Oskolkov Petr Viktorovich – Ph.D. in Political Sciences, Leading Researcher, Department of European Integration Studies, Institute of Europe RAS Tevdoy-Burmuli Alexander Izyaslavovich – Ph.D. in Political Sciences, Associate Professor, Department of Integration Studies, MGIMO University
The article examines the contemporary trends in modern understanding of the concept of populism. Upon reviewing the approaches widespread in the academic world toward the interpretation of that concept, the authors state that contemporary research of populism is in its crisis phase because all possibilities to clarify the basic functional and discursive features of populism, as well as to find these features in other ideological and political phenomena that are formally far from populism already have been exhausted. The most important challenges that modern political scientists face while addressing populist issues are «conceptual stretching» and «conceptual compression», i.e. either an overly broad or overly narrow interpretation of the basic concept. Trying to overcome these problems, researchers usually resort to alternative conceptualization, which, in turn, has its own significant drawbacks. The authors support the opinion that populism studies are entering the so-called «first revisionist stage» which all key approaches in social sciences should undergo. To preserve the heuristic value of the populist concept, the authors propose several basic imperatives as guidance. In particular, it is proposed to study not only populism per se, but also the ways employed to frame it in the scientific meta-discourse, and to quantify the discursive markers of populism concentrating not on their absolute value but on their relative weight and, consequently, operationalization, which allows for more opportunities to apply the concept of populism to empirical research. The authors also propose to shift the analytical focus from researching the substantive content of populism to studying its usage as an instrumental marker. This shift would make the concept applicable not only to the analysis of national party landscapes but also to the more complex interdisciplinary research of contemporary sociopolitical dynamics.
populism, methodological crisis, revisionist stage, ideology, political discourse, party system, mainstream parties
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