The Role of Economy in Right-wing Populism: Two Differing Approaches

Abstract

Populism has been one of the concepts that attract conflicting opinions from scholars. These debates revolve around many different aspects such as who votes for populist parties, what constitutes a populist leader, which institutional factors help populist parties come to power, and even on how populism should be defined. This conflicting opinion then matters for social scientists since differing opinions about the question of what populism is would then lead to different research and different results. This article analyzes the two different populism definitions: Populism as an ideology, and populism as a discursive style and shows how two definitions yield different results in explaining the economic nexus that drives populist parties. This article shows two seminal works on populism literature; Cas Mudde, and Norris and Inglehart have differing opinions on the economic reasoning behind populist parties solely because of the definitions they attribute to populism.