Populism Studies

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Populism Studies

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The European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS) is an independent, nonpartisan, nonprofit organisation, based in Brussels, for research on and analysis of challenges posed by increasing political populism.

25/08/2026

📢 ECPS Voice of Youth (VoY)

🤖🌍 The Hidden Cost of AI: Our Climate, Our Children, Our Future

✍️ By Emaan Zahra

📌 In this VoY contribution, Emaan Zahra examines a critical but often overlooked dimension of the generative AI revolution: its consequences for both environmental sustainability and the development of younger generations.

💧⚡ Behind the seemingly immaterial convenience of AI lies a resource-intensive physical infrastructure. Zahra draws attention to the growing demands of data centers for freshwater and electricity, their contribution to greenhouse gas emissions, and the pressures these infrastructures can place on local communities.

🧠👧 At the same time, she raises questions about the developmental consequences of habitual AI use among children. When AI substitutes for independent learning rather than supporting it, she argues, it may undermine the sustained practice required for critical thinking, creativity, memory, and problem-solving.

🌱📚 Connecting these environmental and educational concerns, Zahra presents AI proliferation as a dual challenge: how can societies benefit from technological innovation without externalizing its ecological costs or weakening the intellectual autonomy of future generations?

🚨 Her call is for greater responsibility from parents, educators, technology companies, and policymakers in establishing boundaries that reconcile technological progress with environmental protection and independent learning.

📕 Read the article: 🔗 https://www.populismstudies.org/the-hidden-cost-of-ai-our-climate-our-children-our-future/

25/08/2026

📢 ECPS Interview

📌 Prof. Mazzoleni & Dr. Koxha: Demographic Populism Links Cultural Survival to Biological Reproduction

✍️ Interview by Selcuk Gultasli

👥 Who is entitled to reproduce the “true people”? In this interview, Professor Oscar Mazzoleni and Dr. Klaudia Koxha (), editors of “The Radical Right and Demographic Populism,” unpack how immigration, fertility, gender, religion, family, and national identity are increasingly woven together through a politics of demographic survival.

🔎 They conceptualize “demographic populism” as a framework that connects cultural survival to biological reproduction, transforming demographic change into an existential political struggle. The interview explores the weaponization of demography, conspiracy narratives, the Great Replacement, Fratelli d’Italia’s calculated ambivalence, and the generational politics of the Austrian Freedom Party’s youth organizations.

🌍 Looking beyond Europe, the discussion examines transnational radical-right networks and the emerging political consequences of aging, migration, labor shortages, and AI. Professor Mazzoleni warns that these transformations can create new opportunities for radical-right populism, while Dr. Koxha argues that democracies must confront real demographic challenges without accepting narratives of “cultural extinction” or the premise that “one group’s security requires another’s exclusion.”

📕Read the interview: 🔗 https://www.populismstudies.org/prof-mazzoleni-dr-koxha-demographic-populism-links-cultural-survival-to-biological-reproduction/

24/08/2026

📢 ECPS Publication Alert!

📚 Journal of Populism Studies (JPS)

🌍 Mandate Inflation: How Populists Claim Authority to Challenge Global Constraints

✍️By Muhammad Faizan Aslam

⁉️How do populist leaders transform electoral victories into claims of authority to challenge treaties, courts, international institutions, and supranational rules?

📌 In a new article for the Journal of Populism Studies, Muhammad Faizan Aslam develops the concept of “mandate inflation”—the process through which an election or referendum is recast from a limited authorization to govern into a broader mandate to challenge constraints in the name of “the people.”

🔎 Through a structured comparison of Donald Trump’s “America First” politics, Brexit’s “take back control” discourse, and Viktor Orbán’s conflicts with EU constraints, the article identifies four recurrent moves: mandate condensation, construction of “the real people,” reframing constraints as anti-democratic obstruction, and asserting special authority to act.

⚖️ Crucially, the study shows that populist challenges to global governance do not necessarily lead to withdrawal. They can also produce renegotiation, obstruction, selective compliance, and symbolic defiance from within international institutions—highlighting how struggles over global governance are increasingly also struggles over the meaning and limits of democratic mandates.

