Populism in World Politics: Conceptual and Comparative Approaches in Global, Regional and Cross-Regional Perspectives

Abstract

Research on populism has grown exponentially in the last 30 years, but neither the significance of populism for world politics nor the transnational dimensions of populist phenomena have been systematically explored yet. This panel builds on earlier works conducting cross-regional comparisons of varieties of populism or looking at the impact of populism on foreign policy, but also goes beyond the still predominant focus on the roots and impact of populist phenomena in national arenas, the preoccupation with specific world regions, or the sheltering of the study of populism from its global and regional context. The panel brings together experts in a variety of fields (comparative politics, foreign policy analysis, security policy, regional integration, political economy) and regions (Western and Eastern Europe, Latin America, Asia and the Middle East) with an interest in studying both the impact and the sources of populism at the crossroads of domestic and international politics. Populism is seen as a powerful influence on national foreign policies and on international outcomes like the shape and content of regional security institutions or powerful discourses of global governance. Populism is also seen as a significant phenomenon in multiple regional contexts and embedded in wider political and economic developments of a global and regional scale. In many ways, these two views (‘inside-out’ and ‘outside-in’ as it were) are of course intimately linked, and the panel will highlight this dimension as well. Ultimately, these papers reveal the usefulness of the conceptual flexibility of populism in explaining processes and phenomena running in both directions of the domestic-international nexus. At the same time, the study of populism is substantially enriched both by a decidedly global perspective and by an analytical eclecticism that allows the concept of populism to be applied in different institutional (e.g. democratic, semi-authoritarian and authoritarian), geographical and historical contexts.