Populism as a New Revolt of the Masses. What Implications for Democratic Politics?

The debate about the state of democracy has taken a U-turn in the last decade. Following the fall of the Berlin Wall, for twenty years there was a widespread optimism about the fact that the peoples of the world wanted to elect their leaders and build democratic institutions. This optimist climate was corroborated by significant events: in Eastern Europe and in Latin America many countries started to hold free elections and the citizens expected that this would also have distributed material advantages in terms of economic development, salaries and well-being. But over the last decade the wind has blown in the opposite direction: there are increasing concerns about the fact that a growing number of citizens start to be sympathetic to the perspective of being ruled by “strongmen” (Foa and Mounk, 2016) and the satisfaction with existing institutions, in both consolidated and young democracies, has started to decline. However, what is actually populism is still highly controversial, especially since it is a label that is applied to a wide range of political movements that have very little in common. It is still also highly controversial whether populism should be classified as an ideology, a political style or a sociopolitical mentality, as well as its impact on liberal democracies. In the present Chapter we discuss the effects that populism can have on democratic regimes, and we suggest debating several actions for contrasting them.