Putin: populist, anti-populist, or pseudo-populist?

Vladimir Putin’s populism is much contested. There are three research questions. The first is empirical: is Putin a populist, and on what grounds? The second is methodological: can comparative measuring techniques help analyse the presence of populism? The third is theoretical: what (if anything) does the case of this ‘populist icon’ tell us about the populist phenomenon? Four domains of Putin’s politics are analysed: Russia’s support for international populists, Putin’s leadership style, and his leadership ‘strategy’; finally, content analysis is utilized for an in-depth look at the articulation of ideas in Putin’s principal speeches from 1999 to 2023. Putin is not substantively a populist, since the state (not the people) is his central political subject and his ‘populism’ reinforces centralized state authority. Ideationally, he is demotic (people-centrist), but also fundamentally statist, which vitiates this people-centrism. Some populist themes are used instrumentally in foreign policy, but even here the statist impulse predominates. Methodologically, the content analysis works well at showing the limited articulation of populist themes relative to demotic ones. Theoretically, this study is fully consonant with recent movements in populist studies to provide complexity-oriented accounts which avoid reifying and over-emphasizing populism.