Keyword

Axes

Upper Left Quadrant Details Upper Right Quadrant Details Lower Left Quadrant Details Lower Right Quadrant Details Details

Quadrants

Outline

In spite of its sound historical roots, populism has become a catch-all word, applied to many different ideologies, movements, governmental experiences. Once confined to countries undergoing deep social and economic transformations, it is now applied also to define tensions within well-established democratic regimes.
The vertical axis, ideology to government, takes into consideration two aspects of democracy - redemptive and pragmatic - as described by Margaret Canovan (1999), while also underlying the fact that populism is no longer limited to the ideology of opposition movements but has become, in many instances, an instrument of governmental power. The horizontal axis distinguishes the traditional populist environment, based on communitarian and ethnic linkages, from the individualistic mobilization typical of contemporary media-driven and charismatic populism.