以协商消解民粹:数字时代下网络民粹主义的应对之策

新近在欧美兴起的第三波民粹主义,已演变成一场政治运动。这种民粹在当下中国虽不存在,但以网络民粹主义的特有形式展现出来。网络民粹主义作为民粹主义的一种特有现象,既具有民粹主义的一般特征,又具有因网络技术的应用而衍生出的独有特质。网络民粹主义虽然具有一定的促进参与、让人民发声等积极意义,但是它的非理性、非此即彼的二元对立、反建制倾向则需要有效规制。无论是在理念价值、制度规范还是在实践层面,我国社会主义协商民主都是对网络民粹主义的有力回应。社会主义协商民主所倡导的理性协商、多元共识、制度化路径可以逐步消解网络民粹主义的负面效应,发挥正向有序的参与和监督作用,实现从网络民粹向网络民主的转变。     

西方极端政党民粹化及警示

近年来,西方国家左右翼极端政党群体崛起。极左翼政党民粹化主张赢得选民支持,民粹主义则加速极右翼政党的兴起。民粹思想说到底是民众不满情绪的聚合反应。要警惕民粹主义对我国的影响。     

英国脱欧与当代世界认同危机的变异

英国脱欧是民粹主义在欧洲泛滥的一个标志性事件,这一事件几乎符合右翼民粹主义的所有特征;然而,民粹主义盛行的表象下是当代世界的认同危机。作为现代性核心的认同危机在民粹主义的冲击下发生了变异,导致身份狭隘化、民主民粹化、价值平庸化等现象,从而产生极端主义、保守主义和虚无主义趋向。这股汹涌的民粹主义浪潮已延烧至全世界,成为新的世界难题。     

福利民粹主义的生成逻辑及其政策实践——基于拉美地区和泰国的经验

本文首先将福利民粹主义界定为民粹式的福利超载,即民粹主义政治人物为了获取"人民"的支持或践行其政治理念,强力推行违背经济发展规律、带有"政治性分配激励"色彩的社会福利政策。在此基础上,结合拉美地区和泰国的经验,本文归纳出了福利民粹主义的生成逻辑:客观条件方面,贫富分化导致的严重社会分裂使得民粹式的社会福利政策具备了必要的社会基础,而缺乏法治和社会基础的民主制度则使民粹主义政治人物有机会绕开体制,实施"福利赶超";主观推力方面,民粹主义政治人物首先使"人民"聚焦于已经十分严重的贫富分化和社会对立,加剧社会分裂,以吸引"人民"的政治参与和支持,在获取政权后则通过目标指向明确的高强度社会福利激励,将来自"人民"的支持持久化。当然,也不能否认特定的经济结构和社会文化心理,乃至民粹主义政治人物的政治理念在福利民粹主义生成过程中的重要影响。     

冲突与整合:网络民粹主义治理机制的建构

网络民粹主义治理是把治理的理念运用到网络民粹主义这一特定对象上的活动,宏观上属于国家治理、社会治理的范畴。网络民粹主义治理作为一种多元主体的平等协商过程,具有与网络管制、规制不同的内涵和意蕴。网络民粹主义治理机制的构建,需要处理好民主和民粹的复杂关系,把网络民粹主义纳入到协商民主的轨道之内;需要把网民自发性的政治参与热情规约在制度规范的边界之内;需要修复网络生态,构建网络空间的自我净化机制。     

多元动因与网络聚合:当前中国网络民粹主义的生成机制

当前中国网络民粹主义是社会转型、政治变革、心理嬗变、文化发展等多种宏观因素嵌入微观的网络空间并持续发酵所致。剧烈的社会转型带来了阶层分化、利益调整和分配不公等现实问题,大众对于平等的朴素诉求在网络空间以民意的方式迅速聚合和集中表达,构成网络民粹主义的民意聚合机制;民主的理想与现实、民众高涨的参与热情与制度性吸纳相对不足,人民话语的"所指"与"能指"之间的裂缝,构成了网络民粹主义的激进民主参与机制;线下大众心理的网络投射、网络大众心理的生成和极化网络舆论的集中表达等环节,构成网络民粹主义的舆情极化机制;商业利益推动下的网络文化媚俗逐利趋向,大众娱乐狂欢隐藏着对精英文化的抵制和解构,二者共同构成网络民粹文化的生成机制。     

莫把民主当民粹

公民的表达权是宪法权利，受到国家的保护。政府顺应民意，是人民政府的基本职责，这都与民粹无关。而群众的利益表达是否合理，应当由公众通过平和的对话、交流来解决。政府不仅要为公众的讲理创造条件，而且应当带头讲理，并成为平和对话和讲理的一方。政府不能无视民众的呼声，更不能动辄以“民粹”为由加以拒绝。     

