Centripetal and Centrifugal Tendencies in Populism

One reason for the enduring confusion over populism as a concept is that it is informed by conflicting exemplars. Consequently, there is often a tension between conceptions of populism that emphasize its centripetal or centralizing character, informed by the rise of Caesar in the late republican Rome, and those that emphasize its centrifugal or decentralizing tendencies, informed by the exemplars of small property populism, from the nineteenth-century US farmers’ movement to twentieth-century Poujadisme. Contemporary populisms come in both varieties.