With the victory of Donald Trump in the 2016 United States presidential election, populists have come to power in the US for the first time in many years. However, US political scientists have been flat-footed in their response, failing to anticipate or measure populism's impact on the campaign or to offer useful policy responses. In contrast, populism has long been an important topic of study for political scientists studying other regions, especially Latin America and Europe. The conceptual and theoretical insights of comparativist scholars can benefit Americanists, and applying their techniques can help US scholars and policymakers place events in perspective.

This book examines the populist movement of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela and argues that populism is primarily a response to widespread corruption. It defends a definition of populism as a set of ideas and measures populism across Venezuela and other countries. It also explores the influence of populist ideas on political organization and policy.

This book provides a global overview of populist actors and strategies around the globe from a comparative perspective. By presenting six country studies on the United States, France, Poland, Turkey, the Philippines and Argentina, the contributors analyze how parties from both the radical left and right use a populist discourse combining people-centrism, anti-elitism, and the exclusion of certain population cohorts from the national community. They illustrate how populist actors mobilize and persuade citizens by using simple and slogan-based language and charismatic leadership while offering simple solutions to complex problems. Each case study describes the history of populism in the respective country, current populist actors, the strategies these parties and movements employ, and how successful these tactics are within the population. These case studies are embedded within two theoretical chapters that link the cases to the theoretical and empirical literature on populism. This timely book will appeal to anyone interested in understanding the current enormous appeal of populist movements around the globe.

The first cross-regional study to show that populism can have both positive and negative effects on democracy.

This edited book aims to contribute to the political science scholarship on populism by focusing on the contemporary manifestations of populism in light of the current context. Populism has gone global, with populist parties gaining considerable ground, particularly in the last decade: populists are now in government in almost every part of the globe. In so doing, this book not only takes stock of the previous work on populism, but also builds upon it to further deepen our understanding of the phenomenon and take research forward. The authors explore different facets of the most recent manifestations of populism, trying to engage in new avenues as suggested by recent and authoritative academic work. The approach is comparative and multi-dimensional, with a cross-regional focus on Western Europe and the USA. The 12 contributions gathered in this book address a wide spectrum of aspects, many of which are largely understudied.

American political observers express increasing concern about affective polarization, i.e., partisans' resentment toward political opponents. We advance debates about America's partisan divisions by comparing affective polarization in the US over the past 25 years with affective polarization in 19 other western publics. We conclude that American affective polarization is not extreme in comparative perspective, although Americans' dislike of partisan opponents has increased more rapidly since the mid-1990s than in most other Western publics. We then show that affective polarization is more intense when unemployment and inequality are high; when political elites clash over cultural issues such as immigration and national identity; and in countries with majoritarian electoral institutions. Our findings situate American partisan resentment and hostility in comparative perspective, and illuminate correlates of affective polarization that are difficult to detect when examining the American case in isolation.

Populism is on the rise in Europe and the Americas. Scholars increasingly understand populist forces in terms of their ideas or discourse, one that envisions a cosmic struggle between the will of the common people and a conspiring elite. In this volume, we advance populism scholarship by proposing a causal theory and methodological guidelines – a research program – based on this ideational approach. This program argues that populism exists as a set of widespread attitudes among ordinary citizens, and that these attitudes lie dormant until activated by weak democratic governance and policy failure. It offers methodological guidelines for scholars seeking to measure populist ideas and test their effects. And, to ground the program empirically, it tests this theory at multiple levels of analysis using original data on populist discourse across European and US party systems; case studies of populist forces in Europe, Latin America, and the US; survey data from Europe and Latin America; and experiments in Chile, the US, and the UK. The result is a truly systematic, comparative approach that helps answer questions about the causes and effects of populism.