Public lecture "The Ideational Approach to Populism: A Comparative Research Agenda"

A public lecture by Levente Littvay, one of the editors of the book "The Ideational Approach to Populism: Concept, Theory, and Analysis".

Trump, Orban, Maduro, Brexit: populism is on the rise in Europe and the Americas with destructive consequences. Populism scholarship, at the same time, is fragmented and struggle with ever the base definitions of the phenomena often conflating with radical right (or, ironically, also left) politics. Team Populism is a loosely organized group of scholars who introduced a research agenda that is based on a populism as a set of ideas or discourse, one that envisions a cosmic struggle between the will of the common people and a conspiring elite.  We set out to advance the scholarship by proposing a causal framework and methodological guidelines – a research program – based on this ideational approach arguing that populism exists not only as elite discourse, where it has been studied most extensively, but also as a set of widespread attitudes among ordinary citizens. This framework allows for richer theory generation and rigorous multi-method empirical tests through the in-depth assessment of the micro-macro dynamics.

Everyone is welcome!

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Activity is financially supported by Project TU TEE - Tallinn University as a Promoter of Intelligent Lifestyle