In this commentary, Dr. Ana Filipa Joaquim develops a political-marketing framework for understanding the adaptive power of digital populism. Drawing on her book “The Age of Digital Populism,” she argues that populism’s “chameleonic” character lies in its ability to alter themes, leadership images, and audience appeals while preserving a recognizable antagonism between “the people” and their opponents. At the center of the analysis is a nine-P model—People, Polarization, Propaganda, Personification, Performance, Propagation, Precision, Permanence, and Participation—which connects symbolic positioning with the circulation and reproduction of political narratives. The framework highlights how adaptability, repetition, audience segmentation, leadership, and participation interact across digital environments, while distinguishing communicative visibility from persuasion, electoral success, and governing competence.
The book A Era do Populismo Digital: Como a Desinformação e a Propaganda Estão a Transformar a Política [The Age of Digital Populism: How Disinformation and Propaganda Are Transforming Politics] is currently available only in Portuguese and has not yet been published in an English-language edition.
The conceptual diversity of populism research raises a question about how a politically recognizable phenomenon accommodates different ideological commitments and communicative environments. Drawing on The Age of Digital Populism – How Disinformation and Propaganda Are Transforming Politics, this article examines populism through an interdisciplinary political marketing perspective. Its argument is that populism’s chameleonic capacity allows themes, leadership images and audience appeals to change while sustaining a recognizable antagonistic relationship between the people and their opponents.
The nine Ps model identifies the interconnected practices through which this adaptability becomes strategically meaningful: People, Polarization, Propaganda, Personification, Performance, Propagation, Precision, Permanence and Participation. The framework connects symbolic positioning with the circulation and reproduction of political narratives. It offers an interpretative contribution, with European illustrations, while distinguishing communicative visibility from persuasion, electoral success and governing competence.
Conceptual Disagreement and An Interdisciplinary Perspective
Populism occupies a central place in political debate without having acquired a single, universally accepted academic definition. Its frequent use as a term of political criticism compounds the problem: a label employed to discredit opponents can become detached from analytical criteria. In A era do populismo digital, this conceptual difficulty provides the starting point for examining the connections between political meaning, strategic communication and mobilization (Joaquim, 2026: 23–27).
The disagreement concerns the analytical status of populism as well as its defining features. Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser (2017) conceptualize it as a thin-centered ideology organized around a moral opposition between the people and the elite. Laclau (2007) approaches it through the discursive construction of a collective political subject and the articulation of demands. Moffitt (2016) foregrounds political style, embodiment and performance. Weyland’s (2017) political-strategic approach emphasizes personalistic leadership and its relationship with followers. These perspectives locate populism in different, sometimes competing, dimensions of political life.
Conceptual plurality does not mean that scholarship has failed to identify meaningful patterns. It indicates that ideological content, discourse, leadership and mediated performance cannot simply be treated as interchangeable objects. The question is how to examine their relationships without assuming that one perspective exhausts the phenomenon. Sorensen’s (2021) integration of ideology, performance and mediation supports the relevance of this broader communicative enquiry.
An exclusively classificatory debate can therefore be complemented by a question about strategic practice: how are social grievances translated into recognizable political offers, directed towards particular audiences and sustained through repeated interaction? Moving beyond a narrowly disciplinary reading of populism makes political marketing useful here. This broadens political analysis through attention to audience relationships, symbolic value and communication. It does not require abandoning ideological differences or treating citizens as equivalent to commercial consumers.
There is also an established basis for this connection. Winder and Tenscher (2012) examine populism as a political marketing technique concerned with communicative relationships, organization and mobilization. Lees-Marshment (2011) situates political marketing within strategic engagement with public expectations. The present argument draws these concerns together through the nine Ps model developed in Joaquim (2026). Conceptual disagreement alone does not establish that populism is marketing; the analytical justification lies in the strategic construction, differentiation and circulation of its political offer.
Chameleonic Adaptability as a Strategic Resource
Sign of the right-wing conservative political party Chega, led by André Ventura, in Faro, Portugal, March 16, 2023. Photo: Dreamstime.
The book explicitly identifies populism’s chameleonic nature as a source of political strength (Joaquim, 2026: 55). The metaphor describes adaptation with continuity. Populist actors can change the themes they priorities, the identities they invoke and the opponents they designate while retaining an antagonistic account of legitimate representation. Its flexibility concerns how the political division is expressed and made relevant within particular circumstances.
This interpretation is compatible with the thin-centered ideological approach. A limited ideological core can attach itself to different political projects, helping explain why populism is not confined to a single ideological family (Mudde & Rovira Kaltwasser, 2017). It is also consistent with the book’s distinction between cultural, socioeconomic and anti-establishment configurations. These overlap in practice, allowing identity, material insecurity and institutional distrust to be combined in different proportions (Joaquim, 2026: 67–77).
The European illustrations clarify this flexibility without establishing a uniform strategy. The book discusses national identity in France’s Rassemblement National, or National Rally, and the combination of anti-corruption, cultural and socioeconomic appeals in Portugal’s Chega. The themes differ in emphasis, but both can be organized through a morally charged distinction between a deserving community and those represented as responsible for its predicament (Joaquim, 2026: 76–77, 111–113). These examples illustrate how national specificity shapes political communication.
From a marketing perspective, this adaptability involves the construction of perceived relevance. A political offer acquires value when it gives recognizable expression to grievances, offers belonging and identifies an apparently intelligible response. Positioning distinguishes that offer from established alternatives, while leadership and recurring symbols help maintain recognition. Changing an emphasis from insecurity to corruption need not dissolve the broader narrative if both are presented as consequences of an unresponsive or illegitimate establishment.
Adaptability does not imply the absence of ideology or unlimited freedom to change. As the book stresses, emotion reconfigures the experience of ideology rather than simply replacing it (Joaquim, 2026: 31–36). Historical conditions, institutional arrangements and existing political commitments shape the available appeals. The marketing perspective explains how these materials are organized in relationships with audiences; it cannot, by itself, explain every source of political dissatisfaction.
Chameleonic strength thus rests on a tension between variation and recognizability. Messages must respond to changing concerns while preserving enough continuity to sustain identification. The nine Ps make this relationship analytically accessible by connecting the definition of a political community with the practices through which its narrative is embodied, distributed and repeatedly renewed.
The Nine Ps as an Integrated Marketing Strategy
The model comprises People, Polarization, Propaganda, Personification, Performance, Propagation, Precision, Permanence and Participation. Developed in Chapter 15 of the book, these dimensions constitute an interpretative framework rather than a linear campaign sequence (Joaquim, 2026: 129–150). Their relevance derives from their interdependence. The preceding discussion of political marketing supplies the connection to segmentation, positioning, branding and the construction of symbolic value (Joaquim, 2026: 105–114). The nine Ps reorganize these concerns around the distinctive communicative practices of digital populism.
People identifies the collective subject in whose name the political project speaks. This is a discursively constructed community, endowed with moral legitimacy and boundaries of belonging. Its strategic importance lies in offering citizens a position within the narrative: their experiences become evidence of what has happened to the community. The political offer consequently combines proposed action with recognition. As different grievances gain prominence, the representation of the people can adjust without abandoning the claim to speak for a legitimate collective subject (Joaquim, 2026: 130–132).
Polarization gives that community an antagonistic relationship with its opponents. Differences become moralized, allowing political choices to be experienced as affirmations of identity. Within the model, this concerns a communicative practice of constructing conflict, not an independently measured level of polarization across society. Its strategic function is to distinguish the political offer through an intelligible attribution of responsibility. The relevant analytical question is how disagreement is transformed into a distinction between legitimate representatives and actors presented as undeserving of recognition (Joaquim, 2026: 132–134).
Propaganda organizes the problems through which antagonism acquires urgency. Selection, emphasis and dramatization can turn complex circumstances into emotionally charged interpretations. Entman’s (1993) account of framing clarifies the importance of defining problems and attributing responsibility. The book treats corruption, insecurity and immigration as recurrent themes through which this process operates. Propaganda may involve real grievances interpreted selectively; fabrication is not a necessary condition. Its place within the model is to connect attention with a politically consequential understanding of what is wrong and who should answer for it (Joaquim, 2026: 134–135).
André Ventura of the Chega party speaking during the plenary session of the Portuguese Parliament debating the government’s motion of confidence, March 11, 2025.
Personification concentrates the political offer in a recognizable leader. Image, biography and public conduct become resources through which a complex organization acquires an accessible identity. The book discusses André Ventura’s centrality to Chega as an illustration. The leader can provide continuity across changing themes because audiences recognize the person through whom the project is represented. Yet this concentration also creates dependency: damage to individual credibility can destabilize the wider narrative. Personification therefore combines an opportunity for identification with organizational vulnerability (Joaquim, 2026: 136–138).
Performance concerns how the narrative is enacted through gesture, tone, confrontation and staged proximity. Moffitt’s (2016) analysis of political style helps explain why the form of a political intervention matters to its reception. Informality or an emotionally intense appearance may support a perception of authenticity, even when carefully constructed. In this model, performance means communicative enactment, distinct from electoral results or governing effectiveness. Personification identifies the figure who embodies the offer; performance concerns the experience through which audiences encounter that figure and attach meaning to the message (Joaquim, 2026: 138–140).
Propagation concerns the circulation of messages across platforms, social networks and mediated encounters. Supporters, journalists and other intermediaries can extend the visibility of material beyond its original audience. Sharing also allows messages to be reinterpreted, so strategic circulation is not reducible to organizational control. The book relates propagation to the interaction between emotional engagement and platform visibility, while recognizing the role of informal networks. The dimension identifies how a political offer acquires communicative reach. That reach remains distinct from persuasion or evidence of electoral support (Joaquim, 2026: 140–142).
Precision describes the adjustment of content, tone and framing to particular audiences through segmentation and data use. This provides a direct connection between chameleonic adaptability and marketing practice: different concerns can be addressed through differentiated appeals within a recognizable narrative. Precision concerns the intended fit between a message and an audience; it does not certify targeting accuracy or imply that every campaign has equivalent technical capabilities. Its democratic significance lies partly in visibility, since citizens may encounter different political promises without being able to scrutinize the complete range of appeals (Joaquim, 2026: 142–144).
Permanence refers to sustained narrative presence through repeated themes, symbols and interpretations. The repetition need not be literal. Wording and format may change while preserving a familiar account of political responsibility. Research on illusory truth demonstrates that repetition can influence perceived truthfulness (Fazio et al., 2015), although this does not establish the effects of any particular campaign. Permanence gives the model a temporal dimension: recurring interpretations can become the frame through which subsequent events are understood. Its effectiveness remains conditional, since repetition can also generate saturation and fatigue (Joaquim, 2026: 144–146, 186).
Participation incorporates audiences into the reproduction of political meaning. Reactions, comments, shares and user-generated content can express belonging, extend circulation and supply visible signals of approval. It overlaps with propagation but identifies a distinct relationship: citizens contribute to the visibility and perceived legitimacy of the narrative. Their activity can also provide feedback that informs subsequent communication. Participation may broaden access to political expression while reinforcing homogeneous communities. Interaction counts therefore cannot be treated as measures of informed deliberation or representative public endorsement (Joaquim, 2026: 146–148).
Adaptation and Reinforcement Across the Nine Ps
The model’s interpretative value lies in the relationships among its dimensions. The construction of the people supplies a political identity, and polarization establishes the conflict within which that identity acquires significance. Propaganda selects problems that connect the conflict with recognizable experiences. Personification and performance give the offer an identifiable presence, while precision and propagation concern its adjustment and circulation. Permanence sustains recognition over time, and participation supplies further opportunities for amplification and renewal.
The connection between precision and permanence is particularly important to the chameleonic argument. Differentiated messages need not repeat identical language to sustain the same interpretation of political life. Appeals organized around corruption, economic insecurity or cultural threat can reproduce a common distinction between the community and those held responsible for its difficulties. Adaptation concerns the immediate appeal; continuity can reside in the underlying attribution of legitimacy and blame (Joaquim, 2026: 76–77, 142–146).
Participation helps connect this variation with visible social validation. When supporters share or reinterpret messages, they contribute to their persistence and can make them appear socially endorsed. Further interaction may then encourage additional circulation. This relationship explains why analyzing a single post, leader or engagement total captures only part of the communicative process. The framework directs attention to recurring connections among meaning, audience activity and visibility (Joaquim, 2026: 121–127, 146–148).
Such integration does not require a centrally controlled apparatus. Political organizations make strategic choices, but users and intermediaries can reproduce or modify messages autonomously. The book’s account of decentralized circulation prevents the marketing interpretation from becoming a claim that every manifestation results from deliberate planning. Strategy operates within an environment that political actors can influence without fully controlling.
Disinformation and the Limits of Communicative Success
Illustration: Shutterstock / Skorzewiak.
Disinformation can reinforce several dimensions of this strategy, connecting distorted claims with established grievances, recognizable leaders and repeated circulation. It is therefore examined across the relationships among the Ps. The distinction between deliberate deception and unintentional error remains necessary (Wardle & Derakhshan, 2017). Neither emotional intensity nor the use of marketing techniques is sufficient to classify a message as disinformation. Propaganda, deception and strategic distribution have related but analytically distinguishable functions (Joaquim, 2026: 95–118).
The explanatory limits are equally important. The framework synthesizes the book’s conceptual argument and illustrative European discussions; it does not present a new dataset or a comparative test of the nine dimensions. The available material does not establish the independent contribution of each P to persuasion or electoral outcomes. The analysis concerns strategic organization and plausible relationships among practices, with attention to their contextual conditions.
The book also identifies vulnerabilities associated with communicative success. Leadership dependence can turn personal credibility into organizational fragility; repetition can produce exhaustion; simplified promises can become difficult to sustain when confronted with governing responsibilities (Joaquim, 2026: 185–187). Chameleonic adaptability does not remove these tensions. A capacity to revise a message cannot be assumed to supply the institutional competence required to address the problem it describes.
Democratic assessment consequently extends beyond whether a strategy attracts attention. It concerns whose grievances acquire recognition, whose membership is denied, how differentiated appeals can be scrutinized and whether visible participation supports informed judgement. The book’s discussion of media literacy, platform transparency and political accountability addresses these connected concerns (Joaquim, 2026: 201–207). The analytical task is to understand how communication organizes influence while retaining criteria for evaluating its consequences.
Conclusion
The absence of a single academic conceptualization of populism creates a case for analytical dialogue across disciplines. Its chameleonic capacity makes political marketing particularly useful for examining how varied political contents are organized into recognizable offers of belonging and representation. The nine Ps specify the practices through which this organization acquires communicative form. Their contribution lies in connecting adaptation with continuity, and strategic intention with audience participation. Approached in this way, digital populism can be analyzed as a marketing strategy whose strength depends on sustaining identification across changing circumstances, while its effects remain contingent and its democratic consequences require scrutiny.
Fazio, L. K.; Brashier, N. M.; Payne, B. K. & Marsh, E. J. (2015). “Knowledge does not protect against illusory truth.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 144(5), 993–1002. https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0000098
Joaquim, A. F. (2026). A era do populismo digital: Como a desinformação e a propaganda estão a transformar a política[The age of digital populism: How disinformation and propaganda are transforming politics]. Editora d’Ideias.
Moffitt, B. (2016). The global rise of populism: Performance, political style, and representation. Stanford University Press. https://www.sup.org/books/title?id=25175
Wardle, C. & Derakhshan, H. (2017). Information disorder: Toward an interdisciplinary framework for research and policy making (DGI(2017)09). Council of Europe. https://rm.coe.int/information-disorder/168076277c
Weyland, K. (2017). “Populism: A political-strategic approach.” In: C. Rovira Kaltwasser, P. Taggart, P. Ochoa Espejo, & P. Ostiguy (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of populism (pp. 48–72). Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198803560.013.2
Winder, G. & Tenscher, J. (2012). “Populism as political marketing technique.” In: J. Lees-Marshment (Ed.), Routledge handbook of political marketing (pp. 230–242). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203349908-28
In this ECPS interview, Professor Michael Kazin, a leading historian of American populism, social movements, and the Democratic Party, examines the asymmetrical rise of MAGA and democratic socialism in contemporary US politics. While stressing that the American left can significantly influence Democratic priorities, Professor Kazin argues that it has historically failed to take control of the party and concludes that “the Democratic Party will not become a socialist party anytime soon.” He links this limitation to the decline of organized labor, noting that Democratic class appeals increasingly come “from the top down.” At the same time, Professor Kazin contends that Democrats cannot simply return to the politics of Obama or Biden and must confront inequality, healthcare, housing insecurity, corruption, and distrust in government more fundamentally.
As the United States approaches the November 3 midterm elections, American politics is being reshaped by two powerful but asymmetrical currents: the consolidation of MAGA within a highly personalized Trump presidency and the growing visibility of democratic socialism within a Democratic coalition that remains considerably broader than its left flank. This tension provides the backdrop to the ECPS conversation with Professor Michael Kazin, Professor of History at Georgetown University and Editor Emeritus of Dissent, a leading historian of American populism, social movements, and the Democratic Party. Professor Kazin’s scholarship has long explored the political language of “the people,” the evolution of the American left, and the relationship between social movements, class politics, and party transformation. Georgetown likewise identifies Kazin as a scholar of US political and social movements, while his influential The Populist Persuasion traces recurring conflicts between “the people” and powerful elites across American history.
At the center of the interview is a fundamental question about whether the current revival of democratic socialism can move beyond insurgency and become a durable governing force. Professor Kazin’s answer is deliberately cautious. While the left can exercise substantial influence within the Democratic Party, he stresses that “historically, at least so far, it has not been able to take over the party entirely.” His conclusion is unequivocal: “The Democratic Party will not become a socialist party anytime soon.”
Yet Professor Kazin does not equate this electoral ceiling with political irrelevance. He argues that the contemporary left resembles earlier progressive factions that transformed Democratic priorities without controlling the party. Bernie Sanders demonstrated this dynamic in 2016 and 2020, while the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) have developed substantial organizational capacity in heavily Democratic cities. For Professor Kazin, their influence illustrates how a faction “does not control the party, but it can have a great deal of influence over it.”
The deeper obstacle, however, is organizational and social. Professor Kazin identifies the decline of organized labor as a critical reason Democrats struggle to construct a persuasive class-based politics. When unions were stronger, working-class appeals came from workers speaking to other workers; today, he argues, “when Democrats make a class appeal, it comes from the top down.”
This diagnosis also shapes Professor Kazin’s understanding of the post-Trump Democratic Party. He argues that Democrats increasingly recognize that they “cannot simply return to some of the policies of Obama or Biden” and must confront long-standing problems including economic inequality, healthcare, housing costs, and distrust of government. In this sense, the interview presents democratic socialism less as an imminent replacement for mainstream Democratic politics than as a persistent force capable of shifting the boundaries of what the party considers politically necessary and possible.
In an interview with the ECPS, Professor Damir Kapidžić examines Bosnia and Herzegovina’s October 4 elections through the intertwined lenses of ethnonationalism, democratic erosion, patronage, institutional paralysis, and foreign influence. He argues that the country’s principal democratic danger lies less in dramatic constitutional breakdown than in the “slow death” of institutions gradually weakened by illiberal practices, elite capture, and political incentives that reward dysfunction. Professor Kapidžić also highlights the durability of ethno-national patronage, the limits of civic alternatives, and the persistence of war memory and religious identity in structuring political competition. Looking beyond the elections, he cautions that Bosnia remains “stuck in the past,” with democratic renewal unlikely without changes in both domestic incentives and the wider external environment.
Bosnia and Herzegovina approaches its October 4 elections at a moment when the country’s post-Dayton political order is once again under pressure over statehood, entity autonomy, ethnic representation, and democratic legitimacy. The campaign is shaped less by a conventional left-right divide than by competing visions of citizenship, constituent peoples, sovereignty, and the future of the Bosnian state. Against this background of ethnonationalism, populism, democratic erosion, and geopolitical influence, the elections offer an important vantage point from which to assess not only who will govern, but also the deeper institutional structures that continue to constrain Bosnia and Herzegovina’s democratic development.
In this wide-ranging interview with the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Professor Damir Kapidžić, Professor of Comparative Politics at the Faculty of Political Science and Director of the Institute for Social Science Research at the University of Sarajevo, argues that Bosnia’s most consequential democratic danger may not take the form of spectacular constitutional collapse. Rather, it lies in the gradual erosion and paralysis of institutions. “We do see the possibility of what I would not call a dramatic constitutional breakdown, but rather a slow death,” he warns, explaining that institutions can simply cease to function when government formation, regulatory bodies, or judicial appointments are left indefinitely unresolved. In his assessment, “the gradual normalization of illiberal practices is likely to continue,”while “a more likely scenario… would simply be a slow demise.”
Professor Kapidžić situates this institutional vulnerability within the contradictions of the Dayton system. While power-sharing has helped prevent renewed large-scale intercommunal violence, he argues that political elites have also “been able to capture the system for their own purposes.” The resulting elite consensus, he observes, has often centered not on effective governance but on “keeping the rule of law weak, not resolving wartime legacies, and capturing state institutions.”
These dynamics are reinforced by deeply embedded patronage networks. Coalition negotiations, Professor Kapidžić notes, are rarely programmatic; instead, they revolve around “the division of power and resources rather than the creation of policies.” Ethnonational parties therefore operate not only as guardians of identity but also as gatekeepers of material opportunity, presenting themselves as protectors of their communities’ access to “resources and employment.”
Looking beyond October 4, Professor Kapidžić remains cautious about the prospect of democratic renewal. Bosnia, he argues, is “very stable, but also stable in a negative sense,” with progress occurring “either very slowly or not at all.” The deeper problem is a political order “stuck in the past”—not simply the wartime past, but “the past 30 years of very little changing.” Without altered domestic incentives and a transformed external environment, Bosnia risks remaining trapped in what he describes as a recurrent political loop, “without clear signposts, clear guidelines about the possibilities, or a clear path forward.”
In this interview with ECPS, Dr. Semir Dzebo, Postdoctoral Researcher at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies at the University of Oxford, examines Bosnia and Herzegovina’s October 4 elections through the lenses of populism, nationalism, secessionism, and ethnic politics. He argues that Bosnia remains marked by “stable instability”: Dayton secured peace but has struggled to function as a democratic constitution. Dr. Dzebo discusses “populist secessionism,” the erosion of anti-elite appeals under long incumbency, competing constructions of “the people,” Croat and Bosniak representation, foreign influence, disinformation, and the limits of territorial revisionism. Rather than expecting dissolution or a sweeping constitutional settlement, he points toward incremental reform, EU integration, stronger state capacity, desegregated schooling, cross-ethnic electoral incentives, and improved economic conditions.
Bosnia and Herzegovina approaches its October 4 elections amid renewed strain on the political architecture established by the Dayton Peace Agreement. More than three decades after the end of the 1992–95 war, questions of statehood, entity autonomy, ethnic representation, foreign influence, and the legitimacy of shared institutions remain deeply intertwined. Political competition continues to be structured less by a conventional left–right divide than by competing understandings of sovereignty, citizenship, collective rights, and of who constitutes the legitimate political community. Against this fragmented backdrop, the elections are not simply about who will govern Bosnia and Herzegovina, but about the character and durability of the post-Dayton state itself.
In this interview with the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Dr. Semir Dzebo, Postdoctoral Researcher at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies at the University of Oxford, examines these tensions through the lenses of populism, nationalism, secessionism, and ethnic politics. He argues that electoral competition in Bosnia carries unusually high constitutional stakes because “whatever coalition gets formed after the October 4th elections is, in a way, a choice about the state itself.” In this sense, the election resembles “a de facto referendum” on the country’s future political architecture.
A central theme of the conversation is what Dr. Dzebo conceptualizes as “populist secessionism.” Whereas ordinary nationalism operates along a horizontal axis of competition between national communities, populist secessionism introduces a vertical, moral division between an allegedly authentic people and corrupt or illegitimate elites. In this framework, political disagreement becomes morally charged: as Dr. Dzebo puts it, disputes that might otherwise be negotiated can acquire “this moral dimension that turns them into treason,” making compromise appear as capitulation.
The interview also explores the limits of this strategy. Dr. Dzebo’s research suggests that support for secession in Republika Srpska is driven less by populist attitudes than by ethnonational identification, ingroup bias, deteriorating intergroup relations, and economic grievance. Long incumbency, moreover, can erode the credibility of anti-elitism: voters predisposed against elites may increasingly view Milorad Dodik himself as part of the elite.
The broader diagnosis culminates in Dr. Dzebo’s assessment of Dayton itself. Bosnia, he argues, lives in a condition of “stable instability.” Dayton “has really accomplished the first task” of securing peace, but “has not really been great at the second task” of functioning as a democratic constitution. Yet he rejects both expectations of imminent dissolution and hopes for a sweeping constitutional reset, instead pointing toward incremental reform, EU integration, implementation of Strasbourg judgments, stronger state capacity, desegregated schooling, cross-ethnic electoral incentives, and improved economic conditions as the more plausible path toward a more cohesive democratic order.
Bosnia’s Elections Are De Facto Referendums on the State
Photo: Dreamstime.
Dr. Dzebo, welcome! Bosnia and Herzegovina enters the October 4 elections with its post-Dayton political order under considerable pressure, and the central political divisions concern not simply left and right but competing understandings of statehood, sovereignty, entity autonomy, citizenship, and ethnic representation. Looking at the campaign as a whole, are these elections fundamentally about who governs Bosnia and Herzegovina—or about what kind of political community and state Bosnia and Herzegovina should be?