审视民粹主义

<正>近年来,从发达的美国和欧洲,到正在快速上升的俄罗斯和印度,再到第三世界的拉美地区,民粹主义都在社会政治舞台上扮演着重要角色,这一思潮和运动正深深地影响着世界政治的发展。时至今日,民粹主义全球化泛滥仍在周期性地进行,而且不仅未有减弱之势,反而愈演愈烈。在欧洲,各种民粹主义政党全方位崛起,竞相在国家、地区以及欧洲议会选举中实现突破,挤压和占领传统政党的生存空间。在欧盟的政治版图上,已出现了北部民粹     

建党时期无政府主义与社会主义的关系辨析

20世纪初,中国无政府主义是一种反对一切形式权力,主张以破坏、动乱改造社会的激进主义。它融入俄国民粹主义若干元素,相较法国无政府主义更激进。无政府主义传入中国时,便与共产主义、社会主义等名词存在混用情况。建党时期,马克思主义者即发起对无政府主义的论战,旗帜鲜明地区分、剔除激进的中国无政府主义,但对褪去民粹色彩的无政府主义仍较宽容。这仍对中国共产党的革命产生过消极影响,无政府主义与马克思主义的论争,远非一场论战可解决,我们仍需加强对无政府主义及其衍生的虚无主义的辨析和警惕。     

伯明翰学派的文化生产民粹主义情结考析

把伯明翰学派纷繁复杂的著作统一起来是学者们共同拥有的文化政治情结。这种情结彰显出对普通大众的关怀,具有显著的"民粹"特征。以霍加特、威廉斯与汤普森为主的伯明翰早期代表人物从文化生产的角度宣扬民众文化活动,代表了一种文化生产的民粹主义情结。     

Don't call me a populist! The meaning of populism for western European parties and politicians

In recent years a common understanding of the core elements of populist communication has been achieved in academia. Yet, we know less about how the term populism is used by political parties themselves, despite widespread assumptions about the use of populism as a battle term to disqualify competitors. Based on a quantitative and qualitative content analysis of Twitter content from mainstream and populist actors in six western European countries, this study finds that populism is indeed used by mainstream parties in a pejorative way in order to label political competitors. Yet, not only populist but also mainstream competitors are labeled populist by the center parties linking a variety of different negative meanings to the term, which are often of a less demonizing nature not questioning the legitimacy of others. Populists in Italy and France refer to the term in a positive way, while Spanish and German populists rather reject the label.     

Economic crisis and the variety of populist response: evidence from Greece,Portugal and Spain

Abstract

Greece, Portugal and Spain are among the countries worst hit by the 2008 Great Recession, followed by significant electoral and political turmoil. However, one of the dimensions in which they differ is the presence and varieties of populism in parties’ political proposals. Drawing on holistic coding of party manifestos, we assess the varying presence of populist rhetoric in mainstream and challenger parties before and after the 2008 economic downturn. Our empirical findings show that populism is much higher in Greece compared to Spain and Portugal. We do not find a significant impact of the crisis as the degree of populism remains rather stable in Greece and Portugal, while it increases in Spain, mainly due to the rise of new populist forces. The study confirms that populist rhetoric is a strategy adopted mainly by challenger and ideologically radical parties. In addition, inclusionary populism is the predominant flavour of populist parties in new Southern Europe, although exclusionary populism is present to a lesser extent in the Greek case. We contend that the interaction between the national context – namely the ideological legacy of parties and the main dimensions of competition – and the strategic options of party leadership is crucial for explaining cross-country variation in the intensity of populism and the specific issues that characterise populist discourse.     

The comparative effectiveness of populist rhetoric in generating online engagement

Worldwide, voters are supporting populist candidates who promise to upend “politics as usual.” Despite all we know about populism, we still do not know how individuals respond to populist content during campaigns, particularly compared to other common content in liberal democracies. This paper adapts framing theory to an online electoral context to argue that populist campaign messages will generate more online engagement compared to three alternative conceptions of the relationship between the people and the elites: pluralism, technocracy, and neutral messages. The paper adapts Snow and Benford's seminal 1988 theory of resonance to studies of populist communication and assess whether populism resonates more with online social media users. An original dataset using the campaign Tweets of 22 national-level actors across five countries is used to test the theory: Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Italy, and Spain (N = 1777). The findings suggest that citizens on Twitter engage with populism more than its alternatives in certain contexts.     

