Once dismissed as irrational, and confined to the margins of society, populism and its conceptual offspring, “illiberal democracy,” are now recognized as posing a serious threat to democratic governance, not only in advanced industrialized countries but in Latin America, South Asia and the Middle East as well. Populism presents a challenging but still unanswered question: What is populism and what accounts for its spread in the 21st century? Is it a transitory political force or does it represent a serious threat to liberal democracy?
This seminar’s main concern is ethnonationalist populism’s threat to liberal democracy. Because it is symptomatic of a broader set of problems facing democracy in a globalized world, analyzing ethnonationalist populist parties and movements provides a vehicle to better understand liberal democracy’s vulnerabilities. To achieve the seminar’s goals requires that we first and foremost clarify the conceptual framework used to analyze populism, and through that process achieve a better understanding of its genesis, development, and future trajectory.
In the course, five case studies receive major, if not exclusive, attention: the United States, France, Germany, Hungary, and Turkey. Each of these countries developed democratic governance at different times, and each took different historical paths to achieve it. At the beginning of the 21st century, each case enjoyed differing levels of political institutionalization. While the ethnonationalist populist movements in the five case studies share common characteristics, they also demonstrate considerable variation, allowing more focused analysis through synchronic and diachronic comparisons.
This seminar hypothesizes that populist leaders eschew developing solutions to the myriad complex problems confronted by democratic political systems. Instead, they focus on developing a political base through providing a sense of community and a “sense of place” and belonging for segments of society who feel marginalized by rapid socioeconomic and cultural change and left behind by increasingly remote and uncaring political elites. Thus, populism is perforce characterized by a weak or “thin” ideology because substantive policy proposals are not its primary concern.
To remain competitive in the world market, political elites in advanced industrialized and semi-industrialized states have been forced to embrace neo-liberal policies. These policies, which emerged during the Reagan and Thatcher administrations of the 1980s, and accelerated after the collapse of communism, have resulted in a dramatic increase in wealth inequality and the reduction of traditional welfare entitlements. For example, the European Union imposed austerity policies after the 2008 Recession which led to spending cuts and tax increases. Populism’s spread in a global context, particularly how it reflects the impact of the forces of globalization on individual nation-states, is one of the seminar’s core themes.
Added to the problems of the neo-liberal policies is the decline in the modern state’s institutional capacity. Domestic political institutions have been unable to adapt to the rapid change imposed on them by globalization, including how to cope with increased trans-national migration, the rapid transfer of information via social media, and AI. The failure of political institutions to address many social and economic problems is evident in the low regard in which they are held in public opinion polling. If we add the demographic decline of Caucasians in the United States and European countries, we see how populist leaders have been able to create a kulturkampf by playing on fears of the “Great Replacement,” especially the influx of Muslim migrants in Europe and Latino, Muslim and Asian-American migrants in the United States.