Dr. Semir Dzebo: Before I start responding, thank you very much for the invitation to be part of the series. With regard to your question, it’s very hard to separate those two things, especially in Bosnia. Whatever coalition gets formed after the October 4th elections is, in a way, a choice about the state itself. It’s a little bit like a de facto referendum on what kind of coalition architecture we’re going to have after the elections.
There’s the option of continuing the Troika model, then potentially the return of SDR, or strengthening the entity-focused axis of SNSD and HDZ. And there’s maybe a larger question looming there about the pardon of Milorad Dodik, depending on what kind of coalition is formed.
I think it’s a little bit unusual because, in most other countries, elections are just about elections and who’s going to govern, without necessarily thinking these elections are going to change the nature of the state itself. But in Bosnia, it’s always a little bit intertwined when it comes to those things.
Certainly, what I really liked in your introduction about the elections was that you said it’s really less about issues that are considered in other countries’ elections, where it’s liberal versus conservative, it’s left versus right. There’s very little sort of program being announced and promoted by parties. Some of the people who have done research on these elections have found that not even 10% of social media content by parties has been about anything but a program.
It’s more about these traditional ethno-national tensions, and that’s why the tension is on top of everything. It’s not necessarily what ordinary voters care about, but, in a way, it’s omnipresent, so they’re almost forced to think about those things.
Then we recently had the death of Ratko Mladić, the convicted war criminal, which was almost a gift for those wishing to stoke the flames of nationalism again, and it forced itself into these elections again as something to really be considered.
Populist Secessionism Turns Disagreement into Treason
Your recent work introduces the concept of “populist secessionism” to describe the fusion of anti-elite populism with ethnonational claims to territorial separation. In Republika Srpska, how should we distinguish ordinary Serb nationalism from specifically populist secessionism? What changes when the claim that Republika Srpska must defend its national autonomy is reframed as a struggle of a morally authentic “people” against corrupt domestic elites, Sarajevo institutions, and international authorities?
Dr. Semir Dzebo: I followed the line of thinking of people who have done earlier work on the distinctions between nationalism and populism and the fusion of those two, like Rogers Brubaker, and then my PhD advisor at Central European University, Erin Kristin Jenne, who writes about ethno-populism. They tried to differentiate them as having two different axes.
I would say that ordinary Serb nationalism would be a horizontal axis, where claims of rights and autonomy of the Serb nation relative to other nations are made in this comparative sense, and the goals of that nationalism can be pursued through institutions. It is acceptable, in that view, that there will be those who disagree on the best course of action and the best way to pursue the goals of Serb nationalism within Serb people.
But populist secessionism has a vertical or moral axis, where the nation has a singular will. The leader is the one who embodies it, and everyone who presents an obstacle is part of the corrupt elite. In my paper, I thoroughly analyzed the discourse of Milorad Dodik. I find that he has three types of elites that he targets.
The first one is the domestic opposition, the Serb political parties within Republika Srpska that are his opposition, the ones that run for votes, that he used to run for votes against; now he’s technically not a part of these elections. Then you have the Bosniak elite in Sarajevo, whom he also targets within the country. Then there’s also the element of what he presents as a neo-colonial international community that he sees as standing in the way of the will of the people and imposing these external decisions without, according to him, any legitimacy to do so.
So, what happens is that some of these disagreements that could happen and could be debated get this moral dimension that turns them into treason. It almost prohibits any sort of compromise, because it sees it as capitulation to the interests of those who wish to harm the Serb national project in Bosnia.
Dodik Uses Populism to Redirect Discontent
Milorad Dodik greets supporters in Pale, Bosnia and Herzegovina, following a meeting and referendum on Republika Srpska’s National Day, September 25, 2016. Photo: Vladimir Stanisic / Dreamstime.
One of the most intriguing findings of your research is that Milorad Dodik’s populist-secessionist discourse appears to function more effectively as an elite political strategy than as a direct reflection of mass attitudes: stronger anti-elitism was actually associated with lower support for both secession and Dodik’s party, while ethnic identification, ingroup bias, and economic grievances were stronger predictors. Does this suggest that analysts have overestimated the popular foundations of secessionism in Republika Srpska? And if so, why does the rhetoric remain politically so persistent?
Dr. Semir Dzebo: Partly, it really does. There’s definitely support for secession in Republika Srpska. It’s real support, and it tends to vary a great deal. But in a survey that I’ve done, I found that it has almost nothing to do with populist attitudes. In fact, those who really hold populist attitudes, and we see them as a combination of anti-elitism, pro-people, and a Manichaean element, are actually the ones who have lower support for both Dodik’s party and secession.
Those who support secession are actually motivated by other, more traditional motivations, like just a sense of distinct ethnonational identity, just a sense that intergroup relations in the country are already poor, that the country is really not a unified whole.
But again, the reason why this populist secessionism exists, and the reason why Dodik uses it, is because it really enables him to have a tool and a discursive arsenal to attack domestic opposition, the Bosniak elite, and the international presence in the country. It really helps him to try to mobilize against all of these elites in pursuit of goals, because he can’t mobilize the anti-elite discourse.
What it shows is that, among people living in Republika Srpska, those who are predisposed to dislike elites are the ones who think of elites in Banja Luka; those are the ones they directly live under. So those who are dissatisfied with elites tend to think of Dodik as elite, while Dodik essentially wants them to think of the Bosniaks in Sarajevo or the international presence in the Office of the High Representative as the elite.
It’s a discursive move to try to shift attention from his long-standing incumbency and the things that people might be dissatisfied with, and to get the people’s attention onto other targets where he can fare more favorably in competition with.
Anti-Elite Voters Increasingly See Dodik as the Elite
That finding also creates an apparent paradox: populists normally mobilize against entrenched elites, yet SNSD has exercised power for many years while continuing to present itself as a resistance movement against Sarajevo, international bureaucrats, and external interference. Does prolonged incumbency eventually exhaust the credibility of populist anti-elitism? Or can ethnonationalism compensate for that contradiction by continually redefining the incumbent elite as the defender of the community against more distant and allegedly more threatening elites?
Dr. Semir Dzebo: Exactly. At the mass level, it really shows that long incumbency is going to exhaust the appeal of anti-elitism. As I said in response to the previous question, those who are predisposed to have anti-elite attitudes are less likely to vote for Dodik or his party because they think of him as the elite. So, if they have an anti-elite predisposition, they’re going to think negatively of him and his party.
This also shows, and is in line with other work, that it’s a bit of a methodological question for all of us working on populism whether standard attitude scales work for predicting support for populists once they are in power for a long time. Sebastian Jungkunz and his colleagues had a paper on this, where it shows that these scales predict support really well when populists are in opposition, but once they hold on to power for a long time, the predictive power of populist attitude scales for support for populists actually vanishes.
This is something that the field still needs to try to figure out better: How do we measure this once populists are in power for a bit longer? What you also see in this campaign for these elections is that those who are really appealing to anti-elitism in the sense of intra-ethnic competition are the opposition in Republika Srpska. They’re saying, we need justice back. We’ve seen them accuse Milorad Dodik of being a false patriot who’s just willing to sell national interests for personal gain, or just asking him to let the reins of power go so the people can finally live.
So, the opposition is really trying to mobilize this anti-elitism against Dodik and his party. What he tries to do is, like you said, shift this anti-elitism from intra-ethnic competition towards the High Representative, towards the Bosniak politicians, and present themselves, the SNSD, as really the savior, the defender of the interests of Republika Srpska.
Weakening SNSD Would Not Weaken Serb Nationalism
How important is it to separate dissatisfaction with SNSD and Dodik from attitudes toward Serb national autonomy itself? Much of the opposition in Republika Srpska challenges corruption, patronage, and personalized rule but remains strongly committed to Serb national interests. If SNSD were significantly weakened in these elections, would that represent a decline of ethnonational politics—or merely a change in who is considered the most credible representative of the Serb national project?
Dr. Semir Dzebo: I would say it’s the latter. If you look at recent examples, such as the death of Ratko Mladic, opposition politicians were present at memorial services, showing that they remain aligned with these ideas and the national project. Some opposition members also went to Belgrade for the commemoration and praised Ratko Mladic and everything that he has done.
So, while they are willing to challenge Dodik on issues such as corruption, the rule of law, and the use of his position for personal gain, they are not going to make a major shift in how they view the position of Republika Srpska or the project of Republika Srpska vis-à-vis the state of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
If SNSD is significantly weakened, as you say, it would be more a statement about the electorate no longer trusting Dodik with the national project and wanting to select someone else because of fears or dissatisfaction that he is willing to compromise or sell out vital parts of this national project for personal gain. You can sometimes see this in decisions regarding the non-recognition of the decisions of the Office of the High Representative, which were later reversed in exchange for the lifting of personal sanctions imposed by the US on Dodik.
That is what the opposition is trying to do: attack him on this basis. If the result is as such, it can certainly signal that people no longer trust him with the national project.
Bosnia’s Ethno-Populist Axes Are Almost Fused
Bosnia and Herzegovina contains several rival constructions of “the people”: the Serb people of Republika Srpska, a historically vulnerable Bosniak community closely associated with the defense of the Bosnian state, the Croat constituent people demanding “legitimate representation,” and a civic conception centered on citizens irrespective of ethnicity. Does this plurality make Bosnia a particularly distinctive case of populism, because political actors compete not only over who represents “the people” but over who the legitimate people actually are?
Dr. Semir Dzebo: It’s a valuable case for all the work on ethno-populism, in particular, because there is no singular people. In the Constitution, it’s defined as three constituent peoples, and then we have others. As a result, the vertical and horizontal axes that I talked about earlier are almost fused and confused everywhere.
One good example of this is the concern that has existed for years within the Croat community over the issue of legitimate representation: whether the way elections are set up allows Bosniaks, because of their sheer larger numbers, to choose the Croat representative to the presidency, and whether this is what they call legitimate representation.
You see the Bosniak member, Bakir Izetbegović, who is the candidate for presidency, borrowing this a little bit and saying that if the member of Troika is elected to be part of the presidency, that will almost be like token Muslim representation, but that wouldn’t be legitimate.
Then, within the elections for the Croat member of the presidency, the opposition, instead of using anti-elitism, is saying, “Hey, you have the same people who have been running the country for a very long time, and we need change.”
So, it’s quite a distinctive case when it comes to who the people are. It’s really valuable for those of us who study ethno-populism to devote attention to the unique dynamics that we have in Bosnia.
Mladić’s Death Mobilized Pride, Grievance, Fear, and Anger
Ratko Mladić is depicted on a Serbian flag during a political rally in Belgrade, Serbia, on May 29, 2011. Mladić is a former Bosnian Serb military leader. Photo: Dreamstime.
The funeral and commemorative ceremonies for Ratko Mladić appear to have reactivated sharply divergent memories of the 1992–95 war. What emotions and forms of political mobilization did they generate among Serbs, Bosniaks, and Croats? From a populism perspective, did political actors use these ceremonies to reinforce boundaries between “our people” and rival communities or elites, revive narratives of victimhood and betrayal, and frame contemporary conflicts as continuations of unresolved wartime struggles?
Dr. Semir Dzebo: Reactions were obviously different. Among Serbs in Republika Srpska, the official reaction, as well as the reaction by most of the opposition, was, in a way, one of pride, but also of mourning and grievance. There were tribute gatherings across the cities and across the entity, including in Srebrenica itself. Certain politicians were trying to present his imprisonment as suffering endured by the entirety of the Serb people. The resulting events related to it in Serbia were intended to send the message that Serbia and Republika Srpska are as one.
Obviously, for Bosniaks, the emotions were quite different. They were ones of humiliation, fear, and anger. Some of the events, like at the football game, when the fans of Crvena zvezda at the Belgrade Stadium had a banner saying, “Pravac Potočari (Straight to Potočari),” which is an infamous saying by Ratko Mladić, were like a clear invocation of genocide. So, there has also been a lot of mobilization on the part of ordinary people trying to report these to the relevant authorities in order to deal with the rise of genocide-denial sentiment through potentially legal channels.
Bosniak Outbidding Takes the Form of Defending the State
The Bosniak political field is itself fragmented between national-conservative, social-democratic, liberal, and civic currents. Can Bosniak political fragmentation weaken ethnonational polarization by preventing one actor from monopolizing national representation, or does electoral competition instead create incentives for rival parties to demonstrate that they are the more credible defenders of Bosnia, Bosniak security, and the integrity of the state?
Dr. Semir Dzebo: Yes, there’s a good side to this fragmentation, and that is democratic accountability. Because there are multiple legitimate options, there’s a way for the electorate to hold those in power accountable and vote them out once they’re not happy with their performance. But outbidding still happens. In particular, it depends on the level of perceived danger to the state and to the existence of Bosniaks within it.
So, let’s say Bakir Izetbegović has been saying that we might not have a country if, again, Troika and Denis Bećirović are elected to power, and that governing with SNSD and HDZ BiH is really a humiliation. Again, it’s like this populist logic: you cannot really compromise on this; otherwise, you’re selling out the people.
I think everything that’s happened with Dodik also gave Troika an opportunity to try to act as defenders of the nation and maybe make some moves that would make them appear tougher when it comes to matters of security and inter-ethnic relations.
But there is also restraint. For example, I’ve read some analysis of the elections saying that it’s actually been quite subdued, that it’s been unusually quiet when it comes to the elections for the Bosniak presidency. I think Bećirović has said that he doesn’t want to campaign on quarrelsome politics. He said he wants to focus on jobs and crime.
So, one thing that’s different, obviously, is that when it comes to Bosniak outbidding, it takes the form of trying to defend the state. But when it comes to outbidding in the case of Republika Srpska, it goes into the realm of separatism.
The Croat Representation Grievance Is Very Real
A comparable tension exists around Croat demands for “legitimate representation.” Supporters see collective representation as necessary to prevent a numerically larger community from determining who represents Croats, while critics fear that further institutionalizing such principles would deepen ethnic territorialization. Is this ultimately a conflict between two democratic logics—individual political equality and collective national representation—and has the Dayton framework reached the limits of its ability to reconcile them?
Dr. Semir Dzebo: It is really a conflict between two democratic logics. From the standpoint of the Croats in Bosnia, their idea is that the representative of the people in the presidency should be chosen by them. If it’s the Croat representative, it should be chosen only by Croats. Obviously, the Dayton Agreement has different prescriptions, and it’s written into the Constitution that what happens is one person, one vote. So, everyone living in the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina has the right to choose whom they want to vote for.
The ruling in the case of Sejdić-Finci has pushed more towards this idea of individual equality, where they’re more sympathetic towards the first option, while the Constitutional Court has a different idea of what the decision should be. The grievance in the case of the Croat community is very real because Željko Komšić won the seat four times, each time with a substantial amount of non-Croat support. The discourse on it is still very much the same.
Bosnia Is More Ethno-Populist than Religiously Populist
Religion in Bosnia is often intertwined with national identity rather than operating as a wholly independent ideological cleavage: Islam with Bosniak identity, Serbian Orthodoxy with Serb identity, and Catholicism with Croat identity. Would you therefore characterize Bosnia as a case of religious populism, or is it more accurate to speak of ethnonational populism in which religious institutions, symbols, sacred geography, and memories of collective suffering provide legitimacy and emotional reinforcement to political projects whose primary logic remains national?
Dr. Semir Dzebo: I think it’s the latter. It’s more about ethno-national populism. I don’t think there’s much there in terms of sacred reinforcement along religious lines. Because of the nature of how ethnicity works in Bosnia in terms of identity, and because it’s a bit fused with religion, it works as this boundary marker of where one belongs or is supposed to belong. But I don’t see much religious doctrine infused into the way populism or ethno-populism works.
Economic Support Is Far More Popular than Territorial Revision
Photo: Mar Tas / Dreamstime.
Your work on kin-state politics in Serbia finds that nationalist appeals can increase support for cultural and economic assistance to co-ethnics abroad, while public resistance to more aggressive territorial revision remains considerably more robust. What does this tell us about Serbia’s relationship with Republika Srpska? Should we distinguish carefully between popular support in Serbia for protecting or assisting Bosnian Serbs and actual public willingness to endorse secession, territorial revision, or destabilizing intervention?
Dr. Semir Dzebo: What it tells us is that, when it comes to matters of irredentism, there are two very different sides to it. One is assistance in terms of economic and cultural support, and what I found is that people are much more willing to support those in the first place. They can also be convinced to either increase or decrease their support through rather minimal framing.
If you frame it as support being costly—that those are funds we could invest here at home in Serbia—then they will decrease their support. If you convince them that there is this duty to support their ethnic brethren, their ethnic kin in Bosnia, then you can convince them to increase their support.
But when you start talking about changing borders, which would likely result in conflict, people will, as a baseline, be less likely to support that. You are also less likely to convince them to either increase or decrease their support, no matter how you try to frame it.
It means that there is really a limit to how much you can engage in this irredentism, and that as long as it’s economic or cultural, you can work with that, you can increase it if you wish to, and you can try to mobilize support for it. But changing borders is really just not something that people will change their minds about, and it does not seem to be something that is as popular as economic and cultural support.
Kin-State Engagement Must Be Transparent and Neutral
More broadly, how should we distinguish legitimate kin-state engagement from political interference in Bosnia’s elections? Serbia and Croatia have obvious constitutional, ethnic, and historical connections to Bosnian Serbs and Croats, while Russia, Turkey, Hungary, the European Union, and the United States possess very different political, strategic, religious, and economic interests. At what point does diplomatic, cultural, religious, financial, or media engagement cease to be ordinary external influence and begin to distort domestic democratic competition?
Dr. Semir Dzebo: What needs to happen, not just in the case of Bosnia, but also anywhere where there is this ethnic kin element of states having ethnic kin abroad, is that, according to the recommendations of the 2001 Venice Commission report on kin-states and the OSCE prescriptions, any engagement of states with their ethnic kin abroad should, first of all, be transparent in terms of the fact that it is occurring.
It should, in the best-case scenario, be channeled through the institutions of the host state, but if that’s not the case, at least the host state institutions should be made well aware of it. Then, it should not be used for the purposes of mobilizing voters, which we often find to be the case, but it should really be aimed at communities at large.
It shouldn’t be timed to the electoral calendar, but should really be sustained long-term support and engagement. And lastly, it should be neutral to the constitutional order of what we call the host state, where the ethnic kin lives.
If these conditions are not satisfied, then you tend to have friction, which can also result in a worsening of the situation of the co-ethnics that live within the host state.
International Inconsistency Feeds Secessionist Opportunities
Foreign influence is frequently narrated through the same populist vocabulary as domestic conflict: external actors can be represented either as protectors of a threatened community or as illegitimate elites overriding popular sovereignty. In Republika Srpska in particular, opposition to the Office of the High Representative and international intervention has become integral to political mobilization. Does international involvement unintentionally strengthen populist secessionism by allowing domestic elites to present constitutional constraints as foreign domination?
Dr. Semir Dzebo: I talked about it quite a bit in the first part of our interview. It really gives a convenient target for Dodik. For example, one of the things related to the elections now is that these are going to be the first elections with the introduction of new election technology and machines. What is supposed to be a technical safeguard against fraud, Dodik is calling the will of unelected foreigners who are trying to impose this technology for the purposes of potentially defrauding the election.
It’s a very convenient target, and throughout his career, he has always targeted the Office of the High Representative, the previous US administration’s ambassador, the US Embassy, and the other European embassies. But I don’t think that this international involvement really causes secessionism. There are all of these other domestic motivations that translate into support for secession. Even if international involvement feeds or gives potential targets for anti-elitism, we also see from this that anti-elitism doesn’t really translate into support for secession.
What, in the case of Bosnia, feeds secession is the opening of potential opportunities to advance secessionist causes because of the inconsistency of the international actors in Bosnia. We have the former High Representative announcing his resignation, and then there’s a bit of disagreement over who the new High Representative is going to be. There might be changing opinions on the mandate of the High Representative in Washington, D.C., as opposed to the opinions in the EU.
So, the inconsistency, the disagreement within the international community, is providing these openings for those who might favor secession in Republika Srpska to try to advance it a bit more, but not involvement per se.
Bosnia Is Highly Vulnerable to Disinformation
Illustration: Shutterstock / Skorzewiak.
Information politics seems especially important in this election. ODIHR is explicitly monitoring social-media campaigning as well as foreign and domestic misinformation, disinformation, and interference. In a society where media spaces are already fragmented along political, territorial, and ethnonational lines, how vulnerable is Bosnia and Herzegovina to coordinated information campaigns? And is their principal danger that they persuade citizens of entirely new ideas, or that they intensify pre-existing fears, historical grievances, and perceptions of ethnic threat?
Dr. Semir Dzebo: Structurally, when it comes to disinformation, Bosnia is very vulnerable. The media space is very fragmented, and there is also a wide reach of media from Serbia and Croatia. A lot of people also get their information from Facebook. There’s been great work done by people at organizations like Istinomjer and Raskrinkavanje, who have documented bot networks and Facebook pages that have been used to smear the opposition and politicians, as well as fabricated posts and a lot of AI-generated content.
Polarization is omnipresent, with ethnic polarization also omnipresent in the coverage of the news, and I don’t think the current fines for any misuse of media are really meaningful. I also don’t think that there’s any danger that it’s going to convert people who weren’t nationalists into nationalists, but there is a danger that it’s just going to amplify nationalist sentiment among those who were already predisposed to it.
One particular danger that I talked about just a while ago is the denial of results. Dodik has already planted the seeds with his comments on the new technology—that the international community is doing it so they could defraud SNSD and him, and that it’s a Western tool of fraud, as he calls it. The danger is that, through the media that is co-opted by SNSD, there’s going to be a rejection of the results, or some of it happening even in advance, whatever the results turn out to be.
The Challenge Is Separating Populism from Antagonism
You have also worked on computational approaches to identifying populist discourse, including research suggesting that large language models can detect context-sensitive people-versus-elite framing with accuracy approaching expert human coding. Could such tools help us map the 2026 Bosnian campaign across Bosnian, Serbian, and Croatian language environments—identifying when ordinary nationalism becomes populist, when religious or historical symbolism is mobilized, and how narratives travel between domestic political actors and external information ecosystems? What methodological cautions would be necessary in such a deeply context-dependent political setting?
Dr. Semir Dzebo: It’s a good question. Having worked in this area, there’s promise there, but I would still say that, for a place as complicated as Bosnia, especially when it comes to distinguishing all of the things that you said from one another, I don’t think we are that close to doing all of it.
But some of the work that I’ve done with my colleagues in Team Populism has really managed to use large language models to replicate the work of human coders when it comes to recognizing populism. As part of all of the testing that we have done, some of it included speeches from Montenegro in Montenegrin, and the results there were really encouraging. Obviously, that would also work in the case of Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian texts.
One of the cautions that I had from similar work on these computational approaches is that it’s sometimes hard to separate populism from just antagonism. The hostility between ethnic groups is everywhere, but not all of it has these elements of populism, like people-centrism, anti-elitism, and Manicheanism. So that would be my primary concern. It’s also about some of the contextual elements—the extent to which those would work.
One other thing that we should try doing is looking at how a lot of the campaign has moved on to digital things like songs, video, and symbols. So, for scholars of populism who work on those things, that would be another interesting thing to look at.
Bosnia Lives in Stable Instability
And finally, Dr. Dzebo, thirty-one years after Dayton, is Bosnia and Herzegovina approaching a point at which the original peace-making consensus can no longer provide a sustainable democratic equilibrium? Dayton successfully institutionalized safeguards against domination, but it also entrenched ethnicity as a central principle of political representation. Looking beyond October 4, do you see a plausible path toward a renewed constitutional settlement that preserves collective security while expanding civic equality and cross-ethnic political competition—or is the more likely trajectory a continued fragmentation in which competing national communities increasingly interpret sovereignty, democracy, and even the legitimacy of the state itself in incompatible ways?
Dr. Semir Dzebo: Hard question. I’ve heard someone once say that the best compromise is the one that leaves everybody unhappy, or at least a peace settlement. In a way, that’s the case in Bosnia, in that it’s a peace settlement that is also supposed to work as a democratic constitution. It has really accomplished the first task. It has not really been great at the second task.
We have this stable instability in Bosnia. There’s no active armed conflict, but there’s always, underneath the surface, some inter-ethnic tension. And also, the Dayton Agreement, the way it was framed, has created this self-reinforcing loop. The institutions, because they’re set up in a way that makes ethnicity the primary political identity, strengthen all these things that I found to also be feeding into secessionism in Republika Srpska, like in-group bias, which I found to be the strongest predictor of support for secession.
I don’t think we’re going to have, anytime soon, some grand settlement, but we’re also not going to have, at least in my opinion, dissolution. The most plausible path is one of incremental moves towards EU accession. Implementing the Strasbourg judgments would be a plausible path forward. Trying to strengthen state capacity through the reform agenda would be a plausible path forward.
In the slightly longer term, the priority should also be ending segregated schooling, because that would produce very positive societal benefits, as well as trying to add some electoral incentives that would emphasize winning votes across communities. Those incremental steps would have a very positive effect on the state of politics in the country.
One thing that I found in my paper on secessionism and populism is economic grievance. So I said in-group bias was the strongest predictor. Economic grievance was the second strongest driver of secessionist sentiment. And this really gives reason for some cautious optimism, because material conditions can change, in a way, more easily than all of the prescriptions of Dayton and the Constitution.
Trying to address the fact that more than half of young people are interested in leaving the country is really a pressing problem, and trying to improve economic conditions should be the priority of both domestic politicians and the international community. That has the potential to have very positive knock-on effects for societal cohesion and interethnic dynamics.
