Populismo, acción política y emociones. Líneas de intersección

This paper focuses on the role of emotions in populism. Drawing on a multidisciplinary perspective that links contemporary studies on populism with the recent scholarship on social movements and the “affective turn” in social sciences, this piece of research stresses concrete emotional manifestations as essential factors that the scholarship has to take into account in order to shed light on the populist phenomenon. This perspective opens up interesting horizons for the debate on the normative value of populism and its relationship with liberal democracy. It is argued that depending on the specific configuration of emotional vectors, this nexus might tend towards a positive equilibrium, one in which populist discourses and practices can be a corrective to democratic weaknesses, or on the contrary, towards a negative relationship, and therefore populism can dismantle democratic equilibrium and, ultimately, lead to authoritarian forms of politics.