T W O S T R A T E G I E S F O R T H E S T U D Y O’F

POPULISM*
MARGARET CANOVAN
University of Keele

Abstract. The reason why ‘populism’ has remained such a confused notion is that two different
strategies can be adopted in trying to clarify it, and the more intuitively appealing of the two
does not work. Attempts at a theory of populism invariably fail because they are either too
wide-ranging to be clear or too restricted to be persuasive. The alternative is a phenomeno-
logical approach, leading t o the construction of a descriptive typology.

T E R M I N O L O G I Cinexactitude
AL is nothing unusual in political science.
Generations of political scientists have deplored, tried in vain to remedy, and
managed to live with the ambiguity and vagueness of key terms like
‘democracy’, ‘elite’ and the rest. In most cases, however, there is a reasonably
solid core of agreed meaning, even if this leaves plenty of room for disputes.
This agreed core of meaning has been notoriously lacking in the case of
‘populism’. The term covers an unusually wide range of diverse phenomena and
is confidently used by different writers to mean quite different things. I t is most
securely based in scholarly literature as a label for that unlikely pair, the US
People’s Party of the 1890s, and the Russian Narodnichestvo of the 1870s and
thereabouts.’ These, however, form merely the advance guard of a bizarre
procession of ‘populist’ movements, ideas and leaders, which have at various
times been held to include (among others) Peronism in Argentina and the
Mexican Institutionalized Party of the Revolution (PRI); Social Credit in
Alberta and the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation in Saskatchewan ;
McCarthyism, Powellism and Poujadism; ‘Progressive’ devices for direct
democracy such as the popular initiative, referendum and recall; Fanon,
Nyerere, and Nkrumah ; Levellers and Chartists; Gandhi and the Indian
Congress Party; Gramsci, Lloyd George, and the Rumanian Iron Guard;
Peasant Parties in various East European countries; Tolstoy and Father
Couglin ; President Carter and Chairman Mao.
According to one recent writer, ‘We know intuitively to what we are referring
when we call a movement or an ideology populist, but we have the greatest
dificulty in translating the intuition into concepts.’2 But this is an over-
optimistic account of the true position. It is not the case that we can all
recognize populism when we see it, and that we merely need to learn to analyse
* I am grateful to April Carter and James Canovan for their comments on a previous draft of this
paper.
’ The adoption of the same term by the American radicals and the translators of Narodnik seems
to have been pure chance.
E. Laclau, ‘Towards a Theory of Populism’, Polifics and Ideology in Marxist Theory;
Capifatism-Fascism-Populism (London, New Left Books, 1977). p. 143.
Politlcd Studies,Vol. XXX, No. 4 (544-552).
 MARGARET CANOVAN 545

what we see. The situation has rather been that some observers see populism
where others see nothing of the sort.3 This is obviously unsatisfactory, and the
need for clarification has long been recognized. There are, however, two
different strategies available to the political scientist who sets out to bring order
into the chaos. I hope in this paper to show why the more attractive strategy
does not work, and why more is to be gained from the alternative strategy which
I have tried to carry out e l ~ e w h e r e . ~