In this ECPS interview, Dr. Mara Nogueira examines Brazil’s 2026 presidential election through the intertwined dynamics of US influence, Bolsonarism, Lulism, religion, labor, and political identity. She argues that the role of the United States—and particularly the alignment between Donald Trump and the Bolsonaro family—has become a consequential new element in the contest, describing the election as “a very important and dangerous one.” Dr. Nogueira also reflects on the durability of Bolsonarism, the increasingly defensive character of Lulism, the political weight of evangelical networks, and the effects of precarious work, entrepreneurialism, and social media. More broadly, she situates Brazil within a transnational landscape of authoritarian and revanchist populism while stressing the importance of class, region, religion, and changing expectations of the state.
As Brazil approaches the October 4, 2026 presidential election, the contest is unfolding amid persistent polarization, a resilient yet more defensive Lulism, the continued strength of Bolsonarism beyond Jair Bolsonaro himself, and increasingly salient cleavages around religion, public security, welfare, and regional inequality. These dynamics are particularly significant in light of the research of Dr. Mara Nogueira, Senior Lecturer in the School of Social Sciences at Birkbeck, University of London, whose work examines the intersections of populism, urban politics, labor, inequality, informality, and political belonging in Brazil, with particular attention to revanchist populism, antipetismo, and the social and spatial foundations of Bolsonarism.
In this interview with the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Dr. Nogueira emphasizes that Brazil’s 2026 election cannot be understood exclusively through domestic political cleavages. Alongside the enduring influence of anti-PT sentiment, regional divisions, gender, class, and religion, she identifies the role of the United States—and particularly the Trump administration—as a new and consequential element in the electoral landscape. “One thing that you didn’t mention in your question and that I think is worth pointing out is the influence of the US in this election,” she stresses, adding pointedly: “They’re not hiding it.”
For Dr. Nogueira, this external dimension became especially visible when President Donald Trump imposed tariffs on Brazil, measures that she interprets as carrying “a very high political element.” She also points to broader American strategic interests in Brazil and argues that political influence should be understood alongside economic considerations, including US interest in Brazilian mineral resources. “There are several interests at play,” she notes, “political influence being one of them.”
The contrast with the 2022 election is, in her view, particularly significant. While Washington inevitably had interests in Brazilian politics under President Joe Biden, Dr. Nogueira argues that the current situation is qualitatively different because “the alignment between Trump and the Bolsonaro family is very well known.” This relationship, she cautions, constitutes “a dynamic there that will need more attention and more scrutiny.”
It is in this context that Dr. Nogueira describes the 2026 election as both unusually consequential and potentially dangerous. According to her, the presence of “one political project that’s very well aligned with American interests”means that, “with Trump in government,” the consequences “could be a very disastrous thing for Brazil and Latin America.”
The interview therefore situates Brazil’s electoral contest not only within the domestic struggle between Lulism and Bolsonarism, but also within a broader transnational configuration linking Trumpism, far-right populism, economic restructuring, religious mobilization, and changing expectations about the role of the state.
Beyond the question of US influence, the interview also explores the changing balance between Lulism and Bolsonarism as political projects. Dr. Nogueira argues that Lulism remains anchored in the Northeast and among lower-income voters, but has become increasingly defensive. She suggests that “Lulism has perhaps become a victim of its own success,” as social mobility has altered popular aspirations and Lula’s political appeal has become more closely associated with defending past achievements than promising transformative change.
Religion is another central theme. Dr. Nogueira stresses that evangelical identity has become deeply embedded in everyday social networks and political value formation, particularly in Brazil’s urban peripheries. At the same time, she cautions against treating “the evangelical vote” as a homogeneous bloc, emphasizing the intersection of religion with class, region, gender, and other identities.
The interview further situates Brazil within broader transformations in labor and political communication. Dr. Nogueira connects precarious employment, entrepreneurialism, and changing expectations of the state to the appeal of authoritarian and revanchist populism, while also highlighting the growing importance of social media and algorithmic echo chambers in shaping political identities and limiting communication across electoral divides.
Here is our interview with Dr. Mara Nogueira, edited lightly to enhance clarity, readability, and overall flow for publication.
The Election Will Probably Be Decided by a Very Tight Margin
People shout slogans during an International Workers’ Day demonstration in São Paulo, Brazil, on May 1, 2026. Photo: Dreamstime.
Dr. Nogueira, welcome! Brazil enters the October 4 election with Lula and Flávio Bolsonaro separated by only a few points in recent polls, while runoff scenarios also remain extremely tight. What, in your view, are the most important forces currently shaping this contest: evaluations of Lula’s government, the persistence of anti-PT sentiment, the durability of Bolsonarism, economic concerns, public security, religion, or something else? And which of these factors do you think scholars have tended to underestimate?
Dr. Mara Nogueira: Thanks again for having me. As you mentioned, this is turning out to be a very tight race. There’s been some oscillation in the polls, and we can talk about those as we progress. But what the polls have shown since the beginning of the electoral campaign is that a large chunk of the electorate is very stable, showing loyalty to the two sides of this contest: electoral support for Lula on the one hand and for Flávio on the other. So, what we are seeing is that the election will probably be decided by a very tight margin and by a group of voters who are more moderate and not necessarily aligned with either of the two main political groups in Brazil.
All the reasons you have mentioned are relevant explanations for the contest. They’re playing different roles. But I thought that, before we went into the analysis, it would be worth mentioning a bit more about the polls—a more broken-down analysis of what they’re showing. They reveal some of the important factors shaping the contest.
Lula, for instance, is leading in nine states, according to the latest Quest poll. Out of those nine, eight are in the northeast of Brazil. The northeast remains one of his strongholds. Flávio is leading in eight states, and his support is not as centered in any specific region in Brazil. It’s a little more spread out. They are technically tied in nine states, so there are a lot of places where you can’t call a winner yet. Although you can’t call a winner anywhere right now, two of the places where they are tied are São Paulo, which is obviously Brazil’s largest electoral college of voters, and Minas Gerais, which is where I’m from and has perhaps also been Brazil’s swing state, to borrow an American term.
In the last two elections, in 2018 and 2022, whoever won in Minas Gerais won the national election. The margins have been very close as well. In the latest election, Lula won by something like 0.5% of the voters, and that was more or less the margin by which he won in Minas Gerais as well.
So, you have this sort of regional aspect to the race. The other thing to consider is gender. Lula is ahead amongst women, whereas Flávio is ahead amongst men. This is a polarization that is not uncommon in other electoral races around the world.
Lula is ahead in all age groups at the moment, but his lowest margin is amongst younger voters, 16 to 34 years old. Lula is leading in the lowest income bracket, which is up to two minimum wages, and leading by a very high margin. They are almost tied in the middle-income bracket, which is between two and five minimum wages, and Flávio is leading amongst those with higher incomes, which is more than five minimum wages.
Finally, religion, as you mentioned, is also another important element. Lula is leading amongst Catholics, and Flávio leads amongst evangelicals. So, you have some important aspects that are revealed by the polls, and what people have talked about since the beginning is that women’s votes would be very important in this contest.
US Influence Is Shaping Brazil’s Election
It also shows that there are several internal factors shaping this election. But one thing that you didn’t mention in your question and that I think is worth pointing out is the influence of the US in this election. They’re not hiding it. Even before the electoral race began, when Trump imposed tariffs on Brazil, those tariffs had a very high political element to them. He mentioned Bolsonaro, for instance, the father, in his tweet when he announced the tariffs.
Now, in Latin America, in the latest elections, the US has had some role in influencing the race in all of them. Brazil is no different. Brazil is a very important country in the regional context, and the US is very interested in some minerals that Brazil owns. There are several interests at play, political influence being one of them.
I think this is one element that is shaping the election, and perhaps it’s a new element in comparison with the 2022 contest. Not to say that the US wouldn’t have had any interest in Brazil’s election back then, but we had Biden in the American government, whereas now, with Trump, the alignment between Trump and the Bolsonaro family is very well known. So, there is definitely a dynamic there that will need more attention and more scrutiny.
That also makes this election for Brazil a very important and dangerous one, because there is one political project that’s very well aligned with American interests and, with Trump in government, that could be a very disastrous thing for Brazil and Latin America.
Anti-PT Sentiment Shapes the Race a Lot
Supporters of Flávio Bolsonaro gather on Avenida Paulista in São Paulo for an Independence Day rally under the slogan “Brazil Will Win.” Photo: Dreamstime.
The 2026 election is striking because Jair Bolsonaro is absent from the ballot, yet Flávio Bolsonaro remains highly competitive. Does this suggest that Bolsonarism has successfully outgrown Jair Bolsonaro as an individual leader and become a more durable political identity? Or does the reliance on another member of the Bolsonaro family indicate that the movement remains fundamentally personalistic and dynastic?
Dr. Mara Nogueira: The one thing that you mentioned in your first question, which was the anti-PT sentiment, is very relevant here as well to understand. Because if you look at the polls for the second round at this stage, we can’t take them seriously because things will change, for sure, after the first round. But what they show is that any candidate—because what’s happening now is that you have Lula on the one side, which represents the center left in Brazil, and all the other candidates with any meaningful vote base are on the right and on the far right. They’re all somehow in the Bolsonarism political force that you mentioned. What the polls show is that Lula would be more or less in a similar position. So, anti-PT sentiment does shape the race a lot. And that sentiment has been very enduring in Brazilian society. The question is: does anti-PT sentiment necessarily mean Bolsonarism?
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that we have Flávio as a contestant rather than, for instance, Tarcisio Gomes de Freitas, who is the current governor of Sao Paulo and who is running again for election in Sao Paulo, and whom a lot of the elites in Brazil would have preferred as a candidate rather than Flávio. But his father—the family has an interest in the continuity of their dynasty in government.
Bolsonarism Is Part of a Wider Trend of Far-Right Populism
When we’re talking about Brazilian elections, we have to think about it in a context as well, because the far right is a global phenomenon. It’s not just a Brazilian thing. In Brazil, Bolsonaro was, and perhaps remains, even if in prison, the leader of this movement. So, as I already mentioned, despite the numerous scandals surrounding Flávio’s candidacy, he remains competitive partially because of his surname, and partially also because he’s the candidate who has the highest chance of winning against Lula. He’s surfing the wave of his father’s popularity, even if he lacks much of the charisma and the passion that his father had. His voters as well are much less passionate and much less vocal about their support. But they are still very loyal.
So, on the one hand, Bolsonarism is part of a wider trend of far-right populism that I see as a result of multiple factors. And some of those are global, like changes in the global market and the rise of entrepreneurialism as an individualistic response to worsening economic conditions. Also, the limits of representative democracy have to be mentioned. And little is said about how the traditional right has been shattered in multiple places, like the US with the rise of Trumpism, and in the UK with the rise of Reform UK and the demise of the Tory Party.
In Brazil, we saw the shrinking of parties like PSDB, which, for several elections, was the antagonist of the Workers’ Party, with Fernando Ricardozo and later José Serra and Geraldo Alckmin who is now Lula’s vice president. They have lost a lot of support, lost importance. Some have called this polarization, but there are critics who see this term as painting a false equivalence between these two political forces, because what has really happened in Brazil, and in much of the world, is that the political spectrum has been pushed to the right. As a result, even some left-wing parties have had to move a little bit more towards the center. Yes, it’s a polarization, but there’s one on the extreme right, and the other one has been pushed much more to the center.
The question then remains to be asked: what makes the far right so successful in the world right now? In my work, I have talked about the notion of revanchist populism, which, together with my colleague Ryan Sentner, we termed to talk about political movements of people wanting to take back the nation from undeserving groups. If you think about the Global North, if you think about the UK and the US, the most visible element of this political movement is the anti-migration sentiment. Whereas in Latin America, the main issue has been about criminality. These are two political questions that the left has a very difficult time addressing, and the right is quick to respond to with aggressive politics that cater to people’s concerns without actually delivering solutions to very real problems.
For instance, in Brazil, people are facing insecurity in their daily lives. Bolsonaro’s pro-gun agenda, which his son also sponsors, is completely harmful according to all serious research that you have around security, but it appeals to a part of the electorate who is dealing with the real issues of lacking safety in their everyday lives.
In my own research, I also talk about changes in the labor market, which are very important to think about, not only in the Brazilian election but in this changing panorama of politics in the whole world, and which explain the rise of authoritarian populism. Stable jobs are becoming less common, and social democratic states were very much founded on the role of the state as the mediator between capital and work. What we see now is a dissolution of this pact as a result of decades of neoliberal policies and austerity, and the rise of entrepreneurialism as an individual solution towards essentially a collective problem creates a situation in which people are less supportive of the government.
So, this question around what is the government and what’s the role of the government is very important in the current election. Because if you’re a worker, for instance, the state can protect you. Social protection for workers has been one of the key roles of the state in democracies. But when you are an entrepreneur, the state is the one who is taxing you and regulating you. So, there is less appreciation for what the state represents, which is a collective provider of services and rights.
Of course, in Brazil, corruption scandals like the most recent one, which is the Banco Master or the Master Bank fraud, reinforce the idea that the state is nothing but a corrupt machine that exists to suck resources from working people rather than provide rights. In my conversations in the field, I have tried to talk to people about the corruption of private actors, which is something very few people talk about. And I have talked about how billionaires don’t pay taxes, but people don’t seem to care about that as much because they see taxes as being poured into inefficient and corrupt states.
In that context, candidates like Flávio in Brazil and Javier Milei in Argentina are gaining ground because they promise essentially to axe the state, which, for a proportion of the electorate, sounds like a good idea because they perceive the state as a hindrance rather than something which is providing them with services and rights.
I think another element worth mentioning is social media, because the way people consume information has changed massively as well. In each election in Brazil, we have had—the first one where social media had an impact was in 2018. When Bolsonaro was first elected, when the TV ads that were usually the TV political campaign, which had been very important up until 2018, had very little impact because people were consuming news and information much more through WhatsApp and other social media than they were through the TV.
That trend has continued and has become even deeper with time. The way that algorithms create echo chambers means that the information that I see is very different from the information other people see. Sometimes, obviously, it’s hard for candidates to really reach across and reach other candidates’ bubbles with information. There’s very little that can do that. Just big scandals can cross those bubbles.
Religion is a main factor as well, but I think you have a question about that later, so I’ll save my answer.
Lulism Has Perhaps Become a Victim of Its Own Success
Brazilia’s Luiz Inácio Lula is seen during the 2022 election campaign in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil on October 20, 2022. Photo: Aline Alcantara.
At the same time, Lulism appears resilient but more defensive than during Lula’s earlier presidencies. Lula remains strong among lower-income voters, Catholics, older voters, and in the Northeast, but his government enters the election without overwhelming approval. How would you characterize the current state of Lulism? Is it still a transformative political project, or has it become increasingly a coalition organized around social protection, democratic stability, and resistance to the radical right?
Dr. Mara Nogueira: What the polls show, as I mentioned in the response to your first question, is that Lula is very strong in the Northeast and also very strong with the poorest voters, up to two minimum wages. This group remains, like the Northeast, a stronghold of Lulism, and the poorest electorate also remains a stronghold of Lula. In the case of the Northeast, the region, which is the poorest in the country, has benefited from Bolsa Familia and other social programs that are essentially the backbone of what has been termed Lulism.
I look back at André Singer’s article, when he first coined this term, and in that article, what he was doing was calling attention to a change in the composition of Lula’s voters from 2002 to 2006, which were the first two elections that Lula won. In 2006, he had lost ground with the more educated, the middle and upper class, which was his main electorate in 2002 and also had been his main electorate throughout the three elections that he lost in ’89, ’94, and ’98. But this loss of this electorate, which was more loyal to him, was compensated for with electoral gains in what Singer called back then the subproletariat, which essentially means the poorest and the precarious workers, who are generally also informal—not waged workers. Also the unemployed, who benefited most from Lula’s social programmes, particularly Bolsa Familia.
So, when you ask if Lulism is still a transformative political project, or has it become increasingly a coalition organised around social protection, democratic stability, and resistance to the radical right, I think you’re pointing to something relevant, because Lula’s major achievement in his political life has been to uplift a huge amount of people from poverty. And a lot of people remember that, and a large amount of those who benefited are still loyal to him, as we can see from the poll numbers. He’s strong in office and amongst those with the lowest incomes.
But Lulism has perhaps become a victim of its own success, and there are other people talking about that, such as Rosana Pinheiro-Machado and Laura Carvalho. Both have published interesting articles recently in Brazil’s main media outlet, which is from Sao Paulo, talking a bit about these changes in people’s aspirations in recent years in Brazil, mostly people’s economic aspirations.
So, a lot of those who left poverty, as well as their sons and daughters, now want more. They are not the poorest of the poor anymore. They want—they aspire to something else. They aspire to social mobility, to being able to afford services and goods that would represent that transition. And I think, again, social media has an important role here because it really shapes people’s aspirations to access products and services that they are not able to access at the moment.
The Left Has Become Conservative While the Right Is Promising Change
I think what has been happening is that Lula’s campaign has been very focused on defending his legacy, defending the achievements of his previous governments, which are very important. He took Brazil out of the hunger map twice. He lifted a lot of people out of poverty. But this legacy is not taking him far enough at this point, because he needs to promise more than what he’s done already. He needs to perhaps promise a more transformative project.
It’s not just Lula who is struggling with that. That is an issue with all kinds of social democratic parties in the world, which also explains the rise of the right, which has become the more disruptive group. The left, and Lula is an example of that, has become conservative in the sense that it’s about defending a legacy, it’s about defending rights, it’s about conserving social gains, and the right is promising change.
I don’t believe that it’s change for the better, that it’s radical change that necessarily delivers what people want—these aspirations. But for a lot of people, that promise of radical change is very appealing. I think that shaped the 2018 election in which Bolsonaro won, is shaping a lot of the changes that we see in the UK, for instance, with Reform UK gaining ground, and explains a bit Trump’s win in the US. So, this idea that what people have right now is not enough and they want more, and they want radical transformation that the left has not been able to promise.
Lula Is a Victim of His Conciliatory Agenda
The government has placed renewed emphasis on Bolsa Família, debt relief, fuel prices, and household income during the final phase of the campaign. To what extent can the classic material foundations of Lulism still mobilize voters in a political environment where religion, security, morality, and cultural identity have become increasingly salient? Has the relationship between redistribution and electoral loyalty weakened?
Dr. Mara Nogueira: The impact of some of Lula’s more recent actions is yet to be captured by the polls. There was a rise in Bolsa Familia, for instance, and the most recent of his political moves has been to ban betting in Brazil, which has been identified as a huge problem connected to growing indebtedness, but also as a health problem in Brazil. You have addiction to betting becoming a key issue, sucking resources out of an already strained public health system.
Some of those moves haven’t been reflected in the polls yet. So we are waiting to see if they will have an impact on those swing voters that, as I said in the beginning, will be the most important in deciding the election.
But there is definitely a limit to the ways that better economic indicators, such as low inflation and low unemployment, are affecting people’s votes. There are other people—Laura Carvalho, in this journal article that I was talking about, mentions that. I think we have partially two issues.
One is that we have low inflation, but price levels are very high, and these high price levels are still an enduring consequence of the pandemic, and also perhaps Bolsonaro’s government, when we saw rising prices during his four years in government. We have low inflation, but what low inflation means is that prices are growing at a lower pace. So people are still perceiving that they’re spending a lot of money on products and services. There’s not a lot of money left after you’ve paid for your rent, and for food, and for fuel, and so on and so forth.
The other thing is that, yes, we have very low unemployment, historically low in Brazil, but Brazil remains a low-salary economy. If you look at the 2022 census results, which are now a bit old but give us a snapshot of Brazil, they showed that almost 70% of Brazilians earn up to two minimum wages. So there’s low unemployment, and incomes are growing ever so slowly, but you have a huge amount of Brazilians who are very low paid. With two minimum wages in Brazil, you’re very strained if you’re paying rent, if you’re paying for food and for fuel. There’s very little left at the end of the month.
When people post a show and people were asking, “Do you think you have enough money to pay for your monthly expenses?” a lot of people are saying no to that. Then you have indebtedness as an issue. As you mentioned, Lula has responded to that with several programmes. But one of the impediments to these policies being effective is that Brazil has a very high interest rate. That is a legacy of the Real Plan in 1994. When we controlled inflation, one of the elements of that plan was high interest rates. That has been a crucial characteristic of the Brazilian economy ever since. So indebtedness will be very difficult to deal with as long as we have high interest rates.
What I think is worth mentioning is that, just going back a little bit to Lulism and so on, and its constraints or its limitations, as I already mentioned, Lula delivered lower poverty rates and a stable economy, but without any radical changes in terms of the economic structure. I’m not saying that Flávio’s programme of government is better. It’s very unclear in its economic proposals. But there’s definitely a limit to the inclusion without structural change, or without challenging established elites, that Lula has promoted.
Lula, in some senses, is a victim of his conciliatory agenda, which makes him a very skillful politician, but brings limits when you are trying to please groups with very divergent needs and agendas. You’re bound to be unable to deliver radical change because, to do that, you have to actually step into very established interests.
For instance, if we go back again to Lula’s first election that he won in 2002, back then he assured markets by choosing a businessman as his vice president and promising to keep the main elements of his predecessor’s economic policy in place: inflation targets, primary budget surpluses, and a floating exchange rate. This macroeconomic tripod has become so key that nobody even mentions it anymore as something that’s challenged.
The Challenge for the Left Is to Offer a Political Project of Real Change
Rather than breaking sharply with the previous government, Lula signalled back then continuity in macroeconomic management by expanding social programmes. So the growth that he achieved and the inclusion were via taking people out of poverty and into the market, with real increases in minimum wages also boosting domestic demand. And as many have observed, it was a process of inclusion via consumption, essentially. People became consumers. The issue is that, when you’re a consumer, the state does not enter your life as a provider of rights, but as a tax collector.
You can see reflections of that in his government’s attempt to tax international purchases, aiming at websites such as Shein and Alibaba, which have grown immensely in Brazil. This tax was an attempt to help local businesses that are unable to compete with international brands, particularly Chinese. The reaction was so intense that the government has had to make a U-turn on that policy.
So the challenge for Lula and for the left in the world right now is to offer a political project of real change that can appeal to people’s aspirations. But this is not a very easy task, as shown by the difficulties of left-wing parties in various places, particularly in Latin America right now.
Religion Is Definitely a Big Factor Shaping Brazilian Politics
Tourists enjoy the first sunset after a week of rain and thunderstorms from Corcovado Hill, overlooking Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on March 3, 2013, with the Christ the Redeemer statue above the city. Photo: Kseniya Ragozina / Dreamstime.
Recent polling reveals one of the clearest religious divides in Brazilian politics: Flávio Bolsonaro has a substantial advantage among evangelicals, while Lula remains considerably stronger among Catholics. How decisive is this religious cleavage for the 2026 election, and what mechanisms actually convert religious affiliation into electoral behavior—pastoral leadership, church-based social networks, moral issues, digital communication, or broader perceptions of social order and threat?
Dr. Mara Nogueira: When I was talking about the polls in the beginning, I mentioned that Flávio Bolsonaro is leading amongst evangelicals, whereas Lula is leading amongst Catholics. In Brazil, religion is definitely a big factor that has been shaping society and politics for a longer period now.
It’s interesting to notice that Brazil is the only country in the world where we have observed a massive change in religious identity without any influence of the state. You have about a third of Brazilians right now, as shown by a recent research survey, who are evangelicals. If you look at Brazil in the 1950s, you had 90% of Brazilians who were Catholic back then. You have this huge change in religious identity in the country, which is bound to have a lot of societal consequences.
One of the things to notice is that the evangelical church has become, for a lot of people, the main way through which they find community and belonging, particularly in the peripheries of urban centers. In any peripheral neighborhood in Brazil, there are a number of evangelical churches. You might not find any sort of public services, you might not find many public schools or public health centers, but you will find evangelical churches almost anywhere in Brazil.
This religious identity is not just about values. It’s about people’s everyday lives, who forms their social networks, who they talk to, and how they form their values as well. When you mention that there are different aspects through which religion enters political life, I think the main one is through the formation of values. For years now, essentially, the ways that people see the world have been shaped by religious identities. When the electorate comes in and one candidate says things that are aligned with those values, this candidate is bound to attract more voters amongst those religious communities.
Obviously, it’s not just about values. You have different political figures in Brazil, like Silas Malafaia, for instance, who use their religious communities to support particular candidates. There is also pastoral leadership, as you mentioned: people who are leaders of religious communities, who really tell the community who to vote for.
Religion Shapes Electoral Behavior, but It Intersects with Other Identities
There has been a recent survey that Quest, alongside the Institute of Religious Studies in Brazil, has just published, and it shows a lot of interesting things about how religion shapes politics in Brazil. One of the things that it mentions is that when you think about people having religious identities, it’s not the only identity that they have.
For instance, if you take a person who is evangelical, the polls show that the majority of evangelicals vote for Flávio, but if you take, for instance, an evangelical person who lives in the Northeast and makes up to two minimum wages, there’s a big chance as well that this person might vote for Lula. So, you have these intersecting identities with religion, which also shape people’s votes, apart from religion itself.
One of the things that I thought was interesting that this survey showed is that about eight in 10 respondents were opposed to political discussions in churches. Around nine in 10 reject the presence of electoral candidates in religious services. Yes, religion might shape their identities, might shape their political votes, but people don’t want people asking for votes inside churches or asking for support or talking about politics inside churches. That doesn’t stop it from happening, but there is a rejection of that.
There’s an interesting point despite this idea that religion alone cannot explain people’s behaviors. There’s a new controversy every week in Brazil that is shaping the election. The most recent one has to do with Brazil’s patron saint, which is Nossa Senhora de Aparecida, or Lady Aparecida, who is Brazil’s patron saint.
