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ABSTRACT
Although in recent years populism has emerged from within mainstream conservative parties around the world, populism and conservatism are still rarely studied together. Trying to establish a link between the two may appear paradoxical, given their opposing ideational content, as populism mobilizes the people against the elites, while conservatism defends established hierarchies and traditions. This article argues however that we can identify many more similarities and overlaps between populism and conservatism if we adopt a broader conceptualization of political ideologies that includes not only their ideational content but also their discursive, strategic, organizational and structural dimensions. On this basis, the article views populism and conservatism as modes of politics that mobilize followers primarily on the basis of idealized visions of the political community and state–society relations. Although populism puts forth an antagonistic vision of these relations and conservatism a deferential one, both are otherwise quite similar to strategies aimed at defining the boundaries and character of the political community on the basis of its relationship with political authority. The article conducts an empirical probe demonstrating how its theoretical argument can be applied in comparative research.
Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank two anonymous reviewers and the editors of the journal for comments and suggestions that helped the article improve substantially before publication. An earlier version of this article was presented in the CSPIR research seminar series of London Metropolitan University. The author acknowledges the comments of his colleagues, especially Kelvin Knight, Shaun Yates and Josefine Nyby.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. Amid a huge literature, see indicatively H. Kriesi, E. Grande, R. Lachat, M. Dolezal, S. Bornchier and T. Frey, West European Politics in the Age of Globalization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); M. Minkenberg, ‘The renewal of the radical right: Between modernity and anti-modernity’, Government and Opposition, 35 (2000), pp. 170–188; C. Mudde, Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); C. Mudde, The Far Right Today (Cambridge: Polity, 2019).
2. For the most comprehensive recent comparative analysis on this topic see T. Bale and C. Rovira Kaltwasser (Eds), Riding the Populist Wave: Europe’s Mainstream Right in Crisis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021). Note the semantic choice in the title of the volume, where adaptation to the far right and adoption of its policies is equated with turning ‘populist’.
3. Y. Stavrakakis, G. Katsambekis, N. Nikisianis, A. Kioupkiolis and T. Siomos, ‘Extreme right-wing populism in Europe: revisiting a reified association’, Critical Discourse Studies, 14 (2017), pp. 420–439.
4. K. O’Hara, ‘Burkean conservatism, legibility and populism’, Journal of Political Ideologies, 26 (2021), pp. 81–100; R.R. Barr, ‘Populists, outsiders and anti-establishment politics’, Party Politics, 15 (2009), pp. 29–48.
5. C. Mudde, ‘The populist Zeitgeist’, Government and Opposition, 39 (2004), pp. 541–563; P.A. Taggart, Populism (Buckingham: Open University Press, 2000).
6. On populism, see, indicatively, M. Canovan, Populism (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1981); P.A. Taggart, op. cit., Ref. 5. On conservatism, see S.P. Huntington, ‘Conservatism as an ideology’, American Political Science Review, 51 (1957), pp. 454–473; J.-W. Müller, ‘Comprehending conservatism: A new framework for analysis’, Journal of Political Ideologies, 11 (2006), pp. 359–365.
7. This is especially the case for the British conservative tradition. Edmund Burke is considered its progenitor, while Hugh Cecil codified these ideas in his famous 1912 book. For a critical discussion of this see A. Vincent, ‘British conservatism and the problem of ideology’, Political Studies, 42 (1994), pp. 204–227.
8. C. Mudde, ‘The populist zeitgeist’, op. cit., Ref. 5.
9. B. Moffitt, The Global Rise of Populism: Performance, Political Style, and Representation (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2016).
10. E. Laclau, On Populist Reason (London: Verso, 2005).
11. K. Weyland, ‘Clarifying a contested concept: Populism in the study of Latin American politics’, Comparative Politics, 34 (2001), pp. 1–22.
12. For some recent exceptions see R. Bourke, ‘What is conservatism? History, ideology and party’, European Journal of Political Theory, 17 (2018), pp. 449–475; O’Hara, op. cit., Ref. 4. On political science having ignored ‘the right’ see S.M. Lipset, Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1960), pp. 17–18.
13. Huntington, op. cit., Ref. 6, pp. 454–455, 457.
14. Müller, op. cit., Ref. 6; R. Scruton, The Meaning of Conservatism (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001). Huntington identifies a third approach which he calls ‘aristocratic’ i.e. that conservatism is the ideology of the aristocratic classes in Europe, and which he dismisses, partly because it overlaps with the other two. On an important example of this approach see P. Kondylis, Konservativismus: Geschichtlicher Gehalt und Untergang (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1986).
