Attempts to Generalize the Concept of Populism and...

Attempts to Generalize the Concept of Populism and Their Predicaments

The contextual and semantic diversity of populism has bought about different opinions on the concept of populism.“When the label of populism is attached to those extremely diverse movements，the phenomenon itself becomes more and more elusive.”^[16] In response to this “awkwardness” of the concept of populism，some foreign scholars have attempted to grasp the universal essence or characteristics of populism to construct a universal definition or theory of populism.Since populism refers to a variety of different phenomena，it is inevitable to properly deal with this diversity to a certain extent when attempting to generalize the concept of populism so as to summarize the universal essence or characteristics of populism.