Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024. US$30.00, paper. ISBN 9780197756935.
As populist leaders continue to win majorities and consolidate their power across the globe, there is increasing scholarly and public debate on the roots, trajectories, and outcomes of this new populist resurgence. Righteous Demagogues presents a new framework to understand the causes of populist politics and their impacts on political systems, focusing on procedural inequality, the crisis of representation, and the restitution of the moral contract.
The book argues that populist politics thrive during times of crisis of representation, when deep inequalities in society lead to feelings of exclusion for large sections of society from the political system. Populists address this feeling of inequality and exclusion among diverse sections of the population by appealing to the moral contract. For the authors, the concept of the moral contract is “at the heart of populist politics” (38) and refers to the moral obligation of the government and the political system to its citizens (i.e., the people). While the main elements of the moral contract vary from one nation to another based on the symbols and values embedded in that nation’s history, one common element of the moral contract in democratic polities is equality. Impactful populists refer to this common notion (i.e., equality) and nationally specific elements of the moral contract to appeal to diverse groups of society, which help them transform extant political divisions across social groups and create new electoral majorities.
The book’s explanatory framework also relies on a new typology of populism, which captures the extent of the resonance of populist appeals. Reordering populists, who are “without clear allegiance to a traditional partisan base” (9), create extensive electoral coalitions across multiple social groups by creating novel parties or radically transforming existing parties (9–10). Additive populists appeal to a traditional base while attracting new underrepresented groups to their electoral base during times of narrower representational crises (10). Finally, quotidian populists mainly appeal to narrow groups rather than creating electoral coalitions across groups. While reordering populists and additive populists are impactful and have long-lasting consequences on the party system and, in some cases, lead to democratic backsliding, quotidian populists contribute to polarization without transforming the party system.
Using this framework, the book explains cycles of populist politics in India and Pakistan. Both countries, despite diverging regimes and institutions in the postcolonial period, witnessed a parallel rise of reordering populists of the left in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and additive populists of the right in the 2010s. In the context of deep representational crises of governance due to economic, social, and political inequities, reordering left-populists, Indira Gandhi in India and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in Pakistan, led successful populist mobilizations in the late 1960s and early 1970s. They were able to forge new electoral coalitions that brought together peasants, workers, and the middle classes, leading to a major transformation of the party system. Albeit in different forms, both populist periods ended with democratic backsliding: Indira Gandhi’s authoritarian Emergency rule ended due to a combination of mass content and a new electoral coalition, while Bhutto’s populist period ended with a military coup and his execution.
A new crisis of representation arose due to the unfulfilled expectations of equality of opportunity among various sections of society in the 2010s. As a response to this crisis, additive populists of the right, Narendra Modi in India and Imran Khan in Pakistan, were able to come to power by forging novel electoral coalitions that added new social groups, such as upper-middle-class professionals and lower (aspiring) middle classes, to their core support base (144). After coming to power, both leaders incorporated policies and rhetoric leading to democratic backsliding, yet the outcomes of these leaders diverged. While Khan fell from power through a vote of no confidence, Modi was able to gain another major electoral success in 2019, this time through a “majoritarian nationalism” (145). The final chapters utilize the conceptual framework to discuss diverse cases of populism from Latin America to Europe, and the US.
A key strength of the book is its ability to offer a fresh perspective on populist politics on many levels, a challenging feat in a field that already seems to be saturated with various theories and analyses. It introduces a new conceptual framework that explains the causes of populist politics in India and Pakistan, providing a valuable analytical tool that can be used by scholars of populism beyond the region. This framework transcends existing dualisms in studies of populism and bridges gaps between different theoretical approaches. For one, while the concept of the “crisis of representation” bridges the gap between supply-side and demand-side explanations of populist success, the concept of the moral contract and its historical and foundational roots helps explain the symbolic power of populist rhetoric without reducing populist success to discursive strategies and style. Furthermore, the rich analysis provided in the book brings a much-needed comparative and historical lens to the literature on populism, which predominantly focuses on the contemporary resurgence of populist mobilizations. The book convincingly shows us that any attempt to understand the contemporary rise of right-wing populists in South Asia will be incomplete without a comprehensive historical narrative that goes back to anti-colonial mobilization and the establishment of the moral contract of redressing inequalities, followed by periods marked post-colonial state, crises of representation, and the long-lasting impact of left-populists.
While Righteous Demagogues does not explicitly seek to answer this question, a critical issue emerges: What explains the concurrent rise of populist mobilizations in India, Pakistan, and beyond, despite their diverse political and institutional contexts? At various conjunctures, global processes—such as colonialism, anti-colonial struggles, independence movements, and neoliberal globalization—have directly shaped crises of representation, fueled populist mobilizations, and informed the moral contracts of various nation-states, especially in the Global South, where nation-states were established through anti-colonial struggles. All these processes, which are already embedded in the book’s rich narrative, suggest whether a notion that captures the international/global crises of representation (i.e., crises of the international system) would further complement the theoretical framework presented in the book.
Sefika Kumral
University of North Carolina, Greensboro