The Populist Moment

• In Event: Theorizing the Populist Moment

Abstract

This paper examines populism as a constitutive moment in the modern history of popular sovereignty, emerging from a crisis of democratic authority in which established political orders lose hegemonic legitimacy without being replaced by a new settlement. Rather than treating populism as a fixed ideology, a pathological deviation, or a mere political style, the paper conceptualizes it as a historically evolving logic of political action grounded in the democratic principles of popular sovereignty and equality. It argues that populism is best understood as a response to the perceived betrayal of these principles by representative institutions that appear unresponsive, unaccountable, and captured by elites.
Departing from both canonical and stipulative approaches to the study of populism, the paper adopts a historically situated, interpretive framework that foregrounds the reciprocal relationship between political practices and their theoretical conceptualization. Its central claim is that populism operates through a logic of democratic resentment: an affective and normative response to systemic failures of representation, growing vertical inequalities, and the erosion of citizens’ effective political agency. This logic is not intrinsically authoritarian or anti-democratic; its consequences depend on how resentment is articulated, directed, and institutionalized.
Empirically, the paper analyzes six “inflection points” in the transatlantic history of populism through close readings of constitutional texts, constitutional drafts, and constitutive political manifestos. These cases illuminate populism’s enduring engagement with constitutional politics, people-making, and constituent power. By situating populism within democratic theory rather than opposing it to democracy by definitional fiat, the paper seeks to reframe contemporary debates and recover populism’s theoretical complexity and political ambivalence.

Author

• Filipe Carreira da Silva, Department of Sociology, University of Cambridge