Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology - Liberalism

Democracy

Rebecca Tishler — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 08:44:39 +0000

A delegate from Somaliland votes in Mogadishu, Somalia, on December 25, 2016. Photo by Ilyas Ahmed

Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul

Initially published 15 Dec 2025

Abstract:

Democracy is a system of governance and a value with a widespread presence worldwide. However, anthropological literature has shown that the transition to democracy articulates practices, institutions, and additional values that depend on previous political experience that is often locally specific. This results in distinct meanings of democracy, as people may not adhere to the principles of Euro-American democracy, which tends to be secular, liberal and representative. Ethnography has cast light on how kinship, religion, gender, morals, and the economy (among others) are entangled in people’s political allegiances and decisions and thereby shape democratic governmental actions. Anthropology focuses not only on who is defined as ‘the people’, and included or excluded from positions of power, but also on how power dynamics organise democratic values, practices, and institutions.

After conveying these established propositions on the anthropology of democracy, this entry will address three important discussions in the discipline: Firstly, it shows that two core Euro-American assumptions—that democracy is necessarily secular and liberal—are disputed worldwide, including in consolidated democracies, where religious movements and populist and authoritarian leaders are flourishing. Second, it discusses the configuration of citizenship, and the citizen’s active role in fighting for rights and in producing oneself as part of a moral collective. It highlights the power relations and political rationalities involved in these processes. The third section addresses the notion of being represented and of participating directly in a democratic government, by looking at the study of elections, the meanings attributed to voting, and at protests and social movements. The entry concludes by arguing that anthropologists’ particular contribution to the study of democracy is twofold: it highlights the cultural, social, and moral aspects in the everyday experiences of democracy among ordinary citizens; and it discovers unexpected power dynamics that shift not only what people fight for in a democracy but also how they do it.

Introduction

What ‘democracy’ is, or ought to be, is not easy to grasp. It is often identified with Euro-American and modern nation-states and seen as rooted in ancient Greek cities. Yet, definitions of democracy and the ideas associated with it have been the subject of extensive debate (Dunn 2019). A simple definition is that democracy corresponds to the ‘rule of the people’ (from the etymological basis of demos and kratia, literally meaning the ‘force of the people’). Modern and contemporary democracy is usually associated with a set of elements such as the rule of law, equality among its members, fair elections of representatives, and freedom of expression, to name only a few. Still, anthropological studies complicate these assumptions by discussing who counts as ‘the people’, how their political will comes to matter, and whether we should distinguish between democracy as ‘a form of governance (i.e. a mode of communal self-organization) or a form of government (i.e. one particular way of organizing a state apparatus)’ (Graeber 2007, 329). What is striking about democracy is that it has increasingly become a core value worldwide over the last one hundred years.

Anthropologists have been studying politics for a long time among people under colonial rule or otherwise dominated within a national context (e.g. Evans-Pritchard 1940; Gluckman 1940; Leach 1954). Hence, they were well-positioned to pay attention during fieldwork to transitions of societies recently liberated from colonial rule or dictatorships towards more democratic forms of governance. Since the 1970s, numerous countries around the world have transitioned to democratic regimes. In these contexts, anthropologists have shown that what democracy turns out to be in practice can be quite different from assumed universal understandings of it. In distinction to other disciplines, which focus on institution-building or the rule of law necessary for the fair election procedures among elites (cf. Mainwaring 1989), anthropological fieldwork has focused on concrete expectations for and lived experiences of democracy as well as the power dynamics at play, which in some cases prolonged the effects of previous political regimes or hindered desired political transformations. Ethnographic fieldwork also enables anthropologists to reject analyses which reinforce normative standards of what democracy should be, and which consider their understanding of democracy as an end goal for history and part of a single road to progress. Such normative analyses all too often continue a colonial mentality that defines non-Euro-American countries as perpetually backwards (Coronil 2019, 238-40).

Anthropological work also brings forth the points of view of local and ordinary people, instead of restricting the study of democracy to formal discourses and state institutions. Thereby, it casts light on how kinship, religion, morals, gender, and the economy (among others) are historically entangled in people’s political allegiances and decisions. Ethnographic research, for example, shows that democratic citizenship is not just a legal status but a form of belonging and behaving that is rooted in particular social experiences, and that people may manifest their interests and political demands in indirect and sometimes even hidden ways. Thus, anthropologists often study democracy in the same way as one would research other intimate domains, such as religion and kinship, allowing them to observe a ‘vernacularisation’ of democracy, i.e. an embedding and reshaping of democratic practices, in people's daily lives (Michelutti 2007).

For example, in northern India, the Yadavs, milk producers and members of a caste that claims ancestral ties to the Hindu god Krishna, draw upon this mythical-religious relationship to shape their political demands. They argue that democracy is a primordial phenomenon passed on from the blood of Krishna to contemporary Yadavs, and that they therefore deserve greater political influence (Michelutti 2007). Such discourse blends religion and governance in ways that contravene democracy’s purported separation between religion and state. Political support for the Yadav also reaches far beyond mere politics of interest or recognition, relying instead on links of caste, ethnicity, and kinship. It produces highly specific dynamics of political inclusion and exclusion, pitting for example Hindus and Muslims against one another, and it changes the meanings of voting from creating flimsy contractual relations to affirming existing ties of status, prestige, or power (Michelutti 2019, 204). The broader insight—that democracy articulates specific sets of practices, institutions, and values that often continue pre-existing political contexts—has been confirmed in various other settings as well (e.g. Caldeira 2000; Paley 2008; Banerjee 2014; Hickel 2015).

The ‘turn to democracy’ worldwide, and in particular in the Global South since the 1970s (Heller 2022), has raised essential questions, such as if there are ‘alternative configurations of democracy and different ways of reaching it, or if claims of difference are merely excuses for undemocratic practices’ (Caldeira and Holston 1999, 727). In other words, scholars of democracy have asked if there can be a minimal transnational and transhistorical definition of ‘democracy’. The difficulty in offering that kind of definition has often led anthropologists to discuss and distinguish between democratic practices, institutions, and values, since similar institutions and practices can have completely distinct meanings as they take root in local contexts following different values.

The remainder of this entry discusses cases of democratic transition, asking how democracy acquires locally produced meanings that are entangled with pre-existing histories and values. It then presents three major aspects that anthropologists have focused on in their work on democracy. Firstly, it shows that anthropological studies have challenged two core Euro-American assumptions about democracy: its secular and its liberal nature. Anthropological work makes clear that even consolidated democracies do not generally adhere to dominant normative assumptions about democracy. In the United States, for example, Christian, authoritarian, and populist practices are flourishing. The entry then discusses different configurations of citizenship with democracy, including the power relations between the state and civil society. Citizens in democratic systems are held to play an active role in fighting for rights and in participating in politics more broadly. Studying these processes has highlighted how citizens produce themselves as ethically bounded subjects with corresponding democratic sensibilities. Finally, the entry examines the representative nature of democracy and how the will of the people can be expressed. This includes discussions on the nature and meaning of participating in electoral and other political processes, such as voting, community organising, and participating in demonstrations and other forms of popular protest.

In discussing these issues, anthropologists have tended to ask: Which sections of society are excluded from positions of power, and how do they fight to improve their participation and rights? How does the government create, promote, and limit ways for people to participate in the exercise of power? What is an election, which meanings are attributed to voting, and is voting the proper or the main form of political participation? And, which beliefs and values are compatible with the democratic decision process, and which may be a hindrance?

Transitions to democracy and local meanings

Given that anthropologists have directly observed various kinds of societies transition to democracy, their studies demonstrated early on that democracy needs to be understood in its local context and with reference to how democratic institutions have been introduced there. Many have pointed out that democratic institutions tend to get ‘selectively assimilated to an existing political cosmology, while also transforming that cosmology in important respects’ (Karlström 1996, 485). They have paid close attention to the underlying values and concepts that guide political decisions, whereby they add a significant layer to the analysis of political actions (Piliavski and Scheele 2022).

For example, local meanings of democracy can incorporate notions of freedom from oppression without thereby corresponding to Euro-American ideals of liberty and equality. This is the case among the Wolof speakers of Senegal studied during the 1990s (Schaffer 1997), where the idea of demokaraasi was derived from the French coloniser's démocratie, and had incorporated local Islamic metaphors as part of being introduced by ruling Muslim elites. Demokaraasi had three interrelated meanings and ideals: treating people fairly, sharing responsibility for one another's well-being, and achieving agreement. This understanding of democracy, which focuses on ‘cooperative caretaking’ and social peace, challenged more agonistic conceptions of democracy which centre on fighting for your candidate or party (Schaffer 1997, 42, 47; cf. Mouffe 2005). Interpreting democracy along Senegalese Islamic lines also came with unforeseen consequences, such as the idea that given that Senegalese mosques may have several muezzins, a democratic Senegalese government might accommodate several presidents at the same time (Schaffer 1997, 45).

