Populism is booming across all the nuances of the political spectrum. It occupies relevant positions in national parliaments, in governmental coalitions with mainstream parties or as successful challengers of the political status quo. This volume sheds new light on the topic from different methodological and theoretical angles and offers evidence from a variety of cases on the ‘why’ and ‘how’ questions on populism’s emergence and consolidation in Europe over the past 30 years. The volume, composed of eight chapters, investigates how different populist parties in the European Union have been affected by the various crises, disentangling the role of the Great Recession vis-à-vis other factors (such as political and party system factors, but also structural social changes or cultural opportunities) in the growing strength of populist parties in various European countries. More specifically, the volume aims are to: promote critical discussion on the concept of populism, reflecting on its conceptual ‘usability’ beyond the traditional party families to which it is usually related; use a preliminary theoretical clarification to shed new light on the different ways in which populism has been articulated in the various European countries (either in Continental and Southern Europe, or in the lesser known and studied East-Central countries) since the economic crisis, which has acted as an external shock for many party systems, either giving birth to new political actors or consolidating existing ones; investigate the connections between populism and the national contextual political and cultural specificities that can determine the development of different types of populisms across countries, elaborating on different ‘configurations’ of triggering conditions for populism and reflecting on the limitations of a discrete conceptualisation of the phenomenon. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of West European Politics.

Populism is booming across all the nuances of the political spectrum. It occupies relevant positions in national parliaments, in governmental coalitions with mainstream parties or as successful challengers of the political status quo. This volume sheds new light on the topic from different methodological and theoretical angles and offers evidence from a variety of cases on the ‘why’ and ‘how’ questions on populism’s emergence and consolidation in Europe over the past 30 years. The volume, composed of eight chapters, investigates how different populist parties in the European Union have been affected by the various crises, disentangling the role of the Great Recession vis-à-vis other factors (such as political and party system factors, but also structural social changes or cultural opportunities) in the growing strength of populist parties in various European countries. More specifically, the volume aims are to: promote critical discussion on the concept of populism, reflecting on its conceptual ‘usability’ beyond the traditional party families to which it is usually related; use a preliminary theoretical clarification to shed new light on the different ways in which populism has been articulated in the various European countries (either in Continental and Southern Europe, or in the lesser known and studied East-Central countries) since the economic crisis, which has acted as an external shock for many party systems, either giving birth to new political actors or consolidating existing ones; investigate the connections between populism and the national contextual political and cultural specificities that can determine the development of different types of populisms across countries, elaborating on different ‘configurations’ of triggering conditions for populism and reflecting on the limitations of a discrete conceptualisation of the phenomenon. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of West European Politics.

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

This volume, covering twenty-five populist parties in seventeen European states, presents the first comparative study of the impact of the Great Recession on populism. Based on a common analytical framework, chapters offer a highly differentiated view of how the interplay between economic and political crises helped produce patterns of populist development across Europe. Populism grew strongly in Southern and Central-Eastern Europe, particularly where an economic crisis developed in tandem with a political one. Nordic populism went also on the rise, but this region's populist parties have been surprisingly responsible. In Western Europe, populism actually contracted during the crisis - with the exception of France. As for the two Anglo-Celtic countries, while the UK has experienced the rise of a strong anti-European populist force, Ireland stands out as a rare case in which no such a party has risen in spite of the severity of its economic and political crises.

A state-of-the-art analysis of the contentious areas of EU law that have been put in the spotlight by populism.

A timely overview of populism, one of the most contested concepts in political journalism and the social sciences

"Populism, a political movement with anti-elite, authoritarian and nativist tendencies, typically spearheaded by a charismatic leader, is an old phenomenon but also a very new and disturbing one at that. The Populist Temptation is an effort to understand the wellsprings of populist movements and why the threat they pose to mainstream political parties and pluralistic democracy has been more successfully contained in some cases than others"--