I1
Since the term ‘populism’ refers to a wide variety of apparently different
things, any account that is to be useful must somehow reduce thisdiversity to
order. The two alternative strategies I have mentioned offer different ways of
doing this. The first, which I shall call Strategy A, is concerned above all to
bring the different cases under one theoretical roof, providing an account of the
essential features of populism and the conditions under which it occurs. Its
object is to demonstrate unity in diversity by getting underneath the surface of
populist ideas and movements, like a physicist investigating the essential
structure of matter.
Strategy B, by contrast, is more reminiscent of a naturalist collecting beetles
and arranging them in groups. This approach is phenomenological, concerned
with description rather than with explanation, aiming at comprehensiveness in
preference to theoretical elegance.
Students of populism have tended to adopt Strategy A, for two reasons. The
first is a by-product of the fact that they have usually been specialists starting
from a particular area, such as Russian Populism or Latin American Populism.
Within any one of these areas it is not too difficult to identify a reasonably clear
core of ‘populist’ phenomena, and some of these specialists have developed
sophisticated theories of populism as known in their own field.5 Having gained
theoretical confidence in one field, the specialist naturally tends to believe that
his account can be applied to populism in general, provided the right variables
are added to explain local differences.6 As Peter Wiles has remarked, ‘To each
his own definition of populism, according to the academic axe he grinds’.’
This is abundantly illustrated by the record of the conference ‘To Define Populism’, held at the
London School of Economics in May 1967. The proceedings were reported in Government and
Opposition, 3 (l968), and issued in a book: G . lonescu and 1. Gellners (eds.), Populism, Its Meanings
and National Characteristics (London, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1969). Many of the contributors
were, however, reluctant to admit how serious the disagreements were. For example, Peter Worsley,
after providing a careful guided tour round a bewildering variety of things called ‘populism’, then
concluded, surprisingly, that the notion was not really any vaguer than, say, ‘capitalism’ or
‘communism’. (P. Worsley, ‘The Concept of Populism’, in Ionescu and Gellner, Populism, p. 247).
M. Canovan, Populism (London, Junction Books, 1981).
See for example two theories concerned mainly with Latin American populism: T. S. Di Tella,
‘Populism and Reform in Latin America’, in C . Veliz (ed.), Obstacles to Change in Latin America
(London, Oxford University Press, 1965); G. Germani, Authoritarianism, Fascism, and National
Populism (New Brunswick, Transaction, 1978).
’ Ernesto Laclau, for example, says of his own theory that ‘although the concepts to be employed
have been developed basically with Latin American experience in mind, their validity is not limited
to a determinate historical or geographical context’. Laclau, ‘Towards a Theory of Populism’, p.
144.
’ P. Wiles, ‘A Syndrome, Not a Doctrine: Some Elementary Theses on Populism’, in Ionescu and
Gellner, Populism, p. 166. This kind of specialist viewpoint was very much in evidence at the LSE
Conference.
546 TWO STRATEGIES FOR T H E STUDY OF POPULISM

