Populism Talks

Is global democracy actually collapsing, or are we misreading the data? In this episode, we sit down with Professor Adam Przeworski, Emeritus Professor at NYU and a titan of democratic theory, to challenge the prevailing narrative of a "worldwide crisis of democracy."

While datasets like V-Dem warn of a global shift toward autocracy, Przeworski offers a provocative counter-perspective: there are more democratic regimes today than ever before. He argues that what we perceive as "backsliding" is often the inherent, messy nature of political conflict and dissatisfaction.

In this episode, we discuss:

• The Minimalist View: Why democracy is defined by the simple power to remove governments through elections.

• The Myth of Global Collapse: Why Przeworski remains skeptical of "democratic recession" headlines.

• Self-Correcting Systems: Lessons from Poland and Brazil on how democracies resist power grabs.

• The Enduring Value of Choice: Why the ability to choose our leaders remains the most resilient force in modern politics.

Join us for a masterclass in political science that balances sobering realism with a cautiously optimistic look at the future of liberal institutions.

Here is the edited version of our interview with Professor Adam Przeworski, revised slightly to improve clarity and flow: https://www.populismstudies.org/profe...

Panel 5, titled “Democratic Resistance in a Hardening World: Civic Capacity, Strongmen, and Economic Coercion,” concluded on April 22, 2026, the second day of the ECPS Fifth Annual International Symposium, “Reforming and Safeguarding Liberal Democracy: Systemic Crises, Populism, and Democratic Resilience.”

Moderated by Professor Jocelyne Cesari, Professor and Chair of Religion and Politics at the University of Birmingham and Senior Fellow at Georgetown University’s Berkley Center, the panel examined the structural, ideological, institutional, and economic forces driving contemporary democratic erosion and the resurgence of strongman politics.

Professor Cesari’s moderation situated the panel within the symposium’s broader concern with democratic resilience under conditions of systemic crisis. The session brought together four distinguished scholars whose presentations approached the hardening global political environment from complementary disciplinary perspectives: historical sociology, political theory, criminology, and international political economy. Together, they explored how economic insecurity, democratic disillusionment, punitive politics, cultural backlash, and coercive trade policy have reshaped the terrain on which liberal democracy must now defend itself.Professor Jack A. Goldstone, Virginia E. and John T. Hazel, Jr. Professor of Public Policy at George Mason University and Senior Fellow of the Mercatus Center, opened the panel with “Structural Pressures Behind Strongman Politics.”Professor Goldstone argued that the rise of authoritarian-populist leaders cannot be explained simply by demagoguery or declining democratic values. Rather, it reflects long-term structural pressures, including globalization, technological displacement, regional inequality, immigration surges, cultural diversification, fiscal stress, and declining confidence in mainstream institutions.Professor Steven Friedman, Research Professor of Politics at the University of Johannesburg and former Director of the Centre for the Study of Democracy, followed with “Changing Democracy’s Address.” Professor Friedman challenged the assumption that contemporary democratic crises reflect a popular rejection of democracy itself. Instead, he argued that the dominant post-Cold War model of democracy has failed by neglecting private power and by presenting democracy as inherently Western, thereby weakening its legitimacy both in established democracies and across the Global South.Professor John Pratt, Emeritus Professor of Criminology at Victoria University of Wellington, then presented “The Return of the Strong Men.” Professor Pratt traced the contemporary rise of populist strongmen to the neoliberal restructuring of the 1980s, the resulting legitimacy deficit, and the emergence of penal populism, anti-expert politics, enemy construction, and strongman promises of protection.Professor Kent Jones, Professor Emeritus of International Economics at Babson College, concluded the presentations with “Weaponized Trade Policy: Tariffs, Industrial Policy, and the Future of Global Economic Governance.” Professor Jones analyzed how Trump’s populist trade agenda undermined the rules-based global trading system, transforming tariffs into instruments of executive power, coercion, and institutional destabilization.

Read the Report of Panel 5: https://www.populismstudies.org/ecps-...

Panel 4 of the ECPS Fifth Annual International Symposium, “Reforming and Safeguarding Liberal Democracy: Systemic Crises, Populism, and Democratic Resilience,” convened on April 22, 2026, under the title “Comparative Regional Pathways of Democratic Backsliding and Far-Right Mobilization.”

