Populism is the most heavily worked political category of the post-2008 period and one of the most contested. The word covers Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, Jeremy Corbyn and Marine Le Pen, Hugo Chávez and Viktor Orbán, the Argentine Peronists and the Italian Five Star Movement. It is used as a serious analytical category by political scientists, as a self-description by some politicians, as a smear by their opponents, and as a generic insult covering anyone the speaker disapproves of. The result is that arguments involving the word are often conducted by participants meaning quite different things by it.

This piece is a short primer. The minimum definition that the major scholarly accounts agree on. The historical origins, which are substantial and largely unknown to current users of the word. The main internal traditions, including the genuinely different left and right variants. What populism correctly diagnoses about the failure modes of representative democracy. Where it slides into the political pathologies that make democratic theorists nervous. The Irish situation specifically, which is less developed than most European parallels but is now a live question.

I would recommend reading the Liberalism, Conservatism, and Nationalism pieces in this series before this one, because populism interacts with each of them in different ways and the interactions matter for getting the analysis right.

A definition that survives the major scholarly accounts

The minimum definition, drawing on Cas Mudde, Jan-Werner Müller, Margaret Canovan, and Ernesto Laclau (who disagree about much else), is that populism is a political style or thin ideology that divides society into two homogeneous and antagonistic groups, "the pure people" and "the corrupt elite", and argues that political legitimacy derives from the direct expression of the people's will against the elite's distortions of it.

This definition has three components, each of which matters.

First, populism is a thin rather than thick ideology. It does not provide a complete worldview the way socialism, liberalism, or conservatism does. It provides a way of organising political conflict that can be combined with other ideological content. Left populists combine the populist style with redistributive economic programmes. Right populists combine it with cultural-nationalist or ethnic-exclusionary content. The populist style is the same. The substantive ideology attached to it differs.

Second, populism is anti-pluralist. The "people" in populist rhetoric is treated as a single homogeneous unit, with a single interest, a single will, and a single legitimate political voice. Disagreement within the people is treated as the work of the elite distorting the people's true preferences, not as legitimate internal pluralism. This is the feature Müller in particular has identified as the marker that distinguishes populism from broader democratic politics.

Third, populism makes a particular claim about democratic legitimacy. The people's will, as identified by the populist movement, takes precedence over institutional, procedural, and legal mediation. Constitutional courts, central banks, professional civil services, parliamentary procedure, and the protections of individual rights are all presented as obstacles to the realisation of the people's will rather than as legitimate components of democratic governance. This claim is the source of populism's structural tension with liberal-democratic institutions.

These three features (thin ideology, anti-pluralism, direct-will democratic claim) are the cluster the major scholarly accounts agree on, even where they disagree about emphasis and about specific cases.

Where the tradition came from

Populism in its modern political form has multiple historical roots, more substantial than the post-2008 framing usually acknowledges.

The Russian Narodnichestvo movement of the 1860s and 1870s, sometimes translated as Russian Populism, was an intellectual and political movement that idealised the Russian peasant commune and rejected both autocratic Tsarist authority and Western-liberal-capitalist alternatives in favour of a distinctively Russian agrarian socialism. The movement produced both serious political theory (Pyotr Lavrov, Mikhail Bakunin in his Narodnik phase) and the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881. It is a substantial chapter in the history of the term that most current users of the word do not know about.

The American People's Party of the 1890s was the second major early use of the term and the source of the name "populism" in English political discourse. The party emerged from agrarian unrest in the American Midwest and South, articulated demands for monetary reform (free silver), railroad regulation, progressive taxation, direct election of senators, and various other reforms aimed at protecting small farmers from concentrated economic power. The party held electoral success at state level for several years before being absorbed into the Democratic Party in 1896 under William Jennings Bryan. The substantive policy programme was largely adopted into mainstream American politics over the subsequent thirty years. The Populist movement was, on the empirical record, more constructive and more successful in shifting policy than its current reputation suggests.

