What Should ‘Pluralism’
Mean in Populism Studies?

What Should ‘Pluralism’ Mean in Populism Studies?

Published on 21 January 2025

Alex Yates

University of Bath

A commonly made critique of populism, which pits ‘the people’ against ‘the elite’ is that it is anti-pluralist. Many claim that populism and pluralism are incompatible because populism homogenises ‘the people’, implying that they can speak in a unified voice, which leads to the marginalisation of dissent. As Giorgos Katsambekis has demonstrated, however, this concern is largely misguided in the case of left-wing populist parties, which are no less pluralistic than their non-populist counterparts. Nevertheless, what is missing from this account is a more emancipatory understanding of pluralism that goes beyond an elitist liberal vocabulary which identifies pluralism at the level of (often exclusionary) liberal-democratic institutions.

In my recent open-access article for Politics, I look to the contributions of Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau, as the two main points of reference for critical populism scholarship, for a more radical conceptualisation of pluralism. Starting with Chantal Mouffe, I claim that her project of agonistic pluralism, which asserts that different political factions should relate to each other as adversaries, rather than enemies, is entirely commensurate with the exclusions of the contemporary liberal hegemony. This is particularly evident in her tacit acceptance of the demands of the far right, who she euphemises as ‘right-wing populists’. 

More promising is the work of Ernesto Laclau, who understands that to advance a pluralistic project, the exclusionary (neo)liberal status quo must be challenged. Neoliberalism is certainly anti-pluralist in the way it insists that all subjects must be profit-maximisers, before anything else. Where I part from Laclau is regarding the top-down way that he thinks about populist politics. Left-wing populism is a way to challenge the anti-pluralist hegemony, but Laclau argues that ‘the people’ of populism becomes cohered by a single demand which represents the whole ‘people’. Think of the way that the Bolshevik slogan of  ‘peace, bread, land’ unified the disparate forces of the Russian Revolution in a vertical manner. 

As an alternative to this top-down understanding of populism, and to inject some pluralism into populist politics, I suggest that we can understand ‘the people’ of populism as meaning something quite different. Instead of ‘the people’ signifying a part that comes to represent the whole, building on the work of Todd McGowan, I contend that the signifier of ‘the people’ represents the fact that we are all, in some ways, excluded. In our neoliberal conjuncture, none of us are the perfect consumer, or the perfect citizen. These labels never quite fit us. In other words, ‘the people’ is a collective subject that describes something we all lack, not something any of us have. Because of this, it is a universal signifier, which we can all be included into. ‘The people’ of populism, then, is a decidedly pluralistic subjectivity that no one is excluded from a priori. Unifying under this banner in a populist formation, I contend, is both a way of challenging the elitist and anti-pluralistic politics that remain dominant, whilst also making sure that nobody gets left behind.