Is Populism a Political Strategy? A Critique of an Enduring Approach
| Author | Daniel Rueda |
| Published date | 01 May 2021 |
| Date | 01 May 2021 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0032321720962355 |
| Subject Matter | Article |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0032321720962355
Political Studies
2021, Vol. 69(2) 167 –184
© The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/0032321720962355
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Is Populism a Political
Strategy? A Critique of an
Enduring Approach
Daniel Rueda
Abstract
The political-strategic approach is one of the most employed frameworks within the
methodologically heterogeneous subfield of populism studies. In the last two decades, it has
contributed to the analysis of populism both in Latin America and the United States and, more
recently, in Western and Eastern Europe. That being said, a close inspection of its axioms and its
conceptualization of the phenomenon shows that it is built on ill-conceived premises. This article
intends to be a comprehensive critique of the approach that can contribute to the methodological
progress of the field. It criticizes the three main dysfunctions of the approach: selective rationalism,
leader-centrism, and normative bias.
Keywords
populism, political-strategic approach, rationalism, leader-centrism, normative bias
Accepted: 8 September 2020
Populism might be one of the most contested concepts in the field of political science
today, as the fact that this observation has now become itself a commonplace shows.
Although its existence as a subfield is still precarious and there is little consensus on how
to approach it, few can doubt of its relevance for academic researchers, especially since
recent developments in the United States and Europe have brought the concept to the fore
of the political and media landscapes. Such salience is a double-edged sword for scholars
who study the phenomenon: on one hand, it is an opportunity to engage on highly visible
and stimulating academic debates; yet, on the other hand, this popularity can provoke a
media and political “contamination” that can produce important research normative
biases (Aslanidis, 2017).
Despite the methodological heterogeneity that characterizes the field, it is possible to
identify the most prominent analytical frameworks. The 2017 Oxford Handbook of
Populism singles out three conceptual approaches that are considered the most employed
Department of European and International Studies, King’s College London, London, UK
Corresponding author:
Daniel Rueda, Department of European and International Studies, King’s College London, London WC2R
2LS, UK.
Email: Daniel.rueda@kcl.ac.uk
962355PSX0010.1177/0032321720962355Political StudiesRueda
research-article2020
Article
168 Political Studies 69(2)
by researchers: the ideational approach (whereby populism is understood as an ideology,
although as a particular one), the sociocultural approach (whereby populism is under-
stood as a particular form of political relationship between leaders and followers), and the
political-strategic approach (Hawkins and Rovira Kaltwasser et al., 2017).1 This article
intends to formulate a comprehensive critique of the latter in order to show its conceptual
unfitness for the analysis of populism.
The strategic-political approach has Kurt Weyland as its main proponent. He has a
long record as an analyst of Latin American populism, although more recently he has also
examined forms of populism in Europe and the United States. According to him, “pop-
ulism is best defined as a political strategy through which a personalistic leader seeks or
exercises government power based on direct, unmediated, uninstitutionalized support
from large numbers of mostly unorganized followers” (Weyland, 2001). He developed
this new definition partly as a reaction against the conceptual flaws of the state of the
literature on populism during the late twentieth century, which was mainly based on soci-
oeconomic structuralism and historicism and was not able to integrate new phenomenon
such as the existence of personalistic leaders who conducted market-oriented reforms in
terms of definitional extension.
That being said, there are other proponents of similar versions of this view, even if they
do not necessarily identify themselves as followers of Weyland’s works. Alan Ware
(2002: 104) defines populism as “a political strategy deployed by a wide range of politi-
cians,” while Hans-Georg Betz (2002) presents it as “primarily a political strategy, whose
political rhetoric is the evocation of latent grievances and the appeal to emotions pro-
voked by them.” Robert R. Barr (2009) for his part considers populism to be “a mass
movement led by an outsider or maverick seeking to gain or maintain power by using
anti-establishment appeals and plebiscitarian linkages.” Although the article will focus
mainly on Weyland’s analytical framework, it will also pay attention to these “thin” ver-
sions of the political-strategic approach, as they are considered to reproduce some of its
basic axioms.
What do these approaches have in common? Their underlying assumptions are mainly
three. First, populist leaders are portrayed as power-seeking politicians who act rationally
in order to maximize their profit, measured in popular support, which leads them to
engage in strategies of deideologization and other tactics as a means to gain political
prominence. Second, it is assumed that populism can be conceptualized and analyzed by
focusing on the behavior of its leaders, which implies that both the demand-side and
institutional and historico-cultural dynamics tend to be overlooked. And third, there is a
clear normative content inasmuch as both populist politicians and their policies are sys-
tematically (and aprioristically) condemned, even when the research objective of the
paper or the book is in principle unrelated to normative considerations.
This article seeks to criticize those starting premises. In order to do so, it is organized
thematically in three parts. The first examines how some of the (implicitly or explicitly
outlined) axioms of the strategic-political approach are in fact shared with primitive ver-
sions of the rational choice theory as it was applied to political science. Needless to say,
such theory has not and should not be methodologically rejected from the very bottom,
but its application to certain subfields (such as populism studies) carries analytical issues.
The second section analyzes to what degree the leader-centric approach defended by
Weyland and others is suitable for a conceptualization of a rich and complex phenomenon
such as populism, which is generally analyzed at a movement or party level. Finally, the
third section points to the normative biases that run through the strategic-political
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