Latin American populism, particularly Argentine Peronism and Brazilian Vargas-era populism, is the third major historical strand. Juan Perón's three terms (1946-1955, 1973-1974) developed a distinctive populist politics that combined working-class mobilisation, nationalist economic policy, charismatic leadership, and a complicated relationship with parliamentary democracy. Peronism remains the dominant political tradition in Argentina more than fifty years after Perón's death. The Latin American populist tradition has produced sustained scholarly work (Federico Finchelstein, Ernesto Laclau, Carlos de la Torre) that continues to shape the broader theoretical literature.

The interwar fascist movements were sometimes described as populist by contemporaries, although the relationship between populism and fascism is contested. Some scholars treat fascism as a particular pathological development of right populism. Others insist on the distinction. The argument turns partly on definitions and partly on judgement about specific cases.

The post-1989 period saw a resurgence of populist politics across multiple regions, with the post-2008 financial crisis substantially accelerating it. The current global wave of populist movements is the largest since the 1930s and is the focus of most current scholarly and journalistic discussion of the term.

The main internal variants

Worth distinguishing because the differences are large.

Left populism combines the populist style (people vs. elite, direct democratic claim, anti-pluralism softened by class-analytical framing) with redistributive and often anti-capitalist substantive programmes. The Latin American Pink Tide (Chávez, Morales, Correa, Lula) is the major recent example. The European post-2008 left populist parties (Podemos in Spain, Syriza in Greece in its earlier phase, Mélenchon's France Insoumise, the broader Corbyn movement in the UK) are the European parallel. Bernie Sanders in the United States is the closest American example.

The left populist position is, in principle, less anti-pluralist than the right variants because the framing identifies the elite as a class rather than as a cultural or ethnic out-group, and because the substantive programme is universalist rather than exclusionary. In practice, left-populist movements have shown some of the same anti-pluralist tendencies (charismatic leadership, intolerance of internal disagreement, occasional drift toward illiberal procedural moves) although typically less severely than right-populist movements.

Right populism combines the populist style with culturally conservative and often ethnic-nationalist substantive content. The current European cases (Le Pen's National Rally, Orbán's Fidesz, Meloni's Brothers of Italy, Wilders's PVV, the German AfD, the Polish PiS) are the major examples. Trump's MAGA movement in the United States is the largest recent example. Bolsonaro in Brazil and Erdoğan in Turkey are non-European cases.

The right populist position is structurally more anti-pluralist than the left variants because the cultural-nationalist content treats internal cultural minorities as obstructions to the people's will rather than as part of the people. The track record of right-populist regimes once in office has been substantially worse for democratic institutions than the left-populist record, particularly in cases like Hungary and Poland where the consolidation of power has involved systematic erosion of constitutional protections.

National populism is a related but distinct sub-category, articulated most fully by Eric Kaufmann and David Goodhart, that argues the post-2008 right-populist wave is centrally about cultural-nationalist concerns rather than about economic distress. The empirical case is contested. Most current scholarship suggests the actual driver is some combination of economic dislocation, cultural-status anxiety, and democratic dissatisfaction, with national context determining the specific mix.

Technocratic populism is a more recent variant identified by some scholars in cases like the Italian Five Star Movement (M5S) in its early phase. The movement combined populist anti-elite framing with claims that technocratic-rational policy-making would replace corrupt politics. The combination is unstable and has typically resolved either toward conventional populism or toward conventional managerialism.

What populism gets right

Worth being explicit about, because the conventional centrist response has tended to dismiss the populist diagnosis without engaging with what it actually identifies.

Populism correctly identifies that representative democracy in many modern Western states has produced a substantial gap between elite consensus and popular preference on a range of important questions. Immigration, trade policy, economic restructuring, EU integration, cultural-liberal social change, and the post-2008 austerity response have, in multiple countries, produced policy outcomes that diverge significantly from majority popular preference as expressed in surveys and referendums. The populist claim that the political system is not adequately representing what its citizens actually want is, on the empirical record, often correct.

Populism correctly identifies that institutional and procedural depoliticisation, of the kind discussed in the Neoliberalism piece in this series, has removed substantial economic decision-making from democratic contestation. Independent central banks, EU treaty constraints, international trade agreements, and supermajority procedural rules together produce a structure in which key decisions are effectively beyond the reach of any incoming government, regardless of electoral mandate. The populist objection to this is not unreasonable, even if the populist proposed remedy (more direct expression of leader will, fewer institutional checks) is often catastrophic.