Moderated by Professor Reinhard Heinisch, Professor of Comparative Austrian Politics at the University of Salzburg, the panel examined how democratic backsliding and far-right mobilization unfold across distinct regional contexts, while also interrogating the conceptual vocabularies through which these phenomena are analyzed.Professor Heinisch framed the panel around a central comparative premise: while democratic backsliding appears as a broadly shared global trend, its manifestations differ significantly across regions. He emphasized that regional variation concerns not only what is empirically observed, but also how scholars conceptualize and interpret developments such as populism, far-right politics, authoritarianism, and democratic erosion. His moderation therefore situated the panel as both an empirical and conceptual inquiry into the regional pathways through which democratic systems come under pressure.The panel brought together distinguished scholars working on different geographical and theoretical terrains. Professor Henri J. Barkey, Cohen Professor of International Relations Emeritus at Lehigh University, opened with “Building an Authoritarian Edifice Step-By-Step,” offering a comparative analysis of Donald Trump and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Professor Barkey explored how personalistic leadership, institutional capture, attacks on expertise, and the politicization of law contribute to the gradual construction of authoritarian power.Professor Hannes B. Mosler, Professor at Universität Duisburg-Essen’s Institute of Political Science and affiliated with the Institute of East Asian Studies (IN-EAST), shifted the focus to East Asia in “Populism and Transnational Ties of the Far Right in East Asia: Recent Developments in South Korea.” Professor Mosler questioned the applicability of populism as an analytical category in East Asia and argued that South Korea’s democratic challenges are better understood through the lens of far-right mobilization, historical revisionism, anti-feminism, and transnational ideological circulation.Professor María Esperanza Casullo, Professor at the Institute of Political Science, Faculty of History, Geography and Political Science, Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, concluded with “Populist Narratives and Democratic Backsliding: Perspectives from Latin America.” Professor Esperanza-Casullo examined contemporary Latin American right-wing populism through the concept of the populist myth, highlighting narratives of grievance, cultural antagonism, hyper-masculinity, and elite collaboration.Together, the panel offered a comparative account of democratic erosion as a globally connected but regionally differentiated phenomenon, underscoring the need for precise concepts, contextual analysis, and transnational democratic responses.Read the Report of Panel 4: https://www.populismstudies.org/ecps-...

Third Panel of the ECPS Fifth Annual International Symposium, “Reforming and Safeguarding Liberal Democracy: Systemic Crises, Populism, and Democratic Resilience,” convened under the title “Normalizing Authoritarian Populism: Institutions, Algorithms, and Fascist Drift.”

Moderated by Professor Werner Pascha, Emeritus Professor of Economics at Duisburg-Essen University and affiliated with the Institute of East Asian Studies (IN-EAST), the panel examined how authoritarian populism becomes normalized through institutional weakening, executive overreach, media transformation, algorithmic amplification, and exclusionary forms of nationalism.Professor Pascha guided the session as a moderator attentive to both institutional and conceptual linkages.

His role was especially important in bringing together the panel’s diverse disciplinary perspectives—from comparative democratization and American political institutions to media studies, war narratives, and multicultural political theory—into a coherent discussion on the contemporary vulnerabilities of liberal democracy.The panel opened with Professor Larry Diamond, William L. Clayton Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute, and Bass University Fellow. In his presentation, “The Arc of Authoritarian Populism in the US under Donald Trump, How Far It Has Progressed, and the Prospects of Reversing It,” Professor Diamond assessed the trajectory of authoritarian populism in the United States, drawing on V-Dem indicators and comparative lessons from Hungary, Poland, and Turkey. He emphasized electoral manipulation, corruption, attacks on institutions, and the importance of broad democratic mobilization.The second speaker, Professor Bruce Cain, Professor of Political Science at Stanford University and Director of the Bill Lane Center, presented “The Institutional Enablement of American Populism.” Professor Cain offered a measured analysis of autocratic drift in the United States, distinguishing between rule-of-law erosion and longer-term shifts in America’s federalized institutional structure. His remarks highlighted executive power, emergency authority, judicial interpretation, federalism, and the political economy of democratic resilience.The third presentation, “Algorithmic Populism in the Age of the Deep-Fake,” was delivered by Assoc. Prof. Ibrahim Al-Marashi, Associate Professor at The American College of the Mediterranean and the Department of International Relations at Central European University. Assoc. Prof. Al-Marashi explored how AI-generated media, memes, “slopaganda,” and hyperreal digital narratives reshape war, propaganda, and populist communication.The final speaker, Professor Tariq Modood, Professor of Sociology, Politics and Public Policy at the University of Bristol, presented “From Populist Capture to Democratic Belonging: Multicultural Nationalism as an Alternative to Exclusionary Nationalism.” Professor Modood proposed multicultural nationalism as a constructive response to exclusionary populism, seeking to integrate majority anxieties and minority vulnerabilities within a shared framework of equal citizenship and belonging.Together, the panel offered a rich interdisciplinary account of how authoritarian populism is institutionalized, mediated, normalized, and potentially resisted.

