Populist mobilization across time and space

The analysis presented in this chapter explores the logic of populist mobilization. On the basis of a brief study of five major cases, both historical and contemporary, I seek to ascertain what are the central mechanisms informing populist strategy and the conditions conducive to its success. The results suggest that successful populist mobilization depends on a combination of several crucial factors: first, on populist actors' ability to invoke a morally grounded ideational repertoire of contestation, centered upon a strong sense of social justice; second, their ability to appeal to diffuse emotions, such as anger, indignation and resentment, and package them as a coherent narrative of victimization; and third, their ability to translate this narrative into a political discourse centered upon the establishment of an antagonistic "internal frontier" between "the people" and a discursively constructed unitary "enemy" (e.g., la oligarquía, la casta, la classe politique), indicted as corrupt and contemptuous of ordinary people, their aspirations and values. This chapter explores the logic of populist mobilization. Populist mobilizations are triggered by a crisis of political representation, i.e., the inability, or lack of will, of the political establishment to respond to the anxiety and grievances of ordinary people during times of profound socioeconomic transformation. The chapter aims to apply the broad framework to the analysis of five cases of successful populist mobilization across time and space: late nineteenth-century American agrarian populism. It also includes the short-lived episode of boulangisme that occurred at roughly the same time in France; the Gaitanista movement in 1940s Colombia; and the upsurge of the Lega Nord in the early 1990s in northern Italy, and Podemos' irruption onto the Spanish political scene in 2014. On the basis of a study of five major cases, both historical and contemporary, the chapter seeks to ascertain what are the central mechanisms informing populist strategy and the conditions conducive to its success.