📕 Read the full article in the Journal of Populism Studies (JPS): 🔗 https://jps.populismstudies.org/articles/mandate-inflation-how-populists-claim-authority-to-challenge-global-constraints-2

23/08/2026

📢 ECPS Voice of Youth (VoY)

🕯️ August 25: From Remembrance to Responsibility for the Rohingya

✍️ By PS Ayaas

🌍 On Rohingya Genocide Remembrance Day, young Rohingya writer, activist, and community advocate PS Ayaas (), reflects on genocide, statelessness, displacement, political exclusion, and the unfinished struggle for home and belonging.

💬 “For Rohingya families, 25 August is not simply a date in history. It is carried in memory.”

🔍 Drawing on the Rohingya experience, Ayaas examines how decades of restrictions on citizenship and fundamental rights, combined with majoritarian nationalism and the construction of an alien “other,” preceded the mass violence and displacement of 2017. He connects this history to the politics of populism, warning that when minorities are portrayed as existential threats, exclusion can be reframed as protection and discrimination can become normalized.

📚 The commentary highlights:
⚖️ The relationship between genocide, statelessness, and systematic exclusion
🗣️ How “us versus them” narratives construct minorities as outsiders
🏚️ The human consequences of prolonged displacement
🎓 The urgent need for education, livelihoods, and opportunities for Rohingya youth
🏠 Why return must mean more than crossing a border—it must guarantee rights, security, and dignity
👥 Why Rohingya voices, especially those of women and young people, must shape decisions about their future
🌐 Why remembrance must be accompanied by accountability and political responsibility

🚨 Ayaas’s message for August 25 goes beyond “never forget.” It is “never normalize”: never normalize statelessness, indefinite displacement, or political narratives that make minorities less deserving of rights.

🕊️ “Remembrance is the beginning of responsibility. And responsibility means building a future in which no child has to learn that belonging can be taken away.”

📕Read the VoY article: 🔗 https://www.populismstudies.org/august-25-from-remembrance-to-responsibility-for-the-rohingya/

23/08/2026

📢 ECPS Interview | VIDEO 🎥

🌍 Prof. Justin Gest: The Way Countries Treat Their Most Vulnerable Is Indicative of the State of Their Democracy

✍️ Interview by Selcuk Gultasli

▶️ Watch the interview with Professor Justin Gest (), Director of the Public Policy Program at George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government, on migration, populism, demographic change, democratic backsliding, and his concept of “democratic drain.”

⁉️ What happens to democracy when citizens most committed to liberal-democratic values decide to leave?

📚 Professor Gest argues that democratic resilience depends not only on institutions but also on the citizens who remain to sustain them. When people with liberal-democratic values emigrate in large numbers, this “depletion effect” can weaken democratic resistance and potentially allow populist and authoritarian-leaning governments to escape political punishment for backsliding.

🔍 In the video, Professor Gest discusses:
🗳️ How democratic drain can reshape democratic resilience
🧠 Why brain drain may also involve the loss of democratic political capital
⚠️ How selective emigration can reinforce populist and authoritarian rule
🌐 How political entrepreneurs frame immigration as “chaos” or “invasion”
🏛️ Why immigration should be framed as a pursuit of the national interest
👥 How the treatment of migrants and minorities can reveal the health of democracy
🇺🇸 Why “we are seeing the beginnings of a democratic drain in the United States”
🌍 How migration could contribute to a new global population equilibrium between ageing societies and rapidly growing populations

💬 Professor Gest: “The way countries treat their most vulnerable… is indicative of the state of their democracy.”

🎥 Watch the interview: 🔗 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Znb3TISimDk

📕 Read the full interview: 🔗 https://www.populismstudies.org/prof-gest-the-way-countries-treat-their-most-vulnerable-is-indicative-of-the-state-of-their-democracy/

21/08/2026

📢 ECPS Commentary

🌐 Long Read — The Economist versus Acemoglu: Who Will Govern the Next World Order?

✍️ By Ibrahim Ozturk

⁉️What lies behind The Economist’s unusually sharp critique of Nobel laureate Daron Acemoglu ()? Is this merely an academic dispute over institutions and AI productivity—or does it reveal a deeper struggle over markets, democracy, technology, and concentrated power?

