Takis Pappas

Chapter 7 examines populist legacies and asks: How does populism endanger democracy? The first part addresses a set of questions about the lessons that can be learnt from our comparative study of populism. What has happened to the countries that experienced populist rule? Which are the particular paths each of them has followed after populist rule?...

Chapter 6 considers the question: Who is the populist voter? Because of its essentially exploratory nature, analysis in this chapter leaves quite a few doors wide open for further research. It begins with a delineation of the populist voter’s worldview, key beliefs, and voting attributes, which, to a very large extent, are characterized by irration...

Based on an original definition of modern populism as “democratic illiberalism” and many years of meticulous research, Takis Pappas marshals extraordinary empirical evidence from Argentina, Greece, Peru, Italy, Venezuela, Ecuador, Hungary, the United States, Spain, and Brazil to develop a comprehensive theory about populism. He addresses all key is...

Chapter 1 begins with a concise overview of the ways earlier scholars have examined populism during consecutive waves of research on the topic, and goes on to expose common conceptual and methodological errors—such as obscuring the genus, overemphasizing essentialism while overlooking ontology, concept stretching, the incertitude about negative pol...

Chapter 5 deals with populists in office and exposes what the author terms the “populist blueprint.” Once again based on comparative empirical analysis, it explains how populist parties consolidate in power by means of grabbing the top state administration and depriving key liberal institutions of autonomy, especially the judiciary, state-independe...

Chapter 4 answers the question: How, and where, does populism rise to power? through an empirical examination of the concepts and theories established in earlier chapters It begins with an elaborate analysis of the most important cases of populist emergence in postwar Europe and Latin America (including, in order of historical appearance, Argentina...

Chapter 2 discusses how to classify populist parties and clearly distinguish them from other types of parties they are often confused with. It begins by contrasting modern populism specifically with the variant of liberalism that developed in postwar Europe and the Americas, and then goes on to offer a rationalization of the need to study populism...

Chapter 3 is largely about the essentials of populism—its nuts and bolts, so to speak, that are absolutely necessary to facilitate its emergence—including notions of the people, political leadership, and symbolic discourse. The chapter introduces a fine distinction of three different subtypes of “the people,” each with their own characteristics and...

Ben Margulies’ critique centers on the question of whether antidemocrats and nativists constitute political phenomena that can be meaningfully distinguished from populism, with the latter understood as equivalent to democratic illiberalism. In fact, we can demarcate a class of clearly antidemocratic parties using authoritative sources—namely, court...

Το άρθρο αποτελεί μια προσπάθεια αναθεώρησης της κρατούσας στη σχετική βιβλιογραφία άποψης, σύμφωνα με την οποία το σύγχρονο κομματικό σύστημα, αφενός μεν, αποτελεί συνέχεια του προδικτατορικού συστήματος, αφετέρου δε, χαρακτηρίζεται από (περιορισμένο) πολυκομματισμό και ισχυρή πόλωση. Αντίθετα, υποστηρίζει αυτό το άρθρο, το κομματικό σύστημα που δ...

Ο ελληνικός 20ός αιώνας έχει να επιδείξει μακρά σειρά χαρισματικών ηγετών. Το άρθρο αναλύει έξι χαρακτηριστικές εμφανίσεις του φαινομένου και προτείνει δύο θεωρητικά υποδείγματα ερμηνείας του με συγκριτικό ενδιαφέρον. Στο πρώτο υπόδειγμα, η κρίση προϋπάρχει του χαρισματικού. Πρόκειται για πραγματικές εθνικές κρίσεις μετά την εκδήλωση των οποίων το...

[Δεν διατίθεται περίληψη / no abstract available]

The Global Rise of Populism: Performance, Political Style, and Representation. By Moffitt Benjamin . Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016. 240p. $65.00. Trust Us: Reproducing the Nation and the Scandinavian Nationalist Populist Parties. By Hellström Anders . New York: Berghahn, 2016. 246p. $95.00. - Volume 15 Issue 1 - Takis S. Pappas

This article takes issue with the common practice of uncritically lumping together as “populist” the various and distinct challengers to democracy in contemporary Europe. It disaggregates and then classifies such challengers into three analytically distinct categories: antidemocrats,nativists,and populists. In so doing,the article reveals the geogr...

The legitimacy claims of liberal democratic states are typically couched in the language of individual rights and the rule of law. But contemporary liberal democratic states increasingly appeal to a logic of security, law and order, and the need to combat “political extremism.” This logic plays out in Ukraine, Egypt, and Turkey, and in Greece and G...

When badly hit by the same global financial and economic crisis in the early 2000s, the Irish and the Greek societies reacted in quite different ways. Whereas Ireland remained largely acquiescent and displayed a high degree of civil compliance, Greeks took massively to the streets using violence and attacking specifically the state and the state pe...

Exploring the negative effects of populism, this study presents an original explanation of Greece's current political and economic failures. It argues that the sovereign debt crisis only exacerbated the malfunctioning of a democracy long ago contaminated by populist politics while also offering a more general insight into the impact of populism.

