James, you’ve made a great contribution to the discourse on populism’s relationship with democracy, noting that the election of populists decreases non-populist voters’ satisfaction with democracy. As you and your co-authors put it, “democratic discontent appears to be not only a cause of but a consequence of populist success.” This suggests that populist success creates a vicious cycle with severe consequences for democratic societies. Can you expound on this phenomenon? Also, have you observed ways that societies can break out of this feedback loop?
I suppose we start with some “bad news.” This work builds on the previous work of my co-author (Hannah Alarian) who showed that the victory of populist parties could shift non-populist voters towards their preferred positions on their most critical issue in Western Europe, which is immigration. We wondered if the same was true of democratic satisfaction, and found this to be the case—essentially, populists decrease democratic satisfaction among opponents above and beyond the typical winner-loser gap. Ironically, because non-populists are so threatened by the entrance of these populists, it is possible that they may endorse anti-democratic measures to push these parties out or ensure that their (usually far-right) policy preferences are not instituted.
However, I wouldn’t want to overstate the threat—I don’t think non-populist voters will shift to autocratic governments just to push the AfD or National Rally out. Populism is a profoundly democratic but illiberal phenomenon—and so I think the response is for more mainstream parties to embrace the language of democracy/majoritarianism as a counter to these far-right parties. This is easier said than done, but it’s how I imagine you could get out of the loop—by making people feel that a vote for their party is a vote for democracy writ large.
Populism is a profoundly democratic but illiberal phenomenon—and so I think the response is for more mainstream parties to embrace the language of democracy/majoritarianism as a counter to these far-right parties.
Turning to the United States, you’ve conducted an impressive analysis of populist discourse in American presidential elections from 1896 to 2016. Can you talk about your approach to populism, which you conceptualize as “the employment of specific discursive frames?” Then, can you talk about whether your approach leaves room for an ideational dimension of populism as well?
Any discussion of populism inevitably leads into an argument over its definition. As a result, I tend to take a fairly expansive and permissive view of how people want to talk about it. Nevertheless, I think understanding populism as a discourse is the most useful way to integrate all the different ways we talk about populism. Cas Mudde’s ideational definition—the idea of populism as a thin-centered ideology that divides the world into a valorized people and a corrupt elite—is obviously the dominant definition used in modern scholarship. The main critique of this is that an ideology must be comprehensive and coherent, and so calling it “thin-centered” is a conceptual flaw—how do you have a non-comprehensive ideology? The discursive approach basically says that the way we observe this “thin-centered ideology” in the first place is through the discourse of parties, candidates, social movements, voters, etc. Basically, you can tell if something is populist by listening to them. For my piece, that’s what I did—I looked for the discursive ways that we have tended to construct the elites and the people in American political discourse, and then measured how presidential candidates have done so since the first true campaigns in 1896. Overall, I tend to think that populism suffers a little from what Supreme Court Justice Potter said of pornography: it’s very difficult to define, “But I know it when I see it.”
As a follow on to that question, given that populist rhetoric has featured fairly heavily in American political discourse for over a century (especially by “outsiders”), as you show in your work, can you talk about the utility of assigning the populist moniker to Presidential candidates? Does it add clarity or value in your opinion? Secondly, can you unpack the differences between what you call the “generic” or “less threatening” populist frames and those you call “risky?”
I think that the political commentariat has been pretty trigger-happy about applying the populist label to nearly every candidate, as I mention in my article. This makes a lot of sense when you think about populism the way Ernesto Laclau did—that populism was an act of constructing the people which was a necessary precondition of any political action. Basically, populism requires creating a people—and because the president is always supposed to represent the people, they will naturally employ this pro-people language. Further, since presidential candidates are often challenging the other party which currently holds the reins of power, it’s strategically advantageous to call those politicians elite and out of touch.
For me, this distinction between “less threatening” and “risky” frames can really be understood as the type of frames that threaten the bulwarks of liberal democracy and those that don’t.
