54 books match the query 'Populism' and 12 start with t

cover of The Humane Economy: Populism, Capitalism, and Democracy

The Humane Economy

Populism, Capitalism, and Democracy

Pollack, Norman

Rutgers University Press, 1990

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cover of The Impact of Populism on the Party System: The Experience of European Democracies (2000–2020)

The Impact of Populism on the Party System

The Experience of European Democracies (2000–2020)

Edited by Jirí Kocián, Michal Kubát, and Martin Mejstrík

Karolinum Press, 2026

Analyzes the influence of populism on the development and transformation of parties and party systems in seven European countries between 2000 and 2020. 

The Impact of Populism on the Party System: The Experience of European Democracies (2000–2020) analyzes the influence of populism on the development and transformation of parties and party systems in Hungary, Poland, Greece, Germany, Spain, Czechia, and France in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. In individual case studies, the international team of authors asks to what extent the rise of populist parties witnessed during the period in question caused increased polarization and ideological distance between parties in a given country, and whether this polarization led to a transformation in party system. Moderate party systems can be transformed into polarized party systems under the influence of populism, with a high degree of polarization affecting the functioning of the entire democratic regime. In extreme cases, the very democratic essence of European political regimes may be threatened.

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cover of The Jackson County Rebellion: A Populist Uprising in Depression-Era Oregon

The Jackson County Rebellion

A Populist Uprising in Depression-Era Oregon

Jeffrey Max LaLande

Oregon State University Press, 2023

The Jackson County Rebellion explores a dramatic if little-known populist insurgency in the American West. Author Jeff LaLande takes a deep dive into a tumultuous uprising that captured national attention as it played out in rural Oregon. First tracing its roots back to the area’s tradition of protest, including the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s, he focuses on Jackson County’s politics of upheaval during the worst days of the Great Depression. The broad strokes of the episode may be familiar to contemporary readers: Demagogues fanning rage — relentlessly accusing an elite of corruption and conspiracy. The strife-torn episode featured nativist and anti-Semitic elements.  

The local press played a key role in the events. Two inflammatory newspapers, one owned by wealthy orchardist Llewellyn Banks and the other by politician Earl Fehl, became the vehicles by which these men won the loyalty of rural and working-class residents. Partners in demagoguery, Banks and Fehl created a movement — dubbed the “Good Government Congress”  that very nearly took over county government through direct action, ballot theft, and threats of violence.  Among those opposing the two men was Harvard-educated Robert Ruhl, owner/editor of the Medford Mail-Tribune, who faced off against Banks and Fehl. Despite boycotts and threats of sabotage. Ruhl ran a resolute editorial campaign against the populist threat in his Mail-Tribune, which won a Pulitzer Prize for its reporting on the uprising.  

The rebellion blazed hotly but not for long. Its end was marked by the arrest of its leaders after the fiercely contested 1932 election and by Banks’s murder of the police officer sent to arrest him. Placing the Jackson County Rebellion squarely within America’s long tradition of populist uprisings against the perceived sins of an allegedly corrupt, affluent local elite, LaLande argues that this little-remembered episode is part of a long history of violent conflict in the West that continues today.

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cover of The Long March of Coxey’s Army: The Path of Protest from Populism to the New Deal

The Long March of Coxey’s Army

The Path of Protest from Populism to the New Deal

Wesley R. Bishop

University of Illinois Press, 2027

In 1894, hundreds of unemployed workers demonstrated in Washington, D.C., to demand jobs and relief. This march, by what came to be called Coxey’s Army, took inspiration from the ideas of businessman and activist Jacob Coxey and redefined how Americans argued about jobs and the power of government.

Wesley R. Bishop explores how Coxey and his allies organized the first national protest to bring citizens to Washington, D.C. Though the march failed in its immediate goals, for the next forty years its ideas influenced America’s political parties. The demonstration pioneered marching for economic justice while its push for federal public works projects and government responsibility for unemployment helped shaped the New Deal. But in the years after the march, racism and other types of exclusion muddied hopes and tainted demands for democratic and economic fairness.

Eye-opening and insightful, The Long March of Coxey’s Army examines the influence and aftermath of an important historical event.
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cover of The Macroeconomics of Populism in Latin America

The Macroeconomics of Populism in Latin America

Edited by Rudiger Dornbusch and Sebastian Edwards

University of Chicago Press, 1991

Again and again, Latin America has seen the populist scenario played to an unfortunate end. Upon gaining power, populist governments attempt to revive the economy through massive spending. After an initial recovery, inflation reemerges and the government responds with wage an price controls. Shortages, overvaluation, burgeoning deficits, and capital flight soon precipitate economic crisis, with a subsequent collapse of the populist regime. The lessons of this experience are especially valuable for countries in Eastern Europe, as they face major political and economic decisions.

