A detailed analysis of how the model of populist causality works is in my Populism and Liberal Democracy: A Comparative and Theoretical Analysis (Oxford University Press 2019), pp. 123-130
A TIP-OFF: The present model does not apply to nativist parties, which are often, unfortunately, and erroneously (mis)classified as “populist.” It only applies to populist parties that have emerged strong, and ruled, in the “lands of populism.”
The image featured above represents the causal model of populism qua democratic illiberalism. It is the outcome of an intricate interplay of structural conditions, quasi-rational extraordinary leaders, and political mechanisms. No factor is independent from the rest, and each factor must be examined in sequential causal logic.
Everything begins in a situation of “nature,” which is to say, against a background of – even feebly – established constitutional and procedural liberal democratic rules. Along the way, a major crisis of democratic representation occurs. In empirical reality, there have been three specific types of such crises. The first type entails the exclusion of sizeable segments of society from the political process (e.g., early postwar Argentina), the second type relates to the collapse of formerly established party systems (e.g., Peru 1990, Venezuela 1993, Italy 1994, Ecuador 2006, Greece 2012), and the third type of democratic representation crisis is generated directly from the discourse of maverick politicians who present politics as being in a situation of general political malaise (e.g., Greece 1981, Hungary 2010, Poland 2015, United States 2016).
Still, no crisis can in itself produce populism; political agency is a necessary requirement, too. For it takes extraordinary political entrepreneurship to set into motion the series of mechanisms that constitute the necessary “pathway” by which the populist effect is produced. There are at least three such mechanisms that have to be sequentially activated for populism to emerge: The politicization of social resentment; the forging of a community of “people;” and the successful political mobilization of those people for winning an electoral battle.
Such leaders, who were able to set in motion all three mechanisms amidst conditions of profound crises of democratic legitimation in their respective countries have been, in chronological order beginning from the end of World War Two until our own days, Juan Perón, Andreas Papandreou, Alberto Fujimori, Silvio Berlusconi, Hugo Chávez, Viktor Orbán, Rafael Correa, Alexis Tsipras, Jaroslaw Kaczyński, and Donald Trump.
