“We are seemingly living in populist times” is how Ben Moffitt’s book begins before going on to examine in more detail populism as a global phenomenon manifesting itself in Europe and the Americas, but also in Africa and the Asia-Pacific region. As is inevitable with any work on the subject, this book, too, begins by trying to tackle the concept of populism to both make it more distinct than it usually appears in the related literature and amenable to empirical reality (Chapter 2). Based on the idea of populism qua performative style (Chapter 3), the bulk of the book is then conveniently, and very neatly, organized in chapters focusing on populist leaders as performers (Chapter 4), the media as the stage upon which populism is played out (Chapter 5), and “the people” as audience (Chapters 6 and 7). There is also some discussion about the effects of populism on contemporary democracy, as well as the future of populism (Chapters 8 and 9).
Moffitt provides sensible critiques of already-existing approaches to populism qua ideology, strategy, discourse, and political logic. Then, based on a (rather biased, for its lack of negative cases) selection of twenty-eight leaders across the globe, he suggests an understanding of the populism phenomenon as a certain political style with three core features: A specific appeal to “the people” rather than “the elite,” the populist leaders’ “bad manners;” and the existence of “crisis, breakdown or threat.” Taking useful cues from authors who have previously explored the idea of populism as a particular style, such as Margaret Canovan (in Europe), Michael Kazin (in the United States), or Alan Knight (in Latin America), Moffitt similarly puts forward the idea that populism is in fact the particular framing, fashioning, staging, gesturing, self-presenting, and theater-acting that a leader must do in a political performance intended for “the people” (pp. 32–3). Just think of Donald Trump's 2016 electoral campaign and you get the idea. Populism, therefore, is above all a show, or political spectacle, during which leaders take advantage of the media in order to construct “the people,” the “elites,” the necessary “crises”—in short, what constitutes politics itself.
The author is of course aware that such an approach invites criticism about the very notion of style as “unscientific” and “superficial” (p. 36), which could, however, have been faced by reference to classical works on this topic by, among others, Pierre Bourdieu (Distinction), Abner Cohen (Two-Dimensional Man), and David Laitin (Hegemony and Culture), which are regretfully missing from the book. But there are other problems, too, which are more pertinent to the ever-growing interest in the comparative study of populism. I will briefly refer to four of them: the unit of analysis, essentialism, conceptual stretching, and the empirical operationalization of cases.
In this book, first, the real unit of analysis is the “populist” leader, not populism in general. “Populist leaders rather than populist movements or parties, have been focused upon, because they are most clearly the central performers and ‘embodiments’ of populism as a distinct political style” (pp. 43–4). It is difficult, however, to infer from this thesis that populism is just about leaders or, even more specifically, about some leaders’ particular styles, and no more.
Second, and following the previous point, the book’s essentialist view of populism-as-style, all its merits apart, is no better, or worse, than viewing populism as a discourse, strategy, or ideology—all cogently criticized in early chapters. In reality, all those characteristics can go well together as none in principle refutes the others. Hugo Chávez, to take just one example of a populist leader, used a discourse and other ideological themes styled in such a way as effectively presenting Venezuela as being antagonistically divided between the people and the elites, which thus became his chief strategy for winning power. Still, although those elements fit together well, we are not sure about what populism really is, that is, the concept’s ontology.
This leads to the third problem in the present, as well as other works on populism, that is, the tendency to broaden the boundaries of the concept until at the end it becomes indefinite. Moffitt is, of course, aware of the danger when he writes that “although there might be a mild consensus on which political actors can be labelled as ‘populist’ in the contemporary literature, … there is actually a wide disparity in these populist actors’ ideologies, discourses and political and organizational strategies” (p. 26, also p. 42). He tries to resolve the issue precisely by focusing on the leaders’ “populist” style, but, again, this effort falls short because, and this is my fourth point, “style” is difficult to operationalize empirically.
For Moffitt, as already mentioned, the populist style is externally characterized by populist leaders’ “bad manners,” such as swearing, slandering, and, in general, politically misbehaving. Now, even leaving aside the fact that many of the leaders considered in the book are rather well behaved (e.g., Geert Wilders, Marine Le Pen, Ross Perot, and Fernando Collor, among others), “bad manners” is a very impressionistic notion and rather impossible to measure. And, certainly, bad manners cannot “act as a supplement” (p. 61) to the concept of political charisma, which retains strong value especially when it comes to explaining populism.
Be that as it may, like the proof of the pudding being in the eating, the proof of general theory is in the comparative analysis of empirical cases. In his own book, Anders Hellström focuses specifically on three Scandinavian parties that are commonly—but, at least in this reviewer’s opinion, both mistakenly and misleadingly—classified as populist: Denmark’s Danish People’s Party (DF), Norway’s Progress Party (FrP), and Sweden’s Sweden Democrats (SD). All three are termed “nationalist populist parties” because they “pursue politics and rhetoric around the populist divide between ‘the people’ and ‘the elite’ centred on the nation—or rather the nation state—as an exclusive category of reference” (p. 16).