Similarly, research in Uganda during the early 1990s shows that democracy (eddembe ery’obuntu in Luganda) was closely associated with freedom from oppression. Yet oppression was locally understood as ‘the consequence of a disordered state, of authority which has lost its anchor’. Democracy was also firmly linked to ideas of liberty, understood as ‘a rightly ordered polity oriented around a properly and firmly installed ruler’ (Karlström 1996, 487). Here, local democratic ideals of democracy did not match either Euro-American counterparts. Ugandans did value freedom of speech; justice and equity; and civility and hierarchy, yet the meanings of these democratic values were profoundly shaped by local context. Freedom of speech is the possibility to speak freely to their ruler, that is, speech in a context of legitimate unitary authority, and reliant on the willingness of power-holders to listen to their subjects. Similarly, justice and equity did not imply that people were fundamentally or ontologically equal, but only that they were situationally equal as subjects before their ruler, who has to treat all of them with fairness. Finally, to act with civility often meant abiding by existing hierarchies (Karlström 1996, 488, 491). Hence, when democratic ideals are re-interpreted locally, they frequently challenge Euro-American definitions of democracy.

The value of equality, which is frequently presumed to be the very essence of democracy, has been questioned in other instances as well. In rural India, for example, the fast adoption of democracy had as a crucial vehicle the value of hierarchy (Piliavski 2023, 583). Indian ideas of hierarchy come with expectations of responsibility, notably the responsibility of superiors to their subordinates. Politicians are patrons who are expected to take full responsibility for the well-being of ‘their people’, while voting is not so much an enactment of equality as it is an expression of loyalty and a way to create alliances with these political leaders (Piliavski 2020). Put differently, hierarchy is valued as a ‘relational logic of mutual expectation […] structured by differences of rank and role’ (2023, 584), and does not hinder but drives the spread of democracy.

The meanings of democracy are not just influenced by pre-existing local political concepts; they also change over time. This may be because different stakeholders attempt to secure a particular definition of democracy that serves their interests. In the 1990s in Chile, for example, campaigns for democracy against military rule attributed to the military dictatorship all that was wrong in the country (pain, misery, torture, exile, low salaries, and poor health clinics) and to a coming democracy what could be achieved (to express one’s opinions, elections, health and education, social benefits, community leaders, family houses) (Paley 2004). After Chile became a democracy, however, these meanings shifted. Social movements maintained a definition of democracy as entangled with social equality, free speech, and citizen's rights, as they demanded to ‘be taken into account’ in political decisions. Yet, government officials and elected representatives mostly ‘equated democracy with electoral procedures generating representative political institutions’ (2004, 504). They considered pressure by social movements in health policy as being on the verge of treason ‘because disagreement is considered unhealthy for democracy’ and ‘could potentially destabilize’ it (2004, 503, 505). Thus, the Chilean experience shows that democratic institutions can retain continuities of dictatorial political and economic practices, and that definitions of democracy can be part of intense power-oriented disputes over meanings and values (Paley 2004). It also foregrounds the ongoing processes through which specific notions of democracy are generated and come to predominate (Paley 2008, 5).

Local inflections of democracy are often linked to the nature of a previous government or governance system. In the South African province of KwaZulu-Natal, colonial rule initially shaped democratic challenges to power, following the end of apartheid in 1994 (Hickel 2015). There, rural working-class migrants rejected liberal democracy as a threat to their most fundamental values—they could not reconcile their existing forms of personhood and social life with the idea that all individuals were supposed to be ontologically equal and autonomous. Kinship, gender, and household organisation were conceived of in hierarchical terms, and progressive policy was understood as destroying families and causing misfortune. This hierarchical moral order of rural Zulus was not an essential and unalterable traditional culture in opposition to modernity. Instead, it resulted from modern colonialism, which had long administered the population very differently, ‘relying on indirect rule in rural areas and deploying direct rule in urban areas’, fostering egalitarianism in urban settings compared to social hierarchies in rural ones (Hickel 2015, 15).

Democracy has also been shown as standing in close relation to and often in tension with existing moral economies. In Switzerland, for example, an emphasis on direct democracy and communal participation has historically favoured consensus over partisanship. However, there is an increasing tension between egalitarian and hierarchical values, made visible by the growing power of corporations and extreme right-wing positions in Swiss political life. This raises questions about the ‘compatibility of democracy with corporate formations’, suggesting that the original Swiss egalitarian bottom-up practice is changing. Positions are on the rise that harness hierarchical tendencies, ‘contributing to the subversion of the democratic process’ by relocating decision-making power from the ordinary citizens of a Swiss canton to a central federal government and multinational corporations (Gold 2019, 24, 27).

Similarly, in Argentina, Peronism had long shaped a national ideal of democracy as valuing trade unions, lifelong support from the welfare state, and state intervention in economic affairs (del Nido 2022, 14). At the same time, the post-Peronist impoverishment of the middle class and the rise of social media served as fertile grounds for the arrival of the multinational transportation corporation Uber in Buenos Aires in the spring of 2016. This prompted a political conflict between the state-managed taxi industry and middle-class citizens who demanded the end of the taxi monopoly. It positioned taxis as symbols of Argentina and its capital against Uber rides as symbols of entrepreneurship and individual choice. Middle-class citizens were quick to embrace and enact a new moral economy of ‘choice, efficiency, empowerment, opportunism, innovation, competition and freedom’ (del Nido 2022, 3) to pressure the government to liberalise its economy and legalise the Uber app.

What unites the examples in this section is the insight that one should not take the core values of democratic life for granted. It is this detailed focus on values and local meanings of democracy that can explain a series of questions about democracy, such as what the American working class may be striving for when it is said that they are voting ‘against their economic interests’ (Graeber 2011). Yet, the focus on values also raises the question: Are there any essential values, practices or institutions that every political configuration should enact in order to qualify as a democracy?

Secularism and liberalism

Anthropologists have spent considerable effort discussing secularism and liberalism, two values that are assumed to be integral to democracy and that transitions to democratic governance are expected to engender and promote. They have thereby questioned the assumed universality and homogeneity of these values.

Secularism

The term ‘secularism’ tends to refer to a separation between institutionalised religion and the state in matters of governance. France’s conception of secularism (laicité), which has often been upheld as an ideal to be pursued by other nation-states, encompasses individualisation and privatisation of religious beliefs, along with their separation from public, political, and institutional life (cf. Gauchet 1998; Bauberot, Millot and Portier 2014). However, maintaining the secular ideal of democracy poses the question of how to consider religious subjects as democratic citizens. Should they express their demands according to their religious beliefs and values, or should they translate and adapt their ideas into a secular (i.e. non-religious) and supposedly naturally shared understanding of politics (Habermas 2008, 114ss)?

It also raises the question of whether any truly secular system of politics exists in the first place. Anthropologists have critically noted that Christianity has served as the default setting against which today’s secular frameworks of democracy have been formed (Asad 2003). Consequently, a recurring political question has been whether (and how) nation-states with a non-Christian population can become truly secular and, hence, democratic. To answer this question, anthropologists have expanded their research beyond the North Atlantic to non-Christian states, arguing that secularism can emerge according to distinct trajectories and different sets of ontological premises (Mahmood 2010; Luehrmann 2011; Agrama 2012; Bubandt and van Beek 2012; Veer 2014; Furani 2015).

Since the last decades of the twentieth century, religion has become increasingly present in public debate. In some cases, historically secular citizens have reacted with furore and anxiety whenever fellow citizens, candidates, or democratically elected representatives have expressed their religious affiliations and concerns (e.g. Navaro-Yashin 2002). And yet, as anthropological research has demonstrated, from the point of view of many ordinary citizens, there is no necessary distinction between an expression of religious morality and political demands. However, religious actions can affirm a particular (and minority) position, causing conflict. For example, in Brazil, many Evangelical Christians understand that they have a ‘duty to position themselves politically, to stop the advance of groups considered to be threats to the moral balance of society’ (Maurício Jr. 2019, 101). They demand changes to national legislation on sexual rights and public education that conform to their religious beliefs. In a religiously plural society, pushing forth such particular religious values can be challenging, as it may bring to the table unnegotiable principles and a moral crusade against those who sustain divergent positions. An alternative set of religious values in Brazil is that of Afro-Brazilian religions like Candomblé. Grounded in a fight against racism and religious intolerance, it values respect for elders, secrecy, and initiation. Proponents of Candomblé suggest at times that a return ‘to a more traditional social order […] grounded in Afro-Brazilian religious values and social practices’ could be a solution to the ‘social disorder’ the country is facing (Hartikainen 2018, 96), making explicit its connection to the religious value of hierarchy.

