Populism and Global Affairs

What is it about?

Six recent books addressing the topic of populist politics offer important insights into what may be the most significant political phenomenon of the current era. Each contributes to defining, delimiting, and understanding populism. Four offer detailed discussions of the causal origins of the phenomenon, and two focus on its likely implications. Taken together, they offer an excellent starting point for empirical analysis by students of international relations and global affairs.

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Why is it important?

While each of the six authors offers some “solutions” to the challenges posed by populist politics, those solutions are often based on implicit causal factors either driving the rise of populism or linking populism to policy outcomes – usually the deterioration of democratic institutions. Only Krastev offers vivid predictions of the effects of such relationships on the future of the European Union; only Sloan does the same for NATO. However, there remains much to do in terms of understanding the empirical relationships that all of the authors leave implicit. Mudde and Kaltwasser (2018) have proposed a future research agenda that focuses on the origins of the populist wave and its implications for democratic institutions, partisanship, and polarization. Global affairs scholars can and should move beyond the domestic institutional implications of the rise of populism to empirically analyze populism’s implications for conflict and cooperation internationally.

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