Popular republicanism versus populism: articulating the people

  • In problematic ways, populism has become a catch-all formula used with discretion to capture all kinds of discontent with democratic politics today. Populism is not only an essentially contested, but also an unavoidably blurred concept. Its recurrent use as a weapon to discredit all kinds of projects that challenge contemporary liberal democracies has led to a situation in which protest movements that aim at democratic renewal end up being conflated with opposite tendencies whose objective is a reactionary scaling down of democracy. Against this background, this article argues that both for political and for analytical purposes, the key point for distinguishing between “progressive” and “regressive” projects that address the crisis of democracy is to determine how such projects conceive of the identity of the people. Invoking the people is not per se an attribute of populism, but ultimately a feature of all kinds of democratic politics. What does make for a critical difference, though,In problematic ways, populism has become a catch-all formula used with discretion to capture all kinds of discontent with democratic politics today. Populism is not only an essentially contested, but also an unavoidably blurred concept. Its recurrent use as a weapon to discredit all kinds of projects that challenge contemporary liberal democracies has led to a situation in which protest movements that aim at democratic renewal end up being conflated with opposite tendencies whose objective is a reactionary scaling down of democracy. Against this background, this article argues that both for political and for analytical purposes, the key point for distinguishing between “progressive” and “regressive” projects that address the crisis of democracy is to determine how such projects conceive of the identity of the people. Invoking the people is not per se an attribute of populism, but ultimately a feature of all kinds of democratic politics. What does make for a critical difference, though, is how peoplehood is articulated in the process of collective mobilization. The distinction becomes particularly relevant with regard to current debates on how to tackle the issue of diversity and democratic integration in Europe and North America. To substantiate this relevance, the article introduces the concept of popular republicanism, which is fleshed out by discussing two recent examples: Catalan sovereignism and the Kurdish-Turkish HDP.show moreshow less

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Metadaten
Author:Peter A. KrausGND
URN:urn:nbn:de:bvb:384-opus4-896832
Frontdoor URLhttps://opus.bibliothek.uni-augsburg.de/opus4/89683
URL:https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0760/10/10/366
ISSN:2076-0760OPAC
Parent Title (English):Social Sciences
Publisher:MDPI
Type:Article
Language:English
Date of first Publication:2021/09/29
Publishing Institution:Universität Augsburg
Release Date:2021/10/04
Tag:people; populism; popular republicanism; sovereignty; independentism; Catalonia; Spain; HDP; Kurds; Turkey
Volume:10
Issue:10
First Page:366
DOI:https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci10100366
Institutes:Philosophisch-Sozialwissenschaftliche Fakultät
Philosophisch-Sozialwissenschaftliche Fakultät / Institut für Sozialwissenschaften
Philosophisch-Sozialwissenschaftliche Fakultät / Institut für Sozialwissenschaften / Politikwissenschaft
Philosophisch-Sozialwissenschaftliche Fakultät / Institut für Sozialwissenschaften / Politikwissenschaft / Professur für Politikwissenschaft mit Schwerpunkt vergleichende Systemanalyse (Europa und Nordamerika)
Dewey Decimal Classification:3 Sozialwissenschaften / 32 Politikwissenschaft / 320 Politikwissenschaft
Licence (German):CC-BY 4.0: Creative Commons: Namensnennung (mit Print on Demand)