Workshop: Crash course on the study of populism
Welcome to a workshop on April 13, 2021 (10.00-13.00 CET) about the study of populism with Uppsala Forum Visiting Fellow, Professor Cristobal Rovira Kaltwasser (Diego Portales University, Chile). The workshop is open to everyone, and particularly welcomes postdocs, doctoral students and master students. Please register by March 30, 2021 to Sofia Nasström. Read more about the workshop here.
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.