Populism and Political Leadership

This chapter addresses both populist leaders and political leadership as an interactive process. As for populist leaders, the first part of the chapter explores some features common to most of them: they tend to exert a personalistic authority and seek government power, and their relationship with followers is direct, unmediated and uninstitutionalised. The second part of the chapter deals with political leadership, which we define, in liberal democracies, as a series of processes of mutual influence – involving mainly citizens and elected officials – aimed at pursuing the common good. Considering populism, with Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser, as both friend and foe to democracy, we describe how it interacts with these processes, in positive and negative ways. Positive, since, for instance, populism can mobilise excluded sectors of society and improve the responsiveness of the political system as well as democratic accountability. And negative, since the populist logic of identity is at odds with the democratic idea of representation, populist parties may well be responsive to the short-term demands of public opinion but feel unconstrained by responsibility, and populists tend to reject the rule of law and the constitutional checks and balances.