Populism and 'unpolitics'

There is a now an extensive body of scholarship, both conceptual and empirical, that uses populism as an ideology. While we have some convergence here, and it is a welcome convergence, the elements that make up that consensus have omitted and elided over the relationship of populism to politics. This chapter argues that we need to re-insert a fuller sense of populism’s relationship to politics into the definition of populism. To do this, I suggest that populism has, at its core, an implicit assertion of what I will term ‘unpolitics’. And it is the confrontation of this unpolitics with the functioning of representative politics that makes populism so potent and so provocative to contemporary representative democracy. First, I offer a literature review to try and back up the case that the element of politics has dropped out of the consideration of populism. The chapter then offers a definition of unpolitics that contrasts it with other related concepts, and then the chapter considers three different implications of unpolitics for populism relating to populism's tropes of conspiracy theories, quasi-religious parallels and war metaphors

Hard choices and few soft options: the implications of Brexit for Euroscepticism across Europe

While much of the discussion surrounding Brexit has focused on the potential impact on the UK, the result of the EU referendum also has clear implications for Eurosceptic movements elsewhere in Europe. Aleks Szczerbiak and Paul Taggart argue that Brexit has made ‘Hard Euroscepticism’ a more viable political project for Eurosceptic parties, necessitating a rethink of how we conceptualise Euroscepticism on the continent

How has Brexit, and other EU crises, affected party Euroscepticism across Europe?

Analysing the results of a new expert survey, Aleks Szczerbiak and Paul Taggart write that Brexit has so far had a very limited impact on national party politics across Europe beyond the UK, particularly compared with the earlier Eurozone and migration crisis. While the longer-term, dynamic effects of Brexit on party Euroscepticism might be greater and there are a number ..

An Investigation of the Metabolic Response to Cardiopulmonary Bypass and the Effects of Two Levels of Intraoperative Hypothermia on the Response

The metabolic response to trauma has been an area of intense clinical research since Studley's identification of an increase in postoperative mortality and morbidity in patients with preoperative weight loss. Consequently, considerable efforts have been made to modify the response, including the use of nutritional, pharmacologic and environmental manipulations, and have met with varying degrees of success. The concept of using intraoperative hypothermia to reduce the "stress response to surgery" was first postulated in the 1950s but there has been little evidence to support this premise. Recently, however, a reduction in "post-traumatic proteolysis" following open-heart surgery, using a combination of moderate hypothermia (2

The populist politics of Euroscepticism in times of crisis: comparative conclusions

This article offers comparative findings of the nature of populist Euroscepticism in political parties in contemporary Europe in the face of the Great Recession, migrant crisis, and Brexit. Drawing on case studies included in the Special Issue on France, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, and the United Kingdom, the article presents summary cross-national data on the positions of parties, the relative importance of the crisis, the framing of Euroscepticism, and the impact of Euroscepticism in different country cases. We use this data to conclude that there are important differences between left- and right-wing variants of populist Euroscepticism, and that although there is diversity across the cases, there is an overall picture of resilience against populist Euroscepticism

You can’t always get what you want: populism and the power inquiry

The Power Report was published in the spring of 2006 as 'an independent inquiry into Britain's democracy', funded by Joseph Rowntree and carried out by a Commission headed up by Helena Kennedy, QC. The Report is essentially a reaction to what its authors believe is a crisis in British governance. At the heart of this crisis, it suggests, lies a sclerotic system which has failed to keep pace with social change and which is run by elites disconnected from rhose they are supposed to serve, many of whom are therefore turning away from conventional politics altogether. It attempts to be evidence based, even-handed and, above all, accessible. We believe, however, that it is fundamentally flawed. The Report overdoes the seriousness of the symptoms that so concern it. It underplays important elements in its diagnosis. And many of its suggested cures - even those which do seem to follow from that diagnosis - are unconvincing and highly problematic

The 2009 European Parliament Elections: A Disaster for Social Democrats. The European Parliament Elections of 2009 and the Fate of Euroscepticism.

None

The populist radical right and the pandemic

COVID-19 shocked the world and provided a particular challenge for populist radical right (PRR) forces. We lay out three research questions that this special issue addresses through case studies of the PRR in government in Brazil, Hungary, Turkey and the US and in opposition in France, Italy, Germany and Spain: (1) How have PRR actors responded to the pandemic? (2) How have PRR actors framed the politics of the pandemic? and (3) What have been the effects of the pandemic on the popularity of the PRR? We explain the case selection of this special issue and summarize the main findings of the eight case studies, which show that the pandemic did not severely damage the PRR and that they had very different responses to the challenge. This reinforces the idea that the PRR is not ephemeral but is rather the by-product of structural transformations of contemporary societies and is here for the foreseeable future