Populism and Leadership: is There Anything New Under the Sun?

The literature on populism tends to consider dominant leaders as a characteristic feature of populist parties across time and space. However, we know very little about what the populist leadership is about. In this context, this paper aims to contribute to a relatively unexplored arena of populist studies, which is what is special about the populist political leadership in an increasingly personalised politics. It relies on the method of expert survey, as a consolidated approach in comparative politics. In order to grasp the peculiar position of populist leaders in the populist politics, we shall first provide a general overview of the features of contemporary leadership in order to be able to compare the general assumptions of the literature with the specific cases of populist leadership in the literature, a topic covered in the second section. In the following section, we shall provide a synthetic, empirical analysis of 21 populist leaders from 10 European countries (Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and Sweden). The choice of these countries is consistent with the literature on the variances of populism in relation to distinct historical, political and social contexts (i.e. the importance of demand-side explanation as well as the relevance of the specific political opportunity structures in which populist parties act) ( Golder 2016). To assure comparability of the dependent variable (populist leadership), this study is focused on democratic party systems in which populist parties found themselves in parliamentary positions in the two most recent elections. This chronological choice is connected to the fact that it is mostly over the last decade that populist parties have either emerged or made spectacular electoral breakthroughs across Europe. In this context, the sample adopts a broad paneuropean perspective including cases from Western (sub-divided between Continental and Northern Europe) as well as Eastern European countries (sub-divided between Central and Southern-Eastern Europe), thus overcoming the conventional West-East divide.