15. The ‘universality’ of ideologies like liberalism refers to their ideational content and professed ambitions rather than their implementation that, from the exclusion of women from basic civic rights to the legitimation of colonialism, falls far short of universality. Regarding philosophical assumptions and their self-avowed universal applicability, however, populism and conservatism’s contextual nature indeed differs from Enlightenment ideologies like liberalism and socialism.
16. O’Hara has approached this affinity between conservatism and populism via the concept of ‘legibility’: O’Hara, op. cit., Ref. 4. The perspective of conservatism as an ideology fundamentally at odds with the Enlightenment mind-set has been advanced, among others, by Karl Mannheim, whose analysis evokes in many ways similar views of populism. K. Mannheim, Conservatism: A Contribution to the Sociology of Knowledge (New York: Routledge, 2005 [1936]).
17. G. Ionescu and E. Gellner (Eds) Populism: Its Meaning and National Characteristics (New York: Macmillan, 1969).
18. Taggart, op. cit., Ref. 5.
19. Kondylis, op. cit., Ref. 14.
20. L. Goodwyn, The Populist Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978).
21. A classic overview and updating of this thesis is in R.S. Katz and P. Mair, ‘Changing models of party organization and party democracy: The emergence of the cartel party’, Party Politics 1 (1995), pp. 5–28. The reference work on parties and their organizations remains to this day M. Duverger, Political Parties: Their Organization and Activity in the Modern World (London: Methuen, 1954).
22. See here also: Y. Stavrakakis, ‘Antinomies of formalism: Laclau’s theory of populism and the lessons from religious populism in Greece’, Journal of Political Ideologies, 9 (2004), p. 256: ‘[O]rganizational aspects of populist movements should not be studied independently from populist discourse but as dimensions of the discourses through which these movements and political identities are constituted … [P]opulism is neither a set of particular ideological contents nor a given organizational pattern, but rather a discursive logic, a mode of representing social and political space which, no doubt, influences both these realms’.
23. The study of ideas by focusing on their real-world impact, the institutions they generate and the ways that these become their material expression draws on sociological and constructivist perspectives, especially in IR theory. For reference works see J.T. Checkel, ‘The constructivist turn in International Relations theory’, World Politics, 50 (1998), pp. 324–348; T. Risse, ‘Ideas do not float freely: transnational coalitions, domestic structures, and the end of the cold war’, International Organization, 48 (1994), pp. 185–214.
24. Note here that ‘mode of politics’ is not proposed as an alternative concept to describe populism, conservatism or other ideologies. It is not meant, for instance, to substitute ‘[thin-centered] ideology’, ‘discourse’, ‘strategy’ etc. in the analysis of populism. It is rather a conceptual lens to study ideologies, highlighting the interconnections between their content and its material expressions. In this sense, the study of modes of politics does not call for a choice between different perspectives of ideologies, but for their integration and fruitful study side by side.
25. Katz and Mair, op. cit., Ref. 21.
26. Many of the debates among the political elites of early modernity concerned precisely such questions. See indicatively Harvey C. Mansfield, Statesmanship and Party Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965); Peter J. Stanlis, Edmund Burke and the Natural Law (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1958).
27. N. Mouzelis, ‘On the concept of populism: Populist and clientelist modes of incorporation in semiperipheral polities’, Politics and Society, 14 (1985), pp. 329–348.
28. Katz and Mair, op. cit., Ref. 21.
29. See, for example, the foundational S.M. Lipset, op. cit., Ref. 12.
30. My use of the topographical description of modes of politics as ‘horizontal’ and ‘vertical’ builds on works that have looked at populism and conservatism as discursive appeals ordering through articulation the political field precisely along a vertical axis. For conservatism, the classical such statement is E.L. Gibson, Class and Conservative Parties: Argentina in Comparative Perspective (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996): ‘[T]he Left seeks to slice society horizontally; conservative movements seek to slice it vertically’ (p. 18). For populism, I rely especially on the work of Jenne, who defines populism as a discourse mobilizing ‘along up-down vertical cleavages’. See E.K. Jenne, ‘Is nationalism or ethnopopulism on the rise today?’, Ethnopolitics, 17 (2018), pp. 546–552.
31. The top-down vs. bottom-up distinction draws on some recent works that explicitly discuss populism in these terms. Most notably, see Heiskanen in this journal. J. Heiskanen, ‘The nationalism-populism matrix’, Journal of Political Ideologies, 26 (2021), pp. 335–355.
32. K. Weyland, ‘A political-strategic approach’, in C. Rovira Kaltwasser, P. Taggart, P. Ochoa Espejo and P. Ostiguy (Eds) Oxford Handbook of Populism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), p. 59.
