scholarly journals Wing Populism: Capturing the Globe

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 79-90
Author(s):  
Pratishtha Rao

This article is an attempt to explore the reasons for the recent trend of the rise of rightwing populism in the whole world. The origin of the terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ dates back to the French Revolution and the seating arrangements. The term ‘right’ was soon understood to mean reactionary or monarchist, and the term ‘left’ implied revolutionary or egalitarian sympathies. While populism is an idea of grouping people against ‘the elites. Both right ideology and populism are based on the segregation of society in two sections. When right wing political ideology merges with populist ideology, it is termed as “Right wing populism”. Right wing populists generally converge on issues like opposing immigration, nativism, protectionism etc. This ideology is gaining popularity rapidly in the present world order. The reasons are many, like social media, print and electronic media, civil society, economic instability, and charismatic leadership. Along with this the article also tries to find out the connection of hatred and human nature with the rise of right-wing populism. It focuses on how when hatred at the international level is justified it gives away for hatred at the domestic level as well which results in the cause and effect of right-wing populism. 

2021 ◽  
pp. 073112142110246
Author(s):  
Adam Mayer

In the last few decades, the United States has experienced several related and significant societal trends—the transition of the energy system away from coal, the intensification of partisan polarization, and the rise of a populist right-wing political ideology, perhaps best exemplified by the election of Donald Trump. We build Gramling and Freudenberg’s little-explored concept of “development channelization” to argue that nostalgic right-wing populism, grievances directed toward the federal government, and partisanship converge to potentially thwart efforts to transition and diversify rural economies. Populist nostalgia and blame are associated with support for expanding the collapsing coal industry but do not predict support for other types of development. There are patterns of partisan polarization in support for extractive industries and wind power, but many development options appear to be relatively nonpartisan. We discuss these findings in terms of populism, nostalgia, partisan polarization, and the potential for rural renewal in the United States.


Author(s):  
Marlene Wind

Doomsdays preachers suggested that Brexit and Trump would mean the end of the liberal world order as we know it and thus the end of the EU. The research presented here suggests the opposite. Not only have Europeans turned their back to populism by voting yes to reforms and pro-EU-parties and governments in different member states over the past months, but Brexit and Trump also seems to have given a complete new momentum to the European project. This chapter demonstrates why Brexit cannot be generalized to the rest of the continent but is the result of a complicated and special British conception of what it means to be a sovereign state in the twenty-first century. Moreover, and paradoxically, surveys show that the greatest fear among Europeans today is not more European integration but right wing populism and European disunion.


2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 88-115 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chenchen Zhang

The past few years have seen an emerging discourse on Chinese social media that combines the claims, vocabulary and style of right-wing populisms in Europe and North America with previous forms of nationalism and racism in Chinese cyberspace. In other words, it provokes a similar hostility towards immigrants, Muslims, feminism, the so-called ‘liberal elites’ and progressive values in general. This article examines how, in debating global political events such as the European refugee crisis and the American presidential election, well-educated and well-informed Chinese Internet users appropriate the rhetoric of ‘Western-style’ right-wing populism to paradoxically criticise Western hegemony and discursively construct China’s ethno-racial and political identities. Through qualitative analysis of 1038 postings retrieved from a popular social media website, this research shows that by criticising Western ‘liberal elites’, the discourse constructs China’s ethno-racial identity against the ‘inferior’ non-Western other, exemplified by non-white immigrants and Muslims, with racial nationalism on the one hand; and formulates China’s political identity against the ‘declining’ Western other with realist authoritarianism on the other. The popular narratives of global order protest against Western hegemony while reinforcing a state-centric and hierarchical imaginary of global racial and civilisational order. We conclude by suggesting that the discourse embodies the logics of anti-Western Eurocentrism and anti-hegemonic hegemonies. This article: (1) provides critical insights into the changing ways in which self–other relations are imagined in Chinese popular geopolitical discourse; (2) sheds light on the global circulation of extremist discourses facilitated by the Internet; and (3) contributes to the ongoing debate on right-wing populism and the ‘crisis’ of the liberal world order.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-27
Author(s):  
Tobias Böhmelt

Abstract This article examines the impact of populism on environmental politics, focusing on countries’ outcome-level performance. I develop the argument that populist leadership likely undermines environmental quality. First, populist leaders tend to reject and refrain from implementing “green” policies, as these are usually promoted by “corrupt elites.” Second, populism erodes democratic institutions, thus offsetting a series of mechanisms that are related to better environmental outcomes. Empirically, I combine data from the Global Populism Database covering sixty-six countries and more than two hundred executive leaders with information on environmental performance at the outcome level. The findings suggest that populist leadership is strongly linked to lower environmental performance—also when controlling for a series of alternative influences and distinguishing between left- and right-wing populism. This research greatly adds to our understanding of the determinants of environmental policies, the role of regime type and ideology, and the literature on populism.


