An Unfinished Grassroots Populism: The Gezi Park Protests in Turkey and Their Aftermath

Focusing on the Gezi protests, this study addresses two questions: How did a particular struggle against the demolition of a park spontaneously turn into nationwide mass protests? And why was this mobilisation unable to transform itself into a popular counter-hegemonic movement? Drawing on the Laclauian concept of populism, I demonstrate that Gezi mobilised various groups by turning into a symbol of the repressive responses of the hegemonic power to various social demands. This popular mobilisation could not go beyond a conjunctural experience due to its inability to unify heterogeneous protesters and to respond effectively to the counter-strategies of the hegemonic power.     

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.     

I want to believe: The relationship between conspiratorial beliefs and populist attitudes in Spain

While research on the relationship between conspiratorial beliefs and populist attitudes has expanded over the years, concerns about causality in said relationship have not been successfully addressed. This research uses a two-pronged methodology combining observational and experimental data to put to empirical test the possibility that conspiratorial thinking breeds populist attitudes relying on Spain as a case study. A first study uses an online survey (N = 2887) to test how conspiratorial thinking covaries with the different dimensions of populist attitudes, accounting for the most likely confounders in this relationship. Results show that conspiratorial thinking and populist attitudes are associated even when considering potential spurious variables. We next use an online experiment (N = 537) in which we expose a randomly selected group to a vignette on three 9/11 conspiratorial stories, then they are asked about their populist attitudes. Our results lend credence to the literature pointing that conspiratorial beliefs led people to develop only one dimension of populist attitudes, the Manichean outlook.     

右翼民粹主义崛起背景下再论英国的市场社会主义思潮--对话英国著名学者戴维·麦克莱伦教授北大核心SSCI

20多年前,“为了公共利益而以强有力的方式控制和调节市场”的市场社会主义曾在英国得到热烈的讨论。在当下经济全球化出现变局、新自由主义面临危机并向民粹主义转化的大背景下,再论市场社会主义,就具有了更深的理论内涵和更直接的实践批判价值。本文以与英国著名马克思主义研究者戴维·麦克莱伦的直接对话为基础,就英美新自由主义因放纵金融资本而自我否定的必然性、民粹主义的崛起及其困局、市场社会主义对英美等国的理论和实践价值等议题,评析了麦克莱伦教授的最新观点。     

Right-wing populism against diploma democracy. The evolution of parliamentary elites in Austria,Italy, and Switzerland

Are the sociological profiles of radical right-wing populist parties' (RRPPs) representatives really unlike those of their counterparts in mainstream parties? Once RRPPs occupy positions of legislative power for an extended period, do their MPs' profiles increasingly converge with those of more mainstream parties? This paper examines three right-wing parties in Austria, Italy, and Switzerland (FPÖ, LEGA, and SVP), and shows how RRPPs' MPs persistently contrast the “diploma democracy”, that is the increasingly dominant high-educated trend in political representation. Inspired by the current scholarship's diachronic and comparative perspectives of political elites and MPs, the analysis focuses trends since the 1980s.