They had a dream. Now Trump will scrub the melting pot clean

On 20 January, Donald Trump will become the 45th President of the United States. His victory is a definitive break with the vision of America that has prevailed for the past century: a land open to migrants and capable of assimilating different cultures and ethnicities, says Takis S Pappas. The great melting-pot is about to be scrubbed clean, and the checks and balances on presidential power that Americans took for granted will come under strain

So-called ‘populist’ parties have many different grievances. Lumping them together won’t help defeat them

Populism is the buzzword of the moment. But, Takis Pappas explains, there are three kinds of parties aggregated under the populist label: anti-democrats, nativists and ‘pure’ populists. Lumping them together is both misleading and politically perilous because they do not spring from the same source or the same set of grievances. Instead of lamenting a generic, ill-defined populism, we need to tackle these parties in different ways

What makes nativists and populists distinct?

With the growth of insurgent political parties that challenge the status quo, scholars are presented with a dilemma about how to categorise them. Takis S Pappas argues that nativist and populist parties are two distinct categories, and offers a set of criteria for classification

Grand designs, narrow choices : conservatives and democracy in southern Europe

Digitised version produced by the EUI Library and made available online in 2020

Why Greece failed

Seeking to offer a unified theory about Greece’s current political and economic crisis, this article unravels the particular mechanisms through which this country developed as a populist democracy, that is, a pluralist system in which both the government and the opposition parties turn populist. It furthermore shows how this democracy facilitated the political class and the vast majority in Greek society to achieve and maintain for several decades an admirably high coordination of aims enabling them to exploit the state and its resources. Seen within the theoretical framework proposed, Greece offers policy-oriented scholars crucial insights into what may go badly wrong in developed Western democracies

Populism and liberal democracy : a comparative and theoretical analysis

Populism and Liberal Democracy is the first book to offer a comprehensive theory about populism during both its emergence and consolidation phases in three geographical regions: Europe, Latin America and the United States. Based on the detailed comparison of all significant cases of populist governments (including Argentina, Greece, Peru, Italy, Venezuela, Ecuador, Hungary, and the U.S.) and two cases of populist failure (Spain and Brazil), each of the book's seven chapters addresses a specific question: What is populism? How to distinguish populists from non-populists? What causes populism? How and where does populism thrive? How do populists govern? Who is the populist voter? How does populism endanger democracy? If rising populism is a threat to liberal0democratic politics, as this book clearly shows, it is only by answering the questions it posits that populism may be resisted successfully.-- Front Matter -- Introduction Part I Populism in Theory 1 What is Populism? 2 How to Distinguish Populists from Non-Populists? 3 What Causes Populism? Part II Populism in Action 4 How and Where Does Populism Thrive? 5 How do Populists Govern? 6 Who is the Populist Voter? 7 How Does Populism Endanger Democracy? -- End Matte

How liberal democracy can be saved

Across the world, liberal democracy is rumoured to be under threat from the rise of autocratic regimes and populist politics. But if this is the case, how can it be saved? Takis S. Pappas argues that the root cause of the current crisis is today’s democratic leaders lack assertiveness in defending the principles that underpin liberal democracy: to reaffirm and defend those principles will require steadfast leadership

The Outbreak of Civil War in Greece: Strategic leadership, brinkmanship, and deterrence failure

This article argues against two firmly-established ideas about the 1944 communist insurgency that led to the outbreak of civil war in postliberation Greece: (a) blame attribution to predominantly one actor, who, depending on each author’s ideological perspective, is either the Greek Communists or the British, and (b) outcome inevitability. Instead, the present analysis brings to the fore a set of no less than five distinct actors including, besides the original two, Prime Minister George Papandreou; Greece’s traditional political class; and the Greek monarch. Based primarily on the close reading of original documents, such as the personal accounts left behind by the protagonists of the civil war drama, and using causal inferences derived from counterfactual logic, this analysis shows that the Greek civil war would have been an inevitable outcome only if there were on the scene just two actors, the British and the Communists, directly confronting each other. Since however that was not the case, it is shown that Papandreou could have prevented civil war had he succeeded in both forging strategic alliances with the traditional political elites and embracing republicanism. His failure to implement either goal offers a novel interpretation of the Greek civil war, which also emphasizes the need for bringing leadership back into the study of civil war and other contentious politics phenomena. This is expected to foster our thinking about the dynamics leading to civil war outbreaks at the crucial meso-level, while also alerting us to the fact that civil wars are rarely inevitable and that they can be prevented by strategic leadership action