Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article first tries to characterize contemporary Western populist movements. It then details the key points of E. Laclau’s penetrating analysis of populism, with a view to using it in a perspective other than its author’s own. It hypothesizes that the center of gravity of the populism in the West resides in a reference to the demos, rather than ethnos or plebs. It goes on to probe the causes of growing citizen alienation, the main source of populism. It suggests that the social aspect, notably the destabilization of the lower-middle classes induced by the Neo-liberal order, does not exhaust the issue. Institutional demands soon emerge to remedy a perceived disenfranchisement of majorities generated over half-a-century by the rise of culturally-defined minority groups, resulting in a “tyranny of minorities”. Further, citizens resent being treated as minors by a “framed democracy” in which their capacity for discernment is ignored, and their assent dispensed with, by ruling elites in the name of a presumed higher moral good, or directives from unelected faraway power centers. The root cause of the malaise is the ascent, from the 1960s onward, of individualism and the relaxation of citizenship norms, leading to a situation where authority and power are questioned or feared, and political leadership becomes weak. Now reduced to a managerial role, it takes to accommodating activists, and delegates policy-making to independent, nonpartisan authorities, experts, or international organizations, thus becoming unresponsive to the will of majorities. In that light, civic populism is a response to a deactivation of democracy. Representative democracy systems, put in place over two centuries when the masses were uneducated, are not aging well now that average education levels have considerably increased and majorities want to make themselves heard. Redefining the relationships between elites and grassroots, majority and minorities, is thus in order.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".