Rumors are circulating that Flávio wins, due to an old bill proposed by one of his supporters to change Brazil’s patron saint, he will propose a change in Brazil’s patron saint. That has had such an effect that he had to record a video saying that he wouldn’t do that, holding a little doll of Lady Aparecida to cater to the Catholics. Because he can’t afford to lose. If you take people who are more educated, who are older, but are not very aligned with either of them, they are swing voters. So, the race is so tight that you can’t really lose voters in demographics where otherwise a candidate is more dominant.
This anecdote shows the importance of religion in Brazil and how it’s really shaping people’s electoral behaviors, but at the same time, it intersects with other identities when you’re thinking about how people actually vote.
Lula Is Trying to Reach Evangelicals Through Their Other Identities
At the same time, the category of “the evangelical vote” risks obscuring major denominational, class, gender, racial, and regional differences. Are there signs that evangelical support for Bolsonarism is becoming more politically differentiated? And could Lula’s attempts to engage evangelical constituencies meaningfully narrow this gap, or has evangelical identification with the Bolsonaro camp become too deeply institutionalized?
Dr. Mara Nogueira: As I already said, what this survey that I was mentioning shows is that religion alone cannot explain it. You have all these other social differences—class, gender, race, but also regional differences—which are shaping people’s electoral identities and votes.
Even though religion alone also has an impact, not just because of values but, as I mentioned before, also because certain key religious figures, particularly in the evangelical church, have very strong political affiliations with Bolsonarism. I didn’t mention before that it’s not just about the presidential race, but also the Congress. You have a whole group in the Congress, which is the Bible group, which is very much aligned with evangelical identities.
When you’re thinking about religion, there’s also the Congress to think about. Because we are very focused on the presidential race—because obviously it’s the tight race, it’s the one that polarises Brazil the most—the race to the Congress, and the power that the Congress has gained recently in Brazilian politics, is also very worth talking about.
But in relation to your question more specifically, Lula trying to gain the evangelical vote through a particular lens, like the evangelical vote, will not be very successful. But he’s trying to reach the evangelical vote through their other identities. For instance, if you look at the survey that I was talking about, which was with people throughout the whole of Brazil and people who are religious independently of their religion, what the survey shows is that there are divides between evangelicals and Catholics, but there are also a lot of convergences. One of them is that they support Bolsa Familia as a social program.
When Lula increases the Bolsa Familia payments, he is somehow trying to cater to the evangelicals who are supportive of Bolsa Familia. When he bans betting in Brazil, he is catering to the evangelicals to an extent. Rejection of betting in Brazil was at 75%, so he’s definitely going to get to evangelical families as well.
Whether they’re going to swing the vote to him remains to be seen, but there are measures that he’s taking that aim at groups that will also be evangelical. If he tries to cater to evangelicals through their evangelical identity, it’s going to be ineffective because he doesn’t have a history of connection to evangelicals, and he’s going to look fake, and I don’t think that would be very useful for him.
Bolsonarism Is Part of a Global Phenomenon
Labour Day celebrations at Old Town Square in Prague on May 1, 2017, featuring a banner depicting democracy as a leaf eaten by caterpillars labeled Putin, Kaczyński, Orbán, Babiš, Trump, and Fico. Photo: Jolanta Wojcicka.
Bolsonarism is frequently compared with Trumpism, and your work on revanchist populism situates Brazil within a broader geography of angry, restorative populisms. Yet Brazil differs sharply from the United States in its party system, religiosity, racial formation, labor informality, welfare state, and territorial inequalities. Which dimensions of Trumpism and Bolsonarism are genuinely comparable, and where does that analogy obscure more than it reveals? How would you situate Brazil alongside cases such as Milei’s Argentina or Bukele’s El Salvador?
Dr. Mara Nogueira: As I mentioned in the beginning, Bolsonarism in Brazil is part of a global phenomenon: the rise of the far right, or the authoritarian right, or revanchist populism, to use the term that Brian Sentner and myself have coined. It has to do with what I was talking about, which is this promise of radical change and this promise to retake the nation from undeserving populations. That is at the abstract level. But who those undeserving people are will be shaped by the different geographies and the different cultures and societies that we are talking about.
In the special issue that we had that talked about revanchist populism, one of the cleavages that we looked at in the US is this very clear division between the urban and rural vote. The urban vote tends to go to the Democratic Party, and the rural vote tends to go to Trump. In Brazil, we don’t necessarily have that.
You have the urban peripheries as key sites to think about swing votes—how peripheries have changed from supporting the left to supporting the right in 2018, and have remained divided ever since. What we see in Brazil, which is worth noting, is that urban peripheries are places where people are dealing with lack of infrastructure, where people are facing long commutes to work, and where people are using a very strained public health system.
Flávio Looks to Milei for the Economy and Bukele for Security
So, it ties back to that question of the government and of the state more broadly that I mentioned earlier: What’s the role of the state, and what is the state doing in my life? What candidates like Trump, Flávio, Milei, and Bukele promise is a liberal state in the economic sense and a strong state in the sense of controlling criminality and migration. Flávio, for instance, when he’s talking about his economic agenda and his agenda for public security, mentions Milei for the economy and Bukele for security. Those are two very important reference points for his campaign.
What you see is what the state should be doing. The state should not be taxing, and it ties back to that question that I mentioned earlier of how inclusion via consumption, on the one hand, as a policy, has turned people into consumers, and the demise of stable jobs. That’s not just a Brazilian thing. That’s also a very global phenomenon.
In Brazil, informality has been an issue for a much longer time, but uncertainty in the job market has become more relevant, and people become entrepreneurs as an individual response to problems around the lack of stable jobs. It turns people into entrepreneurs on the one hand and consumers on the other hand. For both of those positions in society, the state is not a provider of rights, it’s not a provider of services. The state is collecting taxes and regulating.
You see that, as I mentioned, just going back to the attempt of the state to tax international purchases. It’s a very interesting thing to look at, and how it backlashed against the government, because people want to consume, and they want to buy as cheaply as possible. That also has to do with their aspirations, which is another thing that I mentioned shaping people’s political choices and identities.
So, yes, there’s a lot of difference between Brazil and the US, but at the abstract level, you have that question around radical change and the role of the government. And this promise of freedom in the economic sense with conservatism and a strong state against migration and criminality.
Bolsonarism Is Very Much Alive and Will Stay with Us for Many More Years
And finally, Dr. Nogueira, the 2026 election appears to test two succession problems at once: whether Bolsonarism can survive Jair Bolsonaro through a wider political, religious, congressional, and digital ecosystem, and whether Lulism can survive beyond Lula’s personal authority. From the perspective of your work on space, labor, popular governance, and political affect, what would a genuinely post-Lula and post-Jair Brazilian political order look like? Which social forces are most likely to shape that transition?
Dr. Mara Nogueira: Unfortunately, Bolsonarism is very much alive and will last and stay with us for many more years, whereas Lulism is very attached to Lula at the moment. And that’s another one of the limitations of the Workers’ Party political agenda for Brazil, because there is no succession. Who is Lula’s successor? Fernando Haddad, for instance, who ran in 2018, didn’t attract as many voters as Lula does, and he’s not being very successful now against Tarcisio in Sao Paulo. He is Lula’s preferred choice to replace him in the future. But he doesn’t have the same charisma and the same capacity that Flavio has to attract his father’s voters. So, I don’t think you will see such a neat transition of voters from Lula to his successor as you see from Jair Bolsonaro to Flavio Bolsonaro, because they are related. But anti-Lula, anti-PT sentiment shapes a lot of people’s political choices.
If you were asking me how I see that in relation to my work, I already mentioned the changes in the labor market, which will also remain and will become even more relevant in the future. We are not seeing a movement towards more stability in jobs. On the contrary, with AI and other changes in the world, job stability is becoming more of a question. So, whoever wants to capture the political votes and also the political identities of people will have to deal with that change, will have to address people’s concerns and address people’s aspirations.
The other thing is social media, which we already talked about, that’s shaping how people consume content and news, and how they form their opinions. It is also not something that will change unless we have a very united front—not only in Brazil; it would have to be a more global thing—to regulate social media and to change the way algorithms and social media are working right now.
Unfortunately, I would like to have a more hopeful answer. But I think if Lula wins this election, I don’t see the Workers’ Party having a strong successor for the next round, for the 2030 election.
Young Voters Are Where Lula Is the Weakest
On the other hand, just going back to the polls, young voters are where Lula is the weakest. That’s another element to pay attention to. How do you capture the political vote of young people, or how do you cater to the needs of young people who are also dealing with the impact of climate change?
We didn’t talk about this during the interview because it’s not something that has been part of the political agenda at the moment. Neither Flavio nor Lula are very strong on climate change. Flavio is a climate change nihilist, whereas Lula has made some steps towards becoming a leader of the Global South in terms of the environmental transition and so on, but he also has such a strong attachment to the oil industry in Brazil. Thus, he doesn’t have a very stable position on the environmental agenda.
That might be something that could capture young voters, although it hasn’t played much of a role in this election contest, and could perhaps do so if someone appears on the left, such as Mamdani, whom you see in New York City. I think he’s one of the most interesting political figures on the left right now, because he’s promising radical change. The young voters and those struggling with all the issues that we’ve been talking about in this interview are hopeful together with him.
In this ECPS Voice of Youth (VoY) interview, Dr. Amedeo Varriale reflects on the study of populism, the responsibilities of scholars, and the boundaries between public engagement and political activism. Working primarily within the ideational tradition, he stresses conceptual clarity, methodological pluralism, and intellectual humility, arguing that “there is not necessarily one correct answer” in populism research. Dr. Varriale maintains that scholars should contribute to public debate through empirical evidence, theoretical transparency, scientific rigor, and procedural validity while resisting political advocacy. He also emphasizes the need to acknowledge uncertainty, present competing interpretations fairly, and remain transparent about research limitations. Ultimately, scholarship should inform democratic debate without attempting to determine its political outcome or replace citizens’ own electoral choices.
As part of the ECPS Youth Program’s Voice of Youth (VoY) interview series, Dr. Amedeo Varrialereflects on the intellectual, methodological, and ethical challenges confronting a new generation of scholars studying populism. A political scientist specializing in populism, the radical right, and contemporary European politics, Dr. Varriale traces his research interests to the political transformations that followed the 2015 refugee crisis, Donald Trump’s 2016 election, and Italy’s 2018 League–Five Star Movement coalition. His work subsequently developed around questions of how populism should be conceptualized, measured, and distinguished from more explicitly authoritarian and anti-democratic phenomena.
A central theme running through the interview is the importance of intellectual openness in a field characterized by competing definitions and methodological traditions. Although Dr. Varriale works primarily within the ideational approach associated with Cas Mudde, he emphasizes that populism studies contain legitimate theoretical disagreements. For him, scholars should resist the temptation to transform conceptual preferences into unquestionable certainties: “There is not necessarily one correct answer.” Instead, they should “recognize ambiguity and avoid presenting one interpretation of populism as an absolute truth.” His broader methodological principle is correspondingly straightforward: “The most important thing is to keep an open mind when approaching political science.”
This commitment to scholarly pluralism is closely connected to Dr. Varriale’s understanding of the public role of academics. He argues that “scholars have some responsibility to intervene in public discussions,” particularly because research on politics, society, and democratic life can produce consequences extending far beyond universities. Yet public engagement, in his view, requires clearly defined boundaries. “I am skeptical of academic activism,” he stresses, adding that “engaging with the public should not turn into political advocacy or activism.” Instead, academics should contribute “empirical evidence, theoretical transparency, scientific rigor, and procedural validity,” while maintaining sufficient humility to acknowledge that scholarship remains fallible and that research findings “cannot be treated as absolute truths.”
Dr. Varriale extends this principle to democratic decision-making itself. Scholarship, he argues, can clarify the opportunities and risks associated with populism, distinguish democratic protest from challenges to democratic norms, and communicate evidence to journalists, policymakers, educators, and civil society. But its democratic function should remain informational rather than prescriptive: “Scholars can provide evidence to society, but democratic societies and the demos ultimately make their own political and electoral decisions.” Academia, he concludes, should “facilitate democratic debate without attempting to determine its outcome.”
Across discussions of populism, authoritarianism, digital methods, early-career research, and public engagement, the interview therefore presents scholarly rigor, conceptual humility, and openness to competing interpretations as essential foundations for politically relevant—but politically independent—research.
The interview with Dr. Amedeo Varriale is lightly edited to enhance clarity, readability, and overall flow for publication.
From the Refugee Crisis to the Study of Populism
Refugees arriving by inflatable dinghy boats remain in camps on the island of Lesvos, Greece, on October 5, 2015. Photo: Anjo Kan.
Please introduce yourself, outline your academic journey, and explain how your research interests developed. Why do you believe your area of research is particularly significant in today’s global environment?
Dr. Amedeo Varriale: I am a politics graduate of the University of East London, and I completed my PhD in 2024. I am currently a non-resident research fellow at the European Center for Populism Studies, and I am also a research fellow at a center focused on the study of the radical right and populism.
My interest in populism developed over several years. There were three major events between 2015 and 2018 that particularly shaped my research interests: the refugee crisis in 2015, Donald Trump’s election in 2016, and Italy’s 2018 coalition between the League and the Five Star Movement.
The refugee crisis was particularly significant because it created a major divide in public opinion and between political parties, with some advocating for greater openness towards immigration and others strongly opposing it. This contributed to the rise of populist and nationalist parties, particularly on the right.
Trump’s election in 2016 was another important moment. It attracted enormous international attention because the United States, as the leading country of the liberal democratic world, had elected a president whose political language was very different from the traditional language of liberal democracy.
The third event was the most important for me personally. In 2018, for the first time, a key EU member state, Italy, had a government coalition led by fully Eurosceptic populist forces from the right and left: the League and the Five Star Movement.
I eventually studied this coalition during my PhD. I became increasingly interested in understanding what populism was and how it functioned ideologically and rhetorically, particularly because it appeared to me as something very different from mainstream consensus politics on the center-right and center-left.
I believe studying populism today is extremely important. Approximately half of EU member states have a populist party either in government or as the largest opposition party, and this is only within Europe. There are many more populist parties and leaders around the world.
Populism can have a significant impact on political systems. When populists come to power, they do not necessarily abolish democracy altogether, but they can significantly alter democratic institutions. They can erode checks and balances, the rule of law, and minority rights. If we want to understand how liberal democracy is affected, we need to understand why, how, and by whom it is challenged.
Defining Populism Through the Ideational Approach
Do you have your own definition of populism that you use in your research? And do you have a particular conceptual approach that you use? And has your understanding and your definition of populism changed throughout the trajectory of your research?
Dr. Amedeo Varriale: I primarily adhere to the ideational school of thought. I am a big fan of the ideational approach to the study of populism, particularly as conceptualized by the prominent Dutch scholar Cas Mudde.
In my PhD thesis, I used Mudde’s definition of populism. Essentially, populism is an ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic groups: the pure people versus the corrupt elite. It argues that politics should be an expression of the volonté générale, or the general will of the people.
There are three reasons why I think this is a particularly useful approach.
First, it allows us to distinguish between populism and non-populism and therefore establishes relatively clear boundaries. There are two opposites to populism: elitism and pluralism.
Secondly, Mudde’s definition allows for cross-national and cross-regional applicability. There will always be populists to study around the world because anti-elitism and anti-pluralism are recurring features on both sides of the political spectrum.
Third, the ideational approach has a certain versatility. It can be applied at different levels of analysis, including qualitative studies at the mass level. Observing or measuring anti-elitism and people-centrism is possible not only when studying party leaders, but also when studying citizens.
The only aspect of the ideational approach that I am not completely convinced by is Mudde’s argument that populism is thin centered. Unlike thick ideologies such as liberalism, socialism, and communism, populism supposedly offers relatively few specific views on political, institutional, or socioeconomic issues.
I personally believe that populists do share a number of common views. They tend to support a strong majoritarian popular mandate, strong executive power, limitations on the privileges of politicians, and direct democracy. On socioeconomic issues, they can support welfare chauvinism, lower taxation for small and medium-sized businesses, and less or no immigration.
So, I believe populism has a Weltanschauung. While anti-elitism and people-centrism may be its core characteristics, as I argued in my PhD thesis, it also has other important characteristics, such as sovereignism, producerism, reformism, and direct democracy.
My understanding of populism has not radically changed throughout my research. However, I would say that I am now slightly more open to the idea that populism can be thin-centered in some cases.
Populism, Fascism, and the Importance of Conceptual Boundaries
AfD demo with slogan Stop Islamization and counter demonstration of the Left in Luetten Klein in Rostock, Germany on May 14, 2018. AfD, Alternative for Germany, is a right wing political party in Germany. Photo: Shutterstock.
Are there any theoretical debates that you have considered most consequential for the future of the field of populism studies? And what kind of misconceptions do you frequently encounter, both in and out of academia when doing your research?
Dr. Amedeo Varriale: One important debate for the future of populism studies may be whether different approaches can eventually be brought together. Rather than asking whether populism is an ideology, strategy, discourse, or style, scholars may increasingly examine how ideas, political agency, discourse and performance, institutions, and citizen reception interact to create populist politics or populist societies. Perhaps in the future, these different approaches can be complementary rather than mutually exclusive. That is, however, speculation.
Regarding misconceptions, I would say there is a recurring blurring of boundaries between populism and fascism, or between populist radical-right actors and the extreme right. This is particularly common in political journalism, but it also occurs to a lesser degree in academia. It is important to distinguish between populist radical-right actors, who are illiberal but not necessarily anti-democratic, and neo-fascist extreme-right actors, who are both illiberal and anti-democratic.
Populism is reformist. It is not revolutionary. It is anti-establishment rather than anti-system. Once it ceases to be anti-establishment and becomes genuinely anti-system, it starts to become something else and potentially something much more authoritarian.
Populists can be skeptical of or opposed to the rule of law and minority rights, but they generally believe in popular sovereignty and electoral democracy. They do not necessarily believe in liberal democracy.
The Italian scholar Marco Tarchi, for example, distinguishes populists and fascists based on their views of the state, markets, sovereignty, the nation, and other important political questions. We therefore need to be careful not to conflate the two.
Measuring Populism Across Different Contexts
Every research agenda can encounter conceptual and methodological challenges. How do you operationalize and how do you measure populism in your own work? Particularly when comparing different systems, different contexts, or different countries, different case studies. So, how can you balance qualitative and quantitative approaches when doing your research?
Dr. Amedeo Varriale: Many scholars have developed different ways of measuring populism. For example, Pippa Norris with her Global Party Survey, Kirk Hawkins, Akkerman, Mudde and Zaslove, Kurt Weyland, and many others. Personally, I usually observe and interpret populism through qualitative methods, sometimes comparing one case to another. I use party manifestos, thematic content analysis, and discourse analysis.
During my PhD, however, I developed a methodology to measure the ideological populism of two Italian parties. I identified six populist themes from the literature: anti-elitism, people-centrism, sovereignism, reformism, producerism, and direct democracy. I identified these themes in interviews with politicians and in party manifestos. My method also had a quantitative component because I counted the occurrence of these themes to assess the degree of populism.
I used a gradational approach inspired by Charles Ragin’s fuzzy-set methodology. The values were 0, 0.3, 0.7, and 1, corresponding to not populist, barely populist, considerably populist, and full-blown populist. If none of the themes were present, the result was not populist. One or two themes meant barely populist, three or four meant considerably populist, and five or six meant full-blown populist.
I interviewed ten political figures, five from each party. The themes occurred consistently in the interviews, and the manifesto analysis resulted in the Italian parties being classified as full-blown populist.
I have not, however, measured populism in a strict sense across different countries, political systems, and historical contexts. In most of my work, I have analyzed and interpreted it qualitatively.
I think qualitative and quantitative approaches work best in a complementary way. Quantitative approaches can identify broad patterns across different historical and geographical contexts, while qualitative research can explain the significance, mechanisms, and context behind those patterns.
The Digital Transformation of Populism Research
The study of populism increasingly relies on digital data, social media, and computational methods. What role have these tools played in your own research, and how have they transformed the way scholars investigate contemporary political phenomena?
Dr. Amedeo Varriale: In my own research, computational methods and software have essentially played no role so far. I was once a research assistant working on a book where I helped identify themes. Other researchers subsequently used NVivo to locate these themes in tweets, but I was not directly involved in that part. These tools have nevertheless transformed populism studies. Researchers can now examine political communication on a much larger scale and almost instantaneously. They can analyze thousands or millions of posts on platforms such as X, Truth Social, Facebook, and Instagram, as well as online engagement and digital networks. This makes it possible to identify populist themes such as anti-elitism, appeals to the nation, and other forms of political discourse.
Text mining and sentiment analysis can also help researchers measure political discourse and understand relationships between party leaders, parliamentarians, citizens, grassroots activists, and journalists. These tools are particularly useful during major events such as political crises and election campaigns.
There are, however, limitations. Algorithms can contain biases, and social-media users are not necessarily representative of the population or electorate as a whole. There are also ethical and privacy concerns surrounding online data, which can affect research funding or institutional approval, particularly for PhD and postdoctoral research.
Right-Wing and Left-Wing Populism in Italy
Supporters of Five Stars Movement in Naples rally with Italian flag and political symbol of the movement in Napoli, Campania, Italy on May 30, 2018. Photo: Antonio Balasco.
Research can often produce unexpected discoveries. What has been the most surprising finding in your work? Have you encountered evidence that fundamentally challenged your original assumptions or redirected your research idea?
Dr. Amedeo Varriale: During my PhD fieldwork, when I interviewed politicians from the League and the Five Star Movement, I was struck by an interesting difference between right-wing and left-wing populism in Italy. The two parties had a similar overall agenda because of their anti-elitist populism, but their Euroscepticism was different.
The Italian populist right criticized Europe and wanted a Europe that did less but better. They envisioned a Europe that would gradually return to something closer to its pre-Maastricht status.
The Italian populist left criticized Europe from a different perspective. Their Euroscepticism was based more on the idea that the EU should do more but better, particularly regarding fiscal and environmental policy integration.
Overall, both populist right-wing and left-wing actors tended to favor reforming the EU from within rather than leaving it altogether.
The left’s Euroscepticism was aimed more at international corporate elites because of their economic power and influence over sovereign states. Right-wing Euroscepticism was aimed more at national and international liberal-progressive elites because of their positions on immigration, globalization, and popular sovereignty.
Of course, there are also areas where right and left populism overlap. I would not say these findings fundamentally challenged my original assumptions or redirected my research agenda, but they did reveal some interesting differences between right- and left-wing populism.
Conducting Research in Polarized Political Environments
Populism can frequently involve politically polarized environments, disinformation campaigns, and contested narratives. Have these dynamics affected your ability to collect data, access reliable sources or to conduct objective research? And how do you navigate politically sensitive topics while maintaining scholarly rigor?
Dr. Amedeo Varriale: I would not say these dynamics have significantly affected my ability to collect data, access reliable sources, or conduct objective research. However, they can certainly make research on populism more daunting.
Accessibility, accuracy, and reliability can be influenced by polarization, disinformation, and competing narratives. The best way for scholars to address this is to distinguish between sources that provide verifiable evidence, those that provide political or scholarly opinions, and subjective or partisan journalism.
Whenever possible, researchers should collect their own data through fieldwork. If that is not possible, primary sources, peer-reviewed academic sources, and respected independent organizations can be useful. Using multiple sources and avoiding a predetermined ideological perspective can increase the objectivity and reliability of research.
In populism studies, it is also normal to encounter different approaches and conclusions. There are competing ideational, sociocultural, and political-strategic approaches to populism.
There is not necessarily one correct answer. Scholars need to recognize ambiguity and avoid presenting one interpretation of populism as an absolute truth. The most important thing is to keep an open mind when approaching political science.
Research Beyond Academic Publication
Looking beyond academic publication, what impact would you ideally like your research to have? How can scholarly work contribute to addressing democratic challenges associated with populism while avoiding becoming politicized itself?
Dr. Amedeo Varriale: Scholars have some responsibility to intervene in public discussions. Research often deals with questions concerning society and democratic life, and those findings can have real-life consequences for communities.
That said, I am skeptical of academic activism. Engaging with the public should not turn into political advocacy or activism. Academics should try to be as objective as possible and contribute empirical evidence, theoretical transparency, scientific rigor, and procedural validity. They should also have the humility to recognize that their research is not flawless and that findings cannot be treated as absolute truths.
Communicating academic findings to the public, policymakers, politicians, and journalists can be difficult. Academic language needs to be simplified for wider audiences and made reader friendly. Findings should also be summarized clearly and concisely, particularly for journalists and policymakers. There should be concrete examples, and unnecessary jargon should be avoided. Finally, academics should be transparent about the limitations and weaknesses of their research frameworks and methodology.
The Importance of Academic Networks
So, I’m going to shift gears a little bit for my next question. And I would like to ask you about international collaboration. Because contemporary research increasingly involves collaboration with other researchers, how has cooperation with other scholars, with other academic networks and initiatives, such as the ECPS Early Career Researchers Network, influenced your research, your professional development, and your intellectual outlook?
Dr. Amedeo Varriale: I have not directly used the ECPS Early Career Researchers Network yet, but I have had the opportunity to write and publish different articles with ECPS. Earlier this year, I participated in the ECPS Virtual Workshop Series, We, the People and the Future of Democracy: An Interdisciplinary Approach. I served as a discussant for several sessions and as a moderator or chair for one. These workshops gave me the opportunity to engage with scholars who are more experienced than me, and I learned a great deal simply by listening to them. Preparing to act as a discussant also expanded my knowledge and research skills because I had to engage closely with other scholars’ work and prepare meaningful discussion points.
I also participated in a workshop on the New Right in Copenhagen, where I presented research on Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy.
