ABSTRACT
Over the past two decades, the ideational approach has emerged as one of the most popular cross-regional approaches to the study of populism. As its name suggests, the ideational approach explains the causes and consequences of populism in terms of populist ideas – the belief that the political world reflects a Manichean struggle between the good will of the common people and an evil, conspiring elite. These ideas are familiar to anyone following populist political campaigns and movements around the world. For example, in the Netherlands, PVV’s Geert Wilders opposes the Dutch political system, saying that a ruling parliamentarian elite disregards the will of the people, while often invoking the fictitious Henk and Ingrid, a “typical” Dutch couple that are the “heart” of Dutch society. In Bolivia, long-term president Evo Morales rails against national and international forces. In a 2005 speech typical of his style, he declared, “I believe only in the power of the people” and “We must serve the social and popular movements rather than the transnational corporations” (Morales 2005). These ideas explain populism’s most pernicious and beneficial outcomes, and they are one of the main reasons why citizens and activists mobilize in support of populist politicians, parties and movements. Populist ideas are not the only ones that matter in politics; they compete with other discourses and must combine with more traditional political ideologies to generate their appeal. They must also interact with material factors – populist ideas are carried by real people who are constrained by the hard facts of institutions and resources. But most of the features we associate with populism can be linked back to these ideas, and they provide the key to explaining populism’s persistent appeal (Hawkins and Rovira Kaltwasser 2017).