This article makes the case for a novel democratic subtype, populist democracy, indicating a situation in which both the party in office and at least the major opposition force(s) in a pluralist system are populist. Based on a minimal definition of populism as ‘democratic illiberalism’, and through the comparative analysis of post-authoritarian Gre...

Populism was introduced in Greece by Andreas Papandreou, founder and leader of PASOK, a nominally socialist party that posed in Greece’s political arena as the complete antithesis of democratic liberalism. This chapter offers an empirical analysis of populist emergence through the construction of the categories of ‘the people’ and ‘the establishmen...

Why did the crisis-battered Greeks desert the center and flee to both extremes of the political spectrum? Contrary to established theories, and drawing from cognitive psychology and behavioral economics, it is shown that, as the crisis hit Greece much harder than any other European nation, Greek voters became particularly averse to losing what they...

The mass tumult witnessed in Greece was without parallel in other crisis-ridden European countries and led the political system into a deep crisis of legitimation. Significantly, social unrest preceded the economic crisis and unfolded through two distinct phases: one beginning in December 2008 and featuring an insurrection against the state; and an...

Social discord in Greece presented three characteristics that distinguished it from similar phenomena that occurred in other crisis-ridden countries in Europe. Those were: the massive participation of society in protest activity; the specific targeting of the state, its top political personnel, and its material infrastructure; and, above all, the e...

Contemporary Greece shows clearly what may happen when both the political class and the voting public indulge in their particularistic interests by externalizing the cost at the expense of institutions. The populist democracy that resulted out of such collusion in Greece led to a deep crisis of legitimation and rendered the political system prone t...

When populism came to power in the early 1980s, it had to serve its own creation of ‘the people’. With Greek society now clamoring for all kinds of benefits, most often through general strikes and street demonstrations, the populist governments used three means to meet such demands while also keeping the opposition at bay: state grabbing, instituti...

This chapter asks why social unrest in Greece was so different from other crisis-ridden countries in Europe. By examining long-term patterns of strike activity, it advances the idea that social unrest is related to how society perceives the state’s relative utility. Once the utility of Greece’s populist democracy was perceived as low or nearly none...

Patronage is a key mechanism in populism. Even more so in Greece’s populist democracy where, rather than offering a simple principal-agent relation, it amounts to a large-scale collective action problem involving the distribution of tangible as well as nontangible state-related benefits by the political class to the whole of society. Greek society...

In early 2010, lest it default on its debts and exit the Eurozone, the Greek government requested financial assistance from foreign lenders. In exchange, it undertook to initiate reforms and apply a long-term, harsh austerity program. Based on a close reading of the periodic reviews submitted by the IMF staff, this chapter is a step-by-step analysi...

Patronage across the social board would not have been feasible without the development of an additional mechanism for the distribution of state-related benefits. Such was the system of polarized bipartism that developed in Greece after 1981, featuring a two-party format and distinctly polarizing mechanics. For almost three decades thereafter, the u...

In the successive national elections of May and June 2012, the previous party system of polarized bipartism collapsed and took with it the potential for parties to govern singlehandedly. To make sense of the emerging patterns of party competition, I propose a classification of the significant political parties into three groups consisting of: old p...

Greece’s newly emergent party system is categorized as polarized pluralism since it features plenty of anti-system forces assailing a group of center-placed parties. Those anti-system, parties negate: political liberalism; open markets; and Greece’s full integration in the EU. In other words, those parties that are imbued with the biased beliefs de...

A trailblazer during the, so-called, third wave of democratization in the mid-1970s, Greece is shown to make a successful transition to pluralism and proceed with the fast consolidation of liberal democratic institutions. Under the leadership of Constantine Karamanlis, Greece became a constitutional republic; saw the implementation of brave reforms...

In the aftermath of the failure of Constantine Mitsotakis’s government (1990–1993) to reinstitute liberalism, populism became broadly seen as the best vote-catching strategy, thus effectively contaminating Greece’s political and party systems. The country developed into a populist democracy, a democratic subtype in which all major parties, whether...

What explains the failure of reforms in Greece’s populist democracy? Through a, necessarily concise, examination of attempts to improve such crucial policy areas as health, pensions, and education, it is shown that reforms failed because the majority of Greek society typically stood against them. Such a strong resistance to reform is further explai...

Seeking to offer a unified theory about Greece's current political and economic crisis, this article unravels the particular mechanisms through which this country developed as a populist democracy, that is, a pluralist system in which both the government and the opposition parties turn populist. It furthermore shows how this democracy facilitated t...

Before the Greek debt crisis began in 2009, few were aware of the scale of patronage politics in contemporary Greece, and the ways it has for a long time affected the country's policy-making. This chapter presents the first in-depth empirical analysis of Greece as a model case of 'patronage democracy' in the European context. It shows that the scop...

This paper, based on cross-regional empirical research, provides an integrated analytical framework for understanding the emergence of populism in seemingly different political contexts in both Europe (including Greece, France and the Netherlands) and Latin America (including Peru and Venezuela). It is found that, given an appropriate context, poli...