Religious practices can even become political techniques in a democracy. In Guatemala, Christianity and democracy are enmeshed to the point that religious actions like praying, fasting, and examining one’s conscience are considered political actions that aim at the moral strengthening of the nation (O'Neill 2010). In North Maluku, Indonesia, democracy and traditional beliefs and practices of sorcery are equally closely entangled (Bubandt 2006; 2012). Along with juridical manoeuvres and corruption, including bribery and vote-buying, politicians can use sorcery to attack their adversaries or to protect themselves before running in an election. Sorcery and corruption are here perceived as ‘an immoral but inescapable way of conducting democratic politics’ (Bubandt 2006, 426). By focusing on these occult and non-transparent aspects, including by incorporating various spirits and spiritualities, anthropologists have witnessed new ways in which modern politics and democracy are being conducted (Bubandt 2012, 196, 204).

Debates around religion and democracy often come back to a widely held perception that Islam and Muslims' religious practices that make claims on public life threaten democracy’s secular foundation (Hirschkind 2008, 126–7). Yet, studying diverse Muslim contexts such as Turkey (Navaro-Yashin 2002), Indonesia (Bubandt 2012), and Egypt (Agrama 2012), shows how many Muslims include non-Muslims minorities into their polities. In modern Egypt, freedom of religious belief is a right that marks which legal framework will be used to judge family disputes under the law (Agrama 2012). These works question the assumptions underlying the normative definition of secularism to demonstrate how the state regulates religion. Muslim religious and political doctrine does not equate submitting to traditional authorities and discourses, but tends to be much more complex, multifaceted, and open to internal criticism and disputes than popular media and political depictions would suggest (cf. Asad 2003; Mahmood 2005).

Overall, religious beliefs and values tend to remain relevant to citizens' political interests and public life. They are deeply entangled with and sometimes indistinguishable from democratic political life.

Liberalism

As with secularism, Euro-American contemporary democracy was also developed within the framework of ‘liberalism’ (cf. Ryan 2012). Liberal democracy contends that individual rights should be protected, in particular freedom of conscience and expression, as well as private property. The protection of such civil liberties has a strong collective dimension, as it relies on checks and balances on the ruling party and the protection of minorities to avoid democracy from descending into a ‘tyranny of the majority’. And yet, liberal democracy can fit oddly with or turn into authoritarian practices and positions of power that aim to impose or silence parts of the polity. Anthropological research on the global increase of populist and authoritarian leaders and movements, in particular the upsurge in far-right politics, shows the many different ways in which core liberal values and institutions can come under threat (e.g. Hall, Goldstein and Ingran 2016; Balthazar 2017; Kapferer and Theodossopoulos 2018; Mazzarella 2019; Hatzikidi and Dullo 2021; Pasieka 2024).

One important concept in these debates is the idea of populism, i.e. a ‘political logic’ or form of rhetoric that operates by antagonizing ‘the people’ from an external or internal ‘enemy’. Populism poses a particularly complicated challenge to liberal democracy because both consider ‘the people’ to be the foundation of political legitimacy and national sovereignty. Yet, populism frequently undermines the institutions and procedures aimed to safeguard civil rights, to the point of engendering ‘an illiberal rejection of consensus-seeking politics or deliberative democracy’. Anthropology’s major contribution to debates over the similarity and difference between populism and democracy has been to ask who defines ‘the people’ and how this is done. It shows that ‘the people’ is a discursive and performative political entity that often excludes a significant part of the population who are treated as ‘non-people’ in that they are not valued, and in some cases even accused of being ‘anti-people’ and domestic enemies (e.g. Sanchez 2020; Hatzikidi 2023a).

A particularly creative way of studying populism is to focus on its aesthetics, styles, and performances. The way in which populist politics appear in the media has changed from traditional media like television to the more recent rise of social media (Cesarino 2024). In these spaces, populist leaders do not necessarily reach out to or are popular among their supporters for socioeconomic similarities or shared ideological values. Rather, because ‘late capitalism values style over content’ (Hall, Goldstein and Ingran 2016, 72), populist leaders can grab people’s attention with their words, gestures, and positions that are filled with comedy and spectacle (2016, 75). Donald Trump is a good example of this trend. In the context of hyper-mediatised American culture, Trump’s rise as a political figure mirrors his success as a TV entertainer and social media influencer, constantly seizing people's attention, and keeping everyone, including adversaries, attuned to his actions and speeches. While Trump as a billionaire has few socioeconomic similarities with the common citizen he represents, he has mobilised his widespread media presence to posit himself as somehow anti-establishment, thereby charting a common ground with the average American citizen, many of whom constitute his base. This strategy, which has been adopted by several populist leaders beyond Trump, constitutes a logical step in a hyper-mediatised politics ‘that lacks content, sells itself as entertainment, and incorporates comedic stylistics so as to immunize itself from critique’ (Hall, Goldstein and Ingran 2016, 93). Even after being shot at during a speech in his 2024 presidential campaign, Trump managed to perform strength by posing for pictures with blood on his face and the American flag in the background.

Research on democracy in the contexts of populism, far-right politics, and authoritarianism has also raised methodological issues: how should researchers interact affectively and epistemically with those with whom they have profound political and moral disagreements? And what should researchers do if they develop personal affection or friendship for some of the politically ‘unlikable’ others? (Pasieka 2019). Discomfort with studying some aspects of democratic life today may stem from anthropology’s own ‘populist stance, habitually aligning with the common sense of the common people’ (Mazzarella 2019, 46). Anthropologists have often mobilised ordinary people’s perceptions to critique democratic liberalism. Yet, the rise of an illiberal and often far-right populism creates a disconcerting overlap between anthropological critiques of liberalism and those of the far right. Reflecting on this issue, anthropologists have explored how ordinary far-right citizens are usually situated by their political opponents, including researchers. They may be exoticised and ‘othered’ as somehow deplorable because they hold the wrong values; they may be located outside of a progressive political space; or, their political proclivities may be explained away as a mere backlash to decades of neoliberalism (Pasieka 2019).

Given that researchers may disagree with the people they study, it is relevant to ask if they hold unequal epistemological positions for distinct subjects encountered in the field (Dullo 2016). One important response may be to emphasise an anthropological core value: the search for nuance and complexity in social life (Pinheiro-Machado and Scalco 2021). In increasingly polarised times, such nuance, combined with a basic fundamental appreciation of other human beings regardless of their political convictions, may establish an increasingly rare and powerful political discourse. It allows anthropologists to portray complex life narratives of those who move from ‘hope’ (and a left-wing position) to ‘hate’ (and a right-wing authoritarian position) (Pinheiro-Machado and Scalco 2020). At the same time, such a refined approach to studying anti-democratic ‘others’ also makes scholars vulnerable to accusations of not doing enough against authoritarianism and fascism. They may even find themselves accused of being complicit with the far-right by humanising it.

This is all the more serious as populist politics also threaten critical voices from academia, such as politically engaged anthropologists, who are all too easily subsumed under the category of ‘enemies of the people’. Fights against critical scholarship take all kinds of forms, from forbidding certain theoretical approaches and research topics, to cutting research funding across the board, to directly threatening researchers and their families. Scholars from the Global South (Gonçalves and Lasco 2023) have suggested that anthropologists have a responsibility to respond to the increasingly authoritarian and illiberal contexts in which research is conducted today. Instead of criticising liberal democracy due to its inability to prevent exclusionary practices, researchers should pay attention to how its enforcement of the rule of law and freedom of expression and association are the conditions of possibility for pursuing critical scholarship, even against those exclusionary practices. This includes distinguishing liberal democracy from neoliberalism as a governmental rationality that thrives under authoritarian and illiberal democracy, where it deepens its inherent exclusionary logics and widens inequality gaps.

Citizenship and governmentality

Two fruitful ways of studying democracy focus on citizenship and governmentality, i.e. on the techniques and rationalities that aim to direct how people conduct themselves in democratic settings (Foucault 1991; Li 2007). Democracy, like many other systems of governance, co-creates the subjects that live under it, inciting people to adhere to specific conceptions of personhood, often shaped around the idea of a bounded generic individual who is in an equal relationship with fellow citizens. Anthropologists have shown how this production of democratic subjects, or ‘subjectification’, is influenced by all kinds of factors, including disputes over civil, political, social, and human rights; people’s relationships with the state; and exclusionary practices and boundaries that comprise a political community, including gender, race and ethnicity, and class differentiation (e.g. Caldeira 2000; Postero 2007; Lazar 2008; O'Neill 2010; Muehlenbach 2012).