33. R. Heinisch and O. Mazzoleni (Eds), Understanding Populist Party Organisation: The Radical Right in Western Europe (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).
34. Moffitt, op. cit., Ref. 9.
35. Barr, op. cit., Ref. 4, pp. 38, 41–42; Weyland, op. cit., Ref. 11, p. 14.
36. Barr, op. cit., Ref. 4, pp. 33–34.
37. Goodwyn, op. cit., Ref. 20.
38. P. Aslanidis, ‘Populism and social movements’, in C. Rovira Kaltwasser et al. (Eds), op. cit., Ref. 32, pp. 305–325; Laclau, op. cit., Ref. 10.
39. D. Ziblatt, Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).
40. Barr, op. cit., Ref. 4, pp. 38–39.
41. Müller, op. cit., Ref. 6, pp. 361–364.
42. Consider, for example, imperial projects of capitalist modernization and aggressive militarism in 19th and 20th century Japan and Germany. See B. Moore, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston: Beacon, 1967).
43. See for example E.D. Genovese, The Southern Tradition: The Achievement and Limitations of an American Conservatism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993). One may object to Genovese’s assessment of the essence of the Southern ideology in 19th century United States, however he outlines convincingly how a conservatism defending entrenched hierarchies and privileges on a certain level can be re-articulated on another level as a bottom-up defense against externally imposed modernization and encroachment.
44. Genovese, ibid. McLynn similarly sees the opposition in 18th century England between the regime of the Glorious Revolution and Jacobitism (the support for the deposed Stuart dynasty) as ‘the struggle of one form of conservatism against another, […] the empirical/positivistic variety against the nostalgic, reactionary kind’. F.J. McLynn, ‘The ideology of Jacobitism on the eve of the rising of 1745 – part I’, History of European Ideas, 6 (1985), p. 15.
45. D. Caramani, ‘Will vs. reason: The populist and technocratic forms of political representation and their critique to party government’, American Political Science Review, 111 (2017), pp. 60–61.
46. Ionescu and Gellner, op. cit., Ref. 17.
47. V.R. Hadiz and A. Chryssogelos, ‘Populism in world politics: A comparative cross-regional perspective’, International Political Science Review, 38 (2017), pp. 399–411.
48. Aslanidis, op. cit., Ref 38, p. 307; C. Bickerton and C. Accetti, ‘Populism and technocracy: Opposites or complements?’, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 20 (2017), p. 193.
49. Bale and Rovira Kaltwasser, op. cit., Ref. 2; Huntington, op. cit., Ref. 6, p. 454; Gibson, op. cit., Ref. 30, p. 7.
50. N. Gidron, ‘Many ways to be right: Cross-pressured voters in Western Europe’, British Journal of Political Science, 52 (2022), pp. 146–161. See also Huntington, op. cit., Ref. 6, p. 457.
51. In populism, this can be done by an ‘overdeveloped state’ (if populism is already in power) or an all-dominant party leadership. N. Mouzelis, op. cit., Ref. 27; also Barr, op. cit., Ref. 4, pp. 42.
52. D. Caramani, op. cit., Ref. 45, pp. 55, 64. Populist parties of course can end up with thick and strong organizational structures akin to those of sectional mass parties. But rather than a way to represent societal interests, this organizational maturing of populist parties must be understood primarily as a pragmatic and tactical effort to build adaptable and resilient structures in party competition. And even then, the role of leadership at the top over followers in the bottom will remain paramount. See Heinisch and Mazzoleni, op. cit., Ref. 33.
53. One nuanced difference between the heteronomous organizations of populists and conservatives is that in populism, the linkages between leaders and followers are purely ‘plebiscitary’, whereas because such linkages carry the potential for radicalization, conservatives prefer more deferential ones.
54. Goodwyn, op. cit., Ref. 20; Gibson, op. cit., Ref. 30; Scruton, op. cit., Ref. 14
55. N. Gidron and P.A. Hall, ‘Populism as a problem of social integration’, Comparative Political Studies, 53 (2020), pp. 1027–1059.
56. Kondylis, op. cit., Ref. 14.
57. Huntington, op. cit., Ref. 6, p. 454.
58. D. Slater and N.R. Smith, ‘The power of counterrevolution: Elitist origins of political order in postcolonial Asia and Africa’, American Journal of Sociology, 121 (2016), pp. 1475–76.
59. Goodwyn, op. cit., Ref. 20.
60. J. Gest, The New Minority: White Working Class Politics in an Age of Immigration and Inequality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).
