Sociology has long shied away from the problem of populism. This may be due to suspicion about the concept or uncertainty about how to fit populist cases into broader comparative matrices. Such caution is warranted: the existing interdisciplinary literature has been plagued by conceptual confusion and disagreement. But given the recent resurgence of populist politics in Latin America and elsewhere, sociology can no longer afford to sidestep such analytical challenges. This article moves toward a political sociology of populism by identifying (...) past theoretical deficiencies and proposing a new, practice-based approach that is not beholden to pejorative common sense understandings. This approach conceptualizes populism as a mode of political practice—as populist mobilization. Its utility is demonstrated through an application to mid-twentieth-century Latin American politics. The article concludes by sketching an agenda for future research on populist mobilization in Latin America and beyond. (shrink)

Popular sovereignty requires that citizens perceive themselves as being able to act and implement decisions, and that they are de facto causally connected to mechanisms of decision making. I argue that the two most common understandings of the exercise of popular sovereignty—which center on direct decision making by the people as a whole and the indirect exercise of democratic agency by elected representatives, respectively—are inadequate in this respect, and go on to suggest a complementary account that stresses the central role (...) of internally democratic and participatory political parties in actualising popular sovereignty, drawing on the democratic theory of Hans Kelsen. (shrink)

This article explores the formation of democratic subjectivity and its connection to change. Drawing on Wittgenstein's account of aspect seeing, it seeks to elucidate the processes through which political grammars change. More specifically, it illuminates two dimensions of the formation of democratic political subjectivity: the initial " identification as" a democratic subject and its repeated renewal, necessary to the maintenance of a democratic ethos. I argue that by drawing a distinction between "aspect dawning" and "aspect change," it is possible to (...) capture the key characteristics of these two dimensions. This account is developed in contrast to existing democratic theory, which either does not deal sufficiently with the formation of subjectivity or does not give full attention to the specific requirements of the formation of democratic forms of identification. (shrink)