2017 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 146-165 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert A. Huber ◽  
Christian H. Schimpf

This study examines the differences and commonalities of how populist parties of the left and right relate to democracy. The focus is narrowed to the relationship between these parties and two aspects of democratic quality, minority rights and mutual constraints. Our argument is twofold: first, we contend that populist parties can exert distinct influences on minority rights, depending on whether they are left-wing or right-wing populist parties. Second, by contrast, we propose that the association between populist parties and mutual constraints is a consequence of the populist element and thus, we expect no differences between the left-wing and right-wing parties. We test our expectations against data from 30 European countries between 1990 and 2012. Our empirical findings support the argument for the proposed differences regarding minority rights and, to a lesser extent, the proposed similarities regarding mutual constraints. Therefore we conclude that, when examining the relationship between populism and democracy, populism should not be considered in isolation from its host ideology.


2017 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 435-462 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andre Krouwel ◽  
Yordan Kutiyski ◽  
Jan-Willem van Prooijen ◽  
Johan Martinsson ◽  
Elias Markstedt

A large volume of academic research has demonstrated that individuals who profess radical political ideology, both left- and right-wing, tend to share similar underlying psychological patterns. By utilizing data collected through a voting advice application in Sweden, this study aims to assess whether extreme leftists and rightists share similarities in the psychological and political understanding of how society functions. We propose three hypotheses to test this pattern: Extreme left and right individuals are more inclined to believe in conspiracy theories than moderates; they are more likely to have negative economic evaluations; and they are less politically and interpersonally trustful. By means of hierarchical regression analyses, we reveal a quadratic relationship between extreme political ideology and conspiracy beliefs. Moreover, we find a similar linkage between ideology and economic evaluations. However, the empirical analyses fail to provide evidence that extreme ideology is related to lower political and interpersonal trust.


2019 ◽  
Vol 45 (9-10) ◽  
pp. 1132-1143
Author(s):  
Thomas Claviez

The response of academic intellectuals and political elites to populism is very often characterized by a mixture between outright disgust and helpless perplexity. This cannot come as a surprise, since the one thing that left and right populism have in common is that they consider the elites their enemy. The essay argues that the choice the elites have is either to openly voice their contempt for the uneducated masses, or to help educate them. However, as the contributions of Ernesto Laclau and Jacques Rancière on the topic show, this is more easily said than done. Moreover, to simply discard right-wing populism on the basis of its racist tendencies often simply serves to deflect the focus away from the legitimate grievances of those who follow – or ‘fall for’ – populist parties.


Author(s):  
Roger Eatwell

‘Fascism’ is a term referring both to a political ideology and to a concrete set of political movements and regimes. Its most prominent examples were the Italian and German regimes in the interwar period. Fascist ideology is sometimes portrayed as merely a mantle for political movements in search of power, but in reality it set forth a new vision of society, drawing on both left- and right-wing ideas. Fascists stressed the need for social cohesion and for strong leadership. They were more concerned to revitalize nations by cultural change than to propose institutional changes, but they saw themselves as offering a third way between capitalism and communism. There was no fascist philosophy as such, but fascist ideology drew inspiration from earlier philosophers, most notably Nietzsche and Sorel, and was supported by several contemporary philosophers, including Heidegger, Gentile and Schmitt.


2021 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-16
Author(s):  
Glenn Morgan ◽  
Christian Lyhne Ibsen

This introduction summarizes the main contributions of this special issue titled “Quiet Politics and the Power of Business: New Perspectives in an Era of Noisy Politics.” The four articles in the issue use and extend Culpepper’s influential concept of “quiet politics” according to which business is able to shape policies and regulations when issues are of low salience to the public and politicians. The issue takes Culpepper’s analysis further in ways that respond to the rise of noisy politics over the last few years, often associated with new strident forms of left- and right-wing populism. Three contributions are made. First, the articles show that salience is not an inherent property of a policy area but is socially constructed. Second, a variety of strategies are described that business uses when trying to keep politics quiet. Third, strategies are affected by the structure of business, which varies across types of capitalism. Future research can use these insights to extend our understanding of the limits, strategies, and dynamics of quiet politics across political economies.


2019 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 284-305 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Wettstein ◽  
Anne Schulz ◽  
Marco Steenbergen ◽  
Christian Schemer ◽  
Philipp Müller ◽  
...  

Abstract The rising voter support for populist parties in Western Democracies in recent years has incited academic interest in populist voters and attitudes connected to the voting propensity of populist actors. In line of this research, numerous scales to measure populist attitudes among voters have been proposed. In most cases, however, the measurement of populist attitudes was tailored to specific countries and its applicability to cross-national research on populism was not assessed. This article uses a cross-national survey to assess the measurement invariance, reliability, and validity of a deductively developed inventory for populist attitudes. The findings suggest that there is a common attitudinal base to left- and right-wing populism which may be measured reliably and invariantly across nations.


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