Populism, democracy and ‘the people’

The antagonism between ‘the people’ and (corrupted) elites that is core to populism can be understood either as belonging with a distinct interpretation of the political, or as a specific logic that runs through the articulation of popular claims. These different ways of tackling the issue are taken to have different consequences on how we understand the relationship between populism and democracy. This chapter argues that major approaches propose too broad a definition of populism - either by making populism a proxy to democracy (hence facing difficulties in assessing the status of pluralism itself) or by assuming that challenges to the liberal institutional order in the name of ‘the people’ actually challenge democracy itself (populism being necessarily at odds with pluralism). This makes it more difficult to assess how populism relates with democracy - and to what extent movements and discourses labelled as ‘populist’ contribute to democratization and de-democratization.