The fundamental question uniting the contributions to this volume is: what exactly is populism? This is certainly not a new question, as a large amount of literature has focused on this topic for more than half a century. As little conceptual consensus has been reached so far, this book aims to reduce the level of abstraction. To this end, it approaches the populist phenomenon from a broader theoretical and empirical perspective, making reference to its developments on several continents. The book is divided into two parts: the first is theoretical and discusses various perspectives on populism, while the second is empirical and emphasises the diversity of the forms populism has embraced throughout the world. Without aiming to solve old dilemmas, to cover all the existing forms of populism, or to outline unequivocal conclusions, the contributions to this book fulfil a twofold task. On the one hand, they help to clarify theoretically a concept that is difficult to grasp and use. On the other hand, by way of reflecting these difficulties, they present several forms of populism worldwide. Their main purpose is to highlight the differences between the continents. Each of the chapters in the second section successfully accomplishes this, providing an overview that is useful both in analysing populism and in identifying the populist elements in national and international political actions or discourses.
About the Author: Sergiu Gherghina is Postdoctoral Research Fellow and Lecturer at the Department of Political Science at Goethe University, Frankfurt. He holds a PhD in Political Science (Leiden University), an MPhil in Institutional Analysis (Leiden University), and an MA in Political Science (Central European University Budapest). He is affiliated with the Babes-Bolyai University Cluj-Napoca as Associate Researcher in Political Science. His research interests lie in party politics in Central and Eastern Europe, legislative and voting behaviour, and democratisation (with an emphasis on democratic innovations). Sergiu Miscoiu is Associate Professor of Political Science at the Faculty of European Studies, Babes-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca (Romania) where he chairs the Department of International Relations and American Studies. He holds one PhD in Political Science (University of Paris-East Marne-la-Vallee), another PhD in History (Babes-Bolyai University), and a habilitation in Political Science (University of Paris-East). His main research interests are the constructivist and the alternative theories applied to the nation building processes, to populism and to the political dynamics of the European and African public spaces. Sorina Soare is a Lecturer of Comparative Politics at the University of Florence She holds a PhD in Political Science from the Universite Libre de Bruxelles and has previously studied Political Science at the University of Bucharest. She was a Wiener Anspach Postdoctoral Fellow at St Antony's College. Her main research interest are political parties and party systems in post-communist democracies. Her current research focuses on the relationship between populism and democracy. She also works in the areas of postcommunist politics, democratisation processes and political institutions.