Thread by @mrooduijn

Excited to see that my state of the field article “How to study populism and adjacent topics: A plea for both more and less focus” is now First View in the European Journal of Political Research.
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.11…
Short summary: (1/17)

I discuss the literature on populism, thereby mainly focusing on the books and articles that have emerged in the last decade or so. There was an explosion of populism studies which differ from earlier work on populism in at least 5 ways: (2/17)

1. Scholars agree with each other more strongly than before on how to define populism: a set of ideas that concerns the antagonistic relationship between corrupt elite & virtuous people. See work by @CasMudde, @bjmoffitt, @BDStanley, @PaulAdamTaggart, Hawkins. (3/17)

2. Emphasis on conceptualizing populism has made place for a focus on measuring populism. Political actors can endorse populism to lesser or larger extent. Question is to what extent political parties express populism. Focus on content analysis methods & expert surveys. (4/17)

3. There has been a shift from the supply side of politics to the demand side. Most importantly, scholars have shown that populism can also be measured as attitude among voters. See work by @BramSpruyt1, @StijnTvanKessel, @SMVanHauwaert, @annisch, @littvay, @b_castanho. (5/17)

4. Important recent contributions to populism research have been made by communication scientists. An important question is whether and to what extent populist messages in media affect public opinion. See work by @Hameleers_M, @claesdevreese, @LindaBos80. (6/17)

5. Scholars increasingly assess populism in power. To what extent are populists able to actually deliver on electoral promises and what are the consequences for how democracy actually functions? See work by @duncanmcdonnell, @DrAlbertazziUK, @SLdeLange, Rovira Kaltwasser. (7/17)

Hence, populism research is booming. Yet the field also faces some tricky challenges. I discuss two of these challenges and some recommendations on how scholars could deal with them. (8/17)

Challenge 1: it is easy to confuse populism with related concepts. Both journalists and academics often confuse populism with a related (but different) phenomenon: nativism. They think that nationalistic exclusionism is 1 of the core characteristics of populism. It is not. (9/17)

Where populism concerns vertical relation between ‘the people’ & ‘the elite’, nativism is about the horizontal antagonism between ‘the nation’ & ‘dangerous others’. See work by @bartbonikowski, @jens_rydgren. Conflating the two could lead to highly flawed conclusions. (10/17)

To prevent drawing wrong conclusions scholars should: (1) carefully conceptualize populism; (2) carefully categorize parties; (3) choose a research design that logically follows from this; (4) evaluate the research findings of others based on these same strict criteria. (11/17)

To give an indication of how complicated the patchwork is that overlapping typologies form, consider this figure. It shows that: a populist party need not be Eurosceptic, far left/right or challenger; a Eurosceptic party need not be populist, etcetera. (12/17)

Challenge 2: populism research remains relatively detached from adjacent fields. As a result, we know only relatively little about how exactly populism relates to concepts like Euroscepticism and nativism. (13/17)

The solution for the lack of cross-fertilization between literatures is relatively easy (though not so easily implemented): populism scholars (and also researchers focusing on adjacent topics) should look beyond ‘their own’ field and adopt a wider framework. (14/17)

Hence, I argue in favor of both more and less focus within populism studies. How can these two seemingly conflicting recommendations be reconciled? (15/17)

When it comes to conceptualization, classification, research design, and drawing conclusions from studies by others, scholars should employ a narrow framework. When it comes to exploring the literature in search for new hypotheses, they should employ a more open mindset. (16/17)

The sexiness of populism is a huge problem for the literature because it is an incentive to employ the term – even if the real focus is on a different topic. In the end this will most probably lead to conceptual blurriness, sloppy inferences, and invalid conclusions. (17/17)