AD: Welcome to Right Rising, a podcast from the Center for the Analysis of the Radical Right. I'm your host, Augusta Dell'Omo. Today I'm joined by Dr. James Downes, a lecturer in Comparative Politics at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He's here with us today to walk us through what the heck people are talking about when they say populism. James, thank you for being here.

JD: Thanks Augusta, it's a pleasure to be on the show. 

AD: So let's start off with what is populism? We hear this term a lot used in mainstream media by scholars and opinion pieces, but it's never really defined. So could you walk us through what populism is and why have we heard this term so much recently? 

JD: Yeah, definitely. So thanks, Augusta for starting off with a great question. And, you know, you're completely right to say what the heck is populism? And there are many people come up to me and say they're very confused by the term populism because they don't really know exactly what the term is, you know, is it left wing populism, is a right wing populism, what on earth is centrist populism? And to speak about this term, very simply, populism, if we take the definition of Professor Cas Mudde, one of the foremost experts in the world on populism, we can take populism as simply being we've got these kind of two different groups in society, we've got what's called the �pure people,� and the so called �corrupt elites� and what populists are trying to do are all different strands of the left to right political spectrum, is to try and represent the pure people. But again, this is a very ambiguous term, �the pure people� because it means different things for different types of populist parties. So populism, simply speaking can be seen as an anti-political establishment movement that seeks to not only challenge the existing status quo, but also challenge mainstream parties and society and to try and lead to some type of, you know, different situation arising. But of course, for populist, this doesn't occur through revolutions, this occurs through the ballot box. And to walk you through a little bit between the different aspects of populism here, let's perhaps take the aspects of the most common form of populism that we hear about nowadays, radical right wing populists.

And firstly, for the listeners listening in, when I was first researching on populism, I was quite shocked, because there wasn't a very clear definition of it, when I was doing my PhD a few years back. There was lots of kind of different opinions by different scholars and Professor Cas Mudde�s defintion has become the most widely accepted, but it's still challenged by some scholars. And when we're when we're looking at this this concept, you know, we have to be very careful again, about the left to right side, but radical right wing populism, we would define it as three different strands. The first one is nativism. The second one is populism. And the third one is authoritarianism. We've got another great scholar who's also appearing on this series Dr. Eviane Leidig was speaking about, you know, this term as well that we have nativism, authoritarianism, and populism for the radical right wing side. And when we look at left wing populism, what we might call radical left populism, we would define it very differently, more in terms of a socio-economic dimension. So the radical right, or the radical right form of populism is really about socio-cultural issues such as immigration and nativism. And we see this quite clearly in European politics with parties such as National Rally in France, Vlaams Belang or Flemish Interest, as the party is known in English, in Belgium. 

When we look at radical left parties, they're much more about trying to change society, not through the socio-cultural dimension, but to try and change society through reducing income inequality, trying to have a bit of a retreat from globalization, but they're not opposed to the European Union like radical right wing populists are, so radical left wing populace tend to be what's called soft Eurosceptic. So soft Eurosceptic means that you want to reform the EU, but you don't necessarily want to leave the European Union institutions. The radical right populists, by and large want to leave the European Union, although it's become a bit more complex in the last couple of years, but generally speaking, parties in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, particularly across Western Europe, the radical right wing populists, they are anti immigrants. Broadly speaking, the majority of the voters traditionally have come from the male white working classes, but again, this has diversified over the last few years or so. 

And then there's another category of what we might term centrist populism and centrist populism - It's a bit difficult to explain really, because there's not really a clear academic definition. We hear about terms such as ambiguous populism, ideological ambiguity. And there�s a party in Italy called the Five Star Movement, the M5S movement, which is seen as a populist party in the sense that it's anti political establishment. But this is strange, because if you take a step back, you can see that the party has actually been in a governing coalition for the last couple of years, first with La Lega, the league party in Italy. And then right now with the Center-Left party in Italy. And so this again, is the strange thing about populist parties is that they pretend you could say, to some extent to be, you know, representing the pure people against the corrupt elites. And they've got this rhetoric about, you know, wanting to kind of reform politics and also root out mainstream political parties, the center right, the center left, but what happens when populist parties get into government? Do they lose their whole raison d'�tre for their reason of being? And this is a really interesting question that I've become quite focused on because populism, when we look at it, you've got traditional mainstream parties in European politics, traditional conservative parties in Hungary, such as Fidesz, traditional conservative parties in Poland, such as the Law and Justice Party. And these two parties have completely changed the language, the ideological messaging, really in the last five to ten years, and they've actually become populist radical right parties in their own right. 

So we see this ideological transformation or as Dr. Leidig, Dr. Eviane Leidig spoke about it on one of the other episodes in a really succinct and concise way. She spoke about the mainstreaming effect, that Professor Cass Mudde has also spoken about. So populism has really expanded as an academic discipline. But at the same time, it's really the radical right populists, which have been touched upon much more by the international media, as opposed to the populist radical left, and to a much lesser extent, centrist populism. 

AD: Thanks for that, James. And I think that last point about mainstreaming is so interesting, because a lot of what you and I study and a lot of radical right scholars really focus on groups that do find themselves as populist groups that they are a part of, as you said, the pure people versus the corrupt elite. But many politicians rely on populist rhetoric, even if they aren't explicitly part of a Populist Party. So it can be really hard to draw clear distinctions between -Okay, is this group maybe an authentic populist, or are they just using populist tools? So my next question, then, would be to ask you what are some misconceptions about populism that you've run into either during your research or just talking to people about these organizations? 
JD: So thanks a lot, Augusta for that really interesting question. You know, there's so many different types of misconceptions about populism. And, again, this is not just in the academic community, but amongst students that I teach as well. So last semester, I was teaching a course, of course, online via Zoom because of the COVD-19 pandemic. And this was called the �Rise of Populism in Europe.� And this is really interesting, because I'm also teaching this, you know, in a kind of a non-European context in an in an Asian context in Hong Kong. And so a lot of students had some misconceptions about populism, particularly about, you know, again, what, how do we define the topic? How do we define this concept? And but really, there are four main misconceptions that I want to really briefly speak about. 