Focusing on citizenship, anthropologists have argued that democratic institutions that do not address inequalities and socio-economic injustice may fail to consolidate democracy (Caldeira 2000; Caldeira and Holston 1999). When Brazil transitioned to a democracy in the 1980s, for example, inequality and criminality developed together, producing new forms of urban segregation that aimed to protect the rich and legitimised state violence against the poor. Disrespect for individual civil and human rights resulted in conceiving of citizens' bodies as 'unbounded', i.e. as open to violent intervention. This idea of the body resulted from Brazil's history as first a colony and then as part of the periphery of global capitalism. Given Brazil's stark inequalities, the country became a 'disjunctive democracy' (Caldeira 2000, 371-5), institutionally democratic but without protecting people's rights in their everyday lives. In the twenty-first century, poor and Black citizens responded to this situation by taking political action and resisting becoming passive subjects of state violence. Fighting for their rights included, for example, trying to acquire legal property rights to their home and land. Such 'insurgent' forms of citizenship were crucial to the consolidation of Brazilian democracy (Holston 2008).

Since the 1990s, anthropologists noticed a widespread embrace of democracy, evident in the multiplication of social movements and new citizenship claims among previously excluded groups (Postero and Elinoff 2019, 4). However, this occurred together with the increased impact of neoliberalism as a dominant form of governmentality in which citizens are mostly considered consumers and dominant values include economic productivity, socio-economic empowerment, and entrepreneurship. The conjunction of new claims to citizenship and neoliberal rationality operated ‘by educating desires and configuring habits, aspirations and beliefs’ (Li 2007, 275). This is to show that it is not just the state that shapes the techniques and rationalities that structure our behaviour, but a whole set of agents including companies, missionaries, scientists, activists, and NGOs (Li 2007, 276).

In an ideal world, functional democracies govern citizens who participate actively in decision-making and political life. However, anthropologists have debated what participation actually means, which actions are valued, and which ones are ignored (O’Neill 2010). Research in contemporary Italy showed that the neoliberal dismantling of the welfare system was met with a growing promotion of voluntarism and non-paid relational labour, such as care for the elderly (Muehlenbach 2012). Here democratic participation is moralised, and people were made to feel compassion and responsibility to care for others, while also covering gaps left by the withdrawal of state policies. This ‘ethical citizenship’ has citizens imagining themselves as bound together by moral and affective—rather than social and political—ties, leading to asymmetrical relations between caretaker and receiver. They are primarily driven by considerations of duty rather than by claiming their rights (Muelenbach 2012, 43).

Focusing on the different techniques of government has been fundamental to discussing democracy not only as a particular political arrangement but also as a manner of governing a population of citizens by altering ‘how bodies are oriented, how lives are lived, and how subjects are formed’ (Ferguson and Gupta 2002, 984). Through it, anthropologists revisited the theoretical divide between the state and civil society (e.g. Appadurai 2001). It shows that the state is not a monolith but may use a myriad of different techniques, logics, and arguments, including bureaucracy, to shape who we are as citizens and how we conceive of political participation. This raises the question of how the state should be imagined. Does it stand above society and encompass it? Is the state best understood as the effect of spontaneous action by politicians and citizens in support of it? Or is the state largely manipulative and can manufacture even spontaneous-seeming action by citizens via governmental techniques (Navaro-Yashin 2002, 130–54)?

Consider the example of democracy in 1990s Turkey. Here, a dispute between a secularist social organisation and an Islamic party for a ‘better democracy’ led each side to establish their positions as reflecting the demands of the people. Yet, both sides did not just reflect but actively attempted to produce a corresponding ‘people’ that would sustain their agendas (Navaro-Yashin 2002, 144–52). The secularists tried to convince potential voters that secularism had a long history in Turkey, reprinting history books that fit their convictions and creating educational centres in various shantytowns around Istanbul, where women would be taught practical and professional skills, like childcare and sewing, while also learning about the principles of Turkish secularism (Ataturkism). In 1994, the governor of Istanbul even organised celebrations for ‘Republic Day’ in the heart of the capital, a seemingly traditional holiday that celebrated secularism, even if it had never been a day of celebration before. People started actively participating, providing seemingly spontaneous support for one side of the political dispute.

In sum, anthropologists have shown that active democratic citizenship can take unexpected and new directions, and that it is pertinent to consider not just the values that orient people’s actions but also the frequently subtle and pervasive power relations that shape how we think of and engage with state institutions and a ‘spontaneous’ civil society.

Representation and participation

Democracy relies on knowing the will of the people. Frequently, this will is expressed through individual votes for a representative, who will act on their behalf and govern them. Elections, which are crucial for liberal definitions of democracy and which have been studied critically by anthropologists (e.g. Heredia and Palmeira 2006; Spencer 2007; Banerjee 2014), have been a major focus in the study of democracy. Yet, the will of the people also finds other outlets, such as opinion polls, protests, and demonstrations (Paley 2001; Razsa and Kurnir 2012; Kunreuther 2018; Dullo 2022) or debates, memes, and propaganda spread on social media (Juris 2012; Cesarino 2022). The anthropological study of democracy has therefore questioned how citizens express their will and has asked what the limits of representation may be, or rather what may be ‘hidden from view when one figure speaks for another’ (Lee 2011, 937).

Elections and votes have long been analysed as specific kinds of ritual, creating a distinct temporality from everyday life, and with deep social and symbolic effects on how people relate to one another. For instance, in a small village of predominantly Sinhala Buddhists in Sri Lanka in the 1980s, the introduction of elections was perceived as producing conflict in an otherwise calm, polite, and peaceful village. To vote and position oneself according to one or another party was a way of distinguishing between good and bad community members, differentiating oneself morally from others while also following one’s self-interest. This upset the existing moral order in the village previously organised around ideas of unity, gentleness, and restraint in public life (Spencer 2007, 72–95). Here, elections did not just reflect the people’s will, but they generated meaning, plunging public life into a state of moral disorder where naked self-interest was not just displayed but increasingly produced. Electoral disputes’ conflictive relations generate gossip and performative adhesion to a side. They can even promote a split within a community, down to the granular level of homes, families, and friends, but they may also produce hope and faith in a better future (Mayblin and Clough 2014; Mayblin 2025).

Thinking of elections as ritual also highlights some of the constructive ways in which they make meaning. Elections mean a great deal to Indian voters, for example, where voter turnout has been high for decades. Here, voting expresses and enacts values of citizenship, accountability, and civility (Banerjee 2014, 3). It allows people to challenge for one day the inequalities of wealth and status that usually dominate their daily lives, akin to a carnival that turns social hierarchies on their head for a short period of time (Banerjee 2014, 10–1). Surprisingly, the spread of neoliberalism does not so much undermine Indian elections but indeed strengthens them, as voting is one of the few outlets for poor, subaltern, and rural Indians to have a say in an otherwise neoliberal world.

All that said, elections are much more than just ritual. They can be thought of as ‘a set of practices and artifacts’, which may lead to an alternative conceptualisation of democracy (Coles 2004). By focusing on the practical implementation involved in organising elections, such as the production of documents, people’s physical displays and movements inside polling stations, and the filling of forms and registers, it becomes obvious that elections are not just symbolic events that foster or challenge social hierarchy, but also technical artifacts that not only elicit but make real the will of the people. For example, in the democratisation following the civil war in Bosnia-Herzegovina at the turn of the twenty-first century, various measures were taken to ensure people would only be able to cast a single personal vote. First, voters’ fingers were marked with a special fluorescent ink, visible under an ultraviolet light, then voter registries and identification documents guaranteed that votes could be properly registered (Coles 2004). A polling station can thus be thought of as akin to a scientific laboratory, in that it produces ‘facts, knowledge and order’ (Coles 2004, 553).

Given the power that voting techniques and procedures have, it is unsurprising that they are often the subject of heated debate. This was the case in the 2022 presidential campaigns in Brazil, when the incumbent candidate Jair Bolsonaro questioned the security of electronic voting machines and demanded the return of printed ballots. Discrediting the voting system and promoting conspiracy theories about the fairness of a ballot count (Hatzikidi 2023b) can be a political strategy that highlights the importance of elections and their procedures to establish a fair decision. That is why anthropologists nowadays include fake news and digital influencers in their analyses of the technical processes of campaigns (e.g. Cesarino 2022). The latter also reminds us that elections do not exist in a vacuum. While the concrete electoral procedures may try to uphold and instantiate egalitarian ideas such as ‘one person one vote’, electoral campaigns also reproduce structural inequalities when it comes to campaign financing, access to media outlets, and the existing social stigma of ethnic groups running for office (Collins 2021).

Studying democracy ethnographically also attunes us to the unintended effects and internal paradoxes that it can bring. Take, for example, the experience of the rural Mueda people of Northern Mozambique, studied in the 1990s (West 2008). Here, democratic reformers sought to promote local leaders to political office rather than sending authorities from the capital to govern Mueda communities. These changes in the dynamics of authority and local power were perceived locally as an abandonment by the central administration, as the loss of local voices at the federal level. Instead of empowering the Mueda, efforts of bringing about local leadership as part of a greater democratic participation made them less integrated with the decision-making centres in the capital and thus politically weaker. This case raises the question of whether choosing one’s representative is sufficient as a democratic practice, or whether democracy also requires having freedom of speech and the power to be taken into account.

