The Causes of Populism: Cross-Regional and Cross-Disciplinary Approaches

No doubt about it, populism is everywhere on the rise. It has already been in power in several countries (such as Greece, Italy, Hungary and Venezuela) and is now growing strong in many more (including such hitherto populism-free countries as Spain and Germany). The flourishing of populist parties and movements has led in recent years to a proliferation of studies on the meaning of populism, its nature and characteristics, as well as the ways it affects normal democratic politics, and also has helped the development of a whole gamut of methodological instruments – ranging from textual analysis to survey research to more traditional qualitative techniques. However, scholars have yet to seriously tackle the next most important question in the study of populism: What causes it? Precisely because, and quite obviously, the causes of populism are often different depending on the country, this workshop aims at bringing together scholars from various world regions and various disciplines to bear on the analysis of populist causality. This framework is expected to catalyze the kind of iterative work that is more characteristic of productive individual research in the field, one in which scholars repeatedly test competing theories. We seek to identify the key causes of populism, compare them cross-regionally, analyze them cross-disciplinarily, and consider how they produce different populist outcomes. We propose bringing together both junior and senior scholars from Europe and the Americas. These two regions contain important variation/cases and provide the resources to constitute a useful workshop; at the same time. Just as important, theorizing about populism in the two regions has often been disconnected. Ouraim is to think within three distinct and yet interrelated theoretical and methodological approaches to the problem (i.e., structuralist, institutionalist, and constructivist-rationalist ones), each contributing to arriving at a synthetic understanding of populist causality.