Populism, or, politics at the edges of democracy

Neopopulism and neocorporatism are regular entries in our political lexicon, yet the meaning assigned to the prefix ‘neo’ is not as clear in the former as it is in the latter. The rather unambiguous meaning of neocorporatism derives from the conceptual stability of its classical referent in the mainstream literature of political science. In the case of neopopulism, the prefix has not fared as well, partly due to the contested status of populism as such. One only needs to look at the cluster of meanings associated with the term. The account offered by the sociology of modernization prevailed throughout the sixties, at least in the developing world. A classical exponent of this approach is Germani, who sees populist mobilization as a deviation in the standard path from traditional to modern society. Di Tella proposes a modified yet equally functionalist interpretation. For him, populism is the result of the convergence of two anti-status-quo forces, the dispossessed masses available for mobilization and the educated elite that resents its status incongruence—the gap between rising expectations and job satisfaction—and broods on ways of changing the current state of things. More generally, theoretical interpretations range from this functionalist view of populism as a road to modernize class-divided, traditional societies, to Lasch’s claim that populism is a response to the crisis of modernity; from Laclau’s initial neo-Gramscian approach to populism as a dimension of the popular-democratic imaginary whose class-nature varies in accordance with contending discursive constructions, to Cammack’s revival of a Marxist standpoint that associates the phenomenon with resistance to neoliberal capitalism, albeit with a functionalist twist whereby the changing status of neopopulism is read according to the weathervane of capitalist reproduction. Moreover, as Worsley maintains, the term is wide enough to encompass rightand left-wing variants, to appear in advanced and in developing countries, in towns and in the countryside, and amongst workers and the middle classes as well as peasants. It includes political phenomena ranging from the Russian narodnichestvo of the nineteenth century to William Jennings Bryan and small farmer movements in the USA during the thirties and the classical Latin American populism of the forties and fifties. The latter, exemplified by Argentina under Peron and Brazil under Getulio Vargas, was characterized by strong nationalism; the perception of the state as both a political bounty and the prime mover of economic activity; economic programmes based on subsidies and price