Understanding how elections are made sense of locally is as important for understanding rural Mozambique as it is for grasping the political dynamics in the capital of the United Kingdom. Here, the Brexit referendum in 2016 was not so much an expression of ‘culture wars’ between cosmopolitan liberals and nationalist conservatives; rather, it was an expression of dissatisfaction with the government and with elections more generally, which were seen as having no tangible effect on people's lives (Koch 2017). Once again, democratic elections presented us with a paradox: namely, that the Brexit referendum had a high voter turnout, in part to communicate via voting that electoral politics do not make a difference. It was an opportunity to reject British government, police monitoring, and Kafkaesque welfare bureaucracy. Thus, people took an opportunity to insert their own moralities and expectations into how electoral politics are run (Koch 2017, 228).

The aforementioned works show that in order to analyse elections as both extraordinary rituals and epistemic and political laboratories it is necessary to understand ordinary life. Elections and ordinary life can also hang together, sometimes inextricably so. In Brazil, for example, left-wing demonstrations took millions to the streets across the country in June 2013 over a continued dissatisfaction with the government, public services, and living conditions against the context of a booming economy. This in turn produced a rise in right-wing demonstrations and a polarised presidential campaign in 2014, with a narrow victory for the governing Workers Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores). Conservative demonstrations during the following years demanded and eventually succeeded to remove the president via impeachment in 2016. This was again followed by mass demonstrations from both political sides until the presidential election of 2018. Against such a politically explosive series of events, the elections of 2018 cannot be studied in isolation. They need to be understood as part and parcel of a longer period of political turmoil, which changed the parameters of collective action and the self-perception of the nation (Dullo 2022).

The permeability of election periods highlights that democracy-making is an open-ended process. It also emphasizes the importance of other forms of expressing political will and claiming their demands, such as protests. Self-organised communities can be created via discussions and semi-formal procedures that enable collective decision-making (Razsa and Kurnik 2012; Juris 2012; Greenberg 2014; Kunreuther 2018). In Jakarta, Indonesia, for example, young activists were fundamental to the decline of Suharto’s dictatorship in 1998 and for the establishment of democracy. As part thereof, these activists also positioned themselves as the sole voice of the people, excluding other citizens from demonstrations who did not share their masculine, young, and middle-class identities and styles. Despite their biases and limitations, they claimed to be universal and national citizens, raising the question of ‘who constitutes the fringes as well as the centre of democratic discourse’ (Lee 2011, 934). Protests are thus also sites of exclusion, frequently loaded with power relations among those who constitute the core of a political movement and those who do not. Anthropologists have analysed internal disagreements and ways of reaching consensus, sometimes across generational divergent expectations of what is achievable and how to pursue it (Flynn 2021). One of the most long-lasting social movements, the Landless Workers' Movement in Brazil, reached forty years of existence in 2024 and has produced leaders across generations, allowing researchers to ask how political demands and strategies transform over time (Flynn 2024).

But democratic protest is also a site of creativity and prefigurative politics. In social movements around the globe, participants frequently organise according to more horizontal and egalitarian relationships, illustrating as much as claiming what a proper understanding of democracy should be. In Occupy Slovenia, for example, protesters engaged in direct democracy, without trying to embody a popular majority or stand in for the voice of the nation. Instead, they emphasised democratic ways of finding agreement, organising small workshops, the decisions of which were later taken to a common assembly. In this case, it was the form of political decision-making that empowered minorities and unleashed political energies (2012, 244).

Conclusion

Anthropologists’ unique contributions to studying democracy hinge on an empirically grounded understanding of the cultural, social, and moral aspects of the everyday experiences of democracy among ordinary citizens. This distinguishes the discipline’s contributions from other approaches that focus on institutional governance and formal definitions. Instead of adhering to liberal, secular, and representative definitions of democracy, anthropologists have questioned the assumptions underlying these normative concepts. They have shown that local understandings of democracy are much more varied and complex, entangled with history and culture, blurring the boundaries between politics, economics, religion, and ethnicity, and stretching across diverse notions of citizenship, participation, or elections.

Democracy was frequently promoted in the second half of the twentieth century as a remedy for dictatorship or colonial rule, transforming the political regime into one where ‘the people’ are in charge. Yet, anthropologists have demonstrated that asymmetrical power relations are embedded in definitions of democracy, including who counts as ‘the people’ and when. Therefore, anthropologists have concentrated on uncovering the power dynamics and political rationalities that uphold existing democracies and their inequalities, highlighting the gap between their promises and actual realities. In a global landscape marked by rising populism and authoritarianism, anthropologists are also examining the effects of a democratic decline not only on the citizens affected but also on anthropology itself. Rather than formulating a single, universal definition of democracy, many anthropologists focus on democratic practices, institutions, and values. They have concluded that democracy does not always function identically everywhere and that unexpected power dynamics can transform both the concept of democracy and the ways in which people strive to promote or challenge it.

Acknowledgements

The writing of this entry benefited from great input and exchange from my students at the Anthropology of Democracy seminar; colleagues - in particular Corinna Howland and Katerina Hatzikidi -; and the anonymous reviewers and the editorial team at the OEA, Riddhi Bhandari, Felix Stein, and Rebecca Tishler.

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Note on contributor

Eduardo Dullo is an associate professor of anthropology at the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), Brazil. His historical and ethnographical research focused on the disputes between governmental and religious projects to produce citizens with specific ethical subjectivities leading to the formation of Brazilian secularity and democracy.

Dr. Eduardo Dullo, Department of Anthropology, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, Brazil. eduardo.dullo@ufrgs.br ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3793-7406

Editor:

Riddhi Bhandari

Populism

Rebecca Tishler — Fri, 21 Mar 2025 15:35:17 +0000

Donald Trump supporters at a political rally in Mesa, Arizona in October, 2018. Picture by Gage Skidmore.

Julia Fierman

Harvard University

Initially published 21 Mar 2025

http://doi.org/10.29164/25populism

Abstract:

Populism is a conception of political representation that views ‘the people’ as the primary political actor and the basis of political sovereignty. As populism does not refer to a specific ideology, ideologically diverse movements can fall under it. Thus, populism is not intrinsically conservative or progressive, left-wing or right-wing. However, populists’ insistence that their movement, leader, and party should represent ‘the people’ puts populist politics at odds with liberal democracy’s insistence on a public sphere characterised by rational deliberation—the model of deliberative democracy and liberal constitutionalism that has been celebrated throughout Western Europe and gained hegemony in the majority of the Northern Hemisphere since the French Revolution. Populism tends to reject consensus politics, even if it believes in democratic elections—as shown by most populist political parties. While the first populist party came about in the United States, populist parties and movements are prominent across all continents.

Anthropologists have studied populism within highly distinct cultural contexts, often foregrounding the very overt role of emotion and feelings of socioeconomic disenfranchisement in populist rhetoric. They have also investigated the relationship between populism and democracy, and the seemingly unique role of the leader in populist movements, which seem to equate a political movement with a singular figure. Ethnographic methods, which allow us to come closer to understanding the lives of others, have challenged hegemonic narratives about populism, questioning its assumed ties to specific ideologies and pushing back against the notion that populism disqualifies itself just because it relies on emotions. Thereby, anthropology provides us with a critical lens on populism that still helps us grasp its seemingly global appeal in the twenty-first century.

Introduction: What is populism?

The twenty-first century has been characterised by an upsurge in the popularity of populist movements across the globe. If it is possible to identify the first formal populist movement in history, we could arguably start with the United States, which, in the 1890s, saw the establishment of the People’s Party, or Populist Party. The American People’s Party never enjoyed significant electoral success, but its platform, which generally sought to improve the lives of labourers and regulate the concentration of capital, remains relevant in American politics. Historian Federico Finchelstein has claimed that Peronism, which came to power in Argentina in 1946, is the first populist regime in global history. Peronism emerged as a workers’ movement in 1945 but has evolved to take on many ideological iterations since then. Beyond Peronism, which within a single populist movement has taken on varying policy positions, in other places, such as the United States, different parties of opposing views may be labelled as ‘populist’, such as the followers of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders in the United States. As a result, ‘populism’ is difficult to define; it is a very broad concept—or an ‘overdetermined signifier’ (Stavrakakis et al. 2017, 425)—that stands for a plethora of political movements, which seem quite different from each other.

Because so many different political moments representing diverse and even conflicting views have been called ‘populist’, a question of great scholarly importance, including for anthropologists, is what exactly the term stands for. Many scholars of populism have argued that the term does not refer to a specific political platform, but rather, in the words of Ernesto Laclau, one of the most influential theorists of populism, to a ‘political logic’ or form of political discourse that can be adapted to any ideological program or political platform (2005). Populist movements, parties, and regimes can thus be on the left or right or anywhere in between. For example, the New Left leaders of Latin America that emerged in the 2000s, which included Evo Morales in Bolivia, Néstor and Cristina Kirchner in Argentina, Lula Ignacio da Silva in Brazil, and Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, represented a populist turn to progressive politics in South America. In contrast, Viktor Orban in Hungary and Donald Trump in the United States (as well as several other leaders in the Global North) are right-wing populists related to fascism, as they overtly celebrate xenophobia and anti-immigrant policies.

