Varieties of Populism: Literature Review and Research Agenda

In recent years, populism has attracted considerable interest from social scientists and politicalcommentators (Panizza 2005, Bale et al. 2011, Mudde 2004, Berezin 2013, Rovira Kaltwasser2013), despite the fact that, “[t]he mercurial nature of populism has often exasperated thoseattempting to take it seriously” (Stanley 2008, 108). Indeed, the term ‘populism’ is both widelyused and widely contested (Roberts 2006; Barr 2009).1 It has been defined based on political,economic, social, and discursive features (Weyland 2001, 1) and analyzed from myriadtheoretical perspectives—including structuralism, post-structuralism, modernization theory,social movement theory, party politics, political psychology, political economy, and democratictheory—and a variety of methodological approaches, such as archival research, discourseanalysis, and formal modeling (Acemoglu et al. 2011, Ionescu and Gellner 1969, Canovan 2002,Hawkins 2009, Goodliffe 2012, Postel 2007). As observed by Wiles, “to each his own definitionof populism, according to the academic axe he grinds” (Wiles, in Iunescu and Gellner 1969, p.166).