Introduction: The Global Rise of Populism

Populism returns ... to haunt the sentient world, undeterred by the bright dawn of democracy and neo-liberalism.

— Knight (1998, 223)

We are seemingly living in populist times. The effects of the Global Financial Crisis drag on, the Eurozone sovereign-debt crisis continues to threaten the very existence of the European Union, and more broadly, it is alleged that we are suffering from a crisis of faith in democracy, with political party membership falling dramatically and citizens finding themselves more and more disillusioned with mainstream politics. The anger, fury and disgust targeted at members of 'the elite' — whether the bankers of Wall Street, the bureaucrats of Brussels, the politicians of leading parties or the cultural warriors of the op-ed pages — is palpable, with calls for layoffs, imprisonment or even all-out revolution to change the status quo. The time is ripe for canny political actors who can speak effectively in the name of 'the people' to make great political gains.

And gain they have. Over the past two decades — but particularly in the last decade or so — populists across the world have made headlines by setting 'the people' against 'the elite' in the name of popular sovereignty and 'defending democracy'. Europe has experienced a groundswell of populism in the form of leaders like Silvio Berlusconi, Geert Wilders, Jörg Haider and Marine Le Pen, and populist parties throughout the Continent have enjoyed significant and prolonged political success. Latin America has seen influential left-wing populist leaders change the region irrevocably, with Hugo Chávez, Nicolás Maduro, Evo Morales and Rafael Correa all gaining the highest office in their respective countries. In the United States, the Tea Party ostensibly caused the 2013 government shutdown, and figures like Sarah Palin, Ted Cruz and Donald Trump have shaped the new face of American conservatism. In the Asia-Pacific, populists like Thaksin Shinawatra, Joseph 'Erap' Estrada, Pauline Hanson and Winston Peters have left indelible marks on their respective countries, while Africa has experienced its own share of heavy-handed populist leaders, witnessing the presidencies of Yoweri Museveni, Michael Sata and Jacob Zuma. In other words, populism is back — and it is back with a vengeance. What was once seen as a fringe phenomenon relegated to another era or only certain parts of the world is now a mainstay of contemporary politics across the globe. In order to account for this situation, some scholars have spoken of a "populist Zeitgeist" (Mudde 2004, 542), "populist wave" (Krastev 2007, 57) and "populist revival" (Roberts 2007, 3) in different regions of the world in recent years.

Indeed, the academy has paid close attention to such developments, with the academic literature on populism having its own 'populist revival' of sorts over the same period. Although populism has a relatively long — if disjointed and staggered — record in the annals of political science, the concept was given a new lease of life in the mid-1990s by authors who sought to make sense of the emergence of 'new populism' in Europe and 'neopopulism' in Latin America (Betz 1993, 1994; Roberts 1995; Taggart 1995, 1996). This led to a veritable explosion of empirical work on populism in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Populism has also been at the centre of recent debates within political theory, with key figures like Laclau (2005b, 2005c), Mouffe (2005a), Rancière (2006) and Zizek (2006a, 2006b) having engaged with the concept, tackling populism's sometimes paradoxical relationship with democracy. Taken together, these trends have seen populism move from a relatively fringe topic in political studies towards it becoming one of the discipline's most contentious and widely discussed concepts (Canovan 2004; Comroff 2011).

Yet this newfound interest in populism is not confined to the ivory towers of academia. Politicians and journalists have also pounced on the concept in recent years, with populism being portrayed as an imminent danger for democracy: the New York Times frets about "Europe's populist backlash" and the New Statesman has called populism "a real threat to mainstream democracy under stress". Former Italian prime minister Enrico Letta has similarly labelled populism as a "threat to stability in Europe", and former Mexican foreign minister Jorge Castañeda has called populism "disastrous for Latin America". Yet elsewhere populism is painted as a panacea for our broken democratic systems: the Atlantic argues that populism is the only way that the liberal narrative can be fixed, while the Huffington Post called 2014 "the year of economic populism".

Despite this widespread interest in populism, we still do not understand a number of aspects of the phenomenon all that well. Questions still abound: why has populism seemingly spread so rapidly across the globe? What do these different manifestations of populism have in common? Does populism really represent a threat to democracy? And perhaps the most basic question of all — what are we actually talking about when we use the term 'populism' today?

The central argument of this book is that in order to answer these questions, we need to rethink contemporary populism. This is because populism today has changed and developed from its earlier iterations, embedded as it is within a rapidly shifting political and media communications landscape. While still based around the classic divide between 'the people' and 'the elite', populism's reliance on new media technologies, its relationship to shifting modes of political representation and identification, and its increasing ubiquity have seen the phenomenon transform in nuanced ways that need explaining. In this light, the book contends that we need to move from seeing populism as a particular 'thing' or entity towards viewing it as a political style that is performed, embodied and enacted across a variety of political and cultural contexts. This shift allows us to make sense of populism in a time when media touches upon all aspects of political life, where a sense of crisis is endemic, and when populism appears in many disparate manifestations and contexts.

In making this argument, this book has three central aims that all work towards providing the reader with a more comprehensive, nuanced and time- and context-sensitive understanding of contemporary populism. The first aim is to locate populism within the shifting global media landscape. This is an era in which 'communicative abundance' reigns supreme, and where the increasing ubiquity and...