Ideology, style or both? The complementarity of different definitions of populism

While populism studies are burgeoning, the concept of populism still remains heavily contested. Different schools define populism based on different ontologies, some of which explicitly exclude one another, while others are to an extent complementary. For instance, the ideational school views populism as a thin-centred ideology, while the Laclauian discourse theoretical school builds to a great extent in opposition to the former. Furthermore, critical discourse analysis uses a completely different set of identifiers of the populist radical right, and while the performative school shares some with both discursive approaches, it also adds some additional features. This paper aims to study this theoretical contestation from an empirical vantage point: while the conceptualisations diverge, do they still apply to the same empirical cases? The paper is based on a content analysis of existing literature, covering 24 most studied parties or politicians identified as populist, including different varieties of populism (e.g. the populist radical right, left-wing populism and authoritarian populism). Using a text corpus of nearly 300 political supply side studies, we analyse, which definitional features have been found to characterise specific parties, and to what extent do the defining features of different schools of populism apply to each case. The analysis demonstrates that in many cases, the different conceptualisations of populism are complementary,. However, both the complementary cases as well as the mutually exclusive cases give us a basis to advance an understanding of how populist political parties strategise across different ontological domains, how this might potentially affect party competition, and also help to settle an epistemological debate in populism studies.