Populism and Liberal Democracy A Comparative and Theoretical Analysis

Populism and Liberal Democracy is the first book to offer a comprehensive theory about populism during both its emergence and consolidation phases in three geographical regions: Europe, Latin America and the United States. Based on the detailed comparison of all significant cases of populist governments (including Argentina, Greece, Peru, Italy, Venezuela, Ecuador, Hungary, and the U.S.) and two cases of populist failure (Spain and Brazil), each of the book's seven chapters addresses a specific question: What is populism? How to distinguish populists from non-populists? What causes populism? How and where does populism thrive? How do populists govern? Who is the populist voter? How does populism endanger democracy? If rising populism is a threat to liberal democratic politics, as this book clearly shows, it is only by answering the questions it posits that populism may be resisted successfully.

Takis S. Pappas has a PhD from Yale University and is a comparative political science researcher and writer affiliated with the University of Helsinki, Finland. He is the author of Making Party Democracy in Greece (Macmillan,1999),Populism and Crisis Politics in Greece (Palgrave, 2014), and the co-editor of European Populism in the Shadow of the Great Recession (ECPR, 2015).