Populism draws growing scholarly attention, but the concept remains contested and inconsistently used. A two-step review maps how scholars treat populism across time, place, and method and highlights a recurring analytical problem: conflating populism with the ideologies it accompanies.
📊 What Was Reviewed (2004–2018):
- A quantitative, text-as-data review of 884 abstracts from 2004–2018 to detect broad patterns in topics, geography, and methods.
- A deeper qualitative read of 50 articles to assess how populism is conceptually framed and whether it is distinguished from accompanying ideologies.
🔍 Main Patterns Identified:
- Scholarship clusters at "separate tables": distinct groups of researchers focus on different geographic regions, employ different methods, and foreground different host ideologies.
- The qualitative sample shows a common tendency to conflate populism with other ideologies, which produces analytical neglect of populism as a distinct phenomenon.
- Populism is frequently treated as "what it travels with," rather than being separated analytically from the thin ideology itself; the dynamic interlinkages between thin and thick ideologies are underexplored.
⚠️ Why It Matters:
- Conflating populism with host ideologies risks conceptual imprecision and weakens causal claims about populism's causes and consequences.
- Researchers are urged to distinguish populism from the ideologies it accompanies and to study the dynamic relationships between thin and thick ideologies more explicitly, using complementary quantitative and qualitative tools.