The central argument in this book is that, in the well-structured and consolidated political systems in the Nordic region, in order to thrive politically, such parties must cross a certain “threshold of credibility,” or trust, which until now has been achieved by the DF and FrP, but not by the SD. How can those parties gain the voters’ trust? According to Hellström, the answer is simply by turning into the political mainstream and trying to steal their opponents’—especially the Social Democrats’—clothes. And what are those clothes made of? As nicely explained, especially in Chapter 3, they are made of the Nordic nations’ common belief in social equity, welfare statism, and political liberalism. “To gain credibility in the political sphere it is important to recognize these liberal values as salient and worthy of defence” (p. 18). There’s a catch. For, unlike their other liberal opponents, the three parties examined in this book propose a liberal state just for the natives. As Jimmie Åkesson, the SD leader since 2005, clearly put the matter, SD is in a better position than the Social Democrats in building a genuine welfare state and thus turn Sweden into “a homogenous society populated by culturally similar individuals, where the natives’ interests always come first” (p. 91).
The real key in Hellström’s book is the idea of the “common people” that has developed historically in the Nordic region, and which is different from the notion of “the people” as it is routinely employed in the literature on populism. The latter is associated with a sense of social inferiority, political impotency, and low economic status; this “people” is moreover predisposed to adversity and conflict, and relishes moralizing rhetoric. The former, in sharp contrast, is characterized by its belief in collective national endeavor for achieving equity, social cohesion, and pragmatic politics. The historical origins of the common-people idea in Scandinavia are to be found in the (certainly romanticized memory of the) organic cohesion of the Swedish yeomanry, the traditional, close-to-nature and freedom-loving peasant communities in Norway, the strong sense of cultural identity and national pride in Denmark. In modern times, perhaps the best metaphor for the Nordic people (folk) is the vision of the Swedish society as “the People’s Home” (folkhemmet), first put forward in the early twentieth century by conservative scholar Rudolf Kjellén (1864–1922) and then embraced by all significant political forces in Sweden until our day. The heyday of this vision was, of course, the postwar years of Social Democratic dominance in Swedish politics and the expansion during that time of universal welfare reforms within the context of liberal democratic politics. Today, however, that vision has been adapted to resonate with the SD calls for preserving national homogeneity, the anti-state libertarianism of the FrP, and the harsh anti-immigration stance of the Danish DF. For all those parties, the “common people” are the natives (including native elites) who constitute the real nucleus in their respective societies, and must be protected, not against elites, but against the dangers of immigration and multiculturalism. Hence their commonly shared motto: “Our own people first.”
Like Moffitt’s, Hellström’s analysis revolves heavily around individual party leaders. And yet, nowhere in the latter book does the reader detect any of the core features of populist political style as described in the former book. First of all, here we have countries that are seldom faced with massive crisis, political breakdown, or other immense threats. All the Scandinavian nations have enjoyed long and relatively high economic growth, political stability, while still sharing an optimistic outlook on the future. Nor are, secondly, the “populist” leaders in those countries bad-mannered individuals like those illustrated by Moffitt. Quite the contrary; in Hellström’s book we are introduced to socially well-behaved, intellectually mildly-tempered, and politically moderately-acting leaders, whose chief concern is how to gain political credibility for their parties as their only way for eventually coming to power. Nor does, as already explained, “the people” in Scandinavia resemble the notion of the people as social and political underdog that is prevalent in the literature on populism. And this is why I suggest excluding DF, FrP and SD from the category of populist parties, examining them instead as what they really are—liberal nativists. Only that, in such a case, Moffitt’s opening phrase about the universality of populism would seem empirically unjustified.
To illustrate the foregoing points, take the case of Sweden, which, although used in both works, puts a different strain on each one of them. In Moffitt’s list of populist parties, one finds included the Swedish New Democracy (ND), a short-lived and by now defunct party, but not the currently strong SD. His findings would certainly be different had he focused on Åkesson instead of the allegedly bad-mannered Bert Karlsson, the co-leader of ND in the short period of its existence between 1991 and 1994. Hellström’s analysis of Sweden, on the other hand, covers the period before the 2014 elections in which the SD won a stunning 12.9 percent of the vote and became the third-strongest party in the country. Had he covered the post-2014 period, the discussion in the book about SD’s “exceptionalism” should have been modified, and the conclusions reached would be somewhat different.
In the end, precisely because the cases they focus on are hardly comparable, the two books are not tied together well despite their claim to study the same phenomenon: populism. Plainly put, Sweden’s or Denmark’s “populist” leaders (as those examined in Hellström’s book) will still make the strangest bedfellows with, say, such alleged populists as Uganda’s Yoveri Museveni or Peru’s Alberto Fujimori (both cases examined in Moffit’s book) even if we engrave the word “populism” in their shared bed’s wooden framework. Here is, then, a precious lesson to learn: As the comparative study of populism is now a fast-growing field of research, it is imperative that we settle on a truly minimal definition providing clear conceptual boundaries for meaningful cross-area comparisons, but also pointing to the specific micro-mechanisms facilitating populist emergence and, increasingly, populist rule.
