Ritchie Savage

My work utilizes discourse theory within a comparative-historical framework in order to identify similar structures of political discourse across cases and tie them to transformations in modern politics. With a background in European social theory and a hermeneutic approach to historical cases, my current research focuses on advancing an argument for the increased presence of institutionalized forms of populism in a global perspective and its policy implications.

In the manuscript and articles currently under preparation, I plan to expand my empirical analysis of cases of populism, in which I utilize this same approach of moving beyond the paradigm of mobilization in accounting for populism as a distinct discursive formation that can occur in the U.S., Latin America, and Europe despite the different historical trajectories of their economic and political development.  One direction I am moving in concerns the cases of other ALBA member countries beyond Venezuela, such as Bolivia and Ecuador, and their experiments with institutionalizing populist discourse within forms of participatory democracy.  In addition to Latin America and the U.S., my work also addresses the increasing prevalence of European cases of right-wing anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant discourse and has already begun to attract the attention of European scholars working on these issues.  Utilizing the theoretical model developed in my dissertation, I have begun an empirical comparison of Greece, Italy, and Hungary as cases containing at least two parties within a national context that employ populist discourse.  In this project, which I intend to publish as my next article, I compare Syriza, Golden Dawn, Forza Italia, Lega Nord, the Five Star Movement, Fidesz and Jobbik, respectively.  This comparison reveals that as a result of the global economic crisis, a proliferation of competing populist parties has emerged to remedy the crisis in an appeal to the ‘people,’ which involves both a right-wing demonization of immigrants and the ‘European project’ and a left-wing demonization of the very same right-wing parties as well as the politics of austerity.  My framework thus moves beyond the more reductive classification of Golden Dawn and Jobbik as ‘neo-fascist’ in order to reveal the populist elements and organizational features they share with other emerging parties on both sides of the political spectrum.  I intend to demonstrate through an interpretive analysis of the political discourses fostered by these parties that all of these cases of populism, despite their divergence in ideological organization, are finding new ways to bring the demonization of the enemy and the collective memory of the ‘founding moment’ into the normal course of their policy-making and legislative decisions as an implicit horizon, which forms the basis of new forms of political action.