The first reason for the popularity of Strategy A, therefore, is that those who
feel they understand one kind of populism naturally assume that it must be
possible to provide a clear account of the thing in general. One might suppose
that this belief would rapidly disappear upon further acquaintance with the
diversity of ‘populist’ phenomena. But this is to reckon without the fascination
of an intellectual challenge. The search for a clear account of populism has all
the attractions of a treasure hunt. What could be more satisfying than to hit
upon a single theory that could explain such a diverse collection of movements
and ideas? As one writer has remarked, ‘What makes populism such an
enthralling study object is that a comparative analysis can reveal a number of
similarities without these being recognised as such by the movements
themse Ives’.*
There has been no lack of incentive, therefore, for students of populism to
provide a general theoretical structure that would clarify the subject. The results
have been disappointing, however. When we look at the various attempts at a
theoretical account of populism, we find that they are all open to one or other of
two objections. Either they are comprehensive but too vague, or else they are
clear but too narrow. Let us look at some examples of each failing.
The social scientist who sets out to reduce populism to order is liable to fall
into a trap. Looking at the enormous range of movements and ideas generally
called ‘populist’, and anxious to bring them all within his net, he tends to
propose a theory which is indeed wide enough to include them all, but which is
so wide that it includes virtually everything else as well.
One example of this is an article by J. B. Allcock which appeared in 1971.
This began with a useful ‘biography’ of populism, that is, an account of the
many different purposes to which social scientists had adapted the term. As
Allcock remarked, the notion had accumulated ‘a bewildering variety of subtly
different connotation^'.^ Evidently it had become very difficult to decide how to
tell whether a particular movement or ideology was populist or not. Instead of
attending to his own warning, however, Allcock shifted the focus of discussion
to the ‘social base’ of populism, which lay (he suggested) in ‘part-societies’:
‘Many of the distinctive characteristics of the populist response are to be
understood in the context of “part/whole” structures of the type analysed by the
anthropological students of peasant society’.l o Reference to this framework
could, Allcock suggested, make it possible ‘to integrate all the various aspects of
the phenomenon of populism’. l 1
At first sight this looks promising. The notion of ‘part-societies’, of groups
that are in a sense both ‘inside’ and ‘outside of’ a wider society, surely
does describe, say, the relation of US Populist farmers to the Eastern commercial
community, or of nineteenth-century Russian intellectuals to Russian society on
the one hand and European culture on the other. Upon reflection, however, the
hidden snag appears: this is too all-embracing to be illuminating, for it could be
applied to virtually any political phenomenon.’ For example, the working
* A . E. Van Niekerk, Populism and Political Development in Latin America (Rotterdam,
Rotterdam University Press, 1974), p. 22.
J . B. Allcock, ‘“Populism”: A Brief Biography’, Sociology, 5 (1971), p. 387.
l o Allcock, “‘Populism”’, p. 380.
’
I Allcock, ‘ “Populism”’, p. 384.
’’ Allcock himself admitted that he was using the terms ‘part’ and ‘whole’ in different senses in
relation to different examples. (Allcock, ‘“Populism”’, p. 383).
 MARGARET CANOVAN 541
class in industrial societies forms a ‘part’ of a wider ‘whole’ upon which it
depends, but from which it is in some ways distinct. Are all labour movements
therefore ‘populist’ too? If they are, what is not populist? And if they are not
populist, why are they not?
In other words, accounts of populism that are general enough to cover all the
cases that happen to be commonly given the name tend to be so all-embracing
that they cover everything indiscriminately. Another example which suffers
from the same defects as Allcock’s article, and which is also sociological in its
orientation, is Angus Stewart’s essay on ‘The Social Roots’ of p o p ~ l i s m . ’ ~
Stewart’s way of tackling the diversity of the field is to claim that ‘the unity that
is populism may. . . be demonstrated to lie . . . in the recurrent pattern of an
ideal type of social relation’. l 4 Populism is, it seems, a response to the problems
of modernization, and springs in particular from the tension between advanced
and backward sections of society, both inside a particular country and in its
relations with the outside world. Populist movements appear among social
groups aware of being peripheral to centres of power, and involve an indirect
confrontation with problems of economic development. The differences
between them are to be explained by means of a number of variables. For
example, while all populist movements are responses to developmental
problems, some, like Nurodnichestvo, are responding to the initial prospect of
industrialization, while others, such as US populism, are less concerned about
the problems of economic backwardness than with ‘the pace and pattern of the
modernisation process’. Similarly, Stewart argues that all populist movements
are ‘Janus-faced’, combining traditional and modern elements, but that this
common feature gives rise to different variants in different contexts.
Stewart shows considerable ingenuity in developing an account of populism
general enough to cover all the expected cases. The trouble is that it is hard to
see what explanations as general as these would not fit. For example, it could be
plausibly argued that socialist movements are responses to crises of moderniza-
tion; that they mobilize people who feel peripheral to centres of power; that
they combine traditional and non-traditional elements (evocations of pre-
industrial fraternity and promises of a brave new world).16 The same terms
could easily fit conservatism, too. The point is that these common features of
‘populist’ movements are really common features of modern political move-
ments in general, so that this line of argument ends with all modern politics
swallowed up in a nebulous and distended concept of ‘populism’.
Clearly, then, those who follow Strategy A and try to catch all cases of
‘populism’ in one theoretical net find themselves in difficulties. There is another
l3 A. Stewart, ‘The Social Roots’ in lonescu and Gellner. Populism.
l4 Stewart, ‘Social Roots’, p. 180.
I s Stewart, ‘Social Roots’, p. 186.
‘Ah’, a defender of Stewart’s position may say, ‘but what about the tension between advanced
and backward sections of society? Where does thar come in?’. The answer is that finding such
‘advanced’ and ‘backward’ sections at the root of socialist movements is as easy or difficult as
finding them in populist movements. For example, what was ‘backward’ about the commercial
farmers of Kansas of Saskatchewan? And were the Narodnik intellectuals of nineteenth-century
Russia ‘advanced’ or ‘backward’? If one is permitted the sort of equivocation necessary to answer
these questions satisfactorily, then one could just as well argue that socialism is characteristic of
‘backward’ groups who see themselves threatened by economic advance, from the artisans who
joined nineteenth-century socialist parties to contemporary government employees and workers in
moribund industries who see themselves threatened by economic changes.
548 TWO STRATEGIES FOR THE STUDY OF POPULISM
version of the strategy, however, which has the advantages of greater clarity and
precision. The theorist need not assume that he has to include all movements
and ideas that happen to be called ‘populist’. After all, the current use of the
term is a highly contingent affair. Instead, he may select certain cases that quite
obviously do have substantial features in common, and propose a coherent
theory based on these, accepting as populist only cases that share the features
required by his theory and ruthlessly excluding all other claimants of the title.
This approach makes possible a greater degree of theoretical coherence: its
defect is that different theorists are liable to make different selections from the
medley of populist phenomena, and hence to propose theories that are mutually
exclusive, one of them leaving out cases that are crucial to another.
Specialists have often done this unconsciously, laying claim to the title of
‘populist’ for their own particular subject-matter without worrying about what
this leaves out.” The most explicit ‘adoption of a selective procedure is,
however, that of Peter Wiles, who leaves out the Narodniki, justifying his
exclusion thus: ‘The Russians a r e . . . neither a prototype nor an archetype. If
the concept of populism is to have general meaning and application it is the
Russians, and not everyone else, who must be fitted upon the Procrustes’ bed of
definition.”* Having got rid of these awkward customers, Wiles is able to
describe a populist ‘syndrome’ of linked tendencies and attitudes characteristic
of populist movements, including anti-intellectualism, hostility to financiers,
sympathy for small business, organization of co-operatives, etc. His syndrome
has considerable coherence, and covers a good many of the movements
generally thought of as p o p ~ l i s t . ’A ~ theory would have to be quite
exceptionally persuasive, however, to convince the academic world at this late
stage that the Narodniki were not really populists.
The problem confronting users of Strategy A is that there is a trade-off
between comprehensiveness and clarity. Either a theory is clear but excludes one
or other of the cases that seem to demand coverage, or else it is so
comprehensive that it includes not only all conceivable cases of populism, but
also all other movements and ideas as well. Perhaps the most ambitious attempt
to steer between the Scylla of ruthless exclusion and the Charybdis of swirling
vagueness has been made by Ernest0 Laclau, who starts from his own Latin
American specialism but makes a real effort to allow for the diversity of
populisms. He argues that the defining characteristic of populist movements is
not that they all arise on the basis of a particular class or at a particular stage in
social development, but rather that they articulate ‘a specific non-class
contradiction’. Alongside the ‘class contradictions’ of all societies, according to
Laclau, runs another ‘objective contradiction’, that between ‘people’ and
‘power bloc’, which gives rise to its own ideological vocabulary: ‘Populism

