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Populism is a dynamic phenomenon. Yet scholars studying populism in post-communist Europe have often treated their topic as static. For example, in the 1990s researchers concentrated on the idea of a politically scary marriage of populism with nationalism, without allowing for variation or complexity among individual cases. This text contends that populism in East Central Europe (ECE) should be treated as a dynamic phenomenon in which radical ideological components are becoming overshadowed by pure anti-establishment appeal. It explores ECE populism through Western-developed populism frameworks. Finally, it argues that in this context populism's strong anti-establishment posture is based on blaming the post-communist mainstream for its political and moral misconduct, rather than on the challenges inherent in the democratic transition.
Tackling an Elusive Concept
It has become a tradition to open a text on populism with a discussion of the term's elusiveness and ambiguity. Commentators have referred to populism variously as a political or economic philosophy, a rhetorical style, a principle, a mentality, even a pathology. Indeed, a cursory look at the literature suggests that populism is overused as a term and overstretched as a concept.
But while attempts to provide a global definition of populism have largely failed, several contemporary scholars have successfully pinned down the term by confining their work to particular geographic regions or political substructures. For example, Margaret Canovan, Paul Taggart, and Cas Mudde1 make the concept tractable by giving up global aspirations and considering populism in the context of established Western liberal democratic societies.
For Canovan, populism is an ideology of democracy, "an appeal to 'the people' against both the established structures of power and the dominant ideas and values of society."2 Or, as Mény and Surel, commenting on Canovan, put it, "[d]emocracy (as it works) is challenged in the name of democracy (as it is imagined)."3 For Taggart, populism is a reaction to representative politics and its pathology. He suggests that "populism has its roots in a primal anti-political reaction of the ruled against the rulers, and it is only under the conditions of representative politics (as both the set of institutions and a type of politics) that this political instinct can be systematically expressed."4 Finally, Mudde treats populism as a distinct ideology "that considers society to be ultimately separated...