The Limitations of the “Populism” Explanation

Some common accounts of “populism” and its causes risk leading us away from understanding what is happening today in parts of the democratic West, according to Senior Scholar Joel Perlmann. He cautions that economic insecurity may well be a common source of populism, but such insecurity is too prevalent and too diverse to be tied primarily to massive international economic shifts. Cross-national explanations are of limited utility; we need to look more closely at the intermingling of political, ethnic, and cultural themes operating in national contexts in order to better understand particular outbursts of popular discontent.