For example, the Russian specialist Andrzej Walicki suggested at the LSE Conference that
’populism was the socialism which emerged in backward peasant countries facing the problems of
modernisation’-a view which squarely leaves out the American Populists. See Governmenf and
Opposifion, 3 (1968), p. 158.
Wiles, ‘A Syndrome, Not a Doctrine’, p. 172.
Not by any means all of them, though. Besides the Russians, Wiles’s scheme leaves out most of
the phenomena described below as Politicians’ Populism, Populist Dictatorship and Populist
Democracy.
 MARGARET CANOVAN 549

starts at the point where popular-democratic elements are presented as an

antagonistic option against the ideology of the dominant bloc’.2o
Laclau’s New Left jargon is obscure, but what he appears to be suggesting is
that the defining characteristic of populism in all its varieties is that it mobilizes
the antagonism of ‘the people’ against the established order, drawing for this
purpose on rhetorical traditions of popular protest that exist virtually
everywhere in different forms. Occasional use of anti-elitist rhetoric is not
enough to make its users populists, according to Laclau: in order to qualify,
leaders or parties must present a genuine challenge to the established authority
when they mobilize the people. Challenges of this kind can, however, be
mounted by all sorts of groups, even dissident sections of a ruling class, all
drawing on parallel traditions of popular antagonism to the state :
So we see why it is possible to call Hitler, Mao and Peron simultaneously populist. Not
because the social bases of their movements were similar; not because their ideologies
expressed the same class interests but because popular interpellations appear in the
ideological discourses of all of them, presented in the form of antagonism.”
This line of argument is an interesting one because it offers a criterion of
populism which might be flexible enough to take in the wide variety of
phenomena generally given the name. Like others who use Strategy A, however,
Laclau is not content to provide merely a criterion of populism: he wants to
provide an explanation as well. Consequently, having first stressed the variety of
populisms, he goes on to claim that they are systematically related to socio-
economic conditions, in two ways. These two supposed relations turn out to
suffer from the now familiar defects of Strategy A : one is too broad and vague,
the other too restrictive.
Laclau maintains in the first place that populism in all its varieties emerges
during ‘a crisis of the dominant ideological discourse, which is in turn part of a
more general social crisis’22-one of those sociological formulas which are so
vague that one is hard put to imagine a situation they would not cover.
Secondly, he argues that the specific form populism takes depends upon the
class or complex of classes by which ‘popular-democratic interpellations’ are
adopted. While his own application of this formula to the case of Peronism is
persuasive, no such class-based approach will cover all relevant phenomena. He
wants to claim, for example, that the proletariat is the only class that can fully
develop ‘the “people”/power bloc contradiction’, and genuinely aim at ‘the
suppression of the State as an antagonistic force with respect to the people’.23
This blatantly ignores non-proletarian movements for populist democracy, for
example the US Progressives’ movement for initiative, referendum and reform,
which was not socialist and did not have the kind of class base Laclau’s theory
demands.

