Populism as Governmental Practice: Spatial, Operational and Temporal Dynamics

Populism as Governmental Practice illustrates how populism functions as a phenomenon of power and draws attention to the brighter and darker consequences of populist rule for ordinary people across the world via bottom-up analyses of populist experiences of government in remarkably different national contexts including Turkey, Venezuela, Greece, India, Philippines, Egypt and the US.

By proposing an understanding of politics that is broader than the one embraced in current populism research, it focuses on a realm stretching beyond the electoral high politics of ideas/ideologies, discourses, public performances/styles and mobilization efforts. The book theorizes populism as a responsive political/governmental practice in congruence with the material and symbolic expectations of populist audiences and analyzes it as a rich praxis of governing people and things that is blurring the boundaries between public and the private as well as formal and the informal while embracing swiftness in temporal terms.

Through an interpretive perspective focusing on the bounded rationalities and moral economies embedded in the populist rule and popular obeyance to it, this book would appeal to researchers and students of politics and its sub-disciplines as well as to the non-expert audience curious about the micro dynamics of populist rule.

Toygar Sinan Baykan is an Assistant Professor of Politics at Kırklareli University in Turkey. His main areas of expertise are populism, party politics, party-voter linkages and Turkish politics. He published reviews and articles in journals such as Party Politics, Democratization, Mediterranean Politics, and Third World Quarterly. He is the author of the monograph Justice and Development Party in Turkey: Populism, Personalism, Organization (2018) and he contributed to the volume Populism in Global Perspective (2021) with an analysis of contemporary populism in Turkey.