📌 In this wide-ranging commentary, Professor Ibrahim Ozturk () situates the Acemoglu controversy within a broader systemic crisis characterized by widening inequality, weakened labor, technological concentration, declining state capacity, and mounting pressures on liberal democracy.

🔍 The commentary explores:
🏛️ Why liberal democracy’s crisis cannot be separated from political economy
🤖 Whether Acemoglu has been too pessimistic about AI productivity
⚙️ Why technological progress is a political and institutional choice—not an autonomous force
💼 How concentrated economic and technological power can undermine democratic representation
🌍 “Reverse convergence” between Western democracies and authoritarian capitalism
📉 How globalization, inequality, and economic insecurity create opportunities for populist mobilization
👷 Why pro-worker AI and shared prosperity matter for democratic resilience
🃏 Whether the coming systemic reset will redistribute power—or simply reshuffle the cards while leaving ownership of the table unchanged

💬 Professor Ozturk argues that “Acemoglu’s real offense is not pessimism.” Rather, it is his insistence that technological progress involves political choices, that liberal democracy requires shared prosperity, and that markets cannot themselves discipline the concentrations of power they create.

📚 A timely intervention into the debate over who will govern technological change, who will capture its gains, and whether liberal democracy can reform itself before the next systemic crisis.

📕 Read the commentary: 🔗 https://www.populismstudies.org/long-read-the-economist-versus-acemoglu-who-will-govern-the-next-world-order/

20/08/2026

📢 ECPS Interview

🌍 Prof. Justin Gest: The Way Countries Treat Their Most Vulnerable Is Indicative of the State of Their Democracy

✍️ Interview by Selcuk Gultasli

⁉️What happens to democracy when citizens most committed to liberal-democratic values decide to leave?

🚨In a wide-ranging interview, Professor Justin Gest (), the Director of the Public Policy Program at George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government, explores the relationship between migration, populism, demographic change, and democratic backsliding through his concept of “democratic drain.”

📚 Gest argues that democratic resilience depends not only on institutions but also on the citizens who remain to sustain them. When people with liberal-democratic values emigrate in large numbers, this “depletion effect” can weaken democratic resistance and potentially allow populist and authoritarian-leaning governments to escape political punishment for backsliding.

🔍 The interview explores:
🗳️ How democratic drain can reshape democratic resilience
🧠 Why brain drain may also involve the loss of democratic political capital
⚠️ How selective emigration can reinforce populist and authoritarian rule
🌐 Why political entrepreneurs shape perceptions of immigration as “chaos” or “invasion”
🏛️ Why immigration should be framed as a pursuit of the national interest
👥 How the treatment of migrants and minorities can reveal the health of democracy
🇺🇸 Why Gest believes “we are seeing the beginnings of a democratic drain in the United States”
🌍 How migration could contribute to a new global population equilibrium between ageing societies and rapidly growing populations.

💬 Most importantly, Professor Gest argues: “The way countries treat their most vulnerable… is indicative of the state of their democracy.”

📕 Read the interview: 🔗 https://www.populismstudies.org/prof-gest-the-way-countries-treat-their-most-vulnerable-is-indicative-of-the-state-of-their-democracy/

14/08/2026

📢 ECPS Commentary

🌍 Look Up, Not Across: How Elites Weaponize Migration as a Distraction from Class Inequality

✍️ By Bernard Allan V. Garcia

⁉️Why has migration become the defining political issue in so many democracies experiencing deep economic inequality? Is anti-migration rhetoric truly about protecting borders, or does it serve a broader political function?

🚨 In this commentary, Bernard Allan V. Garcia argues that contemporary populism strategically redirects public frustration away from structural inequalities and toward migrants. Rather than addressing housing crises, wealth concentration, labor exploitation, and declining public services, populist leaders transform a vertical conflict between citizens and powerful elites into a horizontal conflict between natives and immigrants.

