Takis Pappas
TAKIS S. PAPPAS holds a PhD from Yale University and is a comparative political science researcher and writer currently affiliated with the University of Helsinki, Finland. He is the author of Making Party Democracy in Greece (1999), Populism and Crisis Politics in Greece (2014), On the Tightrope (2017, in Greek), Populism and Liberal Democracy: A Comparative and Theoretical Analysis (2019), and the co-editor of European Populism in the Shadow of the Great Recession (2015). He writes about populism, democracy & more in his blog: https://pappaspopulism.com
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Books by Takis Pappas
What is modern populism and how can it be differentiated from comparable phenomena like nativism and autocracy?
Where in Latin America has populism become most successful? Where in Europe did it emerge first? Why did its rise to power in the United States come so late?
Can Trump's America be compared best with Venezuela’s Chávez, France’s Le Pens, or Turkey’s Erdoğan?
Why has populism thrived in post-authoritarian Greece but not in Spain? And why in Argentina and not in Brazil?
Can populism ever succeed without a charismatic leader? If not, what does leadership tell us about how to challenge populism?
Who are “the people” who vote for populist parties, how are these “made” into a group, and what is in their minds?
Is there a “populist blueprint” that all populists use when in power? And what are the long-term consequences of populist rule?
What does the expansion, and possibly solidification, of populism mean for the very nature and future of contemporary democracy?
Populism and Liberal Democracy will change the ways you understand populism and imagine the prospects of liberal democracy.
Papers by Takis Pappas
This article has three goals. First, it offers an overview of the ways various scholars have treated, and advanced, over recent decades “populism” both empirically and theoretically. Second, it identifies a number of – mostly methodological – shortcomings that in many instances have beset the study of populism: (i) unspecified empirical universe, (ii) lack of historical and cultural context specificity, (iii) essentialism, (iv) conceptual stretching, (v) unclear negative pole, (vi) degreeism, (vii) defective observable-measurable indicators, (viii) a neglect of micro-mechanisms, (ix) poor data and inattention to crucial cases, and (x) normative indeterminacy. Third, in an explicit attempt to cure the foregoing shortcomings, this article proposes a minimal definition of modern populism as democratic illiberalism. This novel re-conceptualization of populism is expected to lead to a more conceptually sensitive and methodologically solid comparative study of the phenomenon at a time when the malfunctioning and pathologies of our modern-day representative democracies are all too visible and sorely felt.