populism

n. movement to advance the interests of the common people

‘To each his own definition of populism, according to the academic axe he grinds’ wrote Peter Wiles in the first major comparative study of populism by Ernest Gellner and Ghita Ionescu, Populism. Its Meanings and National Characteristics . In fact, among both journalists and scholars, the term is often employed in loose, inconsistent and undefined ways to denote appeals to ‘the people’, ‘demagogy’ and ‘catch-all’ politics or as a receptacle for new types of parties whose classification observers are unsure of. Another factor held to diminish the value of ‘populism’ is that, as Margaret Canovan notes in her 1981 study, unlike labels such as ‘socialist’ or ‘conservative’, the meanings of which have been ‘chiefly dictated by their adherents’, contemporary populists rarely call themselves ‘populists’ and usually reject the term when it is applied to them by others . Nonetheless, in recent years, scholars have made advances in defining the term in ways which can be profitably employed in research. One of the latest of these is that by Daniele Albertazzi and Duncan McDonnell who, in their volume Twenty-First Century Populism, define populism as pitting "a virtuous and homogeneous people against a set of elites and dangerous ‘others’ who are together depicted as depriving (or attempting to deprive) the sovereign people of their rights, values, prosperity, identity and voice" .
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Noun
1. the political doctrine that supports the rights and powers of the common people in their struggle with the privileged elite
(hypernym) doctrine, philosophy, philosophical system, school of thought, ism

The ideologies of any of a number of political movements that demand the redistribution of political power, economic dominance and/or cultural leadership away from what are seen as corrupt, greedy, over-centralized, urban-based oligarchies in favor of empowering "the common people," particularly those who live in rural or small-town areas, since such people are typically idealized by populists as embodying a simpler, more virtuous way of life based on traditional values and customs. Populists generally believe in the elitist theory of politics as the best description of how policy-making works, and they find it completely illegitimate . Populists characteristically favor strong but fairly selective government intervention in the economy to counteract market forces undermining the viability of favored traditional occupations such as small farming and small-scale commercial activities. Populists typically also favor strong government action to stop the spread of non-traditional religious and cultural values and to punish and repress minorities pursuing unconventional or "foreign" life-styles. Sociologically-oriented historians usually interpret the growth of populist protest movements as a backward-looking reaction against the stresses of rapid economic and technological change and the painful disruptions of traditional values and customs that accompany such changes; however the policy measures pushed through by successful populist movements in order to protect traditional ways of life have themselves often produced unintended but nevertheless radical changes in politics, the economy and society.
[See also: ideology , legitimacy , elite (elitist) theory ]

populism /'pɔpjulizm/
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