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Populism has relationship issues: collider effects and immigration policy in Italy

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Abstract

This article makes the simple argument that populism is not poorly defined. Rather, this proverbial claim arises from a misunderstanding of concepts and their use. I argue that confusion is linked to a semantic approach to defining a concept. The semantic approach assumes a precise definition of a concept corresponding to some objective phenomena. The main argument is that populism is inherently a collider conceptual variable. The article looks at how it interacts with nationalism and nativism and how this colliding dimension shapes immigration policy in Italy. This article makes two original contributions. First, the paper argues that populism does not have a definitional problem. The second contribution is the use of a case study of immigration in Italy to examine how the colliding effect of populism with nativism and nationalism empirically affects policy framing and implementation.

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Notes

  1. Palano’s reconstruction of the development and use of populism helps clarify why the concept is not able to be tightly defined. He states: adopting the Foucaultian conception of “genealogy”, the purpose of this article is in fact to recognize the “political” logics that have marked the history of the concept of populism and its arrival in the lexicon of the social sciences. The aim of this reconstruction is not simply to point out the derogatory meaning that often marks the term and, because of this, calling one’s opponent as a “populist” is equivalent in the language of journalism and daily controversy to accusing them of using demagogic rhetoric or of inciting the most sinister resentments for electoral purposes. More precisely, this article attempts instead to highlight how the polemical distortion is genetically present in the concept, or rather in the meaning of the term “populism”, which was “invented” by the social sciences of the 1950s and 1960s (Palano 2022: 2).

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Woods, D. Populism has relationship issues: collider effects and immigration policy in Italy. GPPG 2, 5–21 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s43508-022-00035-0

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