Economists and political scientists from the United States and Latin America detail in this volume how and why such programs go wrong and what leads policymakers to repeatedly adopt these policies despite a history of failure. Authors examine this pattern in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Peru—and show how Colombia managed to avoid it. Despite differences in how each country implemented its policies, the macroeconomic consequences were remarkably similar.

Scholars of Latin America will find this work a valuable resource, offering a distinctive macroeconomic perspective on the continuing controversy over the dynamics of populism.
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cover of The Perils of Populism

The Perils of Populism

Sarah Tobias

Rutgers University Press, 2022

From Donald Trump in the U.S. to Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, and Narendra Modi in India, right-wing populist leaders have taken power in many parts of the world. While each country’s populist movement is distinct, they are united by several key features, including the presence of a boastful strongman leader and the scapegoating of vulnerable populations, especially immigrants, people of color, LGBTQ people, and women.
 
The Perils of Populism shows how a feminist lens can help diagnose the factors behind the global rise of right-wing populism and teach us how to resist the threat it presents to democracy. Featuring interdisciplinary essays about politics in the United States, the Middle East, Europe, and India from a variety of acclaimed theorists and activists, the volume contributes to a rapidly expanding literature on gender and the far right. Together, these chapters offer a truly intersectional analysis of the problem, addressing everything from how populism has thrived in a “post-truth” era to the ways it appeals to working-class voters looking for an alternative to neoliberalism. Yet the authors also find reasons to be hopeful, as they showcase forms of grassroots feminist activism that challenge right-wing populism by advocating for racial and economic justice.
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cover of The Politics of Petulance: America in an Age of Immaturity

The Politics of Petulance

America in an Age of Immaturity

Alan Wolfe

University of Chicago Press, 2018

How did we get into this mess? Every morning, many Americans ask this as, with a cringe, they pick up their phones and look to see what terrible thing President Trump has just said or done. Regardless of what he’s complaining about or whom he’s attacking, a second question comes hard on the heels of the first: How on earth do we get out of this?
 
Alan Wolfe has an answer. In The Politics of Petulance he argues that the core of our problem isn’t Trump himself—it’s that we are mired in an age of political immaturity. That immaturity is not grounded in any one ideology, nor is it a function of age or education. It’s in an abdication of valuing the character of would-be leaders; it’s in a failure to acknowledge, even welcome the complexity of government and society; and it’s in a loss of the ability to be skeptical without being suspicious. In 2016, many Americans were offered tantalizingly simple answers to complicated problems, and, like children being offered a lunch of Pop Rocks and Coke, they reflexively—and mindlessly—accepted.
 
The good news, such as it is, is that we’ve been here before. Wolfe reminds us that we know how to grow up and face down Trump and other demagogues. Wolfe reinvigorates the tradition of public engagement exemplified by midcentury intellectuals such as Richard Hofstadter, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Lionel Trilling—and he draws lessons from their battles with McCarthyism and conspiratorial paranoia. Wolfe mounts a powerful case that we can learn from them to forge a new path for political intervention today.
 
Wolfe has been thinking and writing about American life and politics for decades. He sees this moment as one of real risk. But he’s not throwing up his hands; he’s bracing us. We’ve faced demagogues before. We can find the intellectual maturity to fight back. Yes we can.
 
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cover of The Rise of Populist Nationalism: Social Resentments and Capturing the Constitution in Hungary

The Rise of Populist Nationalism

Social Resentments and Capturing the Constitution in Hungary

Balázs Majtényi

Central European University Press, 2020

The authors of this book approach the emergence and endurance of the populist nationalism in post-socialist Eastern Europe, with special emphasis on Hungary. They attempt to understand the reasons behind public discourses that increasingly reframe politics in terms of nationhood and nationalism. Overall, the volume attempts to explain how the new nationalism is rooted in recent political, economic and social processes. The contributors focus on two motifs in public discourse: shift and legacy. Some focus on shifts in public law and shifts in political ethno-nationalism through the lens of constitutional law, while others explain the social and political roots of these shifts. Others discuss the effects of legacy in memory and culture and suggest that both shift and legacy combine to produce the new era of identity politics. Legal experts emphasize that the new Fundamental Law of Hungary is radically different from all previous Hungarian constitutions, and clearly reflects a redefinition of the Hungarian state itself. The authors further examine the role of developments in the fields of sociology and political science that contribute to the kind of politics in which identity is at the fore.
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cover of The Road to Rebellion: Class Formation and Kansas Populism, 1865-1900

The Road to Rebellion

Class Formation and Kansas Populism, 1865-1900

Scott G. McNall

University of Chicago Press, 1988

In the late 1800s an unprecedented coalition of American farmers rose to challenge the course of national politics. Aspiring to a society in which justice and equality were the norm, the farmers galvanized thousands of voters, causing two dominant political parties to reshape their agendas. Yet by 1900, the movement was virtually dead. Scott G. McNall analyzes why America's largest mass-democratic movement failed. He focuses his inquiry on Kansas, the center of the agrarian rebellion that led to the creation of the Farmer's Alliance and, later, to the founding of the People's party. Integrating new historical accounts with original analyses of census data, Alliance membership records, and speech transcripts, McNall restores these Kansas voices, revealing their struggle against an entrenched class system, indifferent political parties, and economic hardship.

