Populism and Nationalism in Comparative Perspective

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

In recent years, journalist and observers have commented on the growing convergence of nationalism and populism in political systems around the world, a change most readily apparent in the emergence of leaders such as US President Donald Trump, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, among others. Although scholars have gestured at the relationship between nationalism and populism, most empirical work focuses on their coincidence (Mudde 2007; Ionescu and Gellner 1969; Inglehart and Norris, 2016). A new strand of populist scholarship holds that populism and nationalism are orthogonal discursive antagonisms—nationalism as an “in versus out” horizontal antagonisms constructed between different ethnic or cultural groups, and populism an “up versus down” vertical antagonisms of “the people” versus “the elites” (Jansen, 2011; De Cleen and Stavrakakis, 2017; Katsambekis and Stavrakakis, 2017; Brubaker 2017). However, the conceptual and empirical work on their intersection is still in its infancy (Rooduijn 2018; Bonikowski et al. 2018).

The papers on this panel takes up this challenge in a number of ways. Bonikowski analyzes the ways in which different conceptions of American nationhood shaped respondents' preferences in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and how the election outcome shaped broader national conceptions. Chryssogelos examines the disparate foreign policy effects of populism and nationalism through a longitudinal analysis of Greek foreign policy over the past century. Stroschein develops a taxonomy of ethnic, religious and nationalist parties and assesses their overlap with populist parties. Finally, Jenne, Hawkins and Silva present the preliminary results of an original dataset of nationalist and populist rhetoric of thirty-six European and North American government leaders to test for foreign policy impacts of populist and nationalist rhetoric articulated both separately and together.

Sub Unit

• Theme Panel

Cosponsor

• Related Groups / Association for the Study of Nationalities

Individual Presentations

• The Polarization of Nationalist Cleavages in the 2016 US Presidential Election - Bart Bonikowski, Harvard University

• Disentangling Populism and Nationalism as Discourses of Foreign Policy - Angelos Stylianos Chryssogelos, SAIS Johns Hopkins

• When are Parties Ethnic, National, Religious, or Populist? - Sherrill Stroschein, University College London

• Mapping Populist and Nationalist Rhetoric Across Thirty-Six Democracies - Erin K. Jenne, Central European University; Kirk A. Hawkins, Brigham Young University; Bruno de Paula Castanho Silva, University of Cologne

Chair

• R. Daniel Kelemen Rutgers University, New Brunswick

Discussant

• Noam Gidron Hebrew University