111

I hope I have shown that in spite of its intuitive attractiveness, the use of
Strategy A has not done much to clarify the confusions surrounding the notion
’O Laclau, ‘Towards a Theory of Populism’, p. 173.
21 Laclau, ‘Towards a Theory of Populism’, p. 174.
22 Laclau, ‘Towards a Theory of Populism’, p. 175.
23 Laclau, ‘Towards a Theory of Populism’, p. 196.
550 TWO STRATEGIES F O R THE STUDY O F POPULISM
of populism. We do not possess an acceptable theoretical account, and the
failure of attempts to generate one suggests that there is not enough common
ground among ‘populist’ phenomena to make such an account p ~ s s i b l e . ’ ~
There is, however, another way of achieving greater clarity, namely the use of
Strategy B.
The distinctive feature of this strategy is that it is phenomen~logical.’~
That is
to say that whereas Strategy A in all its forms looks at the movements and ideas
concerned with a view to their comprehension in a theory, Strategy B demands
abstention from such theoretical ambitions. Instead, we must pay close
attention to the phenomena known as ‘populist’ as these appear in the literature
of social science and history. Given the highly contingent manner in which
many of them have acquired the label, we must not assume in advance that they
all share common features. An open-minded study of them can, however,
enable us to construct a descriptive typology which clarifies the ways in which
the term is used while being spacious enough to do justice to the diversity of the
movements and ideas concerned.
It is important to be clear about what this strategy can and cannot achieve,
for it is at the same time ambitious and modest. It is ambitious in that it aims to
tidy up the chaotic field of populism into a clear typology. The modesty of the
project lies in the kind of typology attempted. Unlike Strategy A, this approach
cannot be expected to yield a theory with pretensions to say what are the
essential features of populism, or why and under what conditions it will occur. If
we look at the whole range of things currently given the name in the literature of
social science, and note the clusters of comparable material, we can set up
categories to accommodate their diversity: but the categories in such a typology
are related to one another contingently, not tied into a grand theoretical
structure.
A phenomenological typology of populisms is a much less exciting affair than
a theory of populism, and may strike some readers as disappointingly ungainly
and pedestrian. The main argument in its favour is that attempts at an
acceptable theory have failed for reasons which make success in the future seem
unlikely.
I have attempted elsewhere the actual construction of such a typology, and
have argued that the range of phenomena covered by the term’s use requires
seven general categories of populisms.26 These can be briefly indicated as
follows:
(1) Farmers Radicalism: movements with a social base among commodity
farmers, favouring radical economic measures by a people’s government :
classically, the US Populist movement of the 1890s, but also Social Credit in
Alberta, the CCF in Saskatchewan.
(2) Revolutionary Intellectual Populism : movements among revolutionary
intellectuals aiming at agrarian socialism, idealizing the peasantry and
trying to short-circuit Western (and orthodox Marxist) models of economic