These experiences allowed me to meet people with similar interests and career objectives. Although I have not yet co-authored anything through these networks, I now have professional contacts and people I can approach for opinions, advice, or potential academic collaboration. I also really value meeting people from different countries, age groups, and areas of expertise.
The Role of Research in Democratic Decision-Making
Israelis protest in Tel Aviv against Netanyahu’s Judicial Coup in Israel. Photo: Avivi Aharon.
What impact would you ideally like your research to have? How could scholarly work contribute to addressing democratic challenges associated with populism while avoiding becoming politicized itself?
Dr. Amedeo Varriale: Looking beyond academic publication, I would like my research to contribute by better informing the public about the opportunities and threats associated with populism. I would like citizens to understand what they are likely to get in terms of policymaking and institutional reforms when they vote for a populist party or leader.
I think it is a moral duty to explain how populism affects liberal democracy, not only in terms of institutions but also political representation and public debate. Once citizens are informed, however, they should be left alone to decide who they want to vote for.
Research can also be useful to journalists, educators, policymakers, and civil society organizations. It can help these groups distinguish between legitimate and spontaneous forms of democratic protest and more serious challenges to democratic norms. It can also identify ways democratic institutions can respond to those challenges while addressing everyday concerns without abandoning the rule of law and political pluralism.
To avoid excessive politicization, I think scholarship should do four things: use methodology transparently; present competing interpretations fairly; acknowledge uncertainty and new evidence that contradicts one’s own argument; and be honest about the limitations and weaknesses of research.
Scholars can provide evidence to society, but democratic societies and the demos ultimately make their own political and electoral decisions. If academics dislike populists, that does not mean they should demonize citizens who support them. Academia should facilitate democratic debate without attempting to determine its outcome.
Challenges Facing Early-Career Researchers
Next, I would like to talk about career obstacles. What has been the greatest personal or professional challenge that you may have faced? Particularly as an early career scholar, and what has enabled you to overcome these obstacles?
Dr. Amedeo Varriale: One of the biggest challenges during my PhD was having to restructure and rewrite a large part of my thesis. Fortunately, I managed to do so successfully, and I was actually happier with the second version of my thesis than the original. My examiners gave me valuable feedback, particularly on how to connect my theoretical framework to the existing literature.
Another challenge has been finding the right postdoctoral position. Populism studies is a very niche subfield of political science, so there are not as many postdoctoral positions as one might expect, and the ones that are available are extremely competitive. This can be particularly challenging for someone who cannot relocate anywhere in the world for personal reasons.
It can be frustrating, but it is important not to give in to that frustration. Continue studying, continue reading other people’s work, continue publishing, get up early every morning, and keep trying.
The Rewards of Academic Research
I want to ask you about what has felt rewarding in your research journey, but also if there is anything that you would have approached differently.
Dr. Amedeo Varriale: The most rewarding aspect has undoubtedly been being published and seeing a well-presented, well-written, and aesthetically pleasing article with my name on it published in an important journal or magazine. This makes me proud, but it also makes my parents, friends, family, and partner proud.
A couple of weeks ago, I received a hard copy of a policy journal containing one of my articles, and it was a very fulfilling experience. It made me realize that all the hard work had served a purpose and, in a complex and not immediately noticeable way, contributed to knowledge.
The pursuit of truth is a noble aim. It is also rewarding to contribute to common knowledge and, indirectly, to society, by producing in-depth work that helps explain how political systems function.
Intellectual Influences on the Study of Populism
Are there any particular scholars, books, experiences, or even unexpected sources of inspiration that have fundamentally shaped your thinking and your research?
Dr. Amedeo Varriale: Certainly. I have several favorite authors and books that have contributed to my intellectual development. When I first started studying populism at a higher level during my PhD, I encountered the work of Cas Mudde and many other scholars who examined populism primarily from an ideological and qualitative perspective. I would particularly recommend Mudde’s books to young scholars entering the field. His writing is conceptually sophisticated without being unnecessarily difficult to understand.
I would also recommend the British scholar Paul Taggart and his seminal book Populism, which helped me understand the origins of populism, including its development in the late nineteenth-century United States with the People’s Party and in Russia with the Narodniks.
I am also a great admirer of Marco Tarchi because he comparatively analyses populism and the fascist extreme right.
Another scholar I would recommend is Benjamin Moffitt. His book Populism examines similarities and differences between populism and other ideologies, including liberalism, socialism, and nationalism.
These scholars have been fundamental to my intellectual development, and I think it is difficult to study populism without becoming familiar with their work.
Advice for the Next Generation of Political Scientists
If there are any skills that you believe young political scientists need in order to thrive. And what advice do you offer to the next generation of scholars entering the field, especially regarding to the fact that universities are becoming increasingly internationalized, and research has become more competitive than it has ever been before?
Dr. Amedeo Varriale: I think computational methods and the ability to work with large amounts of digital data are increasingly important. Learning how to use tools such as NVivo and RStudio, as well as platforms such as MTurk, can be valuable. I myself need to develop these skills further.
Another important skill is teaching experience. It is useful to gain teaching experience early, preferably during the PhD, because it can make a significant difference to your CV and can be valuable when universities are hiring postdoctoral researchers.
But the most important piece of advice I can give is very simple: read, read, and read. Read academic books, political journalism, history, sociology, and even things that are completely unrelated to your research, such as novels and classical literature. Reading widely allows you to develop intellectual connections beyond your immediate field.
Ultimately, an academic needs to be well-read.
The Future of Populism Studies
Populism and political marketing: An illustration of how populist rhetoric is often employed as a strategic tool to swiftly gain voter support. Illustration: Jakub Jirsak.
Looking ahead, where do you see populism studies evolving over the next decade? Which research questions or neglected areas deserve far greater scholarly attention than they currently receive?
Dr. Amedeo Varriale: I think it is reasonable to speculate that populism studies may become increasingly connected with research on authoritarianism. Populism is often described as democratic or even hyper-democratic to the point of becoming illiberal. We have seen populists moderate themselves after entering government, but we have also seen political actors that began as populists evolve into something different.
I am thinking particularly about developments such as Donald Trump’s second term, the AfD, and National Future in Italy, which have advanced policies that are considerably more radical or extreme than those of many populists of ten or twenty years ago.
One example is remigration. This concept does not simply refer to returning illegal immigrants. It can also involve legal immigrants and second-generation citizens who are considered insufficiently integrated. That goes beyond populism and raises questions about authoritarianism and democratic norms.
I therefore think future research should examine more carefully where the boundary lies between populism and extreme-right authoritarianism, particularly in terms of policymaking. This area has been somewhat neglected. Academia has not always provided clear ideational distinctions between neo-populism, neo-fascism, and reactionary right-wing authoritarianism. Scholars such as Marco Tarchi and Robert Paxton have made important contributions to distinguishing these concepts, although in different contexts.
Sometimes parties are described as populist when they are actually neo-fascist or extreme right. In those cases, calling them populist can obscure important distinctions. The opposite can also happen. I think we should try to call political phenomena by their appropriate names. Of course, this can be difficult in political science, and particularly in political journalism, where terminology is often used inconsistently.
A Large-Scale Taxonomy of Populist Parties
If resources, time, and institutional constraints were no obstacle for you, what research project would you most like to pursue? More broadly, what do you hope will ultimately be the lasting contribution of your work to both scholarship and to public understanding?
Dr. Amedeo Varriale: If time and resources allowed me, I would like to undertake a large-scale project with the ultimate aim of developing a taxonomy of populist parties based on their relationship with liberal democracy, their conceptualization of anti-elitism, and their views on important aspects of the political system, including the state, economy, and markets.
This has been done before to some extent. Margaret Canovan conducted similar work in the 1980s and 1990s, and Mudde did something similar in his 2007 book Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe. However, these classifications are now somewhat outdated.
There may therefore be a gap in the literature for a new taxonomy. If I pursue a postdoctoral project in the future, this is likely to be the kind of proposal I would put forward.
I would like to use interviews as a primary methodology, as I did during my PhD, and speak with populist leaders in countries such as Argentina, Britain, Italy, and Poland, potentially expanding the research beyond Europe.
I also think it would be useful to move beyond the simple division between right-wing and left-wing populism. There are different subgroups, including neoliberal or centrist populists on the right and different varieties of socialist populism on the left. Right and left can be treated as broad categories, but there are more detailed distinctions between populists in Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Asia, and the Americas in terms of their beliefs and overall worldviews.
I would hope that developing these kinds of distinctions could become one of the lasting contributions of my research, alongside my work distinguishing between neo-populism and neo-fascism.
The public also needs to understand that populism is not necessarily undemocratic or anti-democratic. It can give a voice to silent majorities or minorities in political systems that are authoritarian or competitively authoritarian.
At the same time, populism can obstruct the rule of law and minority rights in liberal democracies. It can therefore have different effects depending on the political context.
More research needs to be produced and communicated not only within academic circles but also through the media, which plays an important role in shaping public narratives. People need to understand the good, the bad, and the ugly sides of populism.
If I could write a book that brought together all of these aspects, I think that would be a lasting contribution that I would be proud of for many years.
In this ECPS interview, Associate Professor Nick Beauchamp of Northeastern University examines the evolving relationship between MAGA, democratic socialism, political communication, and the institutional structure of American politics. Assoc. Prof. Beauchamp argues that MAGA’s dominance of the Republican Party should not be confused with uniform ideological agreement among Republican voters, emphasizing that “there’s a difference between how much the beliefs have spread and how much the ideology or the party has taken over.” He suggests that democratic socialism could exert comparable national influence even without achieving majority support, noting that a progressive or DSA-aligned faction could still have “similar effects nationally.” The interview also explores media selection, institutional trust, polarization, AI-driven political persuasion, and the persistence of anti-establishment politics.
As the United States approaches the November 3 midterm elections, the political landscape is defined by an unusually narrow congressional balance, weak public evaluations of the economy, declining approval of President Donald Trump, and an election increasingly interpreted through attitudes toward Trump himself. At the same time, MAGA has become deeply embedded in the Republican Party, while Democrats remain divided over how far an economically populist and democratic-socialist agenda should shape their response to Trumpism. Against this backdrop of personalized politics, ideological polarization, institutional conflict, and an increasingly fragmented information environment, the relationship between insurgent movements and the established two-party system has become especially consequential.
In this interview with the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Associate Professor Nick Beauchamp of Northeastern University’s Department of Political Science and Network Science Institute offers a structural interpretation of the apparent asymmetry between MAGA’s transformation of the Republican Party and democratic socialism’s more contested position within the Democratic coalition. Rather than treating MAGA as equivalent to the Republican electorate as a whole, Assoc. Prof. Beauchamp stresses that “there’s the MAGA further-right faction and then the center-right faction. Those two things still exist.” He consequently distinguishes between the diffusion of ideological beliefs among voters and the institutional capture of a political party: “there’s a difference between how much the beliefs have spread and how much the ideology or the party has taken over.”
That distinction underpins one of the interview’s most consequential observations. Assoc. Prof. Beauchamp argues that democratic socialism does not necessarily have to become nationally majoritarian in order to acquire transformative political influence. Even if the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) or the broader progressive left were unable to move substantially beyond their current “core of urban, educated, young, left-leaning liberals,” he maintains that “they could still have similar effects nationally.” There is also, he adds, a possible route toward a broader populist coalition appealing to “economically distressed rural or suburban voters,” although such expansion is “not necessary for having a MAGA-sized effect.”
More broadly, Assoc. Prof. Beauchamp situates both MAGA and democratic socialism within the institutional architecture of American politics. Because the presidential and first-past-the-post systems sustain two large parties, he argues, ideological movements operate as factions competing for control within them. Political outcomes therefore depend not only on ideological appeal but also on contingency: “Trump almost lost the primary in 2016, and Sanders almost won the primary in 2016.” Had those outcomes shifted, he observes, “we’d be living in a very different world.”
The interview thus moves beyond a simple comparison of left- and right-wing populism to examine how factional capture, institutional structure, media selection, political communication, AI-driven personalization, and anti-establishment sentiment may shape the next phase of American democracy.
Here is our interview with Associate Professor Nick Beauchamp, edited lightly to enhance clarity, readability, and overall flow for publication.
Trump’s Unpopularity Adds to Republican Midterm Problems
Demonstrators at The People’s March, an evolution of the Women’s March, NYC, January 18, 2025. A protester holds a sign reading “Presidents Are Not Kings.” Photo: Erin Alexis Randolph.
Professor Beauchamp, welcome! Let me begin with the broader meaning of the November 3 midterm elections:The November 3 midterms are taking place with an exceptionally narrow congressional balance, weak evaluations of the economy, and Donald Trump remaining unusually central to an election in which he is not himself on the ballot. Should we understand this primarily as a conventional midterm judgment on an incumbent administration, or as a broader referendum on Trumpism as a governing project and on the MAGA transformation of the Republican Party?
Assoc. Prof. Nick Beauchamp: It’s a little bit of both. In general, based on historical patterns, you would expect the incumbent party to lose ground simply because it’s a midterm election. When you add the poor state of the economy, particularly inflation, you would expect even greater difficulties for the incumbent party.
Then there is Trump’s own unpopularity, reflected in his low approval rating, which may or may not be separate from his role as an ideological figure within the MAGA movement.
So, whether we can identify an additional effect specifically attributable to Trumpism or MAGA, beyond all these other factors, is difficult to say. Given the broader circumstances, we would already expect the incumbent party to be struggling in a midterm election.
MAGA Is a Faction—but It Now Controls the Party
The Republican Party has changed markedly from the Reagan-era combination of free trade, limited government, and internationalist conservatism toward economic nationalism, immigration restriction, cultural conservatism, and a stronger conception of executive power. From your perspective as a scholar of ideology and political text, do you now see MAGA as one faction among several inside the Republican Party, or as the dominant ideological grammar through which most Republican candidates are compelled to communicate?
Assoc. Prof. Nick Beauchamp: Those two things don’t have to be incompatible; it can be both. A theme I’ll probably return to is that MAGA is a faction within the Republican Party. There are two broad factions within the party, the farther right and the center right, and similarly, there are two factions within the Democratic Party, the farther left and the center left.
At the moment, the Republican Party apparatus has shifted rightward because the farther-right faction represented by Trump has taken over, beginning with the 2016 primary. But there are still other factions within the Republican Party that continue to operate, even if they are, as you were saying, compelled to use the dominant grammar of the faction that now controls the party.
Trumpism and Trump Are Very Well Fused
Jake Angeli or QAnon Shaman was among those who participated in the riots initiated by former US President Donald Trump at the Capitol, Washington D.C. on January 6, 2021. Photo: Johnny Silvercloud
The 2026 campaign has become highly personalized around Trump, with loyalty to him functioning as an important criterion of Republican identity. How should we analytically distinguish Trumpism as an ideology from Trumpism as a leader-centered political relationship? If the presidency, the movement, the party, and the leader increasingly become rhetorically fused, does this change the way voters process political information and partisan identity?
Assoc. Prof. Nick Beauchamp: That’s a hard question. The sense in which they are potentially more readily fused than some combinations of leader and ideology is that leaders and ideology, no matter what your ideology, tend to be fused together in various ways. Regardless of the ideology, many voters take their cues from leaders under any circumstance.
The sense in which it is more fused for the current Republican Party is that the ideology itself tends to be more authoritarian in its structure and therefore has a much more directly and explicitly privileged role for the leader. So, in that sense, the ideology and the leader are naturally compatible with each other, in the way that maybe there’s a little bit of tension between a strong leader and the more traditional liberal individualist ideology.
So, they’re definitely very well fused, and in part that’s just due to the compatibility between the two of them at this particular moment.
Left and Right Populism Both Emphasize Enemies
Right-wing populism under Trump often constructs several antagonisms simultaneously: ordinary Americans against elites, the nation against immigrants or cultural outsiders, and the elected president against institutions that constrain him. In your work on political language and stance detection, how important is this combination of moral judgment, identity, and blame in making populist messages especially effective?
Assoc. Prof. Nick Beauchamp: Maybe the answer is similar, in the sense that both left and right populism, in particular, tend to put a pretty strong emphasis on enemies. Often, the enemies are different versions of the elite, whether the elite are the rich or the cultural elite. Certainly, during a period of anti-establishment fervor right now, both can agree that the establishment, although they disagree about what the establishment is, is a locus for the enemy.
So, in a sense, that is one of the symmetries between the further left and the further right. I’m not somebody who believes that there are lots of symmetries between these two sides, but that’s certainly, structurally, one of these things.
It’s particularly, again, compatible with far-right populism because, along with authoritarianism, you tend to have the opposites—the enemy—that are structurally playing an important role in these things. So, yes, I’d say that having a distinct enemy, or indeed many different enemies, is really constitutive of the ideology and thus feeds into the engine of the far right in the US.
Loss of Institutional Trust Depends on What Institutions Do
The current debate over American democratic backsliding centers on executive power, attacks on institutional constraints, media freedom, immigration enforcement, political retaliation, and the legitimacy of opposition. But democratic erosion also depends on how citizens interpret those developments. To what extent is the durability of democratic norms now a problem of political communication—specifically, whether voters perceive courts, election officials, journalists, universities, and civil servants as legitimate referees or merely as partisan actors?
Assoc. Prof. Nick Beauchamp: That’s a tricky question. The literature on faith in democratic institutions is often portrayed as a matter of communication—showing that these institutions are unbiased, procedural rather than personal, and have these other characteristics. Often, that’s portrayed, as your question was implying, as a task of political communication.
Maybe I’m just an optimist. But my sense, at least in the US context, is that the loss of faith in institutions is driven primarily by what those institutions do, not by how they’re packaged. So, when the courts or the Department of Justice are seen to be operating in a fairly methodical and law-oriented way, it’s very hard to re-describe all of that as unjust. Conversely, when they’re acting in an unjust or personalized way, it’s hard to re-describe that as just.
Again, this is maybe just me being an optimist, but the fundamental problem with loss of faith in democratic institutions, at least maybe just on the left side, is due to how they’re actually operating, not a matter of communication. That doesn’t change the fact that there are other sources of loss of faith in democratic institutions, such as believing that there’s widespread fraud in mail-in voting that has no particular grounding in the truth and thus must be driven by political communication. Maybe there is a bit of an asymmetry there between the two.
A Democratic Congress Would Intensify Confrontation
If Democrats were to secure majorities in both the House and the Senate after the midterms, how consequential could that be for the remainder of Trump’s presidency? Beyond blocking legislation, could a Democratic Congress meaningfully challenge Trumpism through oversight, investigations, subpoena power, appropriations, confirmation politics, and the defense of institutional autonomy? Or, given the intensity of partisan polarization and the growing tendency to portray institutional checks as illegitimate obstruction, might divided government simply shift the conflict from electoral competition toward an even more confrontational struggle between Congress and the executive?
Assoc. Prof. Nick Beauchamp: It certainly will shift the emphasis to an even more confrontational struggle. If the Democrats take the House in particular, surely there will be a bunch of investigations. If they take the Senate, there will be larger fights about confirmations.
Whether either of those things has direct effects on policies will depend on the bills they’re trying to put through. Trump, as we know, has not had a particularly strong emphasis on legislating. It’s part of their philosophy of executive power, and they much prefer to do things through executive orders and other direct effects. So, the ability of Democrats to block bills might not change things that much, but their ability to hold hearings, in particular, will give them an opportunity to raise the salience of all issues and to have an ongoing narrative.
The big challenge for them in that case will just be picking and choosing, because there are literally hundreds of different things that they could choose to investigate or prosecute, and there’s probably a dozen different reasons that they could justify at least having an impeachment vote.
So, the challenge for them, from a political communication perspective, from a PR perspective, is going to be: how do they sequence these things to keep the attention up? That’s not an easy task. As a media consultant or political consultant, I have no idea how they’re gonna do it, but, again, strategically, if they’re smart, they’ll figure out a way to organize the television narrative to keep things moving along for the next two years. That will certainly lead to much more confrontation if they’re successful in that strategy.
What Media Make Salient Has Large Political Effects
Your research shows that media bias can operate not only through partisan wording but through the strategic inclusion or omission of events, even in outlets with strong norms of objectivity. In the highly polarized 2026 campaign, is the more consequential form of media influence often not what outlets say, but which facts, actors, conflicts, or consequences they choose to make visible—or invisible—to their audiences?
Assoc. Prof. Nick Beauchamp: That’s been a perspective I’ve been exploring and testing in research for a number of years now, because there are all these norms, particularly in the major media, about non-bias and so forth. That shapes the way they describe what they’re talking about. But there are very few norms about what they choose to talk about or not, although people try to bring this up occasionally. As a result, they’re fairly unconstrained in what they choose to focus on.
In many ways, this has more latitude in intra-party disagreements. So, the New York Times or other arguably liberal media outlets can choose which things to report on, and those choices can have strong effects on intra-Democratic, intra-left disagreements. If they choose to focus, or if the party apparatus chooses to focus a lot, on what a particular YouTuber has been saying, whether various candidates have an opinion about this YouTuber, or, most recently in the Boston Globe, what happened in a very small bar in western Massachusetts, they might not be directly biased in terms of what they’re saying about it. But the fact that they focus on these particular things has strong effects on these intra-party arguments.
Similarly, they talk more or less about what’s going on in Gaza, or they talk more or less about Trump’s corruption. Or, to choose another example from the headlines just today, if Barry Weiss, who’s taken over the long-running 60 Minutes show, decides not so much to change the tone of the show but to change who’s being interviewed by the show, that, too, has lots of downstream effects on where the attention of viewers is, what kind of judgments they’re making, and what things they consider salient or not for the upcoming elections.
So, much more than changes in their language, it’s changes in what they’re choosing to report on. Those do have large effects, particularly in the primary season for the general election now and again comes around.
Compartmentalized News Is Not Necessarily a Problem
If news organizations on the left and right systematically emphasize different events, different moral stakes, and different political actors, are American voters effectively inhabiting parallel campaign realities? And does this make it harder for elections to function as shared democratic judgments, because citizens may no longer be evaluating the same set of political facts?
Assoc. Prof. Nick Beauchamp: This is where the normative questions diverge from the descriptive questions. Most of the research I’ve done has been empirical and quantitative, looking at these selections and the effects of the selections. Then there’s a normative question: what do we think about that? What should be done about that? That one is more of a subjective perspective.
My perspective is that the selection effects are, in some ways, inevitable—you have to choose, because there’s a finite amount of space and a finite amount of time to report on things. The main problem is not so much the choice, but that the choices themselves are hidden from the viewers. They’re not made explicit as part of the editorial or reporting process.
So, for me, it may not be a problem if there’s a bunch of compartmentalized news organizations that have different foci, as long as the news consumers understand how that works and make their choices in an informed way. This is where I diverge a little bit from some of the people in the polarization world who think that every news organization should cover all the articles in an equally unbiased way.
I’m very cognizant of the fact that this marketplace of ideas does not necessarily work very well in practice, but it still seems the best of a number of incomplete or insufficient solutions here. So, yes, there is this tendency towards bubbles, as they call it, but it’s better to be transparent about the bubbles than to try to erase them altogether.
Authoritarian Ideology Pairs Leaders with Enemies
Immigration remains one of the most durable MAGA issues, combining border control, sovereignty, crime, demographic anxiety, and national identity. From the standpoint of political communication, why is the language of “invasion,” threat, or loss of control so effective? Does anti-immigration politics work primarily because of policy concerns, or because it provides a morally and emotionally simplified narrative that links cultural change to political grievance?
Assoc. Prof. Nick Beauchamp: This gets back to your earlier point about having enemies. We know that, structurally, part of authoritarian ideology is to have an authority figure that you revere and, on the opposite side, a series of enemies that are challenging the structure or have already ruined the structure that needs to be reclaimed from them.
The anti-immigration politics of Trump, in particular, fits into that structure pretty well. But structurally, it doesn’t have to be anti-immigration. It can, in fact, be trans people right now, and it has historically been Black people and various other minority groups and so forth. All of those have slightly different ways of framing the enemy problem, but structurally, they’re similar.
Immigration is certainly well suited to it, and we see that in quite a lot of far-right European parties and so forth. But there’s nothing necessarily about immigration per se that doesn’t function structurally similarly to other out-groups like trans people, Black people, and other minority groups that are threatening the power structure that authoritarians prefer.
Economic Grievances May Be More Fixable Than Identity-Based Enemies
A homeless US Army veteran sits on a street corner in Mesa, Arizona, holding a sign asking for help because he is hungry. Photo: Vicki Been / Dreamstime.
The current US landscape contains two different populist projects. MAGA tends to define “the people” in national-cultural terms against elites, immigrants, globalists, and liberal institutions, while democratic-socialist actors tend to define “the people” socioeconomically—as workers, renters, debtors, and consumers confronting billionaires, corporations, and concentrated wealth. From your perspective, how different are these two populisms in their communicative structure, emotional appeal, and capacity to build durable coalitions?
Assoc. Prof. Nick Beauchamp: That again gets back to the enemy structure, where both of them have things that they’re opposing, both of them have things that they consider to be responsible for the problems here. But, of course, they target different things.
In terms of their capacity to build durable coalitions, both of them, obviously, historically, are quite durable as ideologies, in part because neither of them manages to solve the purported problem that they point to.
Going further in terms of their capacities, one would have to get into the actual truth of the matter: whether a series of policies that progressively restrict immigrants, liberal institutions, and so forth would feed back on itself and produce a more—Jonathan Bein—secure, happy, and wealthy world, or whether that sequence of policy pursuits would, in fact, work counter to that.
