Degan-Krause And Haughton Populism Summary

Kevin Deegan-Krause and Tim Haughton in “Toward a More Useful Conceptualization of Populism” underlined important difference between perception of populism as ideology and style. As they noticed there are clear restrains connected with usage of “populism,” and the word should be applied as an adjective not a noun. Deegan-Krause and Haughton claimed, “[u]nderstanding populism as characteristic rather than as an identity allows it to be used in a variety of combinations, a useful shift in light of recent scholarship, which emphasizes that populism can (and perhaps must) ally with other ideological positions.” As they explained, using the term as a noun forces people to decide between two totally distinct states of fact that is if a leader or

This way, they argued, it would be possible to disassociate populism from its subjective, negative perception, and use the word in just discursive terms. Thus, allowing for making claims about politics in a very broad manner. In accordance with that statement is Francisco Panizza who argued that adjectival usage of populism aims at merely describing “relatively fluid practices of identification,” not at labeling specific parties or leaders. For Panizza, populism is a certain characteristic of politics as a whole, not a feature of particular people involved in

In his books, “Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory” and “On Populist Reason” Laclau strongly opposed analyzing populism based on its ideological content, thus claiming that only the form really matters. His views, however, are on a much greater philosophical level. Laclau states that the symbolic (and simplistic) division of society into “us” versus “them” creates two antagonistic groups. The “people” have to face what Laclau calls “the dominant ideology,” “the dominant bloc,” “the institutional system,” or “an institutionalized other.” Hence, the demands of populist movement are “unified and stabilized not merely by their opposition to the status quo, but also by the emergence of an empty signifier, a concept or name (“freedom,” “Perón”) that loses its own specificity as it stands in for the other specific demands to which it is seen as equivalent.” Therefore, the opposition between the form and content serves nothing more but as a means of labeling that