Workshop: Crash course on the study of populism

Studying populism in comparative perspective:
state of the art and avenues for future research

Academic interest in populism remains high and the issue achieves powerful
resonance in public debate, particularly because of the difficult relationship
between populism and democratic politics. At the same time as the prominence
of populism in the politics of Europe and the Americas has been growing, the
scholarship on populism has gradually developed from being a very disparate set of
literatures to being a more coherent body of work, in particular when it comes to
studying populism in comparative perspective.
Accordingly, this workshop seeks to offer an overview of the state of the art on
the academic debate on populism. Special emphasis will be given to
a) the concept of populism (defined as a specific set of ideas characterized by the
Manichean distinction between “the people” and “the elite”),
b) empirical studies on the demand-side (e.g. populist attitudes) and the
supply-side (e.g. populist discourse) of the populist phenomenon,
c) the ambivalent relationship between populism and democracy, and finally
d) the future research agenda on this topic.