[Populism]

AS A CONTRIBUTION to the Concepts in the Social Sciences series, Paul Taggart's Populism provides an insightful introduction to the concept of populism and a very useful overview of some of the most important cases of populist politics. For those who are familiar with populist politics and the scholarly literature on populism, however, this new monograph may prove disappointing. The series publisher, Open University Press, promises that Taggart "provides a new definition of populism." Unfortunately, there is little in Taggart's attempt to define populism that is truly new. Nor are there any significant new insights into the five cases of populist politics that he reviews. Thus, while Taggart's Populism is a very good introduction to the subject, and a worthwhile read for scholars of populism, it does not substantially advance our understanding of populist phenomena.

Although the burden of Taggart's Populism is to define a genuinely universal ideal type of populism, over half of the book is dedicated to surveying many of the classic cases of populist politics. He makes no pretensions to comprehensiveness. Nevertheless, over the course of five chapters, readers are introduced to a range of American populisms, the case of 19th-century Russian narodnichestvo, Peronism and other examples of Latin American populism, Alberta Social Credit, and what has come to be called the new populism of the contemporary radical right. Informative, but too often lacking in depth, this survey of populist politics is uneven. Particularly disappointing was the chapter on the populism of Alberta Social Credit. Less than six pages in length, and relying almost exclusively on studies published in the 1950s by C.B. Macpherson and John Irving, this chapter never confronts the substance of the theoretically rich and empirically informative debates regarding the character of Social Credit populism and the relationship between this and other cases of prairie populism in Canada.

Taggart, unlike his predecessors writing in earlier decades, is able to examine the new populism as a contrast to earlier populisms. This is very valuable. It would be an impoverished understanding of populism that did not take into consideration the politics of the likes of Jean-Marie Le Pen, Jorg Haider, Pauline Hanson, and Preston...