Populism mobilises political participation among populations that the conventional party system has substantially demobilised. The post-2008 populist movements, both left and right, have brought back into political activity people who had given up on conventional politics. This is, in itself, a contribution to democratic life. The fact that the participation channels they have built are sometimes used in democratically harmful ways does not negate the underlying point that the conventional party system was failing in democratic-participation terms before populism arrived.

Populism produces democratic energy that conventional party politics has often lost. The procedural-managerial tone of much contemporary mainstream politics is not what democracy in its strongest forms has historically sounded like. Populist politics, at its best, recovers something of the older energetic and conflictual register of democratic argument. This is not without costs, but the cost should be weighed against the cost of the alternative, which is a politics so technocratic and procedural that ordinary citizens cease to engage with it.

Where populism is vulnerable

Worth being equally honest about.

The anti-pluralist core is the deepest problem. The populist claim that "we are the only real representatives of the people" is, structurally, an attempt to delegitimise political opposition rather than to compete with it. Opposition becomes treason. Independent media becomes elite conspiracy. Constitutional courts become obstructions to the popular will. Once these moves are made, the conditions for democratic competition begin to erode. The empirical record of right-populist regimes consolidating power, particularly in Hungary, Poland, Turkey, Venezuela, and increasingly the United States, demonstrates the structural pattern with substantial documentation.

The conspiracy-thinking tendency is real and damaging. Populist rhetoric typically requires identifying a coherent elite conspiracy as the source of the people's frustrations. The actual political-economic system is more diffuse and more structural than the conspiracy framing allows, and treating it as a conspiracy substitutes scapegoating for analysis. The populist movement, in trying to mobilise around the conspiracy narrative, often loses the analytical capacity to actually understand what is happening, which means even successful populist insurgencies often fail to produce useful policy responses to the conditions that created them.

The leader-cult tendency is real and damaging. Populist movements tend to organise around charismatic leadership in ways that conventional parties do not. The leader becomes the embodiment of the people's will, which produces both the political energy that populism is good at generating and the structural difficulty of internal disagreement, succession, and policy correction once the leader is wrong. Populist movements have a poor record of surviving leadership transitions and a poor record of correcting course when policies fail.

The substantive-policy improvisation problem is recurring. Because populism is a thin ideology, populist movements often capture power without coherent policy programmes. The substantive policy work has to be done after the capture, often under conditions where the leader's preferences and the movement's improvised commitments compete with the analytical work of careful policy design. The result is frequently that populist regimes deliver less of what they promised than conventional parties would have, even where the underlying diagnosis was correct.

The relationship to facts and norms is genuinely concerning. Populist rhetoric typically requires a degree of deliberate distortion that conventional political rhetoric, while not always accurate, generally avoids. The post-2016 American case is the clearest, but the pattern is broader. Once a politics is established that treats truth-claims as instrumentally useful or harmful rather than as constraints on argument, the conditions for substantive democratic deliberation degrade in ways that are hard to repair after the fact.

These are not small problems. They are why most serious democratic theorists, even those sympathetic to the populist diagnosis, are uneasy about populism as a long-term political strategy.

What it is commonly mistaken for

Three persistent confusions.

First, populism is often used as a synonym for any anti-elitism. This is too broad. Many forms of legitimate political contestation involve criticism of elite behaviour without taking on the populist features (anti-pluralism, leader cult, direct-will democratic claim, conspiracy framing). A trade-union organiser criticising employer behaviour is not necessarily a populist. A reform-liberal criticising regulatory capture is not necessarily a populist. A traditional conservative criticising metropolitan cultural arrogance is not necessarily a populist. The populist features are specific. Treating all anti-elite politics as populist obscures more than it reveals.

