The Interest(s) of the People - A Theory of Populist and Non-Populist Representative Logics

Populist persistence in power is emerging as one of the key theoretical puzzles for populism scholars in the 21th century. Theorists are struggling with how to explain the paradox of stable populist regimes, which antagonize the power-holding, corrupt elites but at the same time establish themselves as the powerful rulers of a country. At the hearth of this paradox lies the widespread understanding that populist success is always predicated on some sort of representative crisis, a failure of the political establishment to represent the interests, fulfill the demands of its constituency (Hawkins & Rovira Kaltwasser 2019; Roberts 2015; Stavrakakis 2017). But how can populists in power rely on the same type of representative crisis to maintain their populist legitimacy? Why do voters continue to support populists in power despite this radical change in their status as elite power-holders? This paper proposes to resolve the paradox of populist persistence in power by critically revisiting what representative crisis means, how populists use it to mobilize support, and how such crises contribute to the populist attitudes of individuals on the mass level. The paper puts forward a theoretical argument that places the concept of populism within the domain of political representation, and in the footsteps of scholars who see populism as a political or social logic (Laclau, 2005; Stavrakakis, 2017), a form of representation (Caramani, 2017) or a type of representation (Urbinati, 2019), proposes that populism is one of multiple existing logics of political representation. The core argument of the paper is that populist success depends on an immanent crisis of other, non-populist logics of political representation. Representative crises, seen as political performances (Moffitt 2016), can be successfully performed both from opposition and power because they are based not on the failure of representation in general, nor on the failure of the incumbent political actors, but on the assumed failure of non-populist representative logics. To support this argument, the paper reviews existing explanations of populist persistence in power, engages with arguments that link populism to political representation, and revisits what the most used characteristics of populism, “people-centrism”, “anti-elitism” and “anti-pluralism” mean for a representative logic. To distinguish populist representation from its opposites, the paper puts forward a typology of representative logics along two dimensions, an ontological and a structural one, which strongly build on the literature about the trustee and delegate models of representative action, and on the discursive theories of populist group identity formation. Finally, the paper offers a brief discussion of what the proposed typology of representative logics means for key arguments prevalent in populism theory: the argument about populism’s majoritarian quality, the moral dimension of the people-elite dichotomy, and the relationship between representative logics and (thick) ideologies. I propose this paper for the section’s panel on “Individual Drivers of Populism, Radicalism, and Extremism”.