Steve Watson

Notes on ‘Populism’

Does the Analysis of Populism Rest on a Mistake?

Scholars who are struggling to come up with a coherent and plausible characterization of populism may be approaching the problem from the wrong direction. They seem to have assumed that there is a thing that ‘populism’ describes and that all uses of the term are referring to the same phenomenon. This is an approach that might work with ‘water,’ to take a classic Kripkean example, or with ‘gold’ or ‘monkey’ or other obvious natural kinds (about which some people can be wrong and some uses can be mistaken,) but there are plenty of counterexamples to show that many terms just don’t have natural kinds as references. ‘Game,’ ‘fish,’ and ‘planet‘ are all problematic in this sense. The term ‘populism’ may well be of this latter sort. It has been applied in many different situations by many different actors for many different reasons, and there is no prima facie reason to think that they were all pointing at the same class of objects when they used the word.

One essential role of political science is to determine the natural kinds that appear in politics – if any – and to label them so that they can be used as tools of analysis. It is further required that the natural or commonplace vocabulary of discussion of political matters is analysed to determine whether discussion using those terms is conceptually coherent or whether it is effectively vacuous. In this case, the uses of the term ‘populism’ have to be analysed to determine which natural kinds, if any, each particular usage is referencing. If a usage cannot be charitably and faithfully rephrased in terms of any such natural kind terms, then the usage is illegitimate and effectively meaningless. On the other hand, if one kind seems close enough to serve as the referent for the vast majority of uses, it may be permissible to define ‘populism’ as referring to that kind; but let it be clear, we are not then discovering that populism is X but deciding, not observing that fact but stipulating it.

Proposing a Populism

My own observation of the use of the term suggests that what most people have in mind when they are using it now is:

a movement that arises when elites and elite political parties fail to address concerns felt widely in the political community (though perhaps not amongst the elites) and that attempts to act to address those concerns.

I would be prepared to take this as a first pass at a description of a political phenomenon that could pass as populism.[1] The next step, if I had sufficient interest in the matter, would be to determine the extent to which such a description covered the phenomena that are so named, the willingness of language users to accept the implicit definition, the connections that could be drawn to other phenomena – particularly causal and conceptual connections, and so on. (What I would not do is try to force every event that had been called by the name into the box that I had built.)

Some implications of the proposed definition are pretty obvious, of course: Populism needn’t be either left or right, it assumes that there is an elite class that has interests and that those interests may be perceived as in conflict with interests of the non-elite, it requires a party system for formation but is neither pro nor anti democracy itself, it is not necessarily either authoritarian or liberal, it is a mass movement rather than a mere faction, it is indifferent to class analysis beyond a simple elite/non-elite distinction, it does not necessarily involve the assumption of a moral distinction between the conflicting parties, it assumes a capacity for mobilisation, and so on. One notices that these obvious implications of the bare bones understanding of Populism rule out most of the political/sociological analyses that have been attempted.

On the Incoherence of the Populists

Note, in particular, that there is no need – nor should there even be an expectation – that any Populist movement should have any coherent ideology. It is not formed in response to ideological dispute, but rather a dispute over interests. For the same reason, there should be no expectation that it will be organized or directed according to any coherent ideology. If there is an ideological tinge to the movement it is likely to be the result of purely contingent circumstances of the political environment in which it arose. For example, it is not rarely the case that there already exists a ‘mainstream’ party whose ideology would seem to be in accord with (support or demand) the solutions offered by the populists, but because the elites refuse to follow that line – for whatever reason – the populists arise as an alienated faction of that party.

In any case, to criticise a ‘populist’ movement because its (implicit?) ideology is incoherent is usually a disingenuous move. Very few political parties of the mainstream today have coherent effective ideologies, whatever their manifestoes or their theorists might claim. This is largely because modern parties have to be alliances of smaller, possibly more ideologically coherent, groups in order to have electoral weight adequate to achieve any policy objectives. Criticisms of incoherence thus show, at best, a misunderstanding both of the populists and of the role of parties in politics. I would also point out that most of the media and academic critics who complain of the incoherence populist movements see themselves very much as allied to or members of the very elite formations against which the populists are acting. Their criticisms need to be read in that light.

[1] As a matter of interest and in support of the plausibility of that definition, it does seem to  align with the so-called Essex School analysis that claims to be applying some sort of ‘Discourse Analysis.’ That, however, might be no sort of recommendation, since the apparent ideological allies and sources of the Essex scholars are such figures as Lacan, Foucault, Barthes, and Derrida. How this might relate to the Discourse Analysis that I learned from Kamp and Reyle’s  From Discourse to Logic: Introduction to Modeltheoretic Semantics of Natural Language, Formal Logic and Discourse Representation Theory is a mystery. I suspect there is no connection and that DA is just Austin/Grice/Searle in fancy dress.