Radical Democracy and Populism: A Thin Red Line?

This book offers an extensive comparative analysis of populism and radical democratic theories, tracing the line dividing the respective conceptions of ‘people’ and ‘popular sovereignty’.

Whereas populism is often said to intertwine with democracy in some way, the contention of this book is that it significantly departs from democratic theory and practice, and belongs to a distinct conceptual space. It cannot be made to overlap, for instance, with “illiberal democracy”, the “democratic my...