“Populism and Social Movements” Chapter in The Oxford Handbook of Populism (2017)
Populism is usually treated as an exclusively top-down affair where political party leaders mobilize diverse constituencies to reap electoral benefits. This perspective discounts a rich universe of bottom-up populist mobilization that remains exogenous to strict electoral contestation, thus unreasonably constraining the empirical study of the phenomenon. This chapter draws from social movement studies and social psychology to examine populist social movements under a comprehensive theoretical framework, aiming to bring together theorists of populism with scholars of social mobilization and encourage their mutually beneficial interaction.