What Is Populism: Definition, Left vs Right, and Why It Keeps Rising

Defining Populism

Populism is one of the most contested and frequently misused concepts in political science. In academic usage, the most influential definition comes from political theorist Jan-Werner Müller: populism is a political style that performs a "Manichaean" distinction between "the people" — virtuous, homogeneous, authentic — and "the elite" — corrupt, self-serving, alien to the true national interest. The populist politician claims to represent the real people against a parasitic elite that has captured the institutions of governance. This claim is inherently anti-pluralist: the populist does not acknowledge that legitimate interests conflict and must be negotiated; instead, they assert that the people have a single general will, which they (the populist leader) uniquely embody.

This definition has important implications. Populism is not simply anti-establishment sentiment or distrust of elites — most healthy democracies harbor these sentiments without becoming populist. What distinguishes populism is the claim that those who oppose the populist leader's agenda are not merely wrong or pursuing different legitimate interests, but are enemies of the people — corrupt, foreign-aligned, or not truly part of the authentic national community. This logic, if carried to its conclusion, justifies suppressing opposition, controlling institutions like courts and the press that constrain the leader's expression of popular will, and defining political participation in terms of loyalty to the populist movement rather than adherence to constitutional procedures.

Populism should be distinguished from demagoguery (appeals to fear and prejudice), nationalism (identification with and promotion of a national community), and authoritarianism (concentration of power in a leader unconstrained by law). All four can overlap and reinforce each other — as they do in the cases of Viktor Orbán, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and Narendra Modi — but they are conceptually distinct. A politician can be a demagogue without being a populist (there are elite-serving demagogues); a nationalist who is not a populist; an authoritarian who rules through bureaucracy and law rather than populist mass mobilization. Understanding the specific logic of populism is necessary for diagnosing its particular dangers to democratic institutions.

Left Populism and Its History

Populism has deep historical roots on the left. The American People's Party of the 1890s — the original "Populists" — was a farmers' movement that identified Wall Street bankers, railroad monopolies, and corrupt politicians as the elite exploiting the producing classes (farmers, workers). Their platform included nationalization of the railroads, a progressive income tax, direct election of senators, and monetary inflation through free silver coinage — all redistributive proposals attacking concentrated wealth. Their language was moralistic and the people-versus-elite frame was explicit, but their specific targets (corporations, financial elites) and their programmatic goals (redistribution, public control of monopolies) placed them clearly within a recognizably left political tradition.

Twentieth-century Latin American left populism — Peronism in Argentina, Vargas in Brazil, APRA in Peru, and many others — shared this basic structure but operated in more authoritarian institutional contexts. Juan Perón built his movement through direct mobilization of the urban working class against the oligarchic landed elite and foreign capital, using state resources, labor unions, and state media to build and maintain loyalty. Peronism's combination of redistributive social policy, nationalist economic protection, and personalist authoritarian tendencies — Perón controlled the press, jailed opponents, and revised the constitution to extend his term — became a template for subsequent Latin American populisms of left and right.

Contemporary left populism is represented by Podemos in Spain, La France Insoumise in France, Syriza in Greece, and the movements associated with Bernie Sanders in the United States and Jeremy Corbyn in the UK. These movements have explicitly embraced populist frames — Sanders's "political revolution" against a "millionaire class" and "corrupt political establishment" is structurally populist even if his specific policy proposals (Medicare for All, free public college) are standard social-democratic fare in European context. Political theorist Chantal Mouffe and her late collaborator Ernesto Laclau have argued that a "left populism" is not only legitimate but necessary for constructing the broad coalitions needed to defeat right-wing neoliberalism — a strategy debated intensively within left political circles.

Right Populism and Nativist Variants

Right populism overlaps substantially with left populism in its formal structure — people versus corrupt elite — but differs crucially in how it defines "the people" and who it identifies as the enemy. Right populism typically defines the authentic people in ethnic, religious, or cultural terms (the real Americans, the true French, authentic Hungarians) and identifies the corrupt elite as including not just economic elites but cultural and cosmopolitan elites, establishment media, academia, and minority or immigrant groups who are portrayed as beneficiaries of elite patronage at the expense of the native majority.

Donald Trump's electoral coalition combined economic grievance (deindustrialized communities left behind by globalization) with cultural and identity grievance (white Christians who felt their place in the social hierarchy threatened by demographic and cultural change). His elite targets were the "Deep State," "fake news media," liberal academics, and "globalists" — categories with significant anti-Semitic resonance — rather than simply economic elites. Wall Street executives who had supported previous Republican presidents were welcomed in Trump's cabinet rather than targeted as enemies. This illustrates a defining feature of right populism: its anti-elite rhetoric is selective, targeting cultural and cosmopolitan elites while often allying with and serving economic elites whose interests it does not challenge.

European right populism — the Front National/Rassemblement National in France, Alternative for Germany, Fidesz in Hungary, PiS in Law and Justice in Poland, the Sweden Democrats, the Italian Brothers of Italy — shares this basic template while reflecting national political cultures. The immigration issue is more central in the European context; parties that built their constituencies on welfare chauvinism (protecting welfare benefits for "us" against "them") and cultural identity against Islamic immigration have gained vote shares of 15–35% across much of Europe. Orbán's Hungary is the most advanced case of right populism institutionalizing itself in power: having won parliamentary supermajorities, Fidesz has rewritten the constitution, packed the courts, captured the media landscape, gerrymandered electoral districts, and created a political system that retains the form of elections while eliminating their substance.