Second, populism is often confused with right-wing extremism. This is too narrow. Left populism exists, has substantial historical and contemporary examples, and is structurally different from right populism in several respects. Treating populism as equivalent to far-right politics produces an analysis that misses the specifically populist features in left movements and obscures the question of which features of right populism are populist and which are right-extremist.

Third, populism is sometimes used as a generic insult covering "any politics that mobilises ordinary people in ways that make me uncomfortable". This usage is too imprecise to be useful and tends to function as a way for centrist commentators to dismiss legitimate political mobilisation they happen to find threatening. Citizens who encounter "populist" used as a smear should ask which of the specific populist features the speaker is identifying. Often the answer is none of them and the word is doing political-rhetorical work rather than analytical work.

Where you find populism in Irish politics

Ireland has had a substantially less developed populist tradition than most European countries, and the reasons are worth understanding.

The Irish political system has historically operated through a combination of clientelist representation, civil-war duopoly, and Catholic-conservative consensus that performed some of the functions populism performs elsewhere. The Healy-Rae phenomenon, in which independents secure local representation through dense constituency-service relationships, is functionally adjacent to populism without sharing the structural features of populist mobilisation. Most Irish political demand for direct, personal, anti-bureaucratic political representation has been absorbed into local independent politics rather than into populist movements at the national level.

The 2020 Sinn Féin breakthrough had populist elements without being a populist movement in the strict sense. The party's framing of housing and cost-of-living issues drew on populist registers (the people vs. the established political class, direct expression of popular frustration, charismatic leadership in some respects) but the underlying movement is closer to left-nationalist social-democracy than to classical populism. Sinn Féin's willingness to operate within the institutional procedures of Irish parliamentary democracy distinguishes it from European populist parties that have been more willing to challenge institutional norms.

Independent Ireland, founded 2023, is the Irish formation closest to right-populist politics in its rhetorical positioning, although the substantive policy work has not yet been substantial. The party draws on rural-populist sentiment (anti-Brussels, anti-NGO, anti-establishment-cultural-liberal) and is building an organisational infrastructure that, on current evidence, is closer to the European right-populist template than any previous Irish formation. Whether it consolidates into a serious populist party or evaporates as a temporary protest vehicle is one of the open questions of the coming Dáils.

Aontú combines socially-conservative content with populist framing in ways that make it the closest Irish parallel to the smaller European right-populist parties. The party's positioning on immigration, EU centralism, and cultural-liberal change carries populist registers, although the explicit theological-Catholic content makes it structurally different from the more secular right-populist formations elsewhere.

The dissident-online far-right that has been organising in Ireland since 2015 and became more visible in the 2023 Dublin riot is more clearly populist in the strict sense, with explicit anti-pluralist commitments and conspiracy-thinking elements. As discussed in the Fascism piece, parts of this current shade into explicit fascism. Most of the broader dissident-right organising is closer to right populism in the European mode.

On the left, Irish populist organising has been substantially less developed than the European left-populist parallels. The post-2008 European left-populist wave (Podemos, Syriza, Mélenchon, Corbyn) did not produce a directly comparable Irish formation. People Before Profit and the broader far-left has continued in conventional Trotskyist organisational forms rather than taking the populist turn that some other European far-left formations did. Whether this is a strength or a weakness for Irish left politics is contested.

The mainstream Irish political conversation about populism is currently held in a vocabulary that mostly assumes populism is a problem occurring elsewhere. The conventional Irish centrist commentary frames populism as a continental European or American phenomenon affecting other countries, with limited reflection on the conditions that produce populism and the question of whether those conditions are forming in Ireland too. The empirical evidence on Irish housing, cost of living, immigration, and democratic-institutional dissatisfaction suggests the conditions are forming. Whether the political response is adequate to address the conditions before populism becomes a major Irish political force is one of the more important open questions of the coming period.

The single most important argument I would make for an Irish reader trying to think clearly about populism is this. Treating populism as merely a problem to be defeated, without addressing the underlying conditions that produce it, has a poor empirical record. The European countries that have been most successful at limiting right-populist breakthroughs have generally been those that have addressed the underlying conditions through serious policy work on housing, regional development, public services, and democratic reform. The countries that have tried to defeat populism through opposition campaigning alone have generally failed. Ireland is currently in a period where the underlying conditions are forming and where the political-system response is, on the available evidence, not yet adequate. Recognising this clearly, rather than treating populism as a moral failing of voters who succumb to it, is part of being a serious citizen of the current moment.

