What to do about populism?

Understanding populism and its causes is in a sense merely a precursor to the pressing issue of how to deal with the populist explosion. In this respect, a focus on structural, systemic and long-term causes of populism will probably lead to recommendations such as general state capacity building, strengthening the rule of law, anti-corruption measures, accountability for unethical conduct and transgressions (the type of accountability that concerns populists, not the accountability of a better ranking by the EU or OECD) and civic education in the values of democracy. An emphasis on actor-oriented explanations, on the other hand, will lead to reflections on the possible responses by mainstream parties, the media, human rights agencies and other specialized institutions that engage directly with populist parties and movements in everyday politics (Mudde & Kaltwasser, 2017: 108). A focus on populism as an integral problem of representative democracy will probably lead to a focus on ways to amend or alleviate the ‘broken promise of democracy’ and the problems of majority rule vis-à-vis minority protection in the practical construction of ‘the people’ (Müller, 2016: 75). Explanations that focus on the decline of party politics and the rise of mediated politics are likely to lead to a search for ways to reconnect political leaders and people that avoid the excesses of populist mobilization (Mair, 2002; Culpepper, 2014; Kriesi, 2014).

This chapter takes the same step from explanations to the more prescriptive problem of how to answer the populist challenge: having analysed populism as a response to technocracy, the question now is what kind of response to the populist explosion might be extracted from this analysis. In general, the answer follows directly from the interplay between technocratic depoliticization and populist repoliticization: if populism is, to some degree at least, an attempt at repoliticization in the face of technocratic depoliticization, one way to approach the populist challenge may be to rein technocracy back in and reduce the politics of depoliticization. This is not to say that populist movements and parties can simply be exonerated from their apparent excesses and more or less outright attack on democracy. Populism is not simply a symptom of the deeper problem of technocratic depoliticization.