‘Populism’ is often used in such a broad, catch-all fashion that it makes for extremely imprecise analysis and policy prescription, according to Richard Youngs, a Senior Associate with the Carnegie Endowment’s Democracy and Rule of Law Program. We need to break down specific areas of concern and focus on these in their own right, rather than rooting debate in nebulous notions of a block ‘populist threat’, he writes for the LSE’s European Politics and Policy:
Most analysts agree that populism should be understood as a political style, not a well-defined, substantive political project. But simply to say that populism advances the will of ‘the people’ against ‘the elite’ is an unsatisfactorily loose definition. It leaves too many questions unanswered. Who is and is not part of ‘the elite’? In a context of increasing social heterogeneity, how do we identify the popular ‘general will’? And don’t ostensibly mainstream parties also often espouse policies that serve the ‘ordinary citizen’ against the elite?
Several essays under the heading “The Specter Haunting Europe” address the growing threats to Europe’s liberal democracies, in the National Endowment for Democracy’s Journal of Democracy.
There is such wide variation amongst rising anti-establishment parties that it is unconvincing to decry the ‘populist threat’ in terms of a particular set of policies, Youngs adds:
While there is deep unease with the spread of Euroscepticism across Europe, for example, there is no common line on the EU amongst those parties normally labelled as populist. As with debates on migration and neo-liberal economics, deriding a party as populist simply because it questions the current model of European integration is analytically questionable – even if one’s own normative instinct is to reject this anti-EU creep.
