Clarifying a Contested Concept: Populism in the Study of Latin American Politics

Abstract

Social scientists commonly encounter concepts that are unclear and contested. Authors inspired by competing theories emphasize different attributes from a complex set of defining characteristics. These differences in intension produce differences in extension as scholars apply the same term to divergent sets of cases. Therefore, it is unclear how one author's findings apply to the cases delimited by another's different definition. Conceptual disagreements thus hinder the cumulation of knowledge. Indeed, scholars can shield their arguments from criticism by attributing discordant results to definitional differences. Due to the lack of conceptual agreement, authors talk past each other and avoid addressing counterarguments. The resulting fragmentation obstructs debate and criticism, the engines of scholarly progress.' A particularly confusing concept is populism. Scholars have diverged not only over its specific attributes, but also over its primary domain. Should populism be defined in political, social, economic, and/or discursive terms? Due to these conceptual disagreements, a wide variety of governments, parties, movements, leaders, and policies has been labeled populist, and scholars have found populism to have radically divergent characteristics.2 To flee from this confusion, some authors have advocated abandoning the concept.3 But the scholarly community has refused to follow these calls. Instead, in the last decade studies of populism have thrived.4 Evidently, many authors continue to regard populism as a useful, even indispensable, concept in elucidating Latin American politics. This article therefore applies a different approach, inspired by Sartori's guidelines for concept analysis.5 It seeks to clarify the meaning of populism and to propose a new definition. To place the debate in a systematic context, it first distinguishes different types of conceptualization. It then assesses the most useful type in clarifying populism. Finally, populism is systematically redefined by determining its domain and genus, clarifying its specific characteristics, and distinguishing two subtypes.