Similarly, you would have to answer whether an ideology that’s directed towards supporting debtors and against billionaires would produce a better or wealthier society. My version is that I tend to lean towards the latter, and so, in a sense, one might be more durable than the other. Although perhaps it’s not durable in the sense that one of these sets of things—the economic ones—are potentially fixable, whereas the existence of immigrants, liberal institutions, minority groups, and so forth is not something that is likely to be fixed, absent some extreme set of policies.
MAGA and Democratic Socialism Are Both Party Factions
One of the most striking asymmetries of the current party system is that MAGA has become a governing project and a dominant force inside the Republican Party, whereas democratic socialism remains influential but contested within a much broader Democratic coalition. Is this principally an organizational difference, a media and communication difference, or a difference in how effectively each movement has translated grievance into a simple and emotionally resonant political identity?
Assoc. Prof. Nick Beauchamp: As with all your questions, it’s a little bit of all these things. What I’m coming back to repeatedly is that these are both factions within these parties. Because of our presidential system, because of our first-past-the-post, winner-take-all electoral system, we have two parties, and so the structure, essentially, of our political system is a hierarchical tree, where you have two parties here. Then, within each of the parties, you have the more extreme and the more centrist faction, and all those factions continue to exist, even with Trump and so forth.
The importance of that is to be cognizant of how important accidents and contingency are. Like, Trump almost lost the primary in 2016, and Sanders almost won the primary in 2016. If either of those things had happened, we’d be living in a very different world, because a different faction would have taken over each of those parties under each of those circumstances.
And we’d have a world in which we’d be talking about Sandersism or whatever; we’d be talking about that versus center-right Republicans. Had political opinion shifted by only 10 points or so in these primaries 10 years ago, maybe the current faction that’s dominating in the Democratic Party, which is the center-left faction, might be more durable than the center-right faction was. The center-right faction obviously had lots of concentrated wealth, but didn’t have quite as much cultural clout, whereas the Democratic faction that currently runs the party has both a lot of wealth and a lot of cultural capital.
So, it may be that we’ll see this recurrent pairing between the furthest, most extreme faction on the right and the centrist faction on the left. But again, a lot of this really depends on the contingency of national presidential politics and who runs and who wins in a couple of years.
The Far Left Could Have a MAGA-Sized Effect Without Majority Support
Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at the “Bernie Is Back” political rally in Queensbridge Park, Queens, New York, on October 19, 2019. Photo: Aleksandr Dyskin / Dreamstime.
The democratic-socialist current has gained visibility through Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, DSA-backed candidates, and a younger activist constituency, but its strongest support remains concentrated in metropolitan areas and particular primary electorates. Do you see democratic socialism developing into a genuinely national current inside the Democratic Party, or is its ideological and geographic appeal still too uneven to reshape the party in the way MAGA reshaped the GOP?
Assoc. Prof. Nick Beauchamp: Maybe there, too, I’d push back a little bit on the degree to which MAGA has reshaped the GOP. It certainly reshaped the GOP in the sense of the party itself, the candidates, and what the candidates are doing. But it’s still the case that, at least among voters, and probably even among the actual representatives, if they were able to honestly respond to surveys or questions, there’s the MAGA further-right faction and then the center-right faction. Those two things still exist.
By analogy, you could have very much the same thing happening on the left, where the progressive or maybe DSA faction, if that’s what it ends up being called, wins the primaries, takes over the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party wins the presidency, and takes over the reins of the government. Structurally, you’d have something very similar, where it would seem that the far left has become dominant. But in terms of the actual opinions of the actual people, it would be analogous to what’s happened with MAGA, where, if you actually look at the surveys that ask people what their views are, probably only half of Republicans and therefore only maybe 1/6 or so of the actual country shares these core, strong far-right beliefs.
So, there’s a difference between how much the beliefs have spread and how much the ideology or the party has taken over. In that sense, even if the DSA couldn’t, or the far left couldn’t, extend beyond their core of urban, educated, young, left-leaning liberals, they could still have similar effects nationally.
That said, there’s also a pathway towards an even broader populist movement where this is what they want, where they appeal to economically distressed rural or suburban voters that aren’t the traditional far left of the Democratic Party. That’s certainly possible, but it’s not necessary for having a MAGA-sized effect.
People Can Still Learn in a Polarized World
Your work on online political conversations found that people often engage across wide ideological divides and that negative or unpleasant exchanges can sustain participation, while extended interaction can sometimes bridge differences rather than simply reinforce information bubbles. Does that finding still give grounds for optimism in the current environment, or have social-media incentives become so dominated by outrage, identity signaling, and algorithmic amplification that cross-partisan argument now more often deepens polarization than reduces it?
Assoc. Prof. Nick Beauchamp: The nuance to emphasize there, in terms of my own research, is that I’ve looked at long-term changes in opinion—radicalization, shifts in people’s positions, or at least how they talk on social media. But one of the things we’ve tended to find is that, while there can be large shifts over time, these tend to occur across smaller differences rather than across the partisan gap between the two sides.
You can still have long-term shifts, long-term changes, long-term evolution, and, if you want to be optimistic, long-term learning, without necessarily having this huge conversation across gigantic political divides. There’s this tendency to lose faith in the deliberative system because the far left and the far right can’t talk to each other, but that doesn’t necessarily have to be the case for people to move, change, and learn more as they go along.
Maybe across the exact middle, there’s going to be a problem because, as people become more polarized or learn more about politics, that gap is large. But at the same time, what we’ve learned is that this unidimensional ideological spectrum doesn’t really capture the way actual people’s opinions work. Actual moderates, or even liberals or conservatives, have a mixture of different policy opinions. As a result, you can have people talking to people about specific policies where they don’t necessarily disagree very much, even across apparently wide divides in their overall voting politics.
So, all of this is, in some ways, a more optimistic view that, even in a heavily polarized world, you can still have changes in people’s views and learning, and become more knowledgeable about politics through these smaller, more gradual changes in conversations.
AI Is Not Fundamentally Different from Existing Campaign Practices
AI, artificial intelligence, and the concept of fake news, misinformation, and disinformation: A man uses his smartphone displaying the red text “Fake News,” surrounded by related keywords. Photo: Dreamstime.
Your recent work on personalized large language models shows how systems can adapt to users’ histories, preferences, and evolving beliefs. In an electoral context, does this create the possibility of a qualitatively new form of political persuasion—where campaigns no longer send one message to millions of voters but generate millions of individually tailored messages, each calibrated to a person’s ideological priors, emotional triggers, and political history? Can AI make political persuasion radically more personalized?
Assoc. Prof. Nick Beauchamp: Now we’ve moved on to the AI side of things. Often, my perspective there is that, despite what the discourse says, at least at the moment, what AI is doing is not fundamentally different from what people are already doing.
The move towards personalized persuasion, micro-targeting, and messaging has been happening in politics for decades now. The dream has always been that, even if the blanket television advertisement doesn’t have much of an effect, maybe if we find just the right message for just the right people by measuring their views very precisely and delivering just the right thing to each door, we can get much more leverage than with these blanket approaches.
In my reading of the research and the evidence, this may be true in a laboratory setting, but in the real world, the overall effects are fairly small in terms of persuasion. The additional effects of personalized persuasion are even smaller; they’re very uncertain outside of the laboratory, even inside the laboratory.
There’s an empirical limit on just how well this can work, due to the inherent noisiness of the human mind. Then the question is: if we have the ability to ramp this up through AI, where we can call up each individual person and have a long conversation with each of them on the telephone, with an AI on the other side, can we get some miraculous additional boost?
The evidence we already have suggests that there are inherent limitations on just how far that can go and that, even though it can probably increase the amount of harassment we all get from campaigns, it might not really change the discourse, particularly when both sides have the capacity to use the same tools.
Personalized Messages Are Not Necessarily Bad for Accountability
If AI-generated political communication becomes increasingly personalized, what happens to democratic accountability? A candidate might present one version of immigration, another of taxation, and another of foreign policy to different voters without those messages ever entering a common public space. Could AI therefore move campaigning from micro-targeting toward something closer to individualized ideological worlds—and make it harder for journalists, opponents, or voters to hold politicians accountable for a coherent public position?
Assoc. Prof. Nick Beauchamp: That, too, is a similar type of question, where we’ve had a lot of these effects already operating before AI. Obviously, within the world of social media studies, there has been a huge amount of attention to bubbles. This is not necessarily about political campaigns, or just about algorithms or other types of things where everybody’s getting their own world, as it were.
What the research suggests is that, again, here too, there are inherent limitations on this: the idea that somebody would be completely in a bubble and unaware of all the other things going on out there just is not the way social media or human interactions actually work.
They could certainly try to make it more targeted to emphasize certain things that matter to each voter. But I don’t think that would necessarily entail voters losing knowledge about other things outside of their world. Without that loss, it’s not necessarily normatively bad if individuals learn more about the things they care more about.
So, again, this is AI aside, just saying that it’s not necessarily the case that personalized messages or campaigns are bad, because maybe a climate-sensitive moderate who’s trying to choose between Democrats and Republicans could really benefit from learning more about the climate policies of the two candidates. As long as that doesn’t exclude their knowledge of the other things, it’s not necessarily bad for democratic accountability, public knowledge, voting, or that sort of thing.
Isolationism Ends When American Dominance Is Challenged
The Iran war has exposed a significant tension within Trumpism: one strand of MAGA rejects “endless wars,” another favors overwhelming force when US power or prestige is challenged, while traditional Republican hawks remain influential. Does this suggest that “America First” is less a coherent foreign-policy doctrine than a flexible political narrative? And from a communication perspective, how can the same movement successfully frame both non-interventionism and military escalation as expressions of the same nationalist principle? How should we understand the tension between “America First” and military intervention?
Assoc. Prof. Nick Beauchamp: I don’t know. I agree that that’s a contradiction. I’m not a campaign strategist for the right, so I don’t really know how to sell those two things. I guess one would try to understand them from the framework of the authoritarian mindset, where your ideal is a world of uncontested American hegemony, where there are no wars and there’s no intervention. They leave us alone in the sense that America is not being attacked. But we’re not being left alone in the sense that America still has economic domination and military bases around the world. There’s no effort to rein those things in prior to any of these wars starting.
On the international stage, maybe the position of America is closer to the authoritarian ideal than it is domestically, in the sense that America’s dominance in the world has been fairly unique, or at least there have only been a few countries in all of human history that have been that dominant. So, it’s closer to what their utopia would already be.
In a sense, they can speak about America First and isolationism in the context of that utopia, but as soon as there’s any challenge to that utopia, where Iran or the Palestinians or other types of groups are pushing back against it, then the traditional structure of suppressing the enemies comes back.
Those two poles go together. In the US context, the story is that the enemies have largely ruined the greatness of America, and it needs to be reclaimed. Whereas in the external context, it’s more like the greatness of America is already in place to some degree, and these things just need to be suppressed.
The Anti-Establishment Mood Will Continue to Shape US Politics
Finally, looking beyond the midterms, what indicators would you watch to judge the future direction of American politics: whether MAGA can survive Trump as a durable ideological movement; whether democratic socialism can move from insurgency toward broader influence inside the Democratic Party; whether institutional trust continues to erode; and whether AI-driven political communication further fragments the public sphere? In other words, are we moving toward a durable system of competing populisms operating inside increasingly personalized and technologically segmented information environments—or is there still a plausible route back toward a more shared, deliberative democratic politics?
Assoc. Prof. Nick Beauchamp: There are six big questions. Maybe working backwards, shared deliberative democratic politics was largely a fiction, or, if it existed, it was a brief product of a very limited television media environment in the 50s, 60s, and 70s. So, I don’t think there’s a route back to this, if it ever existed. Nor do I normally think that we necessarily want such a route as believers in democracy and so forth.
A fragmented media landscape with personalized news, personalized campaigns, and so forth is compatible with deliberation, as long as one’s able to explore this space freely and is not completely unaware of the things going on outside of it. That said, there are much more serious problems with democratic institutions. A lot really turns on the contingency of power in the US or even in the world.
Presumably, in 2028, some form of MAGA Republican, whether it’s J.D. Vance, Trump again, or some other figure, will probably be representing the Republican Party. So, it’s hard for me to believe that, absent some giant catastrophe, the center-right faction, which I still think exists, is gonna succeed in taking over the party. Usually, that happens after the party’s in the wilderness for a while, when you have this change of power.
So, the bigger question is going to be whether that MAGA candidate, whoever they are, is running against a progressive-left candidate or a center-left candidate. In terms of gaming out the election, if it’s a center-left candidate—and there are many more strong center-left candidates than there are progressive candidates, just in terms of polling at the moment—it’s gonna be a structurally challenging approach for the Democrats, because they’re going to be working within what I presume will still be an anti-incumbent, anti-establishment, pro-populist mood, both on the left and the right, and they’ll be running a more centrist establishment figure.
That figure will try to present themself as a figure of change, often probably using strong anti-MAGA or anti-Trump language and so forth. But they won’t necessarily be proposing anti-establishment policies in many cases. So, that’s going to create an interesting structure where, as they are in various primaries, the center left will be adopting many of the tones of the anti-establishment, but not many of the policies, while running against a far-right candidate who will presumably still be running on these very anti-establishment policies, but also will be running as the party that has been running the country for four years.
So, in that case, it’ll be an interesting mix of anti-establishment policies and pro-establishment identity or messaging on both sides. If, on the other hand, the contingency is such that a DSA or far-left candidate wins on the Democratic side, then we’d have a very different debate happening here, and the possibility of a very different set of outcomes.
So, again, unfortunately for scientists who like to study regularities rather than accidents, a lot of these things really depend on the accident of what’s going to happen. The only thing we can be fairly confident of is that I expect this anti-establishment mood will continue and will be shaping the environment in which these figures are contesting things in the near future.
Klaudia Koxha(Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Lausanne).
Speakers
“Populist Strategies of Normalizing Demographic Fears,” by Oscar Mazzoleni (Professor in Political Science and Political Sociology at the University of Lausanne).
“The Scientific Normalization of ‘the Great Replacement’ Conspiracy,” by Alberta Giorgi (Associate Professor in Sociology of Culture and Communication at the University of Bergamo).
“From Demographic Winter to Civilizational Struggle: Anti-Abortion Networks and the Global Radical Right,” by Carol Mason (Otis A. Singletary Chair in the Humanities and Professor at University of Kentucky, US).
“Mestizaje, Backlash, and the Politics of Demographic Populism: Race and Gender in Latin America,” by Carlos de la Torre (Professor at the Centre for Latin American Studies, University of Florida).
“Anti-Muslim Mobilization: Demographic Change and Radical-Right Populism in Austria,” by Reinhard Heinisch(Professor of Comparative Austrian Politics at the University of Salzburg, European Studies Center associate at the University of Pittsburgh and visiting lecturer at Renmin University of China).
Klaudia Koxha is a Senior Researcher at the University of Lausanne, where she works on an international research project examining radical right populism and conspiracy theories across four European democracies. She holds a PhD in Political Science from Paris Lodron University of Salzburg and was a visiting researcher at American University in Washington, DC. Her research focuses on populism and the radical right, European integration and EU policy, gender equality, party politics, and comparative and multi-level politics. Alongside her academic work, she has contributed expertise to regional and international organizations on issues including gender equality and inclusion, integrity, and democratic governance. She regularly contributes to public and policy debates through invited talks, lectures, and expert commentary, with her work featured in outlets including EUobserver, El Mundo, The European Correspondent, and DeFacto. She is co-editor of The Radical Right and Demographic Populism (Manchester University Press, 2026), New Dynamics of Contestation in EU–Western Balkan Relations (Palgrave, 2026), and Perspectives on Populism (Nomos, 2024). Her recent research appears in Government and Opposition journal, with further work accepted for publication in Comparative European Politics and forthcoming with Presses de l’Université Laval.
Oscar Mazzoleni is a professor in political science at the University of Lausanne where he leads the Research Observatory for regional research. He has achieved an interdisciplinary educational path, with a degree in sociology and anthropology and a PhD in contemporary history between the universities of Lausanne and Turin. He has been visiting professor and research fellow at the Universities of Columbia, Cornell, Laval, Geneva, Groningen, Torino, Sorbonne-Panthéon- Paris, Science-Po-Paris, Valencia, Salzburg, European University Institute of Florence, La Tuscia, and Roma-Sapienza. His current interests are devoted on political parties, populism, nationalism, regionalism, electoral studies, and Swiss politics in comparative perspective.
Alberta Giorgi is an associate professor in Sociology of Culture and Communication at the University of Bergamo. Her work explores discursive boundaries and classifications, particularly at the intersection of politics, gender, religion, and science. She has recently co-edited with H. Eslen-Ziya, (Un)silencing Academia in Times of Epistemic Conflicts. Navigating Online Violence (Routledge 2026). She is co-editing with Pauline Cullen Mapping Political Sociology Ambiguities and Complexities for Unpredictable Futures (Routledge 2026)
Carol Mason is the Otis A. Singletary Chair in the Humanities and a professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Kentucky, USA. She is the author of four books on various aspects of the rise of the Right since the 1960s. University of California Press published her latest monograph, From the Clinics to the Capitol: How Opposing Abortion Became Insurrectionary, in 2025.
Carlos de la Torre is a professor at the Centre for Latin American Studies at the University of Florida. He has authored several manuscripts and edited volumes on populism. His most recent books are Populism and Fascism, Elements in the History and Politics of Fascism (Cambridge University Press, 2025); Global Populisms with Treethep Srisa-nga (Routledge Press, 2021); Populisms: A Quick Immersion (Tibidabo editions, 2019); and Populist Seduction in Latin America (Ohio University Press, second edition, 2010).
Dr. Reinhard Heinisch is a Professor of Comparative Austrian Politics at the University of Salzburg and head of the Department of Political Science. He received his academic training in the US where he completed his PhD at Michigan State University and then taught at the University of Pittsburgh from 1994 to 2009. Heinisch’s research focuses on the rise of the radical right, populism, democracy, and political parties. Dr. Heinisch is the author of over 40 research articles and more than 50 other scholarly publications including 14 books. His research appeared in journals such as Journal of European Political Research, Political Studies,Journal ofCommon Market Studies, Party Politics, West European Politics, Democratization, Representation, and many others. His book publications include Understanding Populist Party Organization: The Radical Right in Western Europe (Palgrave 2016); The People and the Nation: Populism and Ethno-Territorial Politics in Europe (Routledge 2019), Political Populism. A Handbook, Nomos (2021), and Politicizing Islam in Austria (Rutgers University Press 2024).
In an interview with the ECPS, Professor Damir Kapidžić examines Bosnia and Herzegovina’s October 4 elections through the intertwined lenses of ethnonationalism, democratic erosion, patronage, institutional paralysis, and foreign influence. He argues that the country’s principal democratic danger lies less in dramatic constitutional breakdown than in the “slow death” of institutions gradually weakened by illiberal practices, elite capture, and political incentives that reward dysfunction. Professor Kapidžić also highlights the durability of ethno-national patronage, the limits of civic alternatives, and the persistence of war memory and religious identity in structuring political competition. Looking beyond the elections, he cautions that Bosnia remains “stuck in the past,” with democratic renewal unlikely without changes in both domestic incentives and the wider external environment.
Bosnia and Herzegovina approaches its October 4 elections at a moment when the country’s post-Dayton political order is once again under pressure over statehood, entity autonomy, ethnic representation, and democratic legitimacy. The campaign is shaped less by a conventional left-right divide than by competing visions of citizenship, constituent peoples, sovereignty, and the future of the Bosnian state. Against this background of ethnonationalism, populism, democratic erosion, and geopolitical influence, the elections offer an important vantage point from which to assess not only who will govern, but also the deeper institutional structures that continue to constrain Bosnia and Herzegovina’s democratic development.
In this wide-ranging interview with the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Professor Damir Kapidžić, Professor of Comparative Politics at the Faculty of Political Science and Director of the Institute for Social Science Research at the University of Sarajevo, argues that Bosnia’s most consequential democratic danger may not take the form of spectacular constitutional collapse. Rather, it lies in the gradual erosion and paralysis of institutions. “We do see the possibility of what I would not call a dramatic constitutional breakdown, but rather a slow death,” he warns, explaining that institutions can simply cease to function when government formation, regulatory bodies, or judicial appointments are left indefinitely unresolved. In his assessment, “the gradual normalization of illiberal practices is likely to continue,”while “a more likely scenario… would simply be a slow demise.”
Professor Kapidžić situates this institutional vulnerability within the contradictions of the Dayton system. While power-sharing has helped prevent renewed large-scale intercommunal violence, he argues that political elites have also “been able to capture the system for their own purposes.” The resulting elite consensus, he observes, has often centered not on effective governance but on “keeping the rule of law weak, not resolving wartime legacies, and capturing state institutions.”
These dynamics are reinforced by deeply embedded patronage networks. Coalition negotiations, Professor Kapidžić notes, are rarely programmatic; instead, they revolve around “the division of power and resources rather than the creation of policies.” Ethnonational parties therefore operate not only as guardians of identity but also as gatekeepers of material opportunity, presenting themselves as protectors of their communities’ access to “resources and employment.”
Looking beyond October 4, Professor Kapidžić remains cautious about the prospect of democratic renewal. Bosnia, he argues, is “very stable, but also stable in a negative sense,” with progress occurring “either very slowly or not at all.” The deeper problem is a political order “stuck in the past”—not simply the wartime past, but “the past 30 years of very little changing.” Without altered domestic incentives and a transformed external environment, Bosnia risks remaining trapped in what he describes as a recurrent political loop, “without clear signposts, clear guidelines about the possibilities, or a clear path forward.”
Here is our interview with Professor Damir Kapidžić, edited lightly to enhance clarity, readability, and overall flow for publication.
Bosnia’s Elections Reflect Deeper Ethno-Political Divisions Over What the State Is and Should Become
A voter casts a ballot against the backdrop of the flag of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Photo: Oleg Kachura / Dreamstime.
Professor Kapidžić, welcome! Bosnia and Herzegovina enters the October 4 elections amid renewed disputes over statehood, entity autonomy, ethnic representation, and democratic legitimacy. Looking at the campaign as a whole, is this primarily an election about who governs—or, more fundamentally, about what kind of state Bosnia and Herzegovina should be?
Professor Damir Kapidžić: In its basic sense, the election is about who will govern for the next four years. But in a broader sense, it is also about competing visions of what the country actually is and what it should become in the future. These visions usually do not collide directly because the parties are not competing for the same voters; they primarily seek support within their own ethnic groups. It is something that I call a sub-divided party system with sub-groups, where competition actually takes place between parties representing the same ethnic group.
Within each group—among Serbs, Croats, or Bosniaks—there is relatively little dispute over the broader vision of how the state should be organized. The major disagreements lie between the three groups, but they are not competing for the same electorate. So, essentially, what we see in the electoral arena is a manifestation of the deeper ethno-political divisions within society.
Power-Sharing Preserved Peace but Failed to Produce the Elite Compromise Bosnia Needs
In your work, you argue that the Dayton system brought peace but failed to overcome tensions generated by ethnic patrimonial elites, weak rule of law, and unresolved wartime legacies. Three decades later, has power-sharing become part of the problem it was originally designed to solve by institutionalizing ethnicity as the principal language of political competition?
Professor Damir Kapidžić: Yes, this is a trick question, because power-sharing has both positive and negative sides, and weighing them against each other can be complicated. Let’s just recap. It has been more than three decades since the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina ended and the Dayton system was put in place, and during that time we have not seen a single major incidence of violence between communities. There has been lived violence, but not known physical violence. This is largely due to the power-sharing system.
At the same time, however, elites have been able to capture the system for their own purposes. This is a key element of consociationalism, the type of democracy established through the Dayton Peace Agreement in Bosnia-Herzegovina: elites are needed to represent the interests of their own groups. But the thinking behind this is that those elites should also be willing to compromise with one another, and that is what we have not seen.
The only compromise that has happened is exactly along the lines you mentioned and that I have written about: keeping the rule of law weak, not resolving wartime legacies, and capturing state institutions. There is agreement among elites on that, but not on how to govern the country effectively or how to make compromises. That is the element of the Dayton system that has never really come forward. Because if elites had the ability to compromise, they would also be able to address the first question: what kind of state do you want Bosnia-Herzegovina to become?
Bosnia’s Populist Polarization Operates Within Ethnically Defined Voter Groups
Would you describe the dominant form of populism in Bosnia and Herzegovina as essentially ethnonational populism? In other words, is the classic populist division between “the people” and “the elite” transformed here into a more dangerous distinction between “our people,” rival ethnic communities, domestic elites, and allegedly hostile foreign actors? And during the current campaign, how important is the invocation of external patrons or enemies in reinforcing these narratives?
Professor Damir Kapidžić: Yes, this is definitely not a typical form of populism in Bosnia. I would probably describe it as a hybrid ethno-national populism, because the main adversary of “us” or “our people” is not so much the other group—although they are also part of it—but rather enemies within our own group.
So, populism here is threefold. It operates within each of the ethnic party groups and is directed not so much against the other groups themselves as against the ideas those groups represent. It is not aimed specifically at politicians or citizens living in other parts of the country. Rather, it targets the “traitors within our own ranks,” so to say. This kind of populism uses the ethnic narrative to polarize within one’s own group, because that is where the electorate is.
You can see this happening among Croats, Bosniaks, and Serbs at the same time. The polarization is there, but it does not transcend these ethnically defined voter groups.
Republika Srpska Still Operates as a Form of ‘Competitive Authoritarianism-Lite’
Milorad Dodik greets supporters in Pale, Bosnia and Herzegovina, following a meeting and referendum on Republika Srpska’s National Day, September 25, 2016. Photo: Vladimir Stanisic / Dreamstime.
Your research on subnational competitive authoritarianism shows how executive dominance, economic power, patronage, informal party networks, and ethnically bounded political competition can produce uneven autocratization within Bosnia and Herzegovina. To what extent does Republika Srpska under the SNSD still represent the clearest example of this model ahead of the 2026 elections?