2 4 For some sceptical remarks on such a project, see K. Minogue, ‘Populism as a Political
Movement’ in Ionescu and Gellner, Populism, p. 197.
2 5 ‘Phenomenological’ in this context is not intended in a strictly Husserlian sense, but refers
simply to the ideal of presuppositionless description.
2 h See Canovan, Populism.
 MARGARET CANOVAN 551

development. Classically, the Narodniki of nineteenth-century Russia, but

there are parallels in the recent Third World, e.g. Fanon, Nyerere.
(3) Peasant Populism : grassroots peasant movements for ‘land and liberty’,
favouring small property, co-operatives and traditionalism against capital-
ists, bureaucrats and socialists : e.g. the Bulgarian Agrarian National Union
and the other peasant parties involved in the ‘Green’ movement in Europe
between the two world wars.
(4) Populist Dictatorship : charismatic leaders who owe their power to their
ability to play upon the masses: e.g. Juan Peron, Huey Long, and other
successful demagogues.
(5) Populist Democracy : schemes and movements for making governments
directly responsive to the people, notably by means of such methods as the
popular initiative, referendum, and recall : e.g. the American Progressives
and their constitutional innovations; the Swiss system of direct democracy.
(6) Reactionary Populism: exploitation of the gulf between educated and
progressive opinion and the views of the reactionary populace, notably on
such matters as ethnic hostilities: e.g. George Wallace, Enoch Powell.
(7) Politicians’ Populism: the use of calculatedly vague notions of ‘the people’
by catch-all parties or leaders who wish to blur established political
divisions or to appeal away from politics altogether: e.g. de Gaulle, Jimmy
Carter, many leaders of one-party states.
It is immediately apparent that this typology is in no sense a theory of
populism: it does not tell us what, if any, are the essential characteristics of
populism, nor does it propose any explanation for its occurrence or its
variations. Instead, the typology is a tidying-up operation, designed to sort out
and classify the range of populisms referred to in the current literature. While its
main purpose and claim to justification is precisely this job of classification,
however, certain theoretical implications do emerge as by-products.
In the first place, the types of populism covered by the scheme differ so much
from one another that it no longer seems surprising that scholars have had so
much difficulty in trying to define populism or to construct a coherent theory
accounting for its varieties. Our seven populisms do not really look like seven
varieties of the same kind of thing: on the contrary, some of them seem quite
unconnected with others.
On the other hand, if our typology shows us why a theory of populism has
proved so elusive, it also shows why the idea of constructing one should have
seemed so plausible, for there are many interconnections and overlaps between
the categories. US Populism, for instance, was not just a case of Farmers’
Radicalism; it was also the bearer of an energetic campaign for Populist
Democracy that later spilled over into the Progressive Movement.” While links
of this kind are possible, however, they are not inevitable. The combination of
agrarian radicalism and populist democracy in the US Populist movement may
seem natural enough, but it is nevertheless contingent,28and not a sound basis
on which to generalize.
2 7 T h e ‘Omaha Platform’ of the US People’s Party recommended adoption o f the popular
initiative and referendum.
2 8 The urban Progressives of the next generation took up the populist democracy while dropping
the agrarian radicalism, while farmers’ radicalism lived on in the South to throw up il different
political style, the populist semi-dictatorship of leaders like Huey Long.
552 T W O STRATEGIES FOR T H E S T U D Y OF P O P U L I S M
It is clear that there is no ideology, economic programme, social base or
political style common to all seven types. The only thing they all share is (as
Ernest0 Laclau has suggested) a common rhetoric. Populist rhetoric is anti-
elitist, exalts ‘the people’, and stresses the pathos of the ‘little man’. When such
symbols are cashed out in real political situations, however, the embodiments of
the common man and his enemies turn out to be bewilderingly diverse. Populist
rhetoric is compatible with all kinds of different social bases and economic
interests, with ideologies of different kinds or with lack of ideology altogether.

CONCLUSION
I have argued in this paper that since attempts at a theoretical account of
populism have failed, it is useful instead to have a descriptive typology to bring
some order into the variety of phenomena called ‘populist’. Although there are
family resemblances of various kinds amongst the types, what is quite lacking is
the sort of systematic logical connection that could be stated in a coherent
theory of populism, so that the typology must remain frustratingly
unsystematic.
It would, in principle, be possible to remedy this situation: if the phenomena
currently known as ‘populism’ will not fit a coherent theory as they stand, then
social scientists could if they wished adopt a more restricted account of the term,
and agree to call ‘populist’ only what fits that. Until this day of theoretical
unanimity dawns, however, we shall be left with the present diversity of uses of
the term to describe an odd assortment of things. Adoption of a descriptive
typology such as the one I have suggested can at least save us some confusion.