Read the Report of Panel 3: https://www.populismstudies.org/ecps-...

Panel 2 of the ECPS Fifth Annual International Symposium, “Reforming and Safeguarding Liberal Democracy: Systemic Crises, Populism, and Democratic Resilience,” convened under the title “Institutions Under Pressure: Rule of Law, Executive Power, and Democratic Defense.”

Moderated by Yavuz Baydar, blogger with Mediapart and columnist with Svenska Dagbladet, the panel examined how liberal democratic institutions respond when the rule of law, bureaucratic autonomy, constitutional safeguards, and electoral accountability come under sustained pressure.Baydar framed the discussion around the urgent question of whether democratic systems possess the institutional and civic resources necessary to resist coordinated attacks from within. His moderation emphasized that contemporary democratic backsliding rarely takes the form of a single rupture. Rather, it unfolds through cumulative pressure on courts, civil services, electoral institutions, media systems, and oversight mechanisms. This framing gave the panel a coherent analytical direction: to understand not only how democracies erode, but also how they may recover, defend themselves, and rebuild resilience.The first speaker, Professor Susan C. Stokes, Tiffany and Margaret Blake Distinguished Service Professor and Director of the Chicago Center on Democracy at the University of Chicago, shifted attention from the causes of democratic erosion to the question of how backsliding leaders leave power. Drawing on comparative evidence, she explored elections, term limits, party dynamics, protests, and impeachment as mechanisms of accountability and democratic recovery.The second speaker, Dr. Robert Benson, Associate Director for National Security and International Policy at the Center for American Progress (CAP), widened the discussion to the transnational level. His presentation argued that attacks on liberal democracy are increasingly coordinated across borders through far-right networks, ideological circulation, institutional repurposing, and strategic inversion, requiring an equally coordinated democratic defense.The third speaker, Professor Barry Sullivan, Raymond and Mary Simon Chair in Constitutional Law and George Anastaplo Professor of Constitutional Law and History at Loyola University, examined executive power in the United States under Trump’s second administration. His analysis focused principally on the erosion of separation of powers, the weakening of institutional guardrails, and the expansion of presidential authority through legal, political, and judicial developments during the first year of the second Trump administration.The final speaker, Professor Stephen E. Hanson, Lettie Pate Evans Professor of Government at William & Mary, offered a broader theoretical reflection on democracy, state power, and regime change. Moving beyond the concept of populism, he argued that patrimonialism and the assault on rational-legal state institutions provide a more precise lens for understanding contemporary authoritarian drift.

Together, the panel offered a rich interdisciplinary account of institutional vulnerability and democratic defense. It showed that safeguarding liberal democracy requires not only electoral resistance, but also coordinated institutional renewal, civic mobilization, and a renewed commitment to the rule-bound democratic state.

Panel 1 of the ECPS Fifth Annual International Symposium, titled “From Grievance to Radicalization: Rhetoric, Ideology, and the International Politics of Populism,” offered a rich and interdisciplinary examination of how discontent is translated into exclusionary politics, institutional erosion, and authoritarian opportunity.

Bringing together perspectives from discourse studies, religious studies, development policy, and modern history, the panel explored the pathways through which grievance is narrated, organized, and mobilized across national and transnational contexts.

Although the presentations addressed distinct empirical terrains—from far-right rhetoric in Europe and Christian nationalism in the United States to multilateral institutions and the lessons of Weimar Germany—they converged around a shared concern: democratic decline rarely emerges suddenly, but is prepared through the cumulative interaction of ideas, identities, institutions, and political strategies.