Further inspired by the work of Laclau (2005), anthropologists tend to think of populism as a style of political discourse that employs a polarising logic. This logic positions ‘the people’—the protagonist of populist politics—against an ‘enemy’, often internal to the nation-state or wider populace. In populism, ‘the people must be extracted from within the people’, as political theorist Jan Werner-Müller has stated (2014). This means that popular sovereignty does not extend to everyone, but only to ‘the people’ that populism celebrates, as opposed to others. Thus, for populist parties, which are often nationalist, not all citizens can be said to truly belong to the nation-state. The frontier that populism creates between ‘the people’ and their others is an antagonistic one. Thus, ‘the people’ are said to have ‘enemies’—often fellow citizens who are viewed as betraying a sense of national authenticity (Laclau 2005, 84-5). ‘Enemies’ or ‘anti-people’ may be defined along status, class, ethnic, party, or sectoral lines, and are often viewed as undermining national well-being (Laclau 2005; Mouffe 2018). Thus, a key aspect of populist politics is its divisive rhetoric, which, when repeated often enough, turns into a discourse, i.e. a way of perceiving and thinking about the world.

Another structural continuity of populism is that it frames its central political actor—‘the people’—as a victimised group within broader national or global populations (Samet 2019). Their ‘enemies’ are somehow a source of ‘the people’s’ suffering or exploitation. This may seem surprising, as ‘the people’ and their assumed ‘enemy’, are single names for heterogeneous groups and social sectors, each representing highly disparate sets of social demands. Moreover ‘the people’ can even include powerful groups, such as dominant racial groups within a society. Yet, this sentiment of victimhood or of being a morally upright ‘underdog’ is particularly important, as it unites vague sectors and otherwise heterogeneous factions of a given society (Chatterjee 2011, 15). By relying on antagonistic victimisation, populism is a necessarily polarising political force. As such, it engenders an illiberal rejection of consensus-seeking politics or deliberative democracy—even if most populist regimes have been democratic. As some scholars have underscored, liberal regimes that present emotional politics as ‘irrational’ may further marginalise the social demands of the most vulnerable populations within society (Ahmed 2004). Populism, on the other hand, allows for the expression of political voices that might otherwise go unarticulated.

A final structural continuity between different forms of populism that draw on ‘the people’ as an underdog, even a downtrodden group, is that its discourse does not rely on traditional notions of class warfare. This can be explored through Trumpism in the United States. In this case, ‘the people’ stands for a highly racialised concept of American identity but is not defined, in membership, by being white. ‘The people’ consists of a broad coalition that feels that their different demands could be satisfied by the same leader and movement. ‘The people’ is also an identity that is inherently exclusive towards many Americans who are considered to be sympathetic to migrants, protesters associated with amorphous leftist forces, as well as various ‘elites’, be they academics and universities, part of a general intelligentsia (including non-aligned media), and even corporate managers who do not adhere to Trumpist politics. Trumpist discourse is thus not restricted to ideas of class warfare but has, instead, allied various sectors of American society against common and often vaguely defined enemies, such as ‘the media’, ‘the Washington elite’, or ‘the Left’.

In sum, populism refers to a discursive logic or manner of constructing the political rather than a specific ideology, and it thinks of politics in polarising, often self-victimising terms. Populism is also usually characterised by charismatic leadership, overtly emotional rhetoric, and positions ‘the people’ as the central actor in politics. While this definition of populism is broad, its structural continuities differentiate its various ideological stripes from the liberal forms of democracy most celebrated in Europe and North America after the French Revolution. As this entry will explore further, the relationship between populism and democracy is not one of diametric opposition, but populist notions of political representation certainly disturb liberal norms of deliberative democracy. More specifically, populism is a political logic that encourages an overtly emotional brand of politics.

The anthropology of populism

While much social science literature has been dedicated to populism, the term does not yet occupy a large amount of literature within anthropology (see Mazzarella 2019). This is surprising, as the discipline is uniquely suited to study the appeal of populist movements. Its ethnographic research methods reveal the emotional, economic, social, and cultural factors that lead to populism’s appeal. Additionally, because anthropologists conduct their research in diverse geographic contexts, their inquiries into populism clarify the historical and social contingencies that give rise to and shape populist movements in specific field sites, while also considering what these sites reveal about the appeal of populism more broadly.

Anthropological investigations of populism have focused on recent and current populist regimes, such as Erdoğan’s Turkey (Tambar 2014), Maduro’s Venezuela (Samet 2019), Modi’s India (Hota 2020), Trump in the United States (Kalb 2023), and Orbán in Hungary (Laszlo 2020), adding distinctively ethnographic insight into what has been described as an illiberal rejection of liberal democratic norms prevalent in the post-WWII era. They have often sought to explain the appeal of the respective populist movements upon which they focus, frequently asking how populist communities are created and sustained. Anthropology links this question to its interest in the structure and reproduction of community as well as to its long-standing interest in the creation of social solidarity. It turns out that rhetoric, ritual, and state fetishism are central to populism’s appeal. For example, in Lauren Derby’s history of Trujillo’s Dominican Republic, she understands fetishism to be key to the dictator’s appeal, or ‘seduction’, in her words, diminishing the population’s capacity to resist authoritarianism (2009). Similarly, Fernando Coronil, Michael Taussig, and Rafael Sánchez have all underscored how reifying and even deifying political figures is central to populist politics.

Similarly, work on scapegoating in times of uncertainty has shown that ambiguous social conditions lead to blaming individuals or groups for social ills, often resulting in violence (Evans-Pritchard [1937] 1976; Geschiere 2013; Siegel 2006). In recent ethnographic work on ethnonationalism in Turkey, for example, we have seen how wounded masculinity among disabled Turkish veterans of the Kurdish conflict contributes to their hatred for their Kurdish foes. Coming home from war disabled, these veterans feel betrayed by the Turkish state, which they criticise for taking too soft of an approach against the Kurds (Aciksoz 2019). Ethnographic work on racialised nationalism elucidates how the demonisation of racialised others becomes the basis for racist political movements. For example, ethnographic work on white nationalists in de-industrialised parts of the United States has reflected this logic of demonisation. Instead of drawing on theories of scapegoating explicitly, some anthropologists have traced this othering logic through a psychoanalytic framework, meditating on the dialectical relationship between self and other to understand how whiteness is constituted through xenophobic and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories in deindustrialised North America (Song 2011).

Scholars working on ultranationalist politics have also drawn on the notion of sacrifice to better understand the rhetoric of ethnonationalist populist discourse. In Turkey, disabled military veterans (gazi) are lionised as modern-day martyrs (şehitler). Their sacrifice, particularly the sacrifice of their bodies in war, is deeply implicated in notions of citizenship. Disabled veterans are held to be owed debts of honour and gratitude by the state, which entitles them to various privileges, such as high-quality prostheses, jobs, interest-free housing credit and medical care (Aciksoz 2019, 56-7). They do not embody the horrors of war as much as they serve state purposes for further militarisation. The celebration of their sacrifice exists alongside a scapegoating of the Kurdish movement as a threat to Turkish sovereignty (Aciksoz 2019).

Further broadening ethnography’s insights into populism, anthropologists of the post-Soviet Visegrád nations (i.e. Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary) have looked at how populism can emerge in opposition to liberal discourses of multiculturalism. Here, people attracted to populism consider national culture to be under attack by an urban intelligentsia. In Poland and Slovakia, populist politics underscore local valorisations of cultural authenticity (both fascist and progressive), which appeal to local identities associated with rural origins and agricultural labour (Buzalka 2021). Post-Soviet populism is also marked by a nostalgia for a sense of collectivism and community, which seem at risk in an increasingly globalised world. In Hungary, the interplay of economic transformation and an attachment to national culture and solidarity are equally at play (Kurti 2020). Here, populism is closely tied to racist ethnonationalism and xenophobic political sentiments that translate into anti-immigrant discourse, as is evident elsewhere in the region (Buzalka 2022; Kalb 2009a, 2009b; Malewska-Szalygin 2009). The ethnographic study of Visegrád politics thus helps understand the logics of populism in other regions, notably Brexit and Trump (Kurti 2020).

The following sections will foreground three main tensions in the anthropological study of populism, namely the emotional drivers of populism, its relationship to democracy, and the nature of populist leadership.

Emotion and political economy

Anthropologists have been interested in the emotional and affective drivers of social life since at least the 1990s. They neither condemn nor celebrate emotion as irrational or rational, but consider feelings, sensations, and emotional and affective dispositions as revelatory of political dynamics. This is true for work on the emotions and affect of political memory (Yashin-Navarro 2002, 2012), volunteer work (Muehlebach 2011), or citizenship (Cox 2016; Savell 2015), for example.