🔍 The commentary explores:
📉 Why migration has become a central instrument of contemporary populist politics
⚖️ How public anger is redirected away from economic elites and toward politically vulnerable groups
🏠 Why housing affordability, labor insecurity, and rising living costs are rooted primarily in structural economic factors rather than migration
💼 How anti-migration politics can preserve existing economic hierarchies while leaving corporate power largely untouched
🗳️ Why populist narratives redefine the meaning of ”the elite” and construct migrants as convenient political scapegoats
🌐 How shifting political conflict from ”Bottom vs. Top” to ”Inside vs. Outside” reshapes democratic debate and electoral competition

📚 Drawing on scholarship in populism, political philosophy, and migration studies, Garcia offers a provocative framework for understanding anti-migration discourse not merely as a response to border management or cultural anxiety, but as a strategy that redirects attention away from structural inequality and the distribution of political and economic power.

📕 Read the commentary: 🔗 https://www.populismstudies.org/look-up-not-across-how-elites-weaponize-migration-as-a-distraction-from-class-inequality/

12/08/2026

📢 ECPS Commentary

🇵🇱 The Polish Exception: Religiosity and Political Right

✍️ By Dr. Kamil Joński

⁉️Why does Poland remain one of Europe’s most religious societies while simultaneously sustaining one of its strongest right-wing political cultures?

🚨In this commentary, Dr. Joński argues that Poland represents a distinctive European exception, where religiosity and right-wing political identity increasingly reinforce one another. Drawing on data from the 11th wave of the European Social Survey (ESS), he demonstrates that regular church attendance and conservative self-identification overlap to create a dominant “churchgoing right”—a social coalition that shapes not only electoral politics but also the priorities of the Roman Catholic Church itself.

🔍 The commentary explores:
⛪ Why Poland’s “churchgoing right” has become a unique political force in Europe
📊 What ESS data reveal about the overlap between religious participation and right-wing identity
⚖️ How this convergence helps explain Poland’s restrictive abortion laws, resistance to same-sex civil unions, and enduring Church influence on public policy
🗳️ Why polarization and secularization have paradoxically strengthened the political conservatism of practicing Catholics
🇻🇦 How growing tensions between Polish conservatives and the post-Vatican II direction of the Holy See may signal the emergence of a new form of “post-secularism”

📚 Combining survey evidence with contemporary political developments, Dr. Joński offers a compelling explanation for why Poland remains an outlier in Europe’s religious and political landscape, and what this reveals about the evolving relationship between religion, democratic politics, and conservative mobilization.

📕Read the commentary: 🔗 https://www.populismstudies.org/the-polish-exception-religiosity-and-political-right/

10/08/2026

📢 ECPS Commentary

🌍 When the Global South Says ‘No’: Waste Sovereignty and the New Geography of Environmental Security

✍️ By Dr. Oludele Solaja

⁉️What if the most important question about global waste is not how it is managed, but who has the authority to decide where its environmental consequences are borne?

🚨In this commentary, Dr. Solaja () introduces the concept of waste sovereignty to argue that environmental security is fundamentally a question of political power, democratic agency, and justice. Moving beyond conventional debates on recycling and waste management, he contends that the international movement of waste reveals profound inequalities in who benefits from consumption and who bears its environmental costs.

🇹🇷 Using Turkey’s emergence as a major destination for European plastic waste as a compelling case study, Dr. Solaja demonstrates how the circular economy can relocate environmental risks rather than eliminate them when accountability is displaced across borders. The commentary also draws on African experiences to show that communities and informal recyclers are not passive recipients of waste, but increasingly important actors in redefining environmental justice and security.

🔍 The commentary explores:
♻️ Why waste sovereignty is becoming a new framework for environmental security
⚖️ How global waste trade reproduces political and environmental inequality
🇹🇷 What Turkey’s plastic recycling industry reveals about the limits of the circular economy
🌍 Why the Global South is becoming a site of resistance, refusal, and environmental agency
🏛️ How producer responsibility and material accountability should extend across borders
📚 Why the future of environmental security depends on who has the power to say “no” to environmental burdens

⚡️A thought-provoking contribution that rethinks environmental governance through the interconnected lenses of sovereignty, justice, political economy, and global inequality.

📕 Read the commentary: 🔗 https://www.populismstudies.org/when-the-global-south-says-no-waste-sovereignty-and-the-new-geography-of-environmental-security/

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