Professor Damir Kapidžić: Yes, within Bosnia-Herzegovina, it still represents the clearest example. There has been some reduction in the elements of competitive authoritarianism, mainly due to several court cases that have limited certain powers of the Republika Srpska parliament and government, as well as some backroom deals, with the help of the United States, that have rolled back some of these elements.
However, the system still exists, and Republika Srpska remains the clearest example. We could still characterize its subnational regime as a kind of competitive authoritarianism-lite. This is also reinforced by external patrons and actors that emphasize the ability, or the need, of the Republika Srpska government to retain as much autonomy as it can muster. Of course, this also shapes the way the current SNSD government uses these external patrons to justify the capture of some of these institutions.
Much of Dodik’s External Support Now Comes from the Trump Administration
Milorad Dodik is not himself a candidate, yet his political influence remains central to the SNSD’s campaign and to its framing of Republika Srpska as being under pressure from Sarajevo and international actors. How important is this personalized form of leadership for the persistence of ethnonational populism, and can the SNSD reproduce the same political model without Dodik formally holding office? To what extent can external support—from Serbia, Russia, Hungary, or other actors—help sustain this political strategy during the election period?
Professor Damir Kapidžić: You are correct: Milorad Dodik is not running in these elections, but if you look at the SNSD billboards, he is always there. That reflects the aura he still carries and his ability to influence politics. He remains one of the most relevant politicians in the country, and his narrative is still taken seriously by voters in Republika Srpska.
That said, he no longer has the same institutional influence. There has to be another form of leadership, including personalized leadership among other politicians. He is not going to be the one speaking for the government. So, there is a trajectory in which Milorad Dodik is slowly becoming less present in the country’s politics. It is very likely to follow a similar scenario to Poland under Kaczynski, where taking a backseat from politics allows others to make use of the power they now have.
External support has always been important, but currently Milorad Dodik and the SNSD are no longer receiving support from Hungary, luckily. They are receiving only limited support from Russia, because Russia is focused on other issues. The same goes for Serbia, which is in the midst of its own electoral campaign with an unclear outcome.
But Milorad Dodik has been able to do something that nobody thought was possible: gain support from the United States of America. Much of his external support now actually comes from the Trump administration, including inviting Trump Jr. to Banja Luka, the capital of Republika Srpska, and trying to create both business and political connections with the United States. That can definitely create support for the SNSD, but also for Milorad Dodik personally.
Being in Opposition Does Not Make a Party Less Nationalistic in Republika Srpska
At the same time, the opposition in Republika Srpska challenges the SNSD over corruption, patronage, institutional degradation, and personalized rule without necessarily rejecting a strong Serb national framework. Does this mean that the central contest inside Republika Srpska is less between nationalism and post-nationalism than between competing claims about who can most credibly represent Serb interests?
Professor Damir Kapidžić: Exactly. This is also what I’ve been talking about: competition and polarization take place within these ethnic groups, particularly around issues of corruption and patronage. These are among the main issues driving polarization: the “traitors” who are stealing from us as a people versus those who promise to bring in a clean slate. Nationalism remains present. Being in the opposition does not make a party less nationalistic; the difference lies in the kinds of policies it defines and sets out within its nationalist agenda.
Religion Versus Secularism Remains the Central Cleavage Distinguishing Bosnia’s Party Families
Muslims gather for a funeral in Maglaj, Bosnia and Herzegovina, in 2016, with an effendi wearing a turban visible among the crowd. Photo: Damir Đuhera / Dreamstime.
On the Bosniak side, the political spectrum ranges from the SDA’s national-conservative and state-protective discourse to the more civic and social-democratic language of the SDP, Naša stranka, and other actors. How meaningful is this ideological distinction when virtually all major Bosniak-oriented parties operate within a political environment in which the survival and integrity of the Bosnian state remain highly salient?
Professor Damir Kapidžić: They are still ideologically distinct. Both Bosniak nationalist parties and the more civic-oriented social-democratic and liberal parties cater to a very similar electorate. Their main distinction concerns secularism and the role religion should play in politics. The SDA takes a moderate position, viewing religion as important—much like the German Christian Democrats—and as a foundational element of politics. This is clearly rejected by the SDP and Naša stranka, who see the only way forward as a clearly secular state.
They are therefore brought together by the idea that Bosnia-Herzegovina must continue to exist as a unified state, probably even a more centralized one than it currently is. But they are divided by this secular cleavage, which is the main cleavage in the country’s party politics. This distinguishes Serb, Croat, and Bosniak parties on the basis of religion, while also distinguishing the civic, social-democratic parties as the secular element—the fourth element—within this party landscape.
Individual Equality Collides with Collective Representation in Bosnia’s Political System
The Croat political debate continues to revolve around “legitimate representation,” particularly the argument that Croats should be able to determine their own member of the state Presidency. How should we understand this dispute theoretically: as a legitimate minority-protection demand within a consociational system, as ethnonational entrenchment, or as a conflict between two defensible democratic principles—individual equality and collective representation?
Professor Damir Kapidžić: The last element is very important here because individual equality—the equality of voters and candidates themselves—collides with the idea of collective representation of a group as such. For example, this whole debate about collective, “legitimate representation,” as it is called, emerged from voting patterns showing that the Croat representative in the current Presidency did not receive his votes primarily from areas with Croat voters. Territorially, his support was more closely aligned with a Bosniak electorate.
This goes against the principle of collective representation, according to which peoples should be able to vote for their own representative. On the other side, you have individual equality, which means that, as a citizen of the country, ethnicity is very fluid. You can redeclare yourself within a limited timeframe, especially as a politician, and you are not required to vote for your own ethnic group.
So, these two principles—individual equality as personhood and the ability to choose one’s identity—collide with the rigid institutional framework of collective representation. The Croats, who are the smallest constituent people, are the ones who have lost out in this contest. You have to see this from their perspective: as being outvoted, or as a form of majoritarization of institutions that, according to the country’s institutional framework, would belong to them. Individual equality here does not translate into representation, which creates the theoretical problem that something needs to change for the system to work, because in its current form it disadvantages the Croats in particular.
In Bosnia’s Ethnically Divided Party System, Demographics Is Destiny
This leads to a broader paradox in Bosnia’s civic politics. Advocates of a stronger citizenship-based state see civic democracy as a way beyond ethnocracy, while many Croat and Serb actors perceive the same project as a vehicle for Bosniak majoritarianism. Is there a politically viable model of civic democracy in Bosnia and Herzegovina that can overcome ethnic segmentation without weakening the security guarantees of smaller constituent peoples?
Professor Damir Kapidžić: Again, this is mostly a trick question, because in ethnically divided societies such as Bosnia-Herzegovina, demographics is destiny, especially when the political party system is so clearly divided along ethnic lines. The problem is that Bosniaks are now a majority in the country. As in any democratic system with a clear majority, you can define and lead politics in the way you want. Even with minority protections, this would create enormous tensions, because we are not speaking about minorities; we are speaking about almost half the population, which does not agree with what the other 53 or 55 percent would vote for.
The other problem is that these ethnic differences are territorially concentrated. You have areas with clear Croat or Serb dominance, which makes a civic system of majoritarian rule almost impossible.
The only country that has been able to overcome this kind of ethnic gridlock is the Netherlands. Its consociational system began to be dismantled when the main dividing lines between Protestants and Catholics became weaker. As religion receded from public life in the Netherlands, other cross-cutting cleavages became more important.
We are not there in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and I do not know if we ever will be. Religious lines here are more clear-cut than those between Catholics and Protestants. So, as for when this might change, it is probably not going to happen soon.
Religious Identity Is Becoming More, Not Less, Important Among Younger Bosnians
Religion is closely intertwined with national identity in Bosnia and Herzegovina—Islam with Bosniak identity, Serbian Orthodoxy with Serb identity, and Catholicism with Croat identity—yet theological questions themselves are rarely the main electoral issue. How does religion function politically today: primarily as faith, as a marker of ethnonational belonging, or as a symbolic resource that political actors can activate during periods of heightened insecurity? And how significant are transnational religious, cultural, and political networks linked to Serbia, Croatia, Turkey, or Russia in shaping these identities during election campaigns?
Professor Damir Kapidžić: Yes, identity is clearly salient in Bosnia, and in our research we track it over time. It is not becoming less important; if anything, it is becoming more important among younger people and younger voters. So, it remains a clear element of personal identity.
We speak here of what we call an identity package, and you mentioned these pairings: Islam with Bosniaks, Serbian Orthodoxy with Serbs, and Catholicism with Croats. We also add a third element, which is language. These languages are mutually very close, almost indistinguishable, but they are called differently and therefore also belong in this identity basket.
All of this becomes much more pronounced during elections, and religion functions in all the ways you mentioned. It is very much faith-focused and very much individual. As an individual, you would not necessarily use it for political purposes. At the same time, however, it is a marker of belonging, so people may perform more religious rituals—whether Sunday Mass or Friday prayer in the mosque—during periods of electoral campaigning. You want it to be seen as a marker of who you are. The same applies to politicians. All of a sudden, you see them becoming more religious in their practice.
Religion also functions as a symbolic resource, because politicians sometimes revert to old narratives of insecurity and threat, talking about churches and mosques that were destroyed during the war and about rebuilding and protecting them. These elements all come together, with religion used both as a personal marker and as a political campaign resource.
What has changed to a large degree, though not completely, is that religious authorities are no longer directly part of political campaigning. That was more common in the past, when they would play a more active role in suggesting—which they could not do openly—which parties would be in the best interests of a particular ethnic group.
When it comes to transnational players, this is much less present. You mostly see it through cultural identity ties, so not so much through religion itself, but through cultural connections, including folklore groups. From Russia, for example, we had biker gangs a few elections ago with a great deal of Christian Orthodox iconography attached to them. But this is relatively minor compared with the way individuals use religion to signal their own belonging and identity to voters.
War Memories Remain a Key Component of Political Mobilization in Bosnia
Ratko Mladić is depicted on a Serbian flag during a political rally in Belgrade, Serbia, on May 29, 2011. Mladić is a former Bosnian Serb military leader. Photo: Dreamstime.
Your work stresses that unresolved memories of the 1992–95 war continue to segment society. How important are Srebrenica, competing narratives of victimhood, the commemoration or glorification of wartime actors, and memories of ethnic cleansing in reproducing contemporary political boundaries? Are these memories still genuinely decisive for voters, or are political elites strategically keeping them alive because they remain effective instruments of mobilization, as seen during Ratko Mladić’s funeral?
Professor Damir Kapidžić: They are a key component of mobilization, in the sense that they serve a purpose when political elites need them. However, I would not say they are genuinely decisive in themselves; rather, the absence or negation of some of these memories can be decisive. For example, a Bosniak politician cannot play down Srebrenica and still expect to be elected. Likewise, a Serb politician cannot place Ratko Mladić firmly in the category of war criminals and still expect to be elected.
In that sense, keeping these figures and events at least in a neutral, and sometimes positive, light becomes an important performative element of campaigning. They also serve to mobilize very specific segments of the electorate. So, political actors need to know who their voters are and strategically when and where these narratives can be used.
Some practices, such as the glorification of war criminals, are prohibited under the laws of Bosnia-Herzegovina, so politicians also have to be careful about how far they go; otherwise, they may face removal from the electoral roll. All of this is therefore used very strategically.
That said, most voters still see key moments and individuals from the war as important in a broader sense. They may be more inclined to support a politician who lays flowers or gives a commemorative speech at a memorial to a person or place that is meaningful to them, whether in Croat-majority areas or elsewhere in the country. So, there is a strong performative dimension, but mobilization also takes shape around these smaller, local sites of memorialization.
The More Likely Scenario for Bosnia Is a Slow Institutional Demise Rather Than Sudden Authoritarianism
You have argued that democratic erosion in Southeast Europe often occurs incrementally: elections continue, but governing parties weaken constraints, dominate institutions, exploit patronage, and tilt the playing field. In the Bosnian context, should we therefore be more concerned about dramatic constitutional breakdown—or about the gradual normalization of illiberal practices within formally competitive elections?
Professor Damir Kapidžić: I would argue both. Primarily, my work analyzes how institutions are gradually weakened over time so that they can be more easily captured. This gradual normalization of illiberal practices is still ongoing, and it is reinforced by a political system that sometimes rewards inefficiency.
However, there is also a flip side to Bosnia’s consociational system: it introduces another layer of checks and balances—ethnic checks and balances—which means that no single politician or party can dominate the entire political system. There are always other ethnic groups that keep that in check. You can see this, for example, at the state level. These institutions are not the main or strongest institutions, but they are almost impossible to capture because other groups are always trying to keep their foot in the door as well.
At the same time, we do see the possibility of what I would not call a dramatic constitutional breakdown, but rather a slow death. Institutions can simply stop functioning because some aspects of government formation, regulatory bodies, or judicial appointments are not strictly defined by time. So, you can simply allow these institutions to slowly die out.
We also have not talked much about the Office of the High Representative, the international body that essentially oversees the implementation of Dayton. It has been weakened to the extent that it cannot intervene effectively if these kinds of political practices intensify.
So, essentially, the gradual normalization of illiberal practices is likely to continue, but only up to a certain point before it becomes authoritarian. A more likely scenario, however, would simply be a slow demise.
Ethno-National Patronage Is Central to How Bosnia’s Dominant Parties Survive
How important are patronage, control of public resources, public-sector employment, party-linked media, and informal economic networks compared with ideology in explaining the durability of Bosnia’s dominant parties? Does ethnonationalism survive partly because political parties have successfully fused identity protection with material dependence on party-controlled institutions?
Professor Damir Kapidžić: Yes, very much so. You can clearly see that patronage is important for most parties. There have very rarely been programmatic coalition talks, even after elections. Most coalition negotiations are about the division of power and resources rather than the creation of policies.
So, you can definitely see that elements such as control over public procurement and the ability to employ people in state-owned enterprises have shaped how parties survive and how they are able to withstand the passage of time and other pressures.
There is, therefore, this element of ethno-national patronage that is clearly important, because patronage itself is also defined within the three groups. Parties see themselves not only as protectors of a group’s identity, but also as protectors of the group’s ability to distribute resources and employment.
Foreign Disinformation Remains Present, but Bosnia’s Fragmented Electoral System Makes Large-Scale Interference Difficult
Your recent work places Bosnia and Herzegovina’s democratic trajectory within a wider geopolitical and transatlantic context. As the country approaches the October 4 elections, how should we distinguish legitimate foreign influence from more problematic forms of electoral interference? What roles are the European Union, the United States, Serbia, Croatia, Russia, Turkey, Hungary, and China playing through diplomacy, party networks, media, religious and cultural ties, economic leverage, lobbying, or disinformation? Are some external actors merely supporting preferred domestic partners, or are they actively reshaping the electoral playing field and reinforcing ethnonational or illiberal politics?
Professor Damir Kapidžić: Here we do see this shifting electoral landscape. I mentioned already that even the support of the United States is shifting in terms of the parties and actors it supports. The most steadfast and clear support has actually come from the European Union, although it is much weaker and more diffuse than that of some of these other actors.
In terms of the type of foreign influence we can see, most of it is very unofficial. It operates through media channels, control of media publishing houses, and the way certain events are framed. Most of these actors are not particularly interested in what happens in Bosnia and Herzegovina, perhaps with the exception of Russia, which still wants to maintain a place where it can gain some influence. But even that has weakened compared with several years ago.
Most of the actors simply see this as a contest in which they can exert influence through what I would mostly call cheap means. If it involves generating online disinformation and specifically tilting the electoral playing field slightly toward one candidate or one party, then they might do that. But again, the problem here is that, in order to govern, you need to tilt several electoral playing fields at the same time within these ethnically defined voter groups, which in itself is a complex problem. Specifically, if we think about how the country is governed, it is not worth it.
It is not a clear yes-or-no situation, such as, for example, in Romania, where you could exert a lot of influence to get a Russia-friendly candidate elected. Here, it would take much more effort across several different voting groups, with sometimes a not-so-clear outcome.
In this sense, a lot of it is simply about supporting particular actors rather than trying to influence the process directly, but you do still see the element of foreign disinformation present.
Citizens Are More Willing Than Politicians to Compromise
Men play on a giant chessboard in a park in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Photo: Henrique Weiss / Dreamstime.
You have also written about citizens’ assemblies and other democratic innovations as possible responses to democratic deficits, polarization, and citizens’ exclusion from decision-making. In a society where representative institutions are heavily structured by ethnicity, could deliberative mechanisms create meaningful cross-ethnic political space—or would they remain too weak to challenge the deeply institutionalized power of ethnonational parties?
Professor Damir Kapidžić: Yes, there were several democratic innovations in the country, including citizens’ assemblies at both the local and national levels. At a very basic level, you could see that citizens, when deliberating among themselves, do not agree on everything, but they are much more willing to compromise and to arrive at solutions that represent a step forward—something that reflects compromise among all the sides involved. So, they are much more willing to do the work that politicians are not willing to do.
This takes place at the level of ordinary citizens: randomly selected groups that mirror the population distribution of the country in terms of ethnicity, age, gender, and so on. But you also mentioned the element of power, and the citizens here, essentially, even though they were sometimes called by city governments or the national parliament to deliberate, do not have the power to challenge these deeply institutionalized rules of governance.
So, their results and recommendations are transferred to decision makers once the citizens are done. In a sense, the citizens do not make the decisions; they create an avenue for decision-making, whether in Parliament or by government, allowing decision makers to legitimately draw on these recommendations in cases where the policy would make the country better as such.
So, in a sense, yes, they can provide a way out of political gridlock. But they themselves do not have the power to do so without institutional support from already existing institutions.
Bosnia Is Stuck in a Loop Without Clear Signposts or a Clear Path Forward
And finally, Professor Kapidžić, looking beyond October 4, what trajectories do you see as plausible for Bosnia and Herzegovina over the next several years? Could these elections open space for more functional cross-ethnic bargaining and democratic renewal, or are the country’s institutional incentives, ethnonational party structures, geopolitical pressures, foreign influence, and unresolved historical divisions more likely to reproduce the existing pattern of recurrent crisis? And what would have to change—domestically and internationally—for Bosnia to become less vulnerable to external interference and move decisively beyond what you have described as being “stuck in the past”?
Professor Damir Kapidžić: I think, by themselves, these elections won’t bring too much change. You might see different parties in government, and this is also one of the good things about the Dayton political system: transfers of power between governing and opposition parties have happened in the past without producing crisis or conflict. So, that might happen. However, a different mode of governing, non-ethnic politics, or even democratic renewal is highly unlikely.
In a political sense, Bosnia is very stable, but also stable in a negative sense, in that progress happens either very slowly or not at all. In a sense, this is best described as being stuck in the past. The past here is not so much the wartime past, but rather the past 30 years of very little changing.
So, what would need to happen for this to change? Mostly, there would need to be a change in the external environment and in the incentives for politicians to act differently. We have not seen any meaningful change in the external environment over the past 20 years, even though globally there have been massive changes, with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the rise of China, AI, and the United States moving more toward nationalist politics.
But for the region itself, not much has changed, and this is what produces this pattern of recurrence in Bosnia-Herzegovina. You don’t see a clear way forward, whether toward the European Union or elsewhere. There are very few alternatives. You’re stuck in a loop, trying to figure out in which direction you want the country to develop, without clear signposts, clear guidelines about the possibilities, or a clear path forward.
In this ECPS interview, Professor Michael Kazin, a leading historian of American populism, social movements, and the Democratic Party, examines the asymmetrical rise of MAGA and democratic socialism in contemporary US politics. While stressing that the American left can significantly influence Democratic priorities, Professor Kazin argues that it has historically failed to take control of the party and concludes that “the Democratic Party will not become a socialist party anytime soon.” He links this limitation to the decline of organized labor, noting that Democratic class appeals increasingly come “from the top down.” At the same time, Professor Kazin contends that Democrats cannot simply return to the politics of Obama or Biden and must confront inequality, healthcare, housing insecurity, corruption, and distrust in government more fundamentally.
As the United States approaches the November 3 midterm elections, American politics is being reshaped by two powerful but asymmetrical currents: the consolidation of MAGA within a highly personalized Trump presidency and the growing visibility of democratic socialism within a Democratic coalition that remains considerably broader than its left flank. This tension provides the backdrop to the ECPS conversation with Professor Michael Kazin, Professor of History at Georgetown University and Editor Emeritus of Dissent, a leading historian of American populism, social movements, and the Democratic Party. Professor Kazin’s scholarship has long explored the political language of “the people,” the evolution of the American left, and the relationship between social movements, class politics, and party transformation. Georgetown likewise identifies Kazin as a scholar of US political and social movements, while his influential The Populist Persuasion traces recurring conflicts between “the people” and powerful elites across American history.
At the center of the interview is a fundamental question about whether the current revival of democratic socialism can move beyond insurgency and become a durable governing force. Professor Kazin’s answer is deliberately cautious. While the left can exercise substantial influence within the Democratic Party, he stresses that “historically, at least so far, it has not been able to take over the party entirely.” His conclusion is unequivocal: “The Democratic Party will not become a socialist party anytime soon.”
Yet Professor Kazin does not equate this electoral ceiling with political irrelevance. He argues that the contemporary left resembles earlier progressive factions that transformed Democratic priorities without controlling the party. Bernie Sanders demonstrated this dynamic in 2016 and 2020, while the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) have developed substantial organizational capacity in heavily Democratic cities. For Professor Kazin, their influence illustrates how a faction “does not control the party, but it can have a great deal of influence over it.”
The deeper obstacle, however, is organizational and social. Professor Kazin identifies the decline of organized labor as a critical reason Democrats struggle to construct a persuasive class-based politics. When unions were stronger, working-class appeals came from workers speaking to other workers; today, he argues, “when Democrats make a class appeal, it comes from the top down.”
This diagnosis also shapes Professor Kazin’s understanding of the post-Trump Democratic Party. He argues that Democrats increasingly recognize that they “cannot simply return to some of the policies of Obama or Biden” and must confront long-standing problems including economic inequality, healthcare, housing costs, and distrust of government. In this sense, the interview presents democratic socialism less as an imminent replacement for mainstream Democratic politics than as a persistent force capable of shifting the boundaries of what the party considers politically necessary and possible.
Here is our interview with Professor Michael Kazin, edited lightly to enhance clarity, readability, and overall flow for publication.
The Midterms Are Both a Referendum on Trump and a Traditional Judgment on the Incumbent
US left- and right-wing politics and the American electoral divide, symbolized by the Democratic donkey and Republican elephant. Photo: Dreamstime.
Professor Kazin, welcome! The November 3 midterms are taking place with an exceptionally narrow congressional balance, weak public evaluations of the economy, and Donald Trump remaining unusually central to an election in which his own name is not on the ballot. More registered voters have described their congressional vote as a vote against Trump than as a vote for him. Should we understand this election primarily as an ordinary midterm judgment on an incumbent administration—or as a broader referendum on Trumpism as a political regime and governing philosophy?
Professor Michael Kazin: Every midterm election in the United States is primarily determined by voters’ views of the incumbent administration. That has pretty much always been true throughout American history. If Trump were more popular, Republicans would probably retain control of the US Senate and might also be able to retain control of the House. In that sense, this is a typical midterm election. Trump’s popularity is somewhere around 37–38% on average across most polls. Clearly, he is most unpopular on the economy, which is, of course, the major issue for most voters here and in most democratic countries most of the time.
At the same time, as everyone reading this knows, Donald Trump is not like most presidents. He is an authoritarian figure, but a very good performer. Those who love him really love him, and he has a movement behind him that is part of the Republican Party but, in some ways, independent of it: the MAGA movement. At the same time, the antagonism he draws from opponents, both former Republicans and Democrats, is also quite intense.
So, I’m not sure you can say there is a coherent Trumpism. So much depends on what Trump decides he favors or opposes on any given day or week. There are certain elements that have been around for a while, but in general, he is perceived as a particular kind of political personality. People who like him identify with what he hates, and people who hate him identify with what they hate about him.
In that sense, the midterm election is both a traditional referendum on the incumbent party and president and an election driven by an intensity of emotions on both sides because of Trump himself.
Republicans May Keep Trump’s Policies Without Trumpism
You have spent much of your career studying how political movements reshape American parties. Has MAGA now accomplished something historically unusual by transforming the Republican Party not simply programmatically but organizationally and emotionally around a single leader? Is MAGA still best understood as a faction within the GOP, or has it become the party’s dominant political identity, with older Reaganite conservatism reduced to a subordinate tradition?
Professor Michael Kazin: On the one hand, certainly, MAGA and those who support Trump or remain loyal to him pretty much no matter what he does are the dominant force in the Republican Party. Yet, because his administration has been so personalist, so narcissistic, and so focused on whatever Trump believes or says on any given day or week, it is unclear what will happen after he leaves office in 2029.
In fact, the debate over what the Republican Party stands for will probably begin the day after the midterm election, on November 4th, because that is when Republicans who want to run for president will begin thinking: What chances do I have? What relationship will I have with the president?
If Trump continues to be unpopular, many Republicans will try to continue some of his policies without identifying with a movement so closely connected to Trump personally. One analogy, interestingly enough, and perhaps not one you would expect to hear, is between Trump and Franklin Roosevelt.
