CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2008
| Author | Abay, Fatih |
|---|---|
| Title | Populism and Democracy: Threat or justifiable alternative to liberal democratic thinking? |
| Summary | This thesis assesses the difficult concept of populism within political theory. Hereby it tries first to conceptualize populism as such within political theory and differentiates it from a social movement by characterizing it as political ideology. Furthermore, it will analyze the main ideas and themes of populism, especially the idea of protest of the people against the political elite. After having determined the theoretical ideas of populism, this thesis will make clear that populism can take shape in different forms. One of these forms, which will be analyzed in this paper, is extreme right-wing populism, which can be seen as a one of the dangerous forms of populism. This paper will especially investigate the reasons for the success and respective failure of extreme right-wing parties within Western Europe. In this context certain variables such as party ideology, electorate, leadership and institutional environment will be taken into account. At the last point this paper will then put populism within democratic theory and will argue that compared to the empirical level populism on the democratic theoretical level can be seen as complementary to liberal democracy as some elements of popular democracy attribute to points where liberal democracy can be seen as incapable. At the end this paper will conclude that populism should not only be seen as a dangerous challenge to established democratic systems, it can be also seen as complementary tool in order to achieve an ideal model of democracy. |
| Supervisor | Andras Bozoki |
| Department | Political Science MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2008/abay_fatih.pdf |
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