Conceptualizing Populism as a Technology of Power: Governmentality and Political Subjectivity in the Age of Globalization

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Abstract

Over the past several decades, populism has evolved from a marginal political phenomenon into a central feature of contemporary democratic politics. Despite its growing empirical presence across liberal democracies, scholars remain divided over its definition, alternately describing it as a style, a discourse, a thin ideology, or a pathology of democracy. This paper argues that populism cannot be adequately understood at the level of ideas or rhetoric alone. Instead, it should be analyzed as a historically emergent political subjectivity linked to transformations in the organization of modern political power.

Drawing on Michel Foucault’s concept of governmentality and engaging both classical and contemporary political sociology (Weber and Bourdieu), the paper proposes a minimal definition of populism as a political claim to embody “the people,” understood as the fusion of three dimensions: the plebeian people, the democratic majority, and a culturally-cum-morally unified community. It then argues that populism arises when liberal forms of governance increasingly address citizens as populations to be administered rather than as collective political subjects.

The central hypothesis is that populism does not only introduce a new form of governmentality but reacts to liberal governmentality itself. As globalization, technocratic policymaking, and expert administration expand, a gap emerges between democratic legitimacy—grounded in the sovereignty of the people—and administrative, managerial or technocratic governance. Populist movements seek to re-politicize this relationship by re-personalizing representation and claiming to restore the political existence of “the people.”

Rather than a deviation from democracy, populism is thus interpreted by targeted audiences as a recurring response to the tension between democratic sovereignty and modern administrative governance.

Author

• Charles Simon Berthelet, University of Quebec at Montreal