7 - Populism and the new political subject

Summary

A case of the missing person

What these four cases illustrate is that certain key ideas matter: populism is not just “a version of …” and crucially, that these ideas matter in their relationship to one another. Taken together they are greater than the sum of their parts, and it is that relational logic between them that imparts its dynamics to populist politics. And citizens seem to have become far more responsive to them. Some of the approaches we initially looked at take into account that values ebb and flow, and of course events and developments shape them. But no approach seems to do justice to the new link between citizen demands for directness, immediacy and transparency, what we have called authenticity.

In fact, in most approaches there is only a vague sense of the citizen, or political subject. Analysts have been a little thin on the relational side of populism, and extremely thin on what some might call the “demand side” of populism. Yet, there may be crisis, and there may be discourses, and there may be ideas, but someone has to be in the mood to respond to them.

A populist profile?

Most studies that try to look at populist “voters” focus on demographics, hoping that through a deductive enterprise a better sense of a “populist voter” might emerge. In a Counterpoint pamphlet, for instance, my colleagues and I looked at the characteristics of populist party voters in Europe and tried to draw out correlations between education, or income or employment status, gender, etc, and a propensity to vote for a populist party (Fieschi, Morris & Caballero-Sosa 2012). But the best one can do with such numbers – and this is by no means useless – is to draw correlations between support for a populist party and voters with these characteristics. This can be helpful in terms of thinking about voting behaviour, but in fact it tells us little about the motivations of these voters. This is also because voters seem increasingly diverse: what used to be a mainly male voting base, for example, has dramatically evolved; and voters’ levels of income and life characteristics are more varied than they used to be, as populism has become more successful and captured more voters.