McNall rejects the traditional view that blames the failure of the Alliance on a turn to mass-based electoral politics, but rather sees the move into national politics by the Farmer's Alliance as part of a rational strategy to better wage their fight for economic justice. The Kansas populists failed, he argues, because of their inability to embrace a broad, working-class base, to provide an effective alternative vision, and ultimately to create a distinct class organization. Debates about how classes come into being, or how democracy is to be realized, cannot be settled in the abstract. McNall's recreation of this heroic struggle is a model in the analysis of class formation. At the same time, The Road to Rebellion is dynamic social history, which holds vital lessons for structuring and realizing alternative political agendas today.
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cover of The Shape of Populism: Serbia before the Dissolution of Yugoslavia

The Shape of Populism

Serbia before the Dissolution of Yugoslavia

Marko Grdešic

University of Michigan Press, 2019

The Shape of Populism examines socialist Serbia, then part of Yugoslavia, which in the late 1980s witnessed popular mobilization and an emergence of a populist discourse that both constructed and celebrated “the people.” Author Marko Grdešić uses quantitative and qualitative analyses to show how “the people” emerge in the public sphere. This book examines over 300 protests and analyzes them in conjunction with elite events such as party sessions. It examines over 1,600 letters-to-the-editor and political cartoons to reveal the populist construction of “the people.” Grdešić also relies on interviews with participants in populist rallies in the late 1980s to examine the long-term legacies of populism.
 
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cover of The University and the People: Envisioning American Higher Education in an Era of Populist Protest

The University and the People

Envisioning American Higher Education in an Era of Populist Protest

Scott M. Gelber

University of Wisconsin Press, 2011

The University and the People chronicles the influence of Populism—a powerful agrarian movement—on public higher education in the late nineteenth century. Revisiting this pivotal era in the history of the American state university, Scott Gelber demonstrates that Populists expressed a surprising degree of enthusiasm for institutions of higher learning. More fundamentally, he argues that the mission of the state university, as we understand it today, evolved from a fractious but productive relationship between public demands and academic authority.
    Populists attacked a variety of elites—professionals, executives, scholars—and seemed to confirm academia’s fear of anti-intellectual public oversight. The movement’s vision of the state university highlighted deep tensions in American attitudes toward meritocracy and expertise. Yet Populists also promoted state-supported higher education, with the aims of educating the sons (and sometimes daughters) of ordinary citizens, blurring status distinctions, and promoting civic engagement. Accessibility, utilitarianism, and public service were the bywords of Populist journalists, legislators, trustees, and sympathetic professors. These “academic populists” encouraged state universities to reckon with egalitarian perspectives on admissions, financial aid, curricula, and research. And despite their critiques of college “ivory towers,” Populists supported the humanities and social sciences, tolerated a degree of ideological dissent, and lobbied for record-breaking appropriations for state institutions.

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cover of Toward a Cooperative Commonwealth: The Transplanted Roots of Farmer-Labor Radicalism in Texas

Toward a Cooperative Commonwealth

The Transplanted Roots of Farmer-Labor Radicalism in Texas

Thomas Alter II

University of Illinois Press, 2022

Agrarian radicalism's challenge to capitalism played a central role in working-class ideology while making third parties and protest movements a potent force in politics. Thomas Alter II follows three generations of German immigrants in Texas to examine the evolution of agrarian radicalism and the American and transnational ideas that influenced it. Otto Meitzen left Prussia for Texas in the wake of the failed 1848 Revolution. His son and grandson took part in decades-long activism with organizations from the Greenback Labor Party and the Grange to the Populist movement and Texas Socialist Party. As Alter tells their stories, he analyzes the southern wing of the era's farmer-labor bloc and the parallel history of African American political struggle in Texas. Alliances with Mexican revolutionaries, Irish militants, and others shaped an international legacy of working-class radicalism that moved U.S. politics to the left. That legacy, in turn, pushed forward economic reform during the Progressive and New Deal eras.

A rare look at the German roots of radicalism in Texas, Toward a Cooperative Commonwealth illuminates the labor movements and populist ideas that changed the nation’s course at a pivotal time in its history.

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