This paper, initially prompted by the puzzles raised from the atypical emergence of charismatic politics in the otherwise ordinary political system that our contemporary democracy is supposed to be, seeks to bring political charisma back into the study of comparative politics by reconstructing the concept and rendering it applicable to empirical re...

This article is a comparative study of the socialist governments in Greece and Spain during the 1980s and is motivated by two interrelated puzzles: first, the sharp policy divergence in these countries despite their previously common political trajectories, comparable socioeconomic conditions, and the similar ideological profiles of their respectiv...

Despite its landslide in the 2009 national election, the victory of the Panhellenic Socialist Movemen (PASOK) was not so much the outcome of its own electoral ascendancy as a result of the precipitous fall of New Democracy (ND). That election, moreover, signified the stagnation of the Greek party system, which has become manifest particularly in th...

Patronage is an enduring feature of contemporary politics and may well develop in modern, mass organized and ideological political parties. This article approaches patronage in an analytical way, and seeks to explore its micro-foundations and logic of development. As the case of Greece's socialist party suggests, patronage is the deliberate outcome...

The perception of liberal democracy as a solidly institutionalized system in which opposition forces moderately compete with legitimate authority is so fixed that people are often surprised when mass radicalism emerges. Why, when, and how do radical mass movements emerge in pluralist (or semipluralist) political systems? The article, by linking rad...

Why did the Greek New Democracy remain in opposition for 11 consecutive years, and what did it take to regain power in 2004 with a landslide? This contribution focuses on three particular issues related to party change - i.e. party leadership, organizational structure, and electoral strategy - and explains how this party turned each and every one o...

To the extent that it still exists, the study of political charisma suffers from two major problems: the conceptual ambiguity and vagueness surrounding the concept, and the uneasy relationship between charismatic leadership and liberal democracy. The scale of the first problem becomes evident from the indiscriminate use of the term in everyday parl...

Slobodan Milošević was the central actor in the recent Yugoslav drama that began with the rise of nationalism and ended with the dissolution of Yugoslavia. How did he emerge as a charismatic leader, and why did the Serbian people follow him to national disaster. It is argued that Milošević owed his charismatic authority to the sense of widespread s...

This study is about party-system change in modern Greece and has two chief aims. First, it seeks to make sense of and explain the evolution of that country's party system from its early post-war years until today. Far from being ‘frozen’, the Greek party system has displayed continuous transformations from a system featuring significant party fragm...

List of Tables, Charts, Figures Preface PART I: OLD LEGACIES, NEW IDEAS The Contours of the Postwar Right From Transition to Democracy to the Establishment of Party Democracy PART II: PARTY DEVELOPMENT Parties and Elections, 1974-1981 The Political Elite Level: How 'New' was ND? The Internal Organization Level: How 'Democratic' was ND? Battles for...

Setting up a democracy is one thing, making it work is quite another. This study began with postwar politics in Greece, when the political parties had no autonomy and were almost entirely dependent on a partisan state. Then it passed to the initially uncertain establishment of the modern democratic regime and traced its trajectory mainly through th...

Clientelism stands out as one of the main variables that explain modern Greek politics. We have already seen how, for the most part, political patronage in the postwar era strove to organize society by incorporating a select part of it, while at the same time excluding another by means of the capacities, and resources of the omnipotent rightist sta...

To say that conservatives of any hue abhor debates on ideological matters is almost to labor the obvious. To them, issues of ideology seem impractical, pointless, and at times embarrassingly bewildering. Traditional disinclinations aside, the muddle in which the early ND ideologues found themselves after the return to democracy had an additional re...

In the general elections of November 1974, still animated by the political euphoria of the sudden return to democratic normalcy and under the spell of Karamanlis’ charismatic authority, the Greek people gave ND a massive 54.4 per cent of the total national vote. It was an unprecedented victory at the polls and has remained unmatched by any politica...

Studying the early years of the German Social Democratic party, Robert Michels made his most often-quoted proposition on internal party organization: to speak of organization is, inevitably, to speak of a tendency to oligarchy.1 Yet when applying this dictum to the early years of ND development, we are confronted with something of a paradox. After...

Not that it was inevitable, but in July 1974 the Third Greek Republic was founded upon the debris of a political past that was demolished almost instantly with intent and by design. Thus, even more than the demise of the military dictatorship, the foundation of a new democratic regime in Greece marked the passing-out of the old political system, co...

The dictatorship that ruled Greece for seven years collapsed in 1974 under the weight of its own deficiencies, failures, and contradictions. From its very inception, the junta of the colonels had failed to institutionalize itself and gain popular legitimacy. The student uprising at the Polytechnic School of Athens in November 1973 caused an interna...

The paper is part of a cross-national expert survey designed to explore various aspects of political patronage in contemporary European democracies and it reports specifically on Southern European countries (Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain). The four democracies under study shared an extended and deep politicisation of administrative bodies as a...