Left and right

Abstract

This chapter’s goal is to map the main contemporary theories and debates around left and rightpopulism. To do so in a clear and systematic way is somewhat of a challenge. On the one hand,there is a nascent consensus on populism being a ‘distinct form of politics’ (Katsambekis andKioupkiolis 2019: 6). This form can be characterized as a type of discourse (Laclau 2005),a logic (Prentoulis 2021), a frame (Heinisch and Mazzoleni 2021), a bodily style (Moffitt2016), a strategy (Weyland 2017) or a thin ideology (Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser 2017).All these approaches, however, share a view of populism as a way of doing politics that canbe combined with different contents. If this is indeed the case, differentiating between left andright populism should be straightforward, and the main debate should only be about the mostsuitable methods