My doctoral research stems from the need to shift the conversation on populism. To grasp the identities behind identity politics, I propose an interpretive turn is necessary to shift the focus from populism to peoplehood, and from top-down survey research to bottom-up qualitative research. This has materialised as a comparative research project on Spain and Portugal, where I conducted fieldwork with discontent citizens (approximately 90 interviews). In this paper, I focus on understanding the nature of populism as a social reality: What are citizens discontent about? How does discontent develop into populism? What are the identities behind it? And what are the implications for potential political change? Building on my analysis, I propose a series of key findings that enrich and contest both the ideational and Essex theories in populism studies. First, I propose populism takes shape as a discourse centred not so much around “corrupt” elites, but around structural factors that determine the process of representation. Chiefly, I show discontent citizens critically problematise parties as institutions of representation. Second, I argue populism expresses not a vertical vindication of the “pure” people against the elites, but a horizontal anxiety at the (im)possibility of constructing/experiencing a people at all among fellow citizens. Overall, I propose we make sense of populism not as a moral or agonistic discourse, but as an epistemic one that emerges from failures in communication and representation. Applying these insights to my comparative case study helps to understand why Spanish citizens are more prone to (populist) participation than Portuguese citizens.
The populist right is among the most researched electorates in contemporary political science. However, we still know little about what populism actually means from the standpoint of these citizens. Therefore, in this paper I ask: how does populism take shape among populist right supporters? And how can we explain their support for populist right parties? I do so by focusing on Spain and Portugal, which are theoretically interesting cases because of the existence of contradictory evidence. To do so, I apply methods and concepts from sociology, chiefly nationalism studies, for an innovative approach to key questions in political science. Providing the first interpretive, comparative analysis of right populism, in this paper I make three key arguments. First, I show that right populism was primarily defined by resentment towards fellow citizens, in terms that included fellow nationals broadly (as opposed to targeting only immigrants, minorities, etc.). This resentment relied on both ethno-nationalism and neoliberal producerism as enmeshed discourses. Second, I argue that neoliberal producerism was preeminent in defining the concept of the “good” or “true” people that respondents abided by, and which constituted for them a positive sense of self amidst a society they felt alienated from. Third, following from this centrality of neoliberal producerism, I show that their vote for the populist right was guided by the desire to further cuts in taxes and social rights. Overall, these findings help to move beyond limitations in how prior research has accounted for contradictory evidence on the populist right in Spain and Portugal. Moreover, these findings counter common assumptions in ideational scholarship on populism, chiefly the idea that right populism channels a desire to revive a traditional, national solidarity. On the contrary, these findings stand in line with perspectives that have conceptualised right populism as an extension of neoliberal exclusion through new means, and they question the extent to which support for the populist right can be conceptualised as “populist” politics.
Despite increasing research on populist discourse, we know little about how populist discontent actually takes shape in the minds of ordinary citizens. Prior research has operated with a deductive framework, approaching populism as a set of psychological traits that assumes underlying values, their interrelations, and their relation to other discourses like pluralism. Bridging new theoretical perspectives on the multi-dimensionality of populism with methodological advances in multivariate statistics, in this paper we explore how populism can take shape as various types of discourses revolving around the issue of popular sovereignty. Using original data from two Spanish regions (Catalunya and Andalucía), we propose three key findings. First, populism can take shape combining various attitudinal dispositions, including pluralism, and a number of combinations emerge as meaningful discourses in both regions. Second, no "populist" voter exists, with populist parties drawing support from people holding different views on popular sovereignty. Third, a wedge nevertheless exists between the kinds of discourses most prevalent within the electorates of mainstream and populist parties, supporting the thesis that populism constitutes a new "cleavage."
Foucault and Butler's anti-essentialist theory has laid the grounds for an immensely generative academic and social agenda. Their influence is paramount in the development of feminist concepts and struggles. The concept of gender identity, central today to feminist and queer politics, is no exception. At once, the concept carries with it a certain essentialism, creating an ambivalence that is reflected in today's social and academic debates. In this paper I trace this essentialism in academic and media sources, and I argue it reflects contradictions internal to Foucault's theory and its derivations through Butler and other authors. Building on Baudrillard's theory of sign value, I argue that the concept of gender identity reproduces these internal contradictions, that unpacking them can help to understand contemporary tensions in the feminist movement as well as the success of the far right, and that working on these contradictions can be productive for meeting the original objectives of its proponents. In turn, the argument provides transferable knowledge for thinking more broadly about the construction of emancipatory subjects in late-modeern societies.
Current studies have made immense progress in the comparative study of populism, yet breadth has come at the expense of depth. Beyond the idea that democratic dissatisfaction is widespread, we know little about the way ordinary people are actually discontent with democracy, how they construct the people, how they think a better democratic politics should work, etc. Building on multivariate methods and original data, I explore ways of making representative claims while factoring in the complexity and heterogeneity of identity discourses like peoplehood and populism. The first article in this project was published in Political Research Quarterly. It is the first quantitative study that explores populist politics by conceptualising and analysing peoplehood as a latent construct. Using Latent Class Analysis, I show that peoplehood is a meaningful social identity for citizens in West Europe, I provide insight into the way that different groups of citizens make sense of it, and I show these differences are important to understand support for populist parties. Currently, with a colleague I am leveraging an original dataset on populism to explore how discontent takes shape in the form of various kinds of populisms, and how these varieties are consequential for electoral behaviour.
The project that gave rise to these results received the support of a fellowship from ‘la Caixa’ Foundation [ID 100010434]. The fellowship code is LCF/BQ/EU21/ 11890039.
Academic discourse has historically fluctuated from celebrating to dismissing the transformative potential of contemporary political innovations (for instance, the alt-globalisation movement or populism). But often either position is driven by an excessive privileging of inductive perspectives or of deductive conceptual impositions, making it hard to feedback academic and social discourses productively. Specifically, I address this problem from two different angles: