Barrios Suvelza, Franz X.(2022).Is populism a kind of ideology, or is ideology only a part
of populism’s definition? Journal of Populism Studies (2022), pp. 1- 19

doi: 10.55271/JPS000115

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Abstract

Contemporary social science has been interested in highly charged topics such as populism. However, theses discussion have neglected to address the pure methodological challenges that defining such topics can pose. Since debates on populism’s definition have been bogged down in discussions of content, this article proposes to explore specific formal methodological techniques of definition building, that populism experts have used without necessarily being aware of them, or which they considered uninteresting, or which they have simply ignored. Three of them are discussed: i) backtracking the generic formal families of analysis, ii) constructing a three-segmented definitional field, and iii) articulating a multistoried definitional procedure. These three methodologies, which draw on Althusserian and Weberian methodological works, are then tested by analysing what role the dimension of ideology plays in the whole definitional work on populism.