Brubaker, Why Populism? Page 1 of 51 Why Populism? 1 Rogers Brubaker Published online in Theory and Society, October 26, 2017 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-017-9301-7 Abstract It is a commonplace to observe that we have been living through an extraordinary pan-European and trans-Atlantic populist moment. But do the heterogeneous phenomena lumped under the rubric “populist” in fact belong together? Or is “populism” just a journalistic cliché and political epithet? In the first part of the paper, I defend the use of “populism” as an analytic category and the characterization of the last few years as a “populist moment,” and I propose an account of populism as a discursive and stylistic repertoire. In the second part, I specify the structural trends and the conjunctural convergence of a series of crises that jointly explain the clustering in space and time that constitutes the populist moment. The question in my title is thus twofold: it is a question about populism as a term or concept and a question about populism as a phenomenon in the world. The paper addresses both the conceptual and the explanatory question, limiting the scope of the explanatory argument to the pan-European and trans-Atlantic populist conjuncture of the last few years. 1 Acknowledgments. This paper was conceived and written at the Wissenschaftskolleg of Berlin, where I enjoyed the great privilege of a residential fellowship and benefited from many collegial discussions. Earlier versions were presented at the Wissenschaftskolleg itself, at the Institute of History of Humboldt University in Berlin, and at the conference on “Populism and Citizenship” organized by the Center for Citizenship, Social Pluralism and Religious Diversity in Potsdam; I thank participants in these events for their comments. A shorter version of the second part of the paper appeared as “Populism’s Perfect Storm” in the Boston Review, July 11, 2017. I am especially grateful to Rob Jansen, Jaeeun Kim, Mary O’Sullivan, and Matías Fernández for close critical readings and very helpful comments; Matías also provided exceptionally able research assistance. I thank Susan Osman for helping me think through the argument and for comments on successive drafts. I would also like to thank Hans-Georg Betz, Paula Diehl, Mathias Koenig, Lena Lavinas, Mara Loveman, Claus Offe, Gianna Pomata, and Peter Vermeersch for helpful comments and challenging questions.