Democracy and populism: friend or foe? A review of Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser (eds.) Populism in Europe and the Americas. Threat or corrective for democracy? (Cambridge University Press 2012)

Abstract

As commonly expressed, populism is a synonym of demagogy, or an adjective used to describe and criticize the set of tools of a political movement. The meaning of democracy as constructed by language users is dynamically-changing and contextually bound. The interpretation of these two concepts is even more confused from a historical perspective as both the words democracy and populism have served to indicate a range of (in some cases diverging) phenomena, although they are perceived as being from the same semantic and contextual family.