Moderated by Professor Ibrahim Ozturk, the session unfolded as a tightly connected conversation on the mechanisms through which populist and far-right forces gain traction in moments of social unease and political dislocation. A central strength of the panel lay in its refusal to treat populism as a singular or self-explanatory phenomenon. Instead, the speakers unpacked the rhetorical, ideological, emotional, and institutional infrastructures that enable anti-pluralist politics to flourish.

Professor Ruth Wodak showed how democratic norms are eroded through discourse, provocation, and the normalization of exclusionary language. Professor Julie Ingersoll demonstrated how theocratic and anti-democratic religious movements, though internally diverse, have strategically converged to influence contemporary American politics. Professor Stephan Klingebiel widened the frame to the international level, showing how populist governance affects not only domestic politics but also the normative foundations of multilateral cooperation. Professor Benjamin Carter Hett, drawing on the history of late Weimar Germany, highlighted humiliation and status anxiety as powerful emotional drivers of anti-system politics, offering a historically grounded lens for understanding present-day grievance mobilization.

Taken together, the panel made clear that contemporary democratic crises cannot be understood through institutional analysis alone. What emerged instead was a layered account in which fear, humiliation, identity, ideology, and strategic communication are inseparable from formal political change. The subsequent discussion deepened these insights further, linking personal experience, comparative reflection, and normative concerns in ways that reinforced the panel’s interdisciplinary value.

In this sense, Panel 1 did more than diagnose the current moment. It established an intellectual framework for thinking about how democratic erosion is prepared, legitimized, and accelerated across multiple arenas. By tracing the movement from grievance to radicalization, the session illuminated not only the fragility of democratic norms, but also the urgency of confronting the political, cultural, and institutional conditions that allow authoritarian and exclusionary projects to take root.

Date: April 21-22, 2026

The opening session of ECPS Fifth Annual International Symposium opened on April 21, 2026 within a carefully structured intellectual framework that brought together empirical rigor, normative urgency, and interdisciplinary reflection. Moderated by Professor Ibrahim Ozturk, the opening segment of the symposium set out to interrogate one of the defining challenges of contemporary politics: how liberal democracies can be reformed and safeguarded in an era marked by systemic crises, populist mobilization, and intensifying pressures on institutional resilience.

From the outset, the session positioned itself at the intersection of scholarly analysis and real-world political developments. The framing emphasized that democratic backsliding is no longer a peripheral or regionally confined phenomenon, but a global trend with profound implications for governance, legitimacy, and international order. In this context, the symposium’s thematic focus—linking systemic crises to populism and democratic resilience—provided a coherent lens through which to examine both structural drivers and political responses.

The opening remarks by ECPS Honorary President Irina von Wiese underscored the urgency of the moment, situating the symposium within a rapidly evolving geopolitical landscape. Her reflections highlighted the accelerating pace of political change, particularly in transatlantic relations, and the difficulty of keeping analytical frameworks aligned with unfolding realities. This sense of temporal compression—where events outpace interpretation—reinforced the need for sustained, collective intellectual engagement.

The keynote address by Staffan I. Lindberg, Professor of Political Science, University of Gothenburg, Founding Director (2012–2025) of V-Dem Institute, further anchored the session in empirical analysis, offering a data-driven diagnosis of global democratic decline. By questioning conventional interpretations of populism and emphasizing the role of anti-pluralism, the keynote set the stage for a deeper exploration of the mechanisms underlying democratic erosion.

The discussion segment that followed extended the analytical depth of the opening session by bringing empirical findings, methodological concerns, and lived political experience into direct dialogue. Participants engaged critically with the keynote’s claims, probing the interpretation of data, the pace and nature of democratic decline, and the conditions under which institutional resilience may still operate. The exchange moved fluidly between macro-level indicators and context-specific realities, revealing both the strengths and limits of comparative measurement in capturing complex political transformations. In doing so, the discussion underscored a central theme of the symposium: that understanding democratic backsliding requires not only robust data, but also careful attention to institutional nuance, temporal dynamics, and the contested nature of political change.

