5. Whose Populism? What Democracy? On the Conceptual and Normative Connections of Populism and Democracy

This chapter discusses how different conceptions of democracy relate to populism. The aim is to reveal how background theoretical commitments regarding both democracy and populism reveal the normative standing of populism and its potential contradictions with democracy. Populism is often described either as a corrective to democracy or its pathology. On the one hand, populism can be seen as politics par excellence, reviving democracies in crisis. On the other hand, its exclusionary and authoritarian tendencies can be considered dangerous to democracy. Despite the apparent contradictory nature of these descriptions, the accounts often agree about the core features of populism itself. This chapter analyses how these core ideas relate to various accounts of democracy, from less to more normative. The claim is that the more normatively demanding the account of democracy is, the more likely it becomes that populism cannot be accommodated within it. In short, the theory of democracy has a key role in the differing normative conclusions that various authors draw from their accounts of populism. The central contribution of this chapter is to make explicit the breadth of the theoretical commitments that are built into the normative evaluation of the role of populism.