Constructing an “Ideal Type” of the Concept of Pop...

Constructing an “Ideal Type” of the Concept of Populism

British scholar Paul Taggart claimed that the generalization of concepts is one of the important tasks of social science，and the generalization of the concept of populism is still of great theoretical significance.Guided by Weber ’s “ideal model”，he tried to construct an “ideal model” for the concept of populism to achieve a “universal” understanding of populism.He mainly selected North America，Russia，Latin America，Western Europe and other countries as samples for populism analysis，and constructed an ideal type of populism by examining specific populist movements，political parties，ideas or regimes： （ⅰ） Populism is hostile to representative politics and advocates political simplicity and directness.（ⅱ） Populism is a response to the crisis.Only when the “crisis” is realized will populists participate in political activities.（ⅲ） Populism regards the people as the“heartland” and endows the “people” with creativity and dependence.（ⅳ） Populism itself has insurmountable contradictions.（ⅴ） Populism，lacking clear core values，can be attached to other ideologies and political positions.（ⅵ） Populism is a chameleon that always changes colors with the environment.^[25] Although Taggart ’s “ideal type” of the concept of populism can help people understand the “universality” of populism to some extent，it“has never conformed to any of the cases in the real sense”.

In 1967，the London School of Economics （LSE） held an international academic conference on “defining populism”，inviting 43 experts in populist research from 8 countries with an aim to reach a comprehensive consensus on the diversified concepts of populism.However，the meeting did not reach its goal in the end.The experts only formulated a collection of essays based on exchange of ideas.The meeting has fully demonstrated the inherent predicament of the attempt to generalize the concept of populism.Peter Worsley，one of the scholars who attended the meeting，claimed that populism “should be regarded as a focus，or a dimension of universal political culture，instead of just a specific and complete ideological system or organizational type”.^[26] In view of the predicament for generalizing the concept of populism，some scholars argued that the term “populism” is not suitable as a theoretical analysis tool.In the 1980s，Rafael Quintero and Ian RoxBorough proposed to remove the concept of populism from the social sciences.^[27]