Taken together, the opening session established both the analytical foundations and the normative stakes of the symposium. It framed the subsequent discussions around a central tension: while the challenges facing liberal democracy are systemic and far-reaching, the possibilities for resilience and renewal remain contingent on timely, informed, and collective responses.

Reported by ECPS Staff

On Thursday, April 16, 2026, the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS) convened the sixteenth and final session of its Virtual Workshop Series, “We, the People” and the Future of Democracy: Interdisciplinary Approaches, under the title “Voices of Democracy: Art, Law, and Leadership in the Era of Polarization.”

Bringing together perspectives from legal studies, political science, history, and discourse analysis, the session examined how democratic life is shaped—and at times distorted—through struggles over representation, institutional legitimacy, collective identity, and the symbolic construction of “the people” in contexts marked by deepening polarization.The participants of the session were introduced by ECPS intern Daniela Puggia, whose introductory remarks on behalf of ECPS set the stage for the discussion and helped situate the panel within the wider aims of the workshop series.

Chaired by Dr. Joni Doherty (Kettering Foundation), the session was organized around a broad but urgent set of questions: how are democratic norms defended when truth itself becomes contested? In what ways do institutional arrangements persist under conditions of deep social division? How do political leaders transform grief, fear, or resentment into collective identity and consent? And what role do art, speech, and symbolic representation play in either sustaining or undermining democratic life?The panel featured four intellectually rich and conceptually complementary presentations. Professor Ciara Torres-Spelliscy (Stetson University) examined the role of defamation law in defending democracy in the United States, focusing on the legal and political significance of the Freeman and Moss case in the aftermath of the 2020 election. Dr. Niva Golan-Nadir (Reichman University), co-authoring with Dr. Michael Freedman (Hebrew University of Jerusalem), explored how religious policy and balanced dissatisfaction shape institutional legitimacy within the Israeli military. Professor Elizabeth Kosmetatou (University of Illinois Springfield) offered a historically grounded reinterpretation of Pericles’ Funeral Oration as a rhetorically sophisticated form of populist mobilization in wartime Athens. Dr. Cristiano Gianolla (University of Coimbra), together with Lisete S. M. Mónico and Manuel João Cruz, analyzed the exclusionary identity of “the people” in radical right populism through a comparative study of emotional narratives in Portugal and Italy.

The session was further enriched by the interventions of its discussants, Dr. Justin Patch (Vassar College) and Dr. Amedeo Varriale (University of East London), whose comments drew connections across the presentations and raised broader questions concerning aesthetics, institutional resilience, populist rhetoric, and democratic contestation. Together, the contributions of chair, speakers, discussants, and moderator produced a wide-ranging interdisciplinary dialogue on the fragility, adaptability, and symbolic politics of democracy in an age of polarization.

Read the Full Report: https://www.populismstudies.org/ecps-...

Interview by Selcuk Gultasli

At a moment when democratic systems are under strain from two mutually reinforcing pressures—rising populist mobilization and the growing concentration of corporate power—the question of whether public anger can renew democratic accountability has acquired unusual urgency. In this wide-ranging interview with the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Professor Pepper Culpepper, Vice Dean for Academic Affairs and Blavatnik Chair in Government and Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford, offers a careful but provocative answer. Drawing on his influential scholarship—from Quiet Politics to his recent book Billionaire Backlash— Professor Culpepper argues that populism should not be understood simply as a threat to democracy. Under certain conditions, it can function as a corrective force, signaling failures of responsiveness and compelling elites to confront public demands they have too long ignored.

This argument runs directly through the spirit of the interview’s headline: “Populism Is Democracy’s Way of the People Telling Elites to ‘Listen Harder’.” Rather than treating populism as inherently pathological, Professor Culpepper urges a more discriminating view. In his recent Journal of Democracy article, “When Populism Can Be Good,” co-authored with Taeku Lee, he distinguishes between two broad dimensions of anti-elite sentiment: one rooted in political failure, the other in economic unfairness. For Professor Culpepper, this distinction is decisive. A populism centered on political failure—marked by distrust in elections, media, and institutions—can become corrosive to pluralism. By contrast, populist energies organized around economic unfairness may serve as a democratizing counterweight to entrenched power. As he puts it, “there are, of course, many negative aspects of populism, but one positive dimension is its potential to enhance responsiveness.”

