Populism

The Mayor of this important city in the Apulia Region of South Italy shows how the content of its communication doesn’t call for the sovereignty of the people, doesn’t attack the elite, and doesn’t hate foreigners. He merged grassroot politics...

Frank Luntz is worried about the hostile political environment caused by the government's response to the covid-19 pandemic. "I have never been so fearful of the democratic process failing as I am right now", he says. We also asked him...

The left-leaning incumbent, Stefano Bonaccini, succeeded in defeating his center-right opponent, the League candidate Lucia Borgonzoni, by 8 percentage points. In other times, this would have represented a foregone conclusion: Emilia-Romagna has a long leftist political tradition, since the end...

President Bolsonaro wasn’t the only quasi-Trump leader that opened the seventy-fourth session of the General Assembly. Whether done intentionally or not, the session also opened with populist presidents Abdel Fattah Al Sisi of Egypt and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey....

Up to recently, it was possible to imagine a world without national borders. Now the toxic rhetoric of wannabe dictators, white supremacists and hate-mongers in power may tip us over the edge into the kind of dystopia that features the...

Professor Urbinati recently contributed to the political debate with two important volumes: Utopia Europa, published by Castelvecchi, and Me, the People. How Populism Transforms Democracy for Harvard University Press (coming soon). We met her in her office at the prestigious...

Cognitive psychology offers the tools to understand how populist movements leverage envy and fear to gain popular support. Yet populists do not offer solutions to the big problems of the modern world, such as globalization and climate change. While we...

The more the discourse of the populist forces is confusing, unrealistic, ideologically violent, closed to others’ rationale, lacking perspective, in contrast with the democratic, universalistic and humanitarian values, the more appealing it is, and the more it is able to...