Populism is unlikely to be effective where the masses are already incorporated into well-established programmatic parties. However, this chapter shows that deep socioeconomic crises can disrupt those political linkages, providing an opening for populism. The sudden rise of Hitler’s Nazi Party in the early 1930s provides the main narrative for this chapter. Long frustrated in both his armed and electoral attempts to gain power, the fallout of the Great Depression in 1929 and Germany’s own banking crisis of 1931 shocked many Germans, especially on the right, out of their existing political affiliations. Hitler, the master demagogue, was ready to take advantage through a sophisticated propaganda machine. In most other cases across interwar Europe, the populist strategy was ineffective. Less severe crises left most the populace embedded in their existing ties to bureaucratic and patronage-based parties.

Even if populism is not simply an illiberal ideology, it is bad for democracy. Because populists are not constrained by power-seeking party elites, they are more likely, on average, to erode civil liberties and judicial and legislative constraints on their authority. At the extreme, populists so erode these constraints that they cross the threshold into authoritarianism. The best defense against this democratic rollback is not to be found in policy alone. Rather, institutional changes are needed that incentivize power-seeking politicians to create and sustain bureaucratic parties. The conditions that produced the mass membership parties of the twentieth century have essentially passed. But a new generation of programmatic political organizations could sustain democracy well into the future, taking advantage of new tools to map how we live and work, integrating people across space, and forging new civil and political spaces.

After the Second World War, countries across occupied Europe were faced with the challenge of restoring political stability at home and peace abroad. Although extremist sentiment had not disappeared, moderate elites resolved to choke it off at the source by building robust bureaucratic parties that could incorporate the masses. Christian democratic parties on the right and moderate social democratic parties on the left took power all across the continent, ushering in an unprecedent period of stability. Yet with the economic stagnation of the 1970s, this consensus began to unravel, giving rise to the emergence of populist alternatives. This chapter departs from existing explanations for this turnaround. It shows that the populist strategy was always most effective in the patronage-based party systems of southern Europe. In northwest Europe, in contrast, bureaucratic parties have adapted, substituting professionalized service provision for mass membership and participation.

Mass democracy went into abeyance with the demise of the Roman Republic. With the revolutions in America and France in the late eighteenth century, the masses asserted their political presence with a vengeance. Although both revolutions began moderately enough, they quickly diverged. In America, patronage became the predominant means of winning and keeping power. In France, in contrast, politics was soon dominated by a series of demagogues, from Danton to Robespierre. Rather than looking to ideology, this chapter proposes that the difference was due to the lower cost of patronage as a means of political incorporation in America compared to France. American elites had more than a century of working in the limited franchise democracy of British America prior to its "democratization." In France, in contrast, French elites had no such legacy on which to build. French institutions instead precluded the building of political parties, rendering direct appeals to the masses, especially those in the capital, cost-effective. The recurrent cycle of populism in France was interrupted only with Napoleon’s combination of popular appeal with the reimposition of centralized, executive power: a popular dictatorship.

The standard explanation for Trump’s 2016 victory is that it was the culmination of a long-term right-wing capture of the Republican Party. However, in 2016, the most consistently right-wing candidate was Ted Cruz. Trump was unusual in that he was the candidate of no faction. Rather, Trump’s low-cost populist strategy, in which he relied on mass rallies and social media, was effective because the factions who backed his opponents could not coalesce to keep him out. Trump won the GOP primary with an historically low share of the vote. This chapter also shows that Trump was not the first to successfully pursue such a strategy. In the wake of the reforms of the early 1970s, a little-known Jimmy Carter was similarly able to capture the Democratic nomination in 1976 on the basis of a low-cost direct-communication strategy. The Democratic Party adapted then to keep future populists out. Whether the Republican Party will do so after Trump remains unclear.

Ancient Greece, especially Athens, provides the best documented early example of mass democracy. With the democratic reforms of the fifth century, populism – the direct mobilization of the masses – becomes an effective path to power. This chapter looks at several examples from fifth- and fourth-century Athens, which demonstrate the use of demagoguery as an efficient, if much derided, alternative to patronage-based politics. Ancient Rome provides a somewhat different context. As a republic, Rome gave the masses a more limited and indirect role in politics. Typically, politics was a purely elite affair. Yet for those elites who found the normal insider path blocked to them, direct appeals to the masses could prove effective. However, given the limited formal role for the plebs in Roman politics, this direct mobilization could often lead to violence.

Politics is first and foremost about power. Short of the recourse to violence, politicians can follow one of three strategies in the quest for power: a programmatic, patronage, or populist strategy. This book proposes that this choice is grounded in economic trade-offs. Politicians will follow a populist strategy when it represents a more efficient use of their resources than alternative strategies.

Populism is a political strategy that relies on the use of a personalistic political organization and mass communication to mobilize support in the quest for power; it will be most successful when it is more cost-effective than the alternatives of programmatic political party building or the distribution of patronage. The costs involved in this trade-off come in two forms: direct costs and indirect (or transaction) costs. In politics, very often transaction costs – search, bargaining, and enforcement costs – are the higher ones. Populists lower the costs of mobilizing support by communicating directly with voters instead of working through intermediaries such as party professionals or political brokers. The populist strategy will be most effective when two conditions are met. First, potential voters or supporters must be available for direct mobilization. This means that they must be relatively free of existing party attachments. Second, the opposition should be divided. Most populists win with the backing of a mere plurality rather than a majority. The more the opposition is split between multiple contenders, the more economically viable is the populist strategy.

Taking up the cases of America and France in the middle third of the nineteenth century, this chapter demonstrates that long-term changes to the organization of a society – demographic growth, territorial expansion, industrialization, etc. – affect the relative costs and benefits of different political strategies. With America’s expansion west and south in the early nineteenth century, millions of new voters, only weakly attached to existing political parties, were available for mobilization. Andrew Jackson took advantage, combining the use of patronage and populism to become the first outsider to win the presidency. In France, political participation remained highly constrained in the wake of the monarchical restorations of the early nineteenth century. When the Orléanist monarchy was overthrown in 1848, Louis Napoleon used his illustrious name to win elections for the new office of president. With Jackson’s administration, a new, more expansive spoils system was introduced. Allegiance to the Democratic and Whig parties was almost total, rendering direct populist mobilization of the masses an unlikely route to power. The populist strategy in America began instead to be aimed at winning the leadership of a mass party.