No dia 30 de janeiro, Zsolt Boda (ELTE Centre for Social Sciences) será o orador de um seminário do Grupo de Investigação RIGoP com o tema “Overpoliticization”? Understanding governance under populist rule. A partir das 11h, na sala 1 do ICS-ULisboa & online.

Abstract:

Cas Mudde argued in 2004 that we lived in a “populist Zeitgeist” (Mudde 2004), while Rosanvallon (2021) considers the 21st century as the “century of populism”. While for a long time populist parties and politicians were part of the opposition, in the past decades a growing trend has been their arrival into power.  The two-times election of Donald Trump as the president of the United States is just one, although a particularly notable example of this phenomenon. How is the policy making process, or more generally speaking, the governance affected by populist politics in power? While Mudde (2004) argued that there is no such thing as populist policy, because populism is ideologically multifaceted, this paper argues that some features of populist policy making are identifiable. Drawing on our previous paper (Bartha et al. 2020) I will present the idealtype of populist government along three dimensions (policy content, policy process and policy discourse) and argue that an overarching theme across these dimensions is the (over)politicization of governance, that is, the phenomenon of (macro)politics taking over the policy subsystem logic. The paper argues that while it is impossible to define the ideal equilibrium between politics and policy in the process of governing, the systemic overthrowing of the policy logic is a detectable feature of populist governance. The possible consequences should include the decline of policy quality.