The socio-cultural approach: toward a cultural class analysis of populist appeals

This chapter reviews the socio-cultural approach to populism, its emergence and international diffusion, as well as new avenues for research. The socio-cultural approach understands populism as a distinctive style of doing politics, of making appeals and of establishing relations between citizens and representatives. This style is marked by a revaluation of the ‘low’ pole of cultural stratification, that is, popular but devalued cultural forms, by localist appeals to the ‘from here’ and by personalistic modes of political representation. The chapter presents key conceptual tools for understanding the populist style, and reviews examples of a growing transnational field of empirical studies in the socio-cultural tradition. We then suggest that populism scholarship can profit from engagement with cultural class analysis. Populism’s ‘plebeian grammar’ and its vindication of the ‘low’, it is argued, thrive in the context of relations of social devaluation and relative political exclusion characteristic of contemporary demobilized class societies.