Why Populism Keeps Rising

The supply of populist politicians exists in all democracies; the question is what creates demand for them. The academic and journalistic debate on this question has produced two main camps: the economic grievance account and the cultural backlash account, with ongoing arguments about which better explains the empirical variation.

The economic account emphasizes the consequences of deindustrialization, globalization, and rising inequality. Regions and communities where manufacturing employment has collapsed, where wages for non-college workers have stagnated for decades, and where local economic and social institutions have been hollowed out are significantly more likely to support populist candidates than economically thriving communities. Political scientists have documented this pattern in the United States, Germany, France, Italy, and elsewhere: the geography of populist support maps broadly onto the geography of economic displacement from globalization and technological change. The argument is not that poor people support populists — populists draw from across the income distribution — but that communities experiencing economic decline and loss of social status are fertile ground for anti-establishment politics.

The cultural backlash account, associated with Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris, argues that rising right-wing populism is primarily a reaction by traditionally dominant cultural groups (white, Christian, rural, less-educated) against the social changes of the past half-century: increasing racial and ethnic diversity, expanding rights for women and LGBTQ+ people, secular cultural values that challenge traditional religious frameworks, and the displacement of familiar cultural reference points by cosmopolitan, university-educated cultural norms. The Trump, Brexit, and European right-wing populist votes are heavily concentrated among demographically threatened majorities experiencing what sociologist Arlie Hochschild calls "status threat" — the sense that their place in the social order is being usurped by groups they perceive as receiving unearned advantages.

These accounts are not mutually exclusive — economic and cultural anxiety can reinforce each other — and their relative importance differs across countries and political contexts. What both accounts share is the identification of genuine grievances as the substrate for populism: real economic displacement, real cultural change, real perception of elite indifference or contempt. Populism is not primarily a cognitive failure or a manipulation of irrational masses; it is a political response to real structural changes that mainstream political parties have managed badly. This is why simply debunking populist claims or attributing support to racism or irrationality fails as a political strategy: it misunderstands the grievances that make populism appealing.

Populism in Power: What Happens

Populist parties in opposition are disruptive to normal political discourse but governmentally harmless. Populist parties in power are something different. The characteristic pathology of populism in power is the erosion of the institutional constraints on executive authority that liberal constitutionalism has constructed to prevent arbitrary rule. Courts, constitutional review bodies, independent oversight agencies, civil service protections, central bank independence, and free media are all portrayed by populist leaders as instruments of elite obstruction of the popular will — and thus as targets for subordination or capture.

Hungary under Orbán provides the most complete contemporary case study. Using the Fidesz parliamentary supermajority won in 2010, the government rewrote the constitution, expanded the Constitutional Court and packed it with loyalists, retired independent judges and replaced them with Fidesz allies, created new regulatory bodies staffed by loyalists, transferred state advertising budgets to pro-government media (driving independent media to closure), and gerrymandered electoral districts to entrench Fidesz's advantage. Each step was legally executed — this is what Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt call "constitutional coups" — but collectively they transformed Hungary from a functional liberal democracy into what Orbán himself calls an "illiberal democracy" and critics call a competitive authoritarian regime.

The Trump presidency illustrated the same logic in a stronger institutional context. Trump's attacks on the judiciary ("so-called judges"), the press ("enemy of the people"), the intelligence community (the "Deep State"), and electoral administration ("rigged" elections) followed the populist playbook for delegitimizing constraining institutions. Where institutional constraints held — courts struck down executive overreach, the Senate declined to convict after impeachment, election officials refused to falsify results — it was because norms of institutional independence remained sufficiently strong among the relevant actors. The January 6 attack on the Capitol represented the extreme conclusion of the populist logic applied to electoral institutions: if the people's will was expressed in the election result, and the election result was fraudulent, then the institutions certifying that result are enemies of the people and must be stopped.

Responding to Populism: Policy and Democratic Renewal

The conventional liberal response to populism — defending institutions, fact-checking claims, pointing out leaders' elite backgrounds and hypocrisy — has been largely unsuccessful and sometimes counterproductive. Treating populist supporters as duped or irrational reinforces the elite-versus-people frame and hardens the identity divisions that fuel populism. More effective responses address the underlying conditions that generate populist demand.

Economic policy responses include investment in left-behind regions, labor market programs that provide economic security for workers displaced by technological change and trade, and redistribution that visibly improves the material condition of communities experiencing decline. Political scientists have found that in regions where government investment and social services are visible and effective, populist support is lower — the argument that government doesn't work for ordinary people is harder to sustain when government visibly does work. This doesn't mean that economic policy alone can resolve culturally-rooted resentments, but it removes the material foundation on which populist grievances are built.

Democratic renewal — making political institutions more responsive and representative — addresses the perception of elite capture that populism exploits. Electoral reform (reducing gerrymandering, expanding access to voting, considering proportional representation), campaign finance reform (reducing the influence of large donors), and anti-corruption enforcement (ensuring that no one is above the law) are all democratic reforms that reduce the gap between the reality and the ideal of representative government. Populism thrives on the hypocrisy of institutions that claim democratic legitimacy while systematically serving narrow interests. Narrowing that gap is both morally correct and politically valuable as a response to the populist critique — even if it does not satisfy those whose grievances are primarily cultural rather than institutional.