Anthropologies of populism share this overarching concern with affect and emotion and have often aimed at understanding the ritualisation and routinisation of emotion in illiberal politics (Sánchez 2016, de Abreu 2021). Take Peronist rallies in Argentina during the 1940s and 1950s. These rallies, in which thousands of Peronists gathered to express loyalty to the leaders of the movement, were highly emotionally charged ritualised theatre in which the masses played a mostly passive role. Many women active in Peronist politics have imitated the matriarch of Peronism, Eva ‘Evita’ Perón, in their speech patterns and hairstyles (Auyero 2001). In contrast to spontaneity, these practices ‘modulate affect’ through ritual, inculcating the followers of such movements with a series of habits that some critics qualify as authoritarian (Sanchez 2015) or at least at odds with the freeing affects of revolutionary politics (Beasley-Murray 2010, 25).

The emotional and affective underpinnings of populist mobilisation can be libidinal, even erotic. The election of Narendra Modi as Prime Minister in India in 2014, for example, catalysed a populist Hindu nationalism that was not just racialised and caste-oriented, but also highly gendered (Hota 2019). Here, Hindu ethnonationalists shored up popular anxieties linked to sex by presenting the ‘national body’ as ascetic, masculine, and pure, whilst conceiving of vilified others (e.g. protesting students, Christians, Muslims) as feminised and polluting. Doing so helped Modi supporters add a sexualised edge to the emotions involved in political othering.

Some scholars have drawn on Western crowd theories to trace a genealogy between the libidinal urges evident in crowds and populist emotions. People in crowds experience a contagious collective effervescence, frequently described as producing sentiments and actions that transcend the individual (Canetti [1960] 1984, Freud 1921, Le Bon [1895] 1995, Tarde [1898] 1989). They may thus act differently than they would on their own. Thus, crowds are sometimes perceived as stripping people of their agency or as intrinsically sinister, as they may elicit irrational and base feelings. Perceived as such, crowds can be thought of as threats to the social order, bypassing institutions and sanctioned normative behaviours. While this can be true—taking the January 6^th, 2021 riots of Trump supporters in the US, who stormed the Capitol because they did not accept that Trump had lost the 2020 election, as an example—ethnographic work also shows that crowds can be a generative political force, capable of transforming social and political norms. The imprisonment of then-Secretary of Labor Juan Perón in 1945 by the Argentine government provoked mass protests that not only led to Perón’s release but solidified Peronism as a formidable political force that would drastically expand workers’ rights in Argentina.

Beyond focusing on affect and emotion, the popularity of nationalist populism, particularly in Europe, is often linked to a general disenchantment with neoliberalism (Gusterson 2017, 210). While populism predates neoliberalism, populism’s increased popularity can be read as a reaction to an economic system in which state intervention favours the market, rather than regulating the market to favour its citizens (Foucault 1979). In Guatemala, this disenchantment takes the form of pessimism in which citizens, even if they may sympathise with drastic political reforms, view social transformation through politics quite cynically. Ethnography has shown how a significant number of citizens from the Indigenous population, which faced genocide at the hands of the military dictatorship led by Ríos Montt in the 1980s, has, since the 1990s, supported his Guatemalan Republican Front in local and national elections. In a context of neoliberalism where revolutionary change seems impossible, this population is drawn to this political party’s local development projects and clientelistic practices, which bring capital to Indigenous communities. In this context, Indigenous Guatemalan subjects are resigned to understanding the limitations of politics and pragmatically engage with a political party that can contribute tangible material gains to their lives (Copeland 2019). Disaffection with neoliberalism and wariness of globalised cosmopolitanism was also evident in the UK’s 2016 withdrawal from the EU through the Brexit referendum (Gusterson 2017).

Notable ethnographies of populism have foregrounded the role of cynicism in the face of neoliberalism. For example, in post-Soviet contexts such as Slovakia (Buzalka 2022) and Poland (Kalb 2009a; Malewska-Szalgin 2001a, 2001b), citizens feel left behind by neoliberal policies that render them further marginalised. In these cases, cynicism towards neoliberalism is also accompanied by a celebration of national tradition that takes on, often, ethnonationalist flavours. As shown by work on post-Soviet populisms in anthropology, the reification of traditional and even rural ways of life are part of a rejection of neoliberalism and liberalism.

The study of populist emotions and affect raises the question of who exactly the subject of populist movements is. Ethnographic work on populism has confirmed that ‘the people’ are not explicitly related to socioeconomic class categories. ‘The people’, even when they are primarily thought of as ‘workers’, such as in the case in early Peronist rhetoric in Argentina, is a vague enough moniker to unite various social sectors that are not constricted by class identity. Instead, who ‘the people’ are is often intentionally left vague so as to absorb as many different social forces as possible. This coalitional nature of populist politics cuts across class alliances. In Brazil, for example, right-wing authoritarian politics include supporters that are not limited to one particular socioeconomic class (de Abreu 2021). Similar inter-class alliances have also been observed in right-wing populism in Guatemala (Copeland 2019), and Chavista and anti-Chavista mobilisation in Venezuela (Samet 2019).

At the same time, populist movements celebrate an underdog identity that appeals to notions of being part of a social sector excluded from the elite. Some scholars have been particularly attentive to the ‘double devaluations’ of space and class felt by those attracted to right-wing populism. The double devaluation refers to feelings of disenfranchisement that arise from those who feel both their socioeconomic class and place of origin to be devalued by liberal norms. Neoliberal global flows of capital, people, and ideas have produced a rise in the popularity of right-wing populist movements that imbue their supporters with a sense of dignity (Kalb 2023). In this work, like those working in post-Soviet contexts and in Latin America, we see how disenchantment with neoliberalism produces cynicism, resignation, and, in the case of Poland, resistance in the form of illiberal, right-wing politics (Kalb 2023).

Both populism’s critics and its supporters are attentive to its emotionally charged nature. Critics often find its overtly emotional dimensions to be proof of its irrationality, disqualifying it from being taken seriously or even condemning it as something that has no place in the political sphere (Ostiguy 2009, 2017). Supporters have argued that populism is radically democratic, and that its capacity to express the affective dimensions of political mobilisation is precisely part of its democratic potential (Samet 2019; Laclau 2005; Mouffe 2018). From this point of view, liberal paradigms of democracy that focus on mediation through institutions are overly restrictive as they repress the emotional nature of political participation.

Ethnography has trodden a middle ground in this debate. While highlighting the importance of emotion and affect, anthropologists refuse to fetishise populism as inherently less rational than other kinds of politics (Hann 2019). Consider the discussion of Peronism mentioned above. While Peronism is marked by dominant emotional features, these do not thereby render it irrational. Instead, its emotional appeal exists in addition to a political field of highly limited practical options. Peronist supporters are motivated by a ‘structure of feeling’ that coexists alongside practicality (Auyero 2000). Rather than pointing at populism as a mostly rational reaction to neoliberalism or as simply a ritualised collective effervescence, ethnographic work shows that practical and emotional drivers co-exist and interact with one another.

Relationship to democracy

As stated above, discussions of populism tend to categorise it as radically democratic or counter to the spirit of democracy. Anthropologists have thus explored the relationship between populist movements and democratic politics. Both privilege the concept of popular sovereignty, which positions ‘the people’ as the foundation of political legitimacy. In populism, ‘the people’ is the political actor par excellence, viewed as having a rather unmediated relationship to power even beyond the sphere of electoral politics. In deliberative democracy, ‘the people’s’ power is mediated, mostly by elections and state bureaucracies, which is meant to protect minorities and temper populist decision-making via a rule of experts.

The classic image of popular sovereignty is the crowd—a group of people that has come together through a common cause or grievance. The Jacobins, who emerged in the late 1700s as part of the French Revolution, represent the crowd’s raw democratic potential and potentially sinister dimensions. Once in power, during the early 1790s, they carried out a wave of political violence known as The Reign of Terror (la terreur), which resulted in thousands of executions of political and ideological enemies. Yet, they also represented a plurality of social forces dedicated to anti-royalist republicanism. The Jacobinian phase of the French Revolution thus positions the crowd as both the embodiment of democratic spirit and the anarchic overturning of an existing order (Mazauric 2014). The mass of the revolution is violent, unpredictable, and destructive—yet it is this mass action that challenges the monarchic notion of the sovereign by demonstrating the bare power of popular sovereignty. And so, within the history of modern democracy and republicanism, we have a reification of ‘the people’ as the political actor par excellence and as the mercurial and temperamental mass that can tear down an existing order through organising around particular demands as well as through brute force. As follows, some political theorists have argued that the crowd embodies true democracy while others consider it true (i.e. deliberative) democracy’s ‘shadow’ or ‘mirror’ (Canovan 1999; Panizza 2005).

