About populism, a-populism and anti-populism

The ideational approach to populism has been widely used in political science besides not without critiques. It defines populism as a “thin ideology” based on two dimensions: a Manichean division of society between “the pure people” versus “the corrupted elite”, and an understanding of politics based on popular sovereignty. One corollary of this definition is that populism have two opposites: pluralism and elitism. However, following the Sartorian tradition on conceptual formation to define any concept we need to be able to identify situations in which the defining characteristics of the concept are completely absent but also what lies at the opposite conceptual pole. Regarding populism then we should be able to identify both no-populism and the opposite of populism. The aim of this paper is twofold. First, starting from an ideational approach to populism we are defining the relationship between populism, pluralism, and elitism. Furthermore, we contribute to the literature on anti-populism (Stavrakakis 2014; 2018; Moffitt 2018) disentangling its relationship with both elitism and pluralism. In this sense we claim that anti-populism is a temporary attitude that is activated when the “threat” is perceived as real.