Thousands of recent publications have given birth to populism studies as a field of independent and interdisciplinary research, one that intersects social science, political science, and legal studies, and extending as far as gender studies and research into communication. But one fact distinguishes such studies today from those of decades ago. It is more pertinent today to discuss populism in the plural and as a more complex phenomenon, both because we can qualitatively describe new typologies of populism – such as global, constitutional, or digital populism, all being new labels – and because we can study this in relation to disparate geographical contexts, from the most advanced to more fledgling democracies. For the reader who wants to get a sense of populism, a wide range of books, case studies, and approaches are all readily available. It may be challenging, however, to organise this vast array of work.

Fortunately, as often happens in every scientific field, certain studies deserve prominence because, as time goes by, they become classics, establishing a standard by which to judge the field. This is the case with the volume Italia populista. Dal qualunquismo a Beppe Grillo by Marco Tarchi, originally published as far back as 2003, republished in a second edition in 2015, and now available in the expanded and revised third edition of 2018.

This most recent version of the book comprises nine chapters, which diachronically reconstruct the distinct phases of Italian populism from the post-Fascist period to the present day. Tarchi's book is still valuable because, first and foremost, it provides the best historical reconstruction of the evolution of Italian populism from the birth of the Republic to the present day. The author highlights how, among the different historical populisms, the Italian case may prove to be the most interesting in its complexity and variety. Once the Fascist experience is excluded, other populist elements, especially in the early years, can be examined, and populism can be understood as a substantially different phenomenon. Tarchi looks at populism as a constant presence in Italian political history. It appears in a residual, minority anti-establishment form in the First Republic and later as an anti-party attitude, reflected in such groups such as Guglielmo Giannini's Uomo Qualunque (Ordinary Man) and in the Neapolitan personal party of Achille Lauro towards the end of the 1980s. After Tangentopoli (the corruption scandal of the early 1990s), populism explodes with the new movements of the so-called Second Republic. The author succeeds in tracing the genealogical diffusion of Italian populism, an approach that yields useful results and models for possible research into populism in other national contexts.

Tarchi's whole approach never separates the populist phenomenon from its political context and the specific phase of Italian democracy. Furthermore, he also underlines how populism is not only a phenomenon internal to political structures, but also how it invades the domain of public opinion and the social mechanisms of legitimisation of democratic powers.

Here lies the most important theoretical innovation of the book, which is more fruitful and original than many other interpretations that often offer only superficial attempts at explaining populism in the abstract. After referring back to Theodor Geiger's theories, which Juan Linz had already successfully explored in his famous studies on authoritarianism, Tarchi considers populism as a ‘peculiar mentality’. As such, it is a social representation, a system of mindsets and a widespread psycho-social modality of conceiving the democratic mechanism which becomes widely diffused in certain particular contexts. Studying populism means, therefore, examining how citizens experience the functioning of a democratic society. The populist mentality profoundly conditions not only the way citizens interpret politics in a democracy but also the way actors carry out their policies.

As the Italian case shows, in recent years the new populism has become one of the central ideological, communicative, and strategic components of politics. It has become an actual entity with different shapes: Berlusconi's telepopulism; the regionalist ethnopopulism of the early League; the web populism of the Five Star Movement; and the ‘sovereignist’ national populism of today's League. Therefore, if we talk today of an Italian multipopulism with populist subjects in competition – and we choose the Italian case as a benchmark for comparison in studies on comparative politics – we do it thanks to Tarchi's overview and his excellent analytical abilities.