Studying Populism in Comparative Perspective: Reflections on the Contemporary and Future Research Agenda

TLDR

Academics increasingly use populism to explain events such as Brexit and the Trump presidency, but the debate suffers from starting anew and remaining insular. The article aims to overcome these two shortcomings by advocating an ideational comparative approach and outlining four future research avenues. The authors employ an ideational framework to analyze populism and identify four research directions—economic anxiety, cultural backlash, responsiveness versus responsibility, and partisanship/polarization.

Abstract

Academics are increasingly using the concept of populism to make sense of current events such as the Brexit referendum and the Trump presidency. This is certainly a welcome development, but two shortcomings can be observed in the contemporary debate. On one hand, new populism scholars often start from scratch and do not build upon the existing research. On the other hand, those who have been doing comparative research on populism stay in their comfort zone and thus do not try to link their work to other academic fields. In this article, we address these two shortcomings by discussing some of the advantages of the so-called ideational approach to the comparative study of populism and by pointing out four avenues of future research, which are closely related to some of the contributions of this special issue, namely, (a) economic anxiety, (b) cultural backlash, (c) the tension between responsiveness and responsibility, and (d) (negative) partisanship and polarization.