Annual Review of Political Science Political Theory of Populism Nadia Urbinati Department of Political Science, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027, USA; email: nu15@columbia.edu Annu. Rev. Political Sci. 2019. 22:111–127 First published as a Review in Advance on November 28, 2018 The Annual Review of Political Science is online at polisci.annualreviews.org https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-polisci-050317- 070753 Copyright © 2019 by Annual Reviews. All rights reserved Keywords audience, direct representation, fascism, majority principle, populist democracy, representative democracy Abstract Populism is the name of a global phenomenon whose defnitional precar- iousness is proverbial. It resists generalizations and makes scholars of pol- itics comparativist by necessity, as its language and content are imbued with the political culture of the society in which it arises. A rich body of socio-historical analyses allows us to situate populism within the global phe- nomenon called democracy, as its ideological core is nourished by the two main entities—the nation and the people—that have feshed out popular sovereignty in the age of democratization. Populism consists in a transmu- tation of the democratic principles of the majority and the people in a way that is meant to celebrate one subset of the people as opposed to another, through a leader embodying it and an audience legitimizing it. This may make populism collide with constitutional democracy, even if its main tenets are embedded in the democratic universe of meanings and language. In this article, I illustrate the context-based character of populism and how its cycli- cal appearances refect the forms of representative government. I review the main contemporary interpretations of the concept and argue that some ba- sic agreement now exists on populism’s rhetorical character and its strat- egy for achieving power in democratic societies. Finally, I sketch the main characteristics of populism in power and explain how it tends to transform the fundamentals of democracy: the people and the majority, elections, and representation. 111 Annu. Rev. Polit. Sci. 2019.22:111-127. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org Access provided by 5.170.9.145 on 06/20/19. For personal use only.