Against the ‘science of populism’: grammatical analysis of studies on populism in Italy

ABSTRACT In recent years, the study of populism has attracted considerable attention in the social sciences. However, this has highlighted certain inherent contradictions in the academic study of politics, which struggles between neutrality and value judgments. Shifting attention away from the representational content toward the actual usage of the term ‘populist’, the essay shows how part of the abundant academic literature on populism fails to address the problem of value judgment effectively. Despite its purported refusal to pathologize, academic analysis employs the term more often than not as a way to label new political parties or movements in terms of deviancy. It thus supports the political aim of incumbents who would like to dismiss such parties/movements as defective political actors. Taking the Italian literature on populism as a case study, we show not only how the moral connotation implicit in ‘populism’ is not neutralized in academic study but also how it constitutes a strategic aspect of the analysis. Our essay shows how ‘populism’ as a moral category allows, on the one hand, the collection in a single category of all the diverse actors emerging in contemporary politics and, on the other hand, the provision of an overall interpretation of these actors.