When Roosevelt was elected in 1932, he was elected, as Trump was in 2016, largely as someone criticizing an incumbent administration that was perceived as having failed to solve the economic problems of ordinary Americans. Of course, there was the Great Depression in 1932, which was very different from the economy Trump inherited in 2017. At the same time, the Democratic Party, which already contained elements of Roosevelt’s politics and of New Deal politics before the New Deal began, was nevertheless very much reshaped by Franklin Roosevelt. The New Deal was very much Roosevelt’s New Deal. The Democratic Party was very much Roosevelt’s party, even after he died in 1945, and arguably remained so until the 1970s or 80s, or, some might say, until Bill Clinton’s administration in the 1990s.
In that sense, the difference is that Roosevelt was all about policy. He was a very charismatic figure. People loved him or hated him, in ways somewhat similar to Trump. Yet he was a more serious world-historical figure. He had a deeper understanding of historical trends and was trying to find a way, when they took power, between fascism and communism, in a way that Trump does not have that perspective.
But both of them, of course, took power at a time of crisis, when many Americans felt that the existing party structures were no longer serving their interests. So, in that sense, there is a similarity.
Trumpism Has Deep Roots in American Populism
Agrarian populism refers to populist movements led by farmers and their allies, often labor unions, such as the Narodniks in Russia during the second half of the 19th century and the Populist Party of 1890s America which focused on issues of land, railroads, and money, including the unlimited coinage of silver.
In your classic work on American populism, you emphasize the moral language through which political actors divide society between ordinary people and powerful elites. How would you locate Trumpism within that tradition? Does MAGA represent a distinctively American populism because it combines vertical resentment against elites with horizontal antagonism toward immigrants, cultural minorities, and perceived internal enemies—and an institutional conflict between presidential authority and bodies that constrain it?
Professor Michael Kazin: You’re the authority on world populism more than I am, but, just to answer the second part of the question first, I think there are a lot of common elements between Trump’s populism and the populism of Rassemblement National (RN) in France, the AfD in Germany, and maybe the Sweden Democrats in Sweden—some of these right-wing populist parties.
They all share an antagonism toward immigrants; they all seek, in some sense, to revive a notion of French identity, or what it means to be Swedish or German, defending a kind of heritage culture associated with those nations. They also, of course, identify internal enemies, whether globalists or culturally woke people, whatever you want to call them. Of course, this differs from one country to another.
In that sense, there is a commonality between Trump’s form of populism and the populism that is, in many ways, more resurgent in Europe right now than it is in the United States, because as Trump has become unpopular in the United States, so has his particular form of populism.
But this is, to a certain degree, different from what I understand about European populism, because many of the themes in Trump’s populism go much further back. I wrote about this in my book, The Populist Persuasion. There have been, for example, labor populists such as the Workingmen’s Party of California, which was a short-lived but very powerful party in California in the 1870s and early 1880s. It took over the government of California with a dual message: regulate the railroads, which were major corporations in America at the time, especially in California, and expel the Chinese.
The Workingmen’s Party brought together white working-class people from a range of European ethnic backgrounds—Irish, Germans, Scandinavians—against the power of the major corporation in America at the time, the Southern Pacific Railroad, and against the Chinese. More and more Chinese immigrants were coming to the United States and were accused of taking jobs away from white Americans.
You can see some parallels in those parts of Trump’s coalition that at least make noises about being pro-labor, even pro-union—people like Senator Josh Hawley from Missouri, some of the post-liberal intellectuals who have had an important impact on J.D. Vance, for example, and Vance himself, who has said positive things about unions.
Father Coughlin, the Canadian-born Catholic priest who was the most popular radio personality in America in the 1930s, based his anti-immigrant, anti-communist populism on the encyclicals of the Catholic Church, Rerum Novarum and Quadragesimo Anno, two important labor encyclicals. Actually, the current Pope Leo named himself Pope Leo after an earlier pope, Leo XIII; he is Pope Leo XIV.
I think there are precedents for a populism on the right that opposes a cultural elite, and sometimes an economic elite, at the top while opposing usually dark-skinned, non-European immigrants at the bottom. That has been powerful at different times, and it almost always contains strong elements of racism. But it also carries a powerful sense that we have to return to a better America—one that was less multicultural and in which there was a much clearer sense of who the real Americans were. In that sense, it is very similar to what Trump is saying now.
Trump’s Personalism Is Powerful but Time-Limited
Much of Trump’s politics revolves around personal loyalty, personal grievance, personal vindication, and the presentation of political victories and defeats as judgments on himself. Without making a clinical judgment about his personality, can we speak historically of a form of political narcissism or, more precisely, extreme personalism? What happens to a party and a constitutional system when the distinctions between leader, movement, party, presidency, and “the people” become progressively blurred?
Professor Michael Kazin: It’s a great question. Every effective authoritarian leader is also personalist and, in some sense, says in their own language, l’état, c’est moi, even though that phrase was originally associated with a monarch, a non-elected ruler.
In that sense, analogies between Trump and Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin are relevant, but perhaps more relevant are figures like Berlusconi in Italy, who also came from a media background, as Trump did. This kind of personalism can be very effective, at least while it remains effective, because policies matter less, and disagreements over policies matter less, than loyalty to the person in charge of the system. As long as that person remains broadly popular, he can get his policies through to a certain extent, as Trump was able to do when he was more popular.
The weakness is that so much depends on the personality. If that personality dies or becomes unpopular, as Trump is now, it produces not exactly a vacuum, but certainly a competition for leadership. That competition will inevitably be won by someone who does not have the charisma or magnetism that Trump had at his best, because there is no other figure who can simply become another Trump, just as you cannot have another Mussolini, another Hitler, another Stalin, or even another Berlusconi.
People tire, to a certain degree, of that kind of personality. Of course, sometimes such leaders bring the nation to ruin, as Mussolini and Hitler did. So, I think personalism has a time-limited impact on the political system itself.
Trump’s Longer-Term Institutional Impact Will Matter Most
Donald Trump delivers a victory speech after his big win in the Nevada caucus at Treasure Island Hotel & Casino, flanked by his sons Eric (right) and Donald Jr. (left) in Las Vegas, NV. Photo: Joe Sohm.
Democracy-monitoring organizations now describe significant deterioration in executive constraints, civil rights, media freedom, and institutional autonomy under Trump’s second administration, while courts, elections, state governments, and civil society continue to function as meaningful counterweights. From the historical perspective of American democracy, should we describe this as democratic backsliding, competitive authoritarian drift, or another episode in the country’s long history of illiberal practices coexisting with electoral democracy?
Professor Michael Kazin: As a historian, I have a hard time predicting the future, and your question really gestures toward the future. What will be the impact of Trump and MAGA after he leaves office? I don’t know. That depends so much on events in this country and events in the world.
The American political system, as much as Americans like to think their country is exceptional and somehow immune from what’s happening elsewhere in the world—the world economy, world politics, wars—is not. It never has been. It cannot be, given the way the modern world is structured.
So, I don’t really know what’s going to happen. I do know, certainly, that Trump has been responsible for some acts that other presidents would not even think about. Take the corruption involved, for example. By some estimates, he has made over $2 billion so far during this term in office because of his investments in cryptocurrency and other investments. Other presidents would not necessarily have been driven out of office over this, but it would have been a major issue: the corruption of the Trump administration. But it is not. The issue is out there, and Democrats are trying to make a big deal of it, but it has really had very little traction among most voters, at least according to public opinion polls.
Other acts, especially things like trying to put his name on the Kennedy Center and trying to change the way history is presented in public museums in America, matter to people like me, as a historian and a political person on the broad left, but I don’t think they matter to most Americans. In the end, their impact will probably be fairly small.
It is interesting that, even though his image is that of a cultural disruptor, it is really the more traditional issues on which he has been failing, and those are the issues historians are likely to judge him by more in the future. These include the tariffs he has imposed rather incoherently on much of the world; the war in Iran, which was immediately unpopular among much of his base as well as others; inflation; and the general deterioration of government agencies like the National Institute of Health, which is a crucial agency for funding health and medical research in this country. Doing away with the foreign aid agency matters as well.
All those acts will be seen as more important in the future, depending on what happens after he leaves office, than the stories that receive the most attention on social media and in the main newspapers. The daily outrages that Trump is responsible for will be less important than the longer-term consequences of some of the structural changes he has tried to make.
Trump’s Attacks on Cultural Elites Have Historical Precedents
Populists have historically attacked establishments for excluding ordinary citizens from power. But under Trump, universities, journalists, judges, prosecutors, civil servants, scientists, and regulatory bodies are increasingly represented not merely as elites but as partisan enemies. Does this constitute a qualitative change in American populism—from challenging concentrated power to delegitimizing institutions whose independence is essential to liberal democracy?
Professor Michael Kazin: Not really. I teach a course on voting and elections in US history, and I’m teaching it right now to undergraduates at Georgetown. We recently had a section devoted to the elections of the 1820s, when Andrew Jackson became president.
When Jackson lost the election in 1824, he accused his opponents of a corrupt bargain funded by the banking elite. Then, when he became president in 1828, he was successful in doing away with the central bank, the Second Bank of the United States, which he accused of trying to further the economic interests of his political opponents.
He used populist rhetoric very strongly, as I discussed in my book on populism—the language of the money power, the financial elite, the monster bank, and so forth. Democrats continued to use that rhetoric, applying those terms to different forces and institutions, for the next 100 years and more, actually through the New Deal.
Republicans, similarly, especially since Ronald Reagan, have talked about a cultural elite made up of un-American or anti-American professors and, sometimes, actors and intellectuals more generally, who are portrayed as always blaming America even though they are making a good living.
In a two-party system such as the one we’ve had throughout the history of the US as a republic, it’s not surprising that each party, at different times, uses populist rhetoric to depict the other side as the party of the elites. The definition of the elites changes, and the definition of the people each party embraces changes as well, depending on that party’s particular ideology at the time.
In that sense, because populism is, after all, a language of opposition between the people and the elites, and because in a two-party system one party will always win and the other will always lose, it makes sense that partisan attacks will often be couched in populist rhetoric.
The Decline of Unions Has Weakened Democratic Class Politics
A fatigued factory worker experiencing exhaustion, weakness, hopelessness, and burnout. Photo: Shutterstock.
One of the striking asymmetries of contemporary American politics is that right-wing populism has effectively captured the Republican Party, while left-wing populism remains an insurgent current inside a much broader Democratic coalition. Given your argument that American progressives should revive a class-centered populism, why has the right been more successful than the left in converting anger at economic inequality, globalization, and elite institutions into a durable mass political identity?
Professor Michael Kazin: Again, I would put a caveat on that. The Republican Party under Trump was able to do that for at least a period of time, but now it is having a much harder time doing so because Trump is in power again and is clearly favoring the economic elite, including those AI companies. He is very close to the richest man in the world—or at least he was, and still is to a considerable extent—Elon Musk. So, the Republican Party under Donald Trump is having a harder time advancing that idea than it did before.
Democrats are a coalition of different constituency groups. Even though they are not a majority party right now, they are, demographically, a broader party than the Republicans. Republicans are predominantly a party of white Christians, who are the majority group in the country, but that is more limited. Democrats are a party of more recent immigrants, African Americans, and liberal, progressive, middle-class professionals like me. So, Democrats have a harder time focusing on one unified message, especially one that emphasizes class more than multiculturalism and cultural respect for difference, including transgender people and people of different ethnic and religious backgrounds.
Because Democrats need to keep these different groups together in order to win, they have a harder time saying, no, we have to focus primarily on class and economic inequality. Now they are trying to do that in this election. Affordability is the buzzword, and it really gestures toward economic inequality, because clearly rich people have no problem affording not just the basic commodities and resources they need, but also fancy vacations, first-class air travel, and so forth.
But another real problem Democrats have—and I have written about this a lot, both in my book on populism and in my recent history of the Democratic Party, What It Took to Win—is that Democrats had a much easier time focusing on class antagonisms and class inequality when there was a sizable labor movement that was very much part of the Democratic constituency.
The New Deal, Roosevelt’s great success, and the New Deal Democrats’ dominance of American politics, both nationally and in most states at the time, would not have been possible without the organized labor movement quintupling its membership between 1933 and 1945, from 3 million members when Roosevelt took office to 15 million at the end of the Second World War.
Unions were an important counterweight to the support that big business gave, especially to the Republican Party. Even financially, unions gave almost as much money to Democrats in campaigns in the 1930s, for example, as business gave to the Republican Party, which is astonishing when you think about the difference in potential resources.
Of course, unions, by their nature, are working-class organizations. So, the decline of labor unions has not only contributed to widening economic inequality in America, but has also meant that many working-class people who, in earlier periods of American history—especially in the 20th century—would have been union members, known union members, or at least known how to organize a union because they knew someone who had done it, no longer have that experience.
There has been such a slow but long decline in the size and influence of labor unions in America over the last 30–40 years that, when Democrats make a class appeal, it comes from the top down. By contrast, when labor unions made that appeal—vote for Democrats because they are the party that supports unions, the party that supports working-class interests—it was working-class people talking to other working-class people.
That is always going to be much more powerful in politics in any democratic nation. When people you trust—your family, your neighbors, your coworkers—talk to you about politics, it is always going to be much more powerful and convincing than seeing an ad on the internet or hearing a Democratic president or senator on television saying something about working-class interests, because Americans are pretty cynical about politics and politicians.
I think that is part of the problem Democrats are having. To summarize a long answer, the problem with Democrats making a class appeal is, first, that they are a broad party. There are people, especially those who call themselves socialists now, who want to push a class appeal much more strongly, but they are still a minority in the party, and Democrats also need to keep their broader coalition together. In addition, there is not really a strong group of working-class people who consider themselves Democrats and are able to make that argument within the party.
Populist Rhetoric Usually Contains Conspiracy Thinking
You have argued that Democrats and progressives need a more forceful politics of class inequality, particularly to reconnect with working-class voters who believe the economy is “rigged” against them. But how can a left populism construct a powerful “people versus oligarchy” narrative without reproducing the conspiratorial thinking, scapegoating, and anti-institutionalism associated with much of right-wing populism? Where, in your view, should democratic populism draw its normative boundary?
Professor Michael Kazin: Great question. Populist rhetoric usually contains a strain of conspiracy thinking; it just does. If you’re angry about what you perceive elites are doing when they control your society, and about how they control it, you tend to assume that they are acting not because they have good motives or because they genuinely believe, for example, that a corporate economy that is lightly regulated—or not regulated at all—is better for society than one that is more tightly regulated. Populist speakers tend to attribute very bad motives to their opponents.
I think that’s simply human. You don’t want to empathize with those you oppose, because that weakens the emotional power of what you’re saying and, in turn, the political power of what you’re saying as well.
The People’s Party, the original populists in the United States who gave populism its name in the 1890s, talked in their original platform, the Omaha Platform of 1892, about a conspiracy hatched on two continents. That’s the wrong verb, but they put conspiracy right there in what was essentially the founding document of the Populist Party in America.
I think there are ways to do this without focusing so much on conspiracy. Franklin Roosevelt, for example, in his acceptance speech for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1936, when he was seeking a second term, talked about “economic royalists,” whom he compared to the British monarchy from which the United States had declared and won its independence in the late 18th century.
Roosevelt didn’t accuse corporate leaders of being greedy and simply wanting more money for themselves. He said they had the wrong ideas about how America should be run. It wasn’t apathetic, but it was more respectful toward his opponents. Even though he was angry with them, he understood that they had a different conception of how the economy should be run—more hierarchical and, in effect, more authoritarian.
Bernie Sanders, when he talks about billionaires running American society—oligarchs, another term he uses—similarly does not accuse them of huddling in secret in a conspiracy to deprive ordinary Americans of their liberties and drive down their wages. He says they want things the way they want them. They want to remain in power, and that in itself is immoral.
So, one can put conspiracy behind you, at least as a lesser theme in populist rhetoric. But again, it is often more powerful simply to say that the people you hate are evil personally, not just politically.
Democratic Socialists Can Push the Party Left but Not Take It Over
Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at the “Bernie Is Back” political rally in Queensbridge Park, Queens, New York, on October 19, 2019. Photo: Aleksandr Dyskin / Dreamstime.
Democratic socialism has gained greater visibility through Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Zohran Mamdani, DSA-backed candidates, and a younger activist constituency, yet it remains far from controlling the Democratic Party. You have long argued that leftists and Democrats are mutually dependent because social movements can generate pressure while only electoral power and the state can institutionalize reform. Does the current moment offer democratic socialism a plausible route from insurgency to durable influence within the Democratic Party, or does its geographic and demographic concentration still impose a clear electoral ceiling?
Professor Michael Kazin: Great question. Of course, we won’t know the answer until we know the results of this election and whether a socialist runs for president again the way Sanders did. Sanders won’t run in 2028, but Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez might, although I think she probably will not in the end. That depends on her own ambitions and how she thinks she can best advance them.
As you say in your question, what’s happening now in the Democratic Party is a good example of something that has happened before: a left or progressive faction within the party does not control the party, but it can have a great deal of influence over it.
That is certainly happening now. It happened with Bernie Sanders in his presidential campaigns in 2016 and 2020. After the 2020 campaign, in which he was clearly Joe Biden’s main competitor, the Biden and Sanders factions came together and made a compact, and Biden accepted some of Sanders’ platform proposals. Under Biden, even though many Americans did not realize it, the Democrats actually pursued a more progressive set of policies than they had in a long time, even more than under Barack Obama.
Something else is happening that has happened before in American history: Democrats on the left tend to attract younger people, who are, by their nature, more visionary, more willing to demand much more, and less willing to moderate their demands. The attitude is: let’s say what we really want instead of what we can get in politics.
Then there is the Democratic Socialists of America. Before Bernie Sanders first ran for president, DSA was a very small, fairly inconsequential organization. It now has 120,000 members. That is not huge, but it nevertheless makes DSA the largest socialist organization in America since the Communist Party during World War II. That was a different situation, of course, because the Communist Party was supporting the government at the time in the fight against fascism.
Where DSA is strong—in very Democratic cities like New York, Seattle, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC, my own city—it has put together something like a Democratic machine to support its own candidates within the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party, like the Republican Party, has in many ways become what two political scientists call the “hollow parties.” It’s a very good book, actually, by Dan Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld.
So, in very Democratic cities, DSA has shown that it can put together a machine of canvassers, mostly volunteers, who go around trying to influence how people vote. When they get behind a particular candidate whose opponent does not have that kind of backing or that kind of moderate centrist machine behind them, DSA candidates have been able to defeat more establishment, more centrist Democrats in congressional districts in New York City, for example, in the recent primary there.
The fact that Mamdani himself was able to defeat a not very popular figure, but still a former governor, Andrew Cuomo, in the mayoral election happened in part because 100,000 people were organized by DSA to canvass for Mamdani. That’s a lot of people, even in a city as large as New York, with 8 million residents. Most of those canvassers were not DSA members, but they were organized by DSA to knock on doors and apartment doors and persuade people to vote for Mamdani. Without that support, Mamdani would not have won.
Going forward, the problem the left faces in the Democratic Party is the same problem it has always faced in American politics: it can be an important influence and even an irritant to more establishment figures, but it has almost never been able to become a majority within the party, with very few exceptions.
In 1972, for example, the Democratic campaign led by George McGovern was basically controlled by the left of that period, but he lost so badly that this dominance did not continue.
This year as well, if the Democrats win a majority in the Senate, which is possible, they will do so because more moderate candidates win elections in very Republican states like Iowa, Alaska, and North Carolina. If Democrats control the Senate, there will be a battle between more left-wing Democrats, whether socialists or not, who want to push policies such as the Green New Deal and probably cutting off all aid to Israel, and more moderate figures who will likely support policies closer to Joe Biden’s on many issues.
So, it’s a perennial problem for the left. It can push some of the party’s policies further to the left and win elections for its own candidates in very pro-Democratic Party areas, districts, and states. But historically, at least so far, it has not been able to take over the party entirely. The Democratic Party will not become a socialist party anytime soon.
Democrats Cannot Simply Return to Obama or Biden
The Democratic debate is often framed as a conflict between moderates and democratic socialists. But is that too simplistic? Is the deeper argument actually between two theories of Trumpism—one holding that restoring constitutional norms, competence, reproductive rights, and institutional stability can rebuild a majority, and another arguing that Trumpism cannot be defeated durably without confronting inequality, concentrated wealth, housing costs, healthcare, and working-class insecurity much more aggressively?
Professor Michael Kazin: That’s a very good question, and all your questions are very good questions, I must say.
A few months ago, I would have said that you were correct: on one side, more centrist and moderate Democrats were saying, just get rid of Trump and return to a more sane, responsible set of government policies; on the other, the left was calling for a completely different kind of government and fundamental changes in the American economy and American politics.
But part of the benefit of Trump to Democrats has been that he has moved almost all Democrats to a position where they realize that, if they take power again, they cannot simply return to some of the policies of Obama or Biden. Biden’s policies were already somewhat further to the left, but most Americans did not even know what they were because he was so poor at communicating them.
Democrats need to address some of the festering problems that have been present in America for 50 years, arguably since the end of the New Deal order: increasing economic inequality, lack of access to good healthcare, the difficulty Americans face in paying for housing, and the broader, more world-historical problem of the gradual decline of the US in the world order since the end of the Cold War.
So, I think even more moderate Democrats, such as Governor Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania or New York Governor Kathy Hochul, and even figures who are very unpopular on the left of the party, such as Hakeem Jeffries, the minority leader of the House, and Chuck Schumer, the minority leader of the Senate, at least pay lip service to the idea that we need important changes—not radical changes, necessarily, but fundamental changes in the way the economy works.
Part of this focuses on the unpopularity of data centers and fears about artificial intelligence. But part of it is also a response to what has been clear to anyone looking at American society over the past few decades: a large majority of Americans do not trust the government to help them and believe that politics is corrupt—that both parties and politics more generally are corrupt.
There are also many ideas that would be incredibly popular if they were passed and that seem very simple. For example, prohibiting members of Congress from investing in the stock market or other securities while in office has not been passed, even though it would be incredibly popular and has support among a minority in both parties.
So, if Democrats win again, even though the left will not control the party, I do not think you will see the same division you described before. It is already clear that Democratic candidates who are likely to win this year are, for the most part, not just running against Trump. They are running on issues they believe Trump has exacerbated—housing costs, inequality, and corruption.
And there is a hunger here, as there is in Europe and some other countries as well, for politicians who talk and act in ways that are quite different from the establishment center-right and center-left parties.
Now, will Democrats be able to do that? I don’t know. It depends on all kinds of different factions within the party and on what can and cannot be achieved legally. But nevertheless, it is important that the Democrats will not be the same party if they gain control of both houses of Congress this year, and certainly will not be the same party if they win the presidency in 2028, as they were in 2024.
Trumpism Will Not Exist in the Same Form After Trump
And finally, Professor Kazin, looking beyond November 3 and toward the post-Trump era, do you expect Trumpism to become a durable ideological tradition capable of surviving its founder, perhaps under figures such as JD Vance, or is its extraordinary dependence on Trump’s personal authority ultimately a source of weakness? On the Democratic side, can democratic socialism and a broader class-based left populism move from metropolitan and activist strength toward a national governing coalition? More broadly, are we entering a lasting era in which American politics will be structured by competing populisms—or is there still a plausible route back to a less personalized, less polarized form of mass democratic politics?
Professor Michael Kazin: I’m not a prophet. I’m a historian. I can tell you what happened in the 1890s or 1930s much better than I can tell you what will happen in the 2030s. But, as you know very well, populism is a language, a rhetoric, a worldview that thrives in times of crisis and does less well when most people in a given country are more or less content, more or less satisfied with what is happening in their country. So, in the end, much depends on what happens in the US and on the relationship between the US and the rest of the world.
I do think it is quite likely that America’s slow decline in the world will continue economically, and maybe even militarily, although that is less certain. Leaders of both parties will want to find someone to blame. In a two-party system, they will blame people in the other party. That’s the way it always works in a two-party system.
The question of what kind of populism it will be, of course, is always an open question in America. As a Democrat, I would like Democrats to focus on a politics of populism that is mostly about class inequality and accompanied by policies aimed at narrowing the class gap and making ordinary Americans better off and more secure in their lives.
But there is also the problem of climate change and the question of economic growth. That could make it difficult, I think, to expand the resources available to ordinary Americans, because growth obviously has its own environmental problems, including the way it can exacerbate climate change.
On the right, I think many Republicans will try to return to more of a libertarian, Reaganite policy, including on immigration, even though anti-immigration remains Trump’s most popular policy stance. Americans, like many people in Europe, are afraid of both the economic and cultural impact of recent immigrants on society and the economy.
But even there, I think anti-immigrant populism will probably have declining success because immigrants are not leaving the country, and Republicans want to win as many of their votes as possible once they become citizens. Obviously, it is a zero-sum game in a two-party system: votes you lose, the other party gains.
So, Trumpism, as I said before, is not an “ism” in the way socialism, fascism, or liberalism is. It is not an ideology in that sense. It is, as we’ve been discussing, personalist and narcissistic. It depends so much on the personality of Trump himself.
The elements of it that will continue to be a force, whether popular or not, include anti-immigrant feelings, a sense that the rest of the world is ripping off the United States, and a sense of grievance against immigrants and those outside the United States. That will continue in some form, but these elements will probably be coupled with or combined with older forms of conservatism, such as opposition to corporate regulation.
For example, even though AI companies are not very popular right now, it is hard to imagine Republicans wanting to regulate them as severely as Democrats will want to. It is simply not in their political DNA to want to do that.
To sum up, I think Trumpism as such will not exist after Trump goes away because it is so closely connected to the individual—to what he wants and what he hates.
At the same time, one does not go backward in American politics. One does not really return to an earlier period. That’s not how history works. Once Trump has been the major figure in a major political party in this country, arguably the most important political figure in the world over the last 10 to 15 years, that has consequences that cannot be undone. We don’t know exactly what those consequences will be, but we know there will be consequences.
