The concept, lexicon and political experiences of populism

Abstract

It is a hard task to draw a frontier between the concept of populism as it is used in specialized academic research and as it is used in political discourse. It had been considered as concept that aims to classify political experiences but also as an ideological weapon displayed in political struggle. My aim is to contribute to the on-going discussion of populism by 1) underlining its complex “theoretical status” as a political concept and the pejorative pathos that seems to have always been related to it.  2) sketching a brief review of the political experiences that seem to have been at the origins of the political use of the term 3) casting theoretical and practical doubts over the efforts to revert this pejorative pathos and to use it as word to describe recent political experiences in Latin America.