The interview shows that this concern with responsiveness is inseparable from Professor Culpepper’s broader work on corporate scandal, media narratives, and regulatory change. Across cases ranging from the Beef Trust and The Jungle to Cambridge Analytica, AI regulation, and Big Tech, he explores how moments of public outrage can disrupt what he famously described as “quiet politics”—those domains in which organized business interests dominate because public attention is weak. Scandals, in his account, operate like “earthquakes”: they release latent pressure, render previously obscure issues politically salient, and sometimes create openings for institutional reform. Yet these openings do not arise automatically. They depend on policy entrepreneurs, compelling narratives of blame, and political actors capable of translating outrage into durable regulation.

What emerges from this conversation is a deeply textured account of the ambivalence of populism in contemporary democracy. Professor Culpepper does not romanticize anti-elite anger; he repeatedly underscores the dangers of polarization, scapegoating, and demagogic capture. Still, he insists that democratic theory must take seriously the possibility that public outrage, when directed at economic concentration and political unresponsiveness, can help rebalance distorted systems of power. The key question, as he suggests, is not whether populism exists, but which grievances it channels and toward what ends. In that sense, this interview is both an analysis of populism and a meditation on democracy’s capacity for self-correction.

Here is the edited version of our interview with Professor Pepper Culpepper, revised slightly to improve clarity and flow: https://www.populismstudies.org/prof-...

Interview by Selcuk Gultasli

As the tenth anniversary of the Brexit referendum approaches, public debate has moved decisively beyond the binary language of Leave and Remain toward a more empirically grounded reckoning with Brexit’s long-term political and economic consequences. In this context, Professor Mark Corner, Emeritus Professor at the University of Leuven, offers a particularly valuable perspective. His work situates Brexit not simply as a rupture in Britain’s relationship with the European Union, but as a dual constitutional and political crisis—one affecting both the European project and the internal cohesion of the United Kingdom. Bringing together political economy, constitutional analysis, historical memory, and populist mobilization, his reflections illuminate how Brexit has reshaped not only policy but also political imagination.In his interview with the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Professor Corner advances a sober conclusion captured in the headline of this conversation: “With Brexit, the UK has lost more than it has gained.” That judgment is not presented as a dramatic slogan, but as the outcome of a broader reassessment now taking place in British public life. As he puts it, “most economists would agree that the UK has lost more than it has gained,” and if that were not so, “the present government would [not] be trying so hard to move back toward a closer economic relationship with the EU.” In this sense, Brexit appears less as a fulfilled promise of renewed sovereignty than as a strategic rupture whose costs have become increasingly difficult to deny.Yet Professor Corner’s account is more layered than a narrow economic audit. He draws attention to one of the central ironies of Brexit politics: that a project framed around “taking back control” did not, in fact, restore parliamentary sovereignty. On the contrary, he argues, the referendum “assert[ed] popular sovereignty over parliamentary sovereignty,”since most MPs would have preferred to remain. Similarly, the promise that Britain could flourish once “freed from the shackles of the EU” has, in his view, been undermined by the enduring reality of geography, interdependence, and trade. The fantasy of becoming “Singapore-on-Thames” has largely faded, replaced by the quieter recognition that “a very large share of our trade is conducted with Europe.”The interview also places Brexit within a broader political and historical frame. Professor Corner shows how populist and radical-right actors have successfully shifted the argument away from economic performance toward sovereignty, border control, and cultural identity. In doing so, they have helped transform British political conflict from an older class-based divide into a more complex terrain shaped by “social and cultural division alongside economic division.” At the same time, he warns that Brexit’s most profound destabilizing effects may ultimately be domestic rather than European. While the feared cascade of exits from the EU never materialized, the United Kingdom itself remains vulnerable to centrifugal pressures, particularly in Scotland and Northern Ireland. In his words, “in the long run, [these] may prove more troubling than the difficulties in the EU.”In sum, Professor Corner’s reflections offer a penetrating and historically informed account of Brexit’s legacy. Far from vindicating the claims of its proponents, Brexit emerges here as a case study in the gap between populist promise and institutional consequence—one that continues to shape the future of Britain, Europe, and the politics of sovereignty itself.

Here is the edited version of our interview with Professor Mark Corner, revised slightly to improve clarity and flow: https://www.populismstudies.org/ten-y...