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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 phenomenological approach, leading to the construction of a descriptive typology.
Margaret Canovan (Wed,) studied this question.