Conceptual problems in the study of populism: normativity, contestability, and plurality

Abstract

The complicated and mercurial character of populism is apodictic, but the consequences of populism’s conceptual confusion have been overlooked as scholars refashion populism to fit the methodological and empirical goals of their research. In this thesis, I interrogate the nature of the conceptual debate and the problems of creating an unequivocal definition of populism. I identify and analyze the challenges of normativity and contestability, and, given these challenges, I utilize the philosophical and epistemological frames of relativism and pluralism to analyze populism’s conceptual utility. I compare populism with a related concept, nativism, based on the pluralist assumption of concepts that concepts can be treated as distinct entities, but we can also form generalizations of concepts at a higher level of abstraction. I analyze the Manichean frame of “us” versus “them” that is the nexus between populism and nativism, and I discuss the vertical and horizontal planes of antagonism that can help differentiate the concepts. From an epistemological perspective, the contestable and normative conceptualizations of populism are not inherently disagreeable, so long as our understanding of concepts is based in the pluralist view.