Values and Empirical Phenomena: Reconstruction of ...
There are many reasons for the confusion and awkwardness of the concept of populism.Some scholars initially used this term in a specific context and did not intend to apply it to a wider range of objects.The use of the term “populism” is also subject to the problem of generalization or even abuse.The author believes that populism is both a value and an empirical phenomenon occurring in a specific social and historical context.The use or quotation of this term has often confused or even equated populist values with populist phenomena.When mentioning“populism”，some scholars actually mean a specific and concrete phenomenon of populism.Therefore，this paper proposes another strategy for conceptualizing populism，namely，to divide populism into two levels:populism as values；populism as empirical phenomena.
Compared with the generalization strategy and the type description strategy，this conceptualization strategy has the following advantages:（ⅰ） Through the hierarchical reconstruction of populism，the universal concept of populism can be constructed at the value level.The traditional generalization strategy attempts to synthesize or summarize various populist phenomena in history or literature，trying to extract the universal concept of populism or construct the universal theory of populism.However，there is no clear common essence between these diversified empirical phenomena，which are even mutually exclusive.Whether by expanding the connotation or narrowing the extension，a satisfactory universal definition cannot be worked out.While the type description strategy directly evades the attempts for the universal essence or concept of populism and focuses on the empirical description of populism phenomena.The layered reconstruction strategy proposed in this paper classifies various mutually exclusive populist phenomena into a single level to be temporarily put aside，so as to work out a universal definition of populism at the value level，thus avoiding turning around many different and even conflicting phenomena of populism，thus solving the inherent dilemma of traditional generalization strategies.（ⅱ） It returns populism at the value level to the “doctrine” itself.As a kind of doctrine，populism should have relatively clear and specific connotation and value concern，instead of being a vague term that is “hollow”，unpredictable and cannot be used for theoretical analysis.Only by returning populism to a“doctrine” can we distinguish the numerous and complicated “populist”phenomena on this basis，and at least understand the sense in which they are called “populism”.（ⅲ） It correlates many phenomena that have been called “populism” in history or literature.Many so-called “populist”phenomena have appeared in the history of various countries or in research documents.Although there is still controversy over whether some of these phenomena belong to populism，it is better to collectively refer to these established populist examples as populist empirical phenomena.Unless every phenomenon is identified，although these phenomena share the label of “populism”，they may conflict with each other，some even not necessarily consistent with the populist values.