Regrounding Populism: Political Articulation and the Partisan Mechanisms of Contemporary Electoral Populism

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Abstract

While conventional studies of electoral populism acknowledge that such mobilizations are linked to significant economic crises, their preoccupation with defining what exactly populism is often leads them to downplay the unified structural roots of different sorts of populist mobilizations. This essay presents the beginnings of an alternative framework for the study of electoral populism that draws on the neo-Gramscian theory of political articulation in an effort studies of global economic crises with conventional theories of populism. While crises are an endemic feature of global capitalism, their political manifestation is shaped by the varied institutional structures and legacies in which they are translated.

Author

• Colin Patrick Arnold, University of Virginia