61. A thorough exposition of this horizontal vision of societal competition is in A. Moravcsik, ‘Taking preferences seriously: A liberal theory of international politics’, International Organization, 51 (1997), pp. 513–553.
62. Gibson, op. cit., Ref. 30, p. 18.
63. Weyland, op. cit., Ref. 11; Moffitt, op. cit., Ref. 9.
64. B. De Cleen and Y. Stavrakakis, ‘Distinctions and articulations: A discourse theoretical framework for the study of populism and nationalism’, Javnost, 24 (2017), pp. 301–319.
65. K.A. Hawkins, R.E. Carlin, L. Littvay and C. Rovira Kaltwasser (Eds), The Ideational Approach to Populism: Concept, Theory and Analysis (London: Routledge, 2019).
66. Barr, op. cit., Ref. 4, p. 32; Bickerton and Accetti, op. cit., Ref. 48, p. 193.
67. Barr, ibid., p. 44; Caramani, op. cit., Ref. 45, p. 63.
68. Mouzelis, op. cit., Ref. 27, pp. 341–344.
69. Ziblatt, op. cit., Ref. 39.
70. Laclau, op. cit., Ref. 9, p. 81.
71. B. Arditi, ‘Populism is hegemony is politics? On Ernesto Laclau’s On Populist Reason’, Constellations, 17 (2010), pp. 488–497.
72. Gibson, op. cit., Ref. 30; Ziblatt, op. cit., Ref. 39.
73. A. Chryssogelos, ‘The people in the “here and now”: Populism, modernization and the state in Greece’, International Political Science Review, 38 (2017), pp. 473–487.
74. P. Mair, ‘Populist democracy vs party democracy’, in Y. Mény and Y. Surel (Eds) Democracies and the Populist Challenge (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 81–98.
75. O’Hara, op. cit., Ref. 4.
76. R.H. Johnson, ‘The new populism and the old: demands for a New International Economic Order and American agrarian protest’, International Organization, 37 (1983), pp. 41–72.
77. The most complete presentation of the social context of Bolingbroke’s time, his philosophical thought and political strategies is the excellent I. Kramnick, Bolingbroke and His Circle: The Politics of Nostalgia in the Age of Walpole (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1968).
78. See especially Colley’s essential study: L. Colley, In Defiance of Oligarchy: The Tory Party 1714–60 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
79. For a framing of Bolingbroke’s conservatism as an expression of populist discontent against modernization, see Kramnick, op. cit., Ref. 77, p. 60, p. 171, pp. 245–250.
80. For an intriguing analysis of how the late 19th and early 20th century constellation resembles the 21st century in the intertwining of populism, economic nationalism and geopolitical change, and Chamberlain and Brexit compared side by side, see C.M. Dent, ‘Brexit, Trump and trade: Back to a late 19th century future?’, Competition and Change, 24 (2020), pp. 338–357. For a placement of Chamberlain and imperial preference in a long history of populist reactions to economic reaction and change, see B. Eichengreen, The Populist Temptation: Economic Grievance and Political Reaction in the Modern Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 38–42.
81. S. Hall, ‘The great moving right show’, Marxism Today, (1979), pp. 14–20. This argument was an extension of a more extensive treatment of the crisis of the postwar settlement in Britain in S. Hall, C. Chritcher, T. Jefferson, J. Clarke and B. Roberts, Policing the Crisis (London: MacMillan, 1978). For a contemporary discussion of how Hall’s concept of populism relates to the discursive approach, see G. Colpani, ‘Two theories of hegemony: Stuart Hall and Ernesto Laclau in conversation’, Political Theory, 50 (2022), pp. 221–246. On populism and neoliberalism through a theoretical lens making use of Hall’s work, see J. Maskovsky and S. Bjork-James (Eds.), Beyond Populism: Angry Politics and the Twilight of Neoliberalism (Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2020).
82. Gidron and Hall, op. cit., Ref. 55.
83. G. Kolko, The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History 1900–1916 (New York: Free Press, 1963).
84. N. Gingrich, ‘The Washington Establishment vs. The American People’. Washington: Heritage Foundation (1990). https://www.heritage.org/budget-and-spending/report/the-washington-establishment-vs-the-american-people-report-the-budget.
85. D.T. Carter, From George Wallace to Newt Gingrich: Race in the Conservative Counter-Revolution 1964–1994 (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1996).
86. K. Bluhm and M. Varga (Eds), New Conservatives in Russia and East-Central Europe (London: Routledge, 2018).
87. D. McDonnell and A. Werner, International Populism: The Radical Right in the European Parliament (London: Hurst, 2019).
88. Minkenberg, op. cit., Ref. 1.