Record Details

What’s in a Buzzword? A Systematic Review of the State of Populism Research in Political Science

Harvard Dataverse (Africa Rice Center, Bioversity International, CCAFS, CIAT, IFPRI, IRRI and WorldFish)

View Archive Info
 
 
Field Value
 
Title What’s in a Buzzword? A Systematic Review of the State of Populism Research in Political Science
 
Identifier https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/3UBYWY
 
Creator Hunger, Sophia
Paxton, Fred
 
Publisher Harvard Dataverse
 
Description While attention to populism is ever-increasing, the concept remains contested. This article provides a comprehensive overview of populism research and identifies tendencies to a conflation of host ideologies and populism in political science through a two-step analysis. First, we conduct a quantitative review of 884 abstracts from 2004 to 2018 using text-as-data methods. We show that scholars sit at ‘separate tables’, divided by geographical foci, methods, and host ideologies. Next, our qualitative analysis of 50 articles finds a common conflation of the populism with its host ideologies resulting in the analytical neglect of populism. We therefore urge researchers to properly distinguish populism from ‘what it travels with’ and engage more strongly with the dynamic interlinkages between thin and thick ideologies.
 
Subject Social Sciences
 
Contributor Hunger, Sophia