Popularisum

Overview
Populism is a political doctrine that proposes that the common people are exploited by a privileged elite, and which seeks to resolve this. The underlying ideology of populists can be left, right, or center. Its goal is uniting the uncorrupt and the unsophisticated "little man" against the corrupt dominant elites (usually the orthodox politicians) and their camp of followers (usually the rich and the intellectuals). It is guided by the belief that political and social goals are best achieved by the direct actions of the masses. Although it comes into being where mainstream political institutions fail to deliver, there is no identifiable economic or social set of conditions that give rise to it, and it is not confined to any particular social class.[1]

Political parties and politicians often use the terms populist and populism as pejoratives against their opponents. Such a view sees populism as demagogy, merely appearing to empathize with the public through rhetoric or unrealistic proposals in order to increase appeal across the political spectrum.[2]

Populism is most common in democratic nations. Political scientist Cas Mudde wrote that, "Many observers have noted that populism is inherent to representative democracy; after all, do populists not juxtapose 'the pure people' against 'the corrupt elite'?"[3]

Academic definitions
Historically, academic definitions of populism vary, and people have often used the term in loose and inconsistent ways to reference appeals to "the people," demagogy, and "catch-all" politics. The term has also been used as a label for new parties whose classifications are unclear. A factor traditionally held to diminish the value of "populism" as a category has been that, as Margaret Canovan notes in her 1981 study Populism, populists rarely call themselves "populists" and usually reject the term when it is applied to them, differing in that regard from those who are identified as conservatives or socialists.[4]

In recent years, academic scholars have produced definitions that facilitate populist identification and comparison. Daniele Albertazzi and Duncan McDonnell define populism as an ideology that "pits a virtuous and homogeneous people against a set of elites and dangerous ‘others’ who are together depicted as depriving (or attempting to deprive) the sovereign people of their rights, values, prosperity, identity, and voice".[5] Rather than viewing populism in terms of specific social bases, economic programs, issues, or electorates as discussions of right-wing populism have tended to do,[6]—this type of definition is in line with the approaches of scholars such as Ernesto Laclau,[7] Pierre-Andre Taguieff,[8] Yves Meny and Yves Surel,[9] who have all sought to focus on populism per se, rather than treating it simply as an appendage of other ideologies.

In the United States and Latin America, populism has generally been associated with the left, whereas in European countries, populism is more associated with the right. In both, the central tenet of populism—that democracy should reflect the pure and undiluted will of the people—means it can sit easily with ideologies of both right and left. However, while leaders of populist movements in recent decades have claimed to be on either the left or the right of the political spectrum, there are also many populists who reject such classifications and claim not to be "left wing," "centrist" or "right wing."[10][11][12]

Cas Mudde says, "Many observers have noted that populism is inherent to representative democracy; after all, do populists not juxtapose 'the pure people' against 'the corrupt elite'?"[3] In the United States populist movements have high prestige in the history books,Template:Vauge for example, farmers' movements, New Deal reform movements, and the civil rights movement that were often called populist, by supporters and outsiders alike.[13] Most recently,[when?] many observers[who?] have categorized the rise of Donald Trump in the U.S. and Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines as populist in nature.[contradictory]

Some scholars argue that populist organizing for empowerment represents the return of older "Aristotelian" politics of horizontal interactions among equals who are different, for the sake of public problem solving.[14][15] Populism has taken left-wing, right-wing, and even centrist[16] forms, as well as forms of politics that bring together groups and individuals of diverse partisan views.[17] The use of populist rhetoric in the United States has recently included references such as "the powerful trial lawyer lobby",[18][19] "the liberal elite", or "the Hollywood elite".[20] Examples of populist rhetoric on the other side of the political spectrum include the anti-corporate-greed views of the Occupy Wall Street movement and the theme of "Two Americas" in the 2004 Presidential Democratic Party campaign of John Edwards.

Populists are seen by some politicians as a largely democratic and positive force in society, while a wing of scholarship in political science contends that populist mass movements are irrational and introduce instability into the political process. Margaret Canovan argues that both these polar views are faulty, and has defined two main branches of modern populism worldwide—agrarian and political—and mapped out seven disparate sub-categories:

Agrarian

 * 1) Commodity farmer movements with radical economic agendas such as the US People's Party of the late 19th century.
 * 2) Subsistence peasant movements, such as the Eastern European Green Rising militias, which followed World War I.
 * 3) Intellectuals who romanticize hard-working farmers and peasants and build radical agrarian movements like the Russian narodniki.

Political

 * 1) Populist democracy, including calls for more political participation through reforms such as the use of popular referenda.
 * 2) Politicians' populism marked by non-ideological appeals for "the people" to build a unified coalition.
 * 3) Reactionary populism, such as the white backlash harvested by George Wallace.
 * 4) Populist dictatorship, such as that established by Getúlio Vargas in Brazil.[21]