Populists in Power: Populist Democratic Regimes and their International Sources

This paper analyzes comparatively the international conditions for the emergence and the implications for democratic practice of populist democratic regimes, i.e. regimes characterized by the electoral strength and excercise of governmental power by at least one major populist party. Following Laclau, I conceptualize populist parties as those that embed prior ideological positions in wider ‘equivalential chains’ of frustrated demands and alternative visions of political community, and sustain polarization after achieving power through ‘equivalential rearticulations’ that maintain opposition to presumed power structures. Using Greece as a paradigmatic case, I also explore similarities between Italy, Turkey and Thailand that include polarization, contagion of populism across the party system, personalization of political stakes, instrumentalization of state power and the proliferation of extra-parliamentary modes of political competition. I finally inquire how externalities caused by states’ adaptation to new geopolitical, normative or economic international conditions serve to give rise to and sustain populists in power.