For me, this distinction between “less threatening” and “risky” frames can really be understood as the type of frames that threaten the bulwarks of liberal democracy and those that don’t. Claiming that you represent “the people” broadly defined and you’re going to go after “the elites” to me is not that scary—nearly every presidential candidate says something akin to this at some point. What is scary is when you start weaponizing this to go after the fundamental pillars of modern liberal democracy: an independent free press, the courts, minority rights broadly, etc.
You’ve also done interesting research on what drives voters to support populist candidates. In particular, you looked at what drove voters to support Donald Trump in 2016. You find that narratives about “economic anxiety” do not accurately capture the picture. Rather, economic motivators were bound up with racial motivations, i.e., fears about a loss of racial status. Can you develop this point, which is an important point to make to put into dialogue the body of literature on economic grievances and the ones of identity politics?
Myself and my co-authors used a measure developed from advertising to get at this debate between economic and racial motivations before high-quality data from the 2016 election was available. We showed that individuals who felt ontologically threatened/insecure about Black Lives Matter—a social movement explicitly designed to rectify racial injustices—were more likely to support Donald Trump, controlling for a number of other factors. I do not think this means that economic considerations are not important, but just that an empathetic reading of Trump voters which prioritizes economic considerations does not paint the whole picture of their motivations, which were often quite regressive on racial issues.
In your fascinating article titled “The Big Lie: Expressive Responding and Misperceptions in the United States,” you find that Republicans who say that the 2020 election was stolen are not “expressively responding” – that is, signaling their identity – but rather that these ideas are deeply held and believed. To tie this into your other work, can you generalize a bit about the relationship between misinformation and even conspiratorial thinking on the one hand and populism and illiberalism on the other? Are these phenomena intrinsically linked? Or are they merely thin concepts that can be paired on an ad hoc basis?
Conspiracy and populism are distinct concepts, but they are natural bedfellows. As an Americanist, anytime I think of populism and conspiracy I think of Richard Hofstadter’s The Paranoid Style of American Politics. Hofstadter felt that paranoia and conspiracy were basically pathologies of American politics, and it’s no accident that one of the first examples he gives of this style is the Populist Party of the 1890s and their belief that the “secret cabals of the international gold ring” were consciously attempting to “deal a blow to the prosperity of the people” through treachery.
Since conspiracy is just a specific form of misinformation which suggests that there are elites who are secretly controlling things and intending to conceal their involvement, there also is naturally a relationship between specific misinformation and populism.
I think the reason for this has to do with the inherent logic of populism. Populists argue that they are the representatives of the true people—always the majority—allied against the corrupt elites. Yet the primary mechanisms for populists to take power are elections, which they mostly lose. How do you lose an election if the vast majority of voters support you? The answer, of course, is that there is some conspiracy that caused you to lose—you actually won the election, if it weren’t for those pesky elites who stole it from you in order to silence the voice of the real people. Since conspiracy is just a specific form of misinformation which suggests that there are elites who are secretly controlling things and intending to conceal their involvement, there also is naturally a relationship between specific misinformation and populism.
And last but not least for us, we are focused on illiberalism. You associate some of these “risky” frames with illiberalism. Can you walk us through how you think about illiberalism in general, and about the relationship between populism and illiberalism?
Illiberalism as I understand it is just the negation of liberalism—disrespect for fundamental civil liberties and minority rights. Of course, many different types of regimes can be illiberal—fascism and communism are both illiberal though of course very different. I am particularly persuaded by Takis Pappas, who understands populism within regimes as a type of “illiberal democracy.” A lot of the time when we talk about populism, we are placed in this uncomfortable place where we try to argue that it’s not democratic because some populists advocate for policies we find morally repulsive. However, we know that populism is one of the purest expressions of majoritarian democracy: Viktor Orbán came to power in Hungary not through subterfuge but because the majority liked what he said and represented. If we understand that what concerns us about populism is fundamentally its illiberal impulse—while recognizing that it is still decidedly democratic—we will be in a better place to counter its appeal.
James J. Fahey is a Visiting Lecturer at the University of Florida and an incoming Assistant Professor at the University of North Florida. He studies the effects of populism and right-wing identity politics on individuals’ democratic attitudes and behavior in the United States and Western Europe.
