ABSTRACTThe political is changing its shape. Ideologies are no longer stable, but instead build hybrid combinations. Populism is getting popular. In addition, there are new forms of political exper...

According to the authors of Populism and Civil Society, ‘populism is situated within the democratic imaginary’ but its logic is authoritarian. This article agrees with the first but challenges the second argument by focussing on the question of representation. In the case of ‘populism as government’ the tensions between bottom-up and top-down articulations seem to be more or less resolved by the repression of bottom-up organization, but in so doing, so the argument of this article, populism is mutating into something (...) else. Furthermore, ‘populist dictatorship’ seems to be closer to a dictatorship strategically using populist tools than to an intrinsic populist logic. While I agree with the authors on the authoritarian cases of populism in government, my argument diverges from the book when it comes to populism as government and introduces a discussion about the nature of populism. To this purpose, I first propose a complex definition of populism which understands populism not as the essence, but as one component of hybrid authoritarian formations, thus enabling the disentanglement of populism, authoritarianism, and totalitarianism. Second, I examine two components of populism that Arato and Cohen lay out in the book: the specific representation pars pro toto and embodiment. Building on Lefort, I argue that these components are not populist but totalitarian and that the empirical manifestations of populism are always hybrid, mixing populist and authoritarian or even totalitarian components. (shrink)

After the 1980s, the political communication and the mise en scène of politicians have become increasingly hybrid, mixing political representation with entertainment. Politicians like Silvio Berlusconi, Beppe Grillo, and even Barack Obama bring their bodies to the center of mass media political representation. They use their bodies not simply as a medium of communication but also as a source of entertainment for their audience. Before Silvio Berlusconi decided to enter politics, the former Brazilian President, Fernando Alfonso Collor de Mello, showed (...) us already in 1989, and in a very emblematic way, how the combination of politics and entertainment functions as one of the main tendencies of political communication. The analysis of his mise en scène brings this practice to the light and shows us a new phenomenon of mass media: the third body of the politician. (shrink)

ABSTRACTModern democratic societies are contradictory societies. They are grounded on normative premises, which are not fully realized in practice. Non-democratic practices have been tolerated in d...