Is populism the third dimension? The quest for political alliances in post-crisis Spain

In this article, we defend the ideational approach to populism by arguing that populist discourses have consequences for government formation and the coalition choices of political parties. Using two attempts of government formation in Spain during 2016 as an example, we show that incorporating a populist dimension of competition alongside the two traditional relevant cleavages in Spain (left-right and center-periphery) can successfully explain agreements where approaches restricted to the two traditional dimensions fail. Essentially, populism forms a third, ideational dimension with its own content, one that can be considered alongside thick ideological dimensions in formal spatial analysis, shaping alliances among political parties.     

Populism in election times: a comparative analysis of 11 countries in Western Europe

Abstract

The article comparatively examines the levels of populism exhibited by parties in Western Europe. It relies on a quantitative content analysis of press releases collected in the context of 11 national elections between 2012 and 2015. In line with the first hypothesis, the results show that parties from both the radical right and the radical left make use of populist appeals more frequently than mainstream parties. With regard to populism on cultural issues, the article establishes that the radical right outclasses the remaining parties, thereby supporting the second hypothesis. On economic issues, both types of radical parties are shown to be particularly populist. This pattern counters the third hypothesis, which suggests that economic populism is most prevalent among the radical left. Finally, there is no evidence for the fourth hypothesis, given that parties from the south do not resort to more populism on economic issues than those from the north.     

Populist parties in European Parliament elections: A new dataset on left,right and valence populism from 1979 to 2019

Despite the increasing interest in populism, there is a lack of comparative and longterm evidence on the electoral performance of populist parties. We address this gap by using a novel dataset covering 92 populist parties in the European Parliament elections from 1979 to 2019. Specifically, we provide aggregate data on the electoral performance of all populist parties as well as the three ideational varieties of populism, i.e. right-wing, left-wing and valence populist parties. We show that there is significant variation both across countries as well as between the ideational varieties of populism. Most notably, while the success of left-wing and valence populists is concentrated in specific areas, right-wing populist parties have consolidated as key players in the vast majority of EU countries.     

An unjustified bad reputation? The Dark Triad and support for populism

While research concludes that populist leaders stand out for their “dark” personalities, studies on the psychological underpinnings of citizens’ populist attitudes are scant and inconclusive, with some agreement on the association between disagreeableness and populist attitudes. By bringing the Dark Triad personality traits of narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism into the picture, we aim to answer whether populist citizens -like populist leaders-score higher in this dark traits, and whether the addition of the Dark Triad helps to better understanding the populist personality. Using an online Spanish sample, our analyses find that using the Dark Triad does indeed add to our understanding of populist attitudes. In opposition to widespread intuitions about the character of populists, we find that psychopathy and Machiavellianism are negatively associated with support for populism, with only narcissism being positively related to the people-centric dimension of populist attitudes.     

Expressing or fuelling discontent? The relationship between populist voting and political discontent

Many studies have found that political discontent and populist voting are positively related. Yet, an important shortcoming of these studies is that they interpret the correlation between these two phenomena as evidence that existing feelings of political discontent contribute to the support for populist parties. We argue that there is also a causal effect in the opposite direction: Populist parties fuel political discontent by exposing their supporters to a populist message in which they criticize the elite. Our study links individual level data on political discontent of voters to the populist message of the party they intend to vote for, employing various operationalizations of populism. Based on a 6-wave panel study from the Netherlands (2008–2013), we conclude that political discontent is both cause and consequence of the rise of populist parties. Our findings imply that the effect of political discontent on populist voting has been overestimated in many previous studies.     

Do populist parties support referendums? A comparative analysis of election manifestos in Europe

Earlier research refers to populist parties as being advocates of a greater use of referendum. Yet, there has been no large-scale systematic test of this claim. This article addresses this gap in the literature and tests the relationship between populism and greater use for referendums in party manifestos. It analyzes 824 manifestos of 187 populist and non-populist parties in 27 Member States of the European Union between 1994 and 2018. We test if populist parties are virtually all in favor of a greater use of referendums and whether they would talk about referendums much more than non-populist parties.     

‘Bigwig hatred’ and the emergence of the first Scandinavian agrarian-populist party

In the genealogy of the Scandinavian populist-party family, agrarian populism has been largely neglected and, when discussed at all, it is traced back to Finland in the late 1950s. This paper argues: (i) that agrarian populism long predated the 1950s and that it was politically salient from the decade before Finnish independence in 1917; (ii) that it is useful to distinguish between an agrarian-class and agrarian-populist party type; (iii) that in wider comparative perspective, first-wave Finnish agrarian populism was distinctive; and iv) that during the critical party-building phase, the Finnish Agrarian Party (AP) is best characterised a populist party embodying a diffuse small-farmer antipathy towards socially superior urban elites. The AP did not create this ‘bigwig hatred’ (herraviha), but in perpetuating it and ‘othering it’ within a binary ‘us-and-them’ paradigm, it became the first populist party in both Finland and Scandinavia.