one looks strictly at the substance of policies, there are always inconsistencies. Also, it has always been weird to me to read about populism’s essential anti-elitism when so-called right-wing populisms usually rally against people who are not part of the elite in any meaningful sense: immigrants, people of Islamic faith, feminists. It is more fruitful to look at the direction of antagonism, who they mobilise against. Left leaning populisms are upward punching: they designate social and economic elites as adversaries, and their policies reflect this. Downward punching populism focuses on excluded or “down” groups, and elitism comes in those supposedly “cultural” elites who are allied with them or defend them. I think this dichotomy is more explicative than left v right. Populists have a lot of leeway in choosing policies, as long as the general direction of the antagonism does not change.

You come from a region that has its own political and intellectual tradition on populism. A great portion of the burgeoning bibliography on populism stems from Europe which also has its own way of understanding populism. To be sure, scholarship in both regions has helped us advance our understanding of the phenomenon at a global level. But, what we often see is highly contrasting conceptualisations of populism rooted in and filtered by regional experience. In what ways the two ‘region-based’ scholarships ‘contaminate’ one another? Do you think there is good communication in the field between European and Latin American scholars? What can European scholars learn from Latin American scholars and vice-versa?

The dialogue and interaction between the European and Latin American tradition has been the most positive feature of the last ten years or so. That dialogue has really helped to focus the attention, to make the concepts more precise, and to weed out non-central elements of theories of populism. Ethno-nationalism, for instance, is not as relevant in the Latin American context; conversely, personalistic leadership is not as relevant for European cases. Should they be regarded as essential features of populism? Can a meaningful core be found even with these differences? These are very productive discussions.

Unlike Europe, where populism was until recently mostly a feature of the opposition, in Latin America populism is frequently an instrument of discursive governance. What challenges and limitations do populists encounter in their process of institutionalisation? Do they necessarily fail once in government and turn mainstream as Canovan, Mény and Surel and others have argued?

No, I really believe that is another big misconception. Populists are not necessarily bad at governing. On the contrary, they tend to be good at it, at least in the Latin American context if one defines “being good at governing” as “being able to stay in power and win elections”. The upwards punching populisms of the  last wave governed ten or more years, in average. Even though downward punching populists do not seem to relish governing as much, they are also resilient and hard to dislodge once they ascend to  power. The malleable nature of populist antagonism,  and the ability to form multi-class coalitions are a key in this respect. A populist needs to have a founding myth, a hero and an adversary, but the designation of who precisely is inside or outside the us/them frontiers is situational and changeable. Yesterday’s adversary can be today’s ally, and vice versa. This gives populism an enormous flexibility.

María Esperanza Casullo is a political scientist. She has a PhD in government from Georgetown University and is an associate professor at Universidad Nacional de Río Negro, Argentina. She has written the book ¿Por qué funciona el populismo?: El discurso que sabe construir explicaciones convincentes de un mundo en crisis.