Why this matters for the citizen

A citizen confronting contemporary politics needs to be able to assess populist movements on their actual content rather than on the loose label. Left and right populisms are different. National-populist, technocratic-populist, and other variants exist. Some populist movements are substantively reformist responses to genuine democratic-institutional failure. Others are anti-pluralist movements with structural tendencies toward authoritarianism. Treating them all as the same thing produces analytical and political failures.

The deeper lesson, on the available evidence, is that populism tends to grow in conditions of representative-democratic dysfunction. Where conventional parties are failing to address the actual concerns of substantial fractions of the electorate, populist movements provide the channel through which those concerns enter politics. The right response is rarely to delegitimise the populist channel without addressing the underlying concerns. The right response is usually to address the underlying concerns through whatever institutional means are available, while remaining alert to the genuine democratic risks that populist movements can pose.

Ireland is, as discussed above, currently in the period where this question is becoming live. The shape of Irish politics over the coming decade depends substantially on whether the mainstream parties, particularly the centre-left, develop adequate responses to the underlying conditions before populist movements consolidate. The empirical record of comparable European countries suggests this work is harder than it looks and easier to fail at than to succeed at. The Irish political conversation has not yet engaged with it at the level it would need to.

Further reading

If you have an evening: Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, Populism: A Very Short Introduction (2017). The standard accessible scholarly account, with the major variants and the major empirical cases laid out clearly.

If you have a week: Jan-Werner Müller, What Is Populism? (2016). The single most influential recent academic statement of the populism-as-anti-pluralism position. Short and demanding.

For the broader theoretical framework: Margaret Canovan, Populism (1981), is the older classic that established much of the conceptual vocabulary. Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (2005), is the major theoretical statement of the populism-as-discursive-logic alternative position.

For the Latin American material: Federico Finchelstein, From Fascism to Populism in History (2017), is the standard treatment of the Latin American case in comparative perspective. Carlos de la Torre's edited volume The Promise and Perils of Populism (2015) is the standard comparative reference.

For the post-2008 wave specifically: Anne Applebaum, Twilight of Democracy (2020), is the most accessible journalistic account of the European populist trajectory across the last decade. John Judis, The Populist Explosion (2016), is the early statement. Yascha Mounk, The People vs. Democracy (2018), is the most influential recent academic statement of the alarm position.

For the left-populist case: Chantal Mouffe, For a Left Populism (2018), is the major contemporary statement of the case that left populism is a defensible and necessary political response to the current conjuncture. Read alongside Müller for the contrast.

For the Irish-specific material: there is no comprehensive scholarly treatment of Irish populism. The journalism of Una Mullally, Fintan O'Toole, and Aoife Moore, across various Irish publications, provides ongoing engagement with the question. The Royal Irish Academy and TASC have produced occasional policy papers on Irish democratic-institutional dissatisfaction that provide useful empirical material.

The thing populism asks, that the conventional centrist analysis of the post-2008 period has often dodged, is whether the institutional structure of contemporary representative democracy is actually delivering what democracy is supposed to deliver. The strongest argument for taking populism seriously is not as a programme but as a diagnosis. The diagnosis is, on substantial parts of the empirical record, correct. What follows from the diagnosis is the work of the current period. Anyone serious about contemporary politics, in Ireland or elsewhere, has to engage with both halves of this honestly.

Related in the Political Literacy series

  • What Is Liberalism? — the institutional tradition populism is most often in tension with
  • What Is Nationalism? — the substantive ideology most often combined with right populism
  • What Is Fascism? — the related but distinct phenomenon populism sometimes shades into
  • What Is Conservatism? — the broader right-wing tradition populism has substantially displaced in some countries
  • What Is Socialism? — the substantive ideology most often combined with left populism

Plus the framing piece, What Do Ireland's Parties Actually Stand For?, and the full Political Literacy archive.