Authors Meet Critics: "Righteous Demagogues"

Session Submission Type: Author meet critics

Session Description

Adnan Naseemullah and Pradeep Chhibber’s Righteous Demagogues: Populist Politics in South Asia and Beyond (Oxford University Press, 2024) argues that populist politics are a symptom rather than a cause of democratic decline, by focusing on the crises of representation that are a necessary condition for populist politics. It argues that populists tell stories and make promises regarding the restitution of a broken moral contract: that the state and the political system are obligated to redress procedural or state-facing inequality. Depending on which and how many groups feel excluded from – and thus unrepresented in – the extant political system, these stories and promises resonate widely or more narrowly across cleavages, leading to different types of populist politics and the polarization, realignment, and wholesale transformation of the party system. Challenges to democratic norms are a possible but not inevitable consequence of populists in power, grounded in the struggle over institutions that arise from political change. The book explores these dynamics through the structured analysis of four cases of national populism in India and Pakistan and investigations of sub-national populisms in the region, Europe, Latin America, and the United States.

This roundtable brings together scholars of comparative politics with expertise in populism, democracy, representation, and inequality to place Naseemullah and Chhibber’s book in greater context. Participants will include Mashail Malik on party politics and exclusion across ethnic groups in Pakistan, Victoria Murillo on mobilization and representation in Latin American countries, Dan Slater on democratic and developmental discontents in East and Southeast Asia, and Ashutosh Varshney on democratic political development and the rising illiberalism in India. Catherine Boone, chairing the session, will provide introductory remarks to place the book in a comparative-historical perspective.

The panel engages with two particular features of Righteous Demagogues. First, it places populist politics as the modal, yet underrecognized, force behind political change in South Asia. The book takes a moral economy and party systems approach to understanding epochal moments of system convergence and contestations around institutions in India and Pakistan in the 1970s and 2010s, situating India’s democracy and Pakistan’s hybrid regime in the tension between what was promised by post-colonial governments and what has been delivered by the partisan establishment and the state apparatus. This focus on populism and political change in the region engages productively with Malik’s exciting research on “defiant pride” and mobilization in urban Pakistan and Varshney’s long-standing, prescient concerns on the nature of democratic competition in India.

The book also brings a typological framework, based on the relative resonance of a populist message across cleavages, to bear on understanding populist politics in greater comparative perspective, in relation to Latin America, Europe, and the United States. Naseemullah and Chhibber offer an approach grounded in party system polarization, realignment, or transformation as the antecedent step to the institutional contestations that can threaten democracy and explore why populist messages resonate in ways that transform the norms of political competition. These questions echo Slater’s wide-ranging work on populism and national self-imaginings and the relationship between development and democracy in Asia and Murillo’s incisive analyses of the interactions among voters, parties, and civil society in Latin American countries. Boone, especially given her excellent recent book on territorial cleavages and political representation in Sub-Saharan Africa, will assist invaluably in setting the stage for the panel.

This authors-meet-critics panel offers a rare and exciting opportunity, afforded by the publication of Righteous Demagogues, for a conversation among those with profound and wide-ranging expertise on the nature and import of different dimensions of populist politics across regions.

Sub Unit

• Division 12: Comparative Politics of Developing Countries

Chair

• Catherine Boone London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE)

Presenters

• Adnan Naseemullah King's College London

• Pradeep Chhibber University of California, Berkeley

• Mashail Aman Malik Harvard University

• Maria Victoria Murillo Columbia University

• Ashutosh Varshney Brown University