Crowds are arguably both celebrated and feared by deliberative democracies, who view popular sovereignty as fundamental yet often insist on its mediation through institutional mechanisms. Within liberal democracy resides a tension between the Jacobinian, evolutionary spirit of popular sovereignty and the requirement for institutionalism, the latter often being viewed as cumbersome to the former (Canovan 2005; Sánchez 2016). In populism, this tension comes to a head as the crowd may potently shirk institutions associated with the status quo. Obvious examples from recent history would include the January 6^th, 2021 riots that sought to overturn the results of the US 2020 presidential election, as well as the January 8^th, 2023 protests in Brazil, which also challenged the outcome of their presidential elections.

As some scholars have argued, the crowd is both necessary for democratic support in the context of republicanism, but also poses a threat to the stability of a republic. Thus, the state must transform the unruly crowd or masses into the disciplined ‘people’ of republicanism. Popular sovereignty makes republican politics possible and constantly challenges its perpetuity. The same is true for populism, which creates ‘the people’ out of a broad coalition of social sectors and political interests. As a result, even in its democratic iterations, populism is ultimately authoritarian because it is so focused on controlling the masses by containing them as ‘the people’. Some have argued that this tension exists in republican democracy as well (Sánchez 2016), but it is more obvious in populism due to its more brazen celebration of popular sovereignty as ‘the people’ (Canovan 1999, 2005; Panizza 2005).

Anthropologists have long been aware of this uneasy relationship between populism and democracy. While some have been critical of populism’s allegedly inherently authoritarian tendencies (Sánchez 2016), several ethnographies argue that populism is the most radically democratic form of political organisation, which is precisely why it seems so threatening to any status quo. Its capacity to unite diverse factions of society makes it a particularly efficacious brand of political mobilisation (Samet 2019).

A major question that these debates raise is what the relationship between populism and fascism may be, as many right-wing populist movements clearly resemble or have components of the latter. Populist movements, in the Global North in particular, represent democratic as well as fascist reactions to liberal paradigms of governance, which favour models of deliberative democracy. In these contexts, popular support for populist movements and parties is, in large part, due to their platforms’ espousal of anti-immigrant and racist sentiments. Scholars studying these cases have shown how neoliberal economic policies, combined with liberal political discourse, have alienated rural and post-industrial contexts (Holmes 2010, 2019; Kalb 2023). These movements, such as the British National Party, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party, Brexit, Trumpism, Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland, as with many Visegrád region nations, articulate national sovereignty and citizenship in ethnonationalist terms (Kalb 2009a; Malewska-Szalgyin 2021a, 2021b). This fascistically ethnonationalist and racist populist illiberalism unites those who feel devalued by liberal multiculturalism and the patterns of capital accumulation that have historically accompanied it in the post-WWII era.

The fascist discourse of many populist movements has led some scholars to argue that they are intrinsically interrelated—in other words, that populism is always related to fascism (Finchelstein 2019). While the abovementioned ethnographic work looks at populisms that are blatantly ethnonationalist, xenophobic, and racist, anthropologists have also argued that because populism is a political logic with drastically varying ideological content, it is important to evaluate different populist traditions based on the ideas they promote, rather than stigmatising all political forms that are labelled as ‘populist’ (Samet and Schiller 2017).

Charismatic leadership

One of the most important and controversial themes of inquiries into populism is the relationship between ‘the people’ and the leader. Because of its emphasis on popular sovereignty, some anthropologists have underscored the importance of people’s mobilisation in populism. They consciously move away from attributing the appeal of populist politics to personal charisma, arguing that depictions of charismatic leaders presiding over a passive mass reinforce stereotypes of socioeconomically precarious sectors as lacking in agency or as being intellectually incapacitated (Aciksoz 2019; Cody 2015; Lazar 2017; Samet 2019; Tambar 2014). These thinkers have sought to underscore the bottom-up dimensions of populism, demanding that we not simply credit the charismatic leader for creating the basis of populist organisation and showing that local and grassroots organisation are central to its appeal and success.

Recent studies of modern-day Peronist labour unions in Argentina have shown them to be far less oriented towards personalist political representation than one might assume. Instead, these unions are primarily spaces of negotiation. For Sian Lazar, labour unions allow for decision-making and debate that do not follow a strictly top-down structure by which a leader gives a command that is then carried out without deliberation or debate (2017). Such work stands in tension to a widespread concern that leaders and their charisma may be a chief organising force of populist movements. Anthropologists of populism elsewhere have also emphasised the importance of populism’s supporters by focusing on crowds and grassroots political organising, showing that populist mobilisation is not purely explained by the pull of a charismatic leader (Cody 2015, Tambar 2014).

The work on Eastern European populism emphasises sentiments on the ground as the source of populist cohesion more than shared loyalty to a single figure (Buzalka 2021; Kurti 2020; Malewska-Szyalgin 2021b). These studies underscore how populist discourse speaks to practical concerns of citizens who feel excluded, unmoored, and disenfranchised by economic and social transformation.

Many scholars of populism have focused on the nature of its conceptions of leadership. They contend that populist notions of political representation often fetishise larger-than-life figures (Finchelstein 2017; Wedeen 1995). Such figures can play a generative role in populist movements, as they help absorb the differences between the diverse social sectors that constitute ‘the people’ (Laclau 2005; Müller 2014). This was famously argued by Sigmund Freud in his examination of crowd psychology. For Freud ([1921] 2001), the leader is a love object. While the crowd is turned against others outside of itself—others whom it has come together against—its attention is also lovingly turned toward the leader, who is held to be a surrogate father figure (Derby 2009). Because populism depends on a coalition between diverse social sectors, the charismatic leader functions as an ‘arbiter of contradiction’.

Of course, the personality and even body of the leader are relevant to other political paradigms beyond populism: Monarchical leaders represent a classical notion of sovereignty in which they are above and beyond the laws that constrict their subjects. German historian Ernst Kantrowicz famously examined how divine right monarchs both embody and represent the divine and the human. He studied the genealogy of political leadership in Europe, examining the king’s two bodies as both divine and human, reflecting the doubling of Christ as, at once, both flesh and blood and godly (Kantrowicz [1937] 2016). Fetishism of a political leader—the reification of a human into a deified figure—has been part of political traditions far before the first populist party even emerged. It should thus not be surprising that followers of populist political leaders may consider them both eminently human and inherently not human, even divine (Coronil 1997; Derby 2009).

Scholars of regimes that are cults of personality, but not necessarily populist, also often have leaders that are both intended to be relatable and incomparable—their fetish quality is essential to their capacity to bring together diverse populations (Wedeen 1999). In the anthropological literature, the role of fetishised political leaders is conceived of in symbolic and psychoanalytical terms. Studies of totalitarianism and dictatorships have drawn on structuralist theories of the ‘master-signifier’—a signifier that does not refer to specific content (or ‘signified’) but is the anchor for a whole symbolic system—to understand how certain figures occupy singular symbolic functions. Thus, work on the Soviet Union has shown how certain historical figures like Lenin come to be reified as beyond reproach and critique, serving as master-signifiers that serve as an anchor through which subjects make sense of themselves and the world around them through a shared official discourse (Yurchak 2006). Scholarship on social uncertainty in times of political upheaval has shown how the deposal of brutal dictators, whose larger-than-life presence had previously served as a constant point of reference for their citizens, leads to a state of social ambiguity in which people feel the loss of a referential anchor (Siegel 2006).

Conclusion: A political question of our time

Ethnographic inquiry makes anthropology uniquely suited to give insights into why populist politics are so popular in today’s world. Anthropological work on populism has centred on its highly diverse manifestations. It generally avoids labelling populism as inherently left or right, but, instead, views it as a discursive style that can be adapted to many different ideological programs. The discipline makes sense of populism by focusing on themes including sacrifice, scapegoating, ritual, and the nature of group belonging. A major topic of investigation is the nature and importance of emotions at play in populist movements. Another main topic concerns the complicated and dynamic relationship between liberal paradigms of deliberative democracy and populism, which demonstrates that democracy encourages mobilisation in the name of popular sovereignty and yet seeks to contain it. While anthropology considers the importance of charismatic leadership, it errs on the side of highlighting the agency of the subjects who engage in populist politics. What unites much of the anthropology of populism is the nature of political representation. Who should or should not be represented, how emotional or direct this representation should be, and who really defines the nature of representation are pressing questions that we need to keep asking against the rapid rise of populist parties globally.

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Note on contributor

Julia Fierman is currently Lecturer on Anthropology at Harvard University. Starting in 2025, she will take up the Hunt Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Wenner-Gren Foundation to complete her monograph on Peronism—the world’s most enduring populist movement. She has previously published articles in various journals on the topics of populism, Peronism, and Argentine political culture.

Editor:

Rachel Cantave