Populism and Other Types of Democracy:
A Conceptual and Empirical Simplification
Wednesday, November 16, 2022
12:00 - 1:00 PM (EST)


Hybrid event
Elliott School of International Affairs
Room 412Q
1957 E Street NW, Washington DC 20052
This event is on the record and open to the public.
How many types of democracy are out there, and how does populism relate to either democracy or autocracy? The challenge in this talk is to come up with a classification containing the whole gamut of political systems in the world, including populism, by using the smallest possible number of concepts. When matching real empirical cases with clear concepts, the new classificatory scheme should be able to both capture stasis and make sense of changes in contemporary democratic politics.
Speaker
Takis S. Pappas (PhD, Yale) is a Visiting Scholar at the Illiberalism Studies Program. He is a political scientist known for his original work on populism and liberalism. A former professor of comparative politics in Greece, he also serves as recurrent visiting professor at the universities of Helsinki, Finland, and the Central European University in Vienna, as well as a researcher with the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy (ELIAMEP). Takis has authored dozens of academic articles and six books with most recent Populism and Liberal Democracy: A Comparative and Theoretical Analysis (Oxford University Press, 2019). Among his other works are several policy briefs, a TED-Ed video on populism, infographics, and comics that popularize the topics he does academic research on. He is currently working on a new book project under the tentative title “The New Illiberal Disorder.” Takis is a regular columnist in major Greek newspaper Kathimerini and maintains the blog www.pappaspopulism.com. He lives in Brussels, Belgium, and Athens, Greece.


Moderator
Marlene Laruelle, Ph.D., is Director of the Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies; Director of the Central Asia Program; Director of the Illiberalism Studies Program; Co-Director of PONARS Eurasia; and Research Professor of International Affairs at The George Washington University. She works on political, social, and cultural changes in the post-Soviet space. Marlene's research explores the transformations of nationalist and conservative ideologies in Russia, nationhood construction in Central Asia, as well as the development of Russia's Arctic regions.
Illiberalism Studies Program
Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies (IERES)
Elliott School of International Affairs, George Washington University
1957 E Street, NW | Suite 412 | Washington, DC | 20052