The first one is the media. And so we often see international media, or we hear about international media outlets speaking about the rise of populism in Europe, or that there's been a political earthquake for populists. So this first misconception is where the media tend to lump populist parties on both the left and the right of the political spectrum, into the same category. So of course, if you, if you lump together Fidesz in Hungary, for example, a populist radical right wing party now we have, say SYRIZA, in Greece, which is a populist radical left party, or, for example, Podemos, which is a populist radical left party. SYRIZA is a little bit complex, actually, because they've moderated since they were in office, and again, since they've been kicked out of office. But the point that I'm trying to make is that you can't have these graphs comparing, you know, lumping populist parties into one category, say with the Spanish Vox Party, going over the radical left in Greece, or Spain, you have to separate them out, and really disaggregate that data out because you're going to get you know, if you're going to have graphs like this, it's going to lead to what we call, you know, a garbage in garbage out model where we can't compare these different populist parties, because ideologically they're so different. 

The second one, is what I would call is a misconception surrounding electoral success. So not all populist parties are electorally successful, nor are all populist parties uniform in the overall policies and strategies. And this again, applies to the far right party family, which we can treat as a big umbrella term. And under this far right party, family umbrella term, we have the populist radical right, the much more moderate radical right party, family or subheading slash grouping that seeks to be democratically elected to bring about change. However, the extreme right as the name implies, tend to be very, you know, anti-democratic in the fact that they may not even seek to be democratically elected. So that's another interesting aspect is that we actually also have to note that not all populist parties are electorally successful, particularly the party in Greece, Golden Dawn an extreme right wing party that has some elements of populism, but does have a lot of elements of extremism, has not been particularly electorally successful in the last couple of years. 

And the third one is, again about the far right party family. There was a theory that was wheeled out quite a lot during the 2008 to 2013 economic crisis, and this theory is called the �Economics Breeds Extremism� theory. Now, this is not a theory that's written down, you know, comprehensively in peer-reviewed academic journals or books. This is a theory that, again, is linked to the first misconception, the media, where there's this misconception that the far right profits from times of economic crisis. However, this has been debunked thoroughly by populism scholars such as Professor Cas Mudde, again, Hanspeter Kriesi from the European University Institute amongst many other renowned international scholars on populism across the globe. And so really, interestingly, the party that profits the most from times of economic crisis, in terms of populist parties, is the populist radical left. We saw that particularly in the Western European context, in 2008 to 2013, where due to the various bailouts, and you know, the so-called policies that were implemented by the European Union, a number of populist radical left parties in Greece, Spain, and to a lesser extent, Portugal, began to do really well. But actually, it was the populist radical right, that didn't do as well as expected. And again, this can be simply explained by the fact that radical right wing populist, tend to be much more focused on a socio-cultural issue dimension of immigration, nationalism, anti-EU. It's the populist radical left that tends to speak a lot more about, they're trying to solve income inequality, trying to solve unemployment. And the radical right doesn't tend to have much strategies here. A recent piece of literature in the academic community by Professor Jan Rovny from SciencesPo, Paris, actually showed that populist radical right parties sometimes tend to blur their issues on the socio-economic dimension on taxation on these, you know, bread, bread and butter issues of the economy, and against the populist radical left that tend to do much better here because they're trusted by voters. But again, it's not just the case that the 2008 to 13 economic crisis in Europe led to the systematic rise of the populist radical right. There are a lot of what we call in political science, anti-incumbency effects where mainstream center left, the mainstream center right parties, were simply booted out of office, particularly the mainstream center left, because they were held accountable by voters by simply being in government at the time when the economic crash took place. 

So fourthly, the final point I want to make about misconceptions, you can tell that there's quite a few. The fourth one is that not all, not all forms of populism can be seen as extreme. So again, we have to actually break down different types of parties, not just in the European context, but we need to look at this regionally as well. And Latin America, for example, even in the US context. And there are some policies when Obama, Presidents Barack Obama, or before he was president, when Obama was running during that, that 2008 campaign where he spoke a lot about change - that could be seen to have populist rhetoric in the fact that there was this element about trying to change American society, and they're trying to change the existing political establishment, trying to promote these progressive politics, and really, you know, empower this kind of minority group in society against the elites. Of course, many scholars might argue that Obama, once he became president, perhaps became, you know, he was constrained by the by the Constitution constrained by, you know, not having a Congress or Senate, for example, that he had a majority in. And, and I just want to quickly say to all viewers that I'm you know, I'm not an expert in American politics, but I do follow American politics frequently, because I think it's important to know, you know, many different countries and contexts across the world. However, Emmanuel Macron, in his 2017 campaign, when he before he became French president also had this type of, you know, positive progressive populist politics. So it is the case that a lot of populist parties, particularly on the radical right, on the far right, for example, for the extreme right do have high levels of extremism. They have, you know, racist policies, and they don't even try to, you know, ideologically moderate themselves. 

But the point that I want to make is that certain forms of populism, particularly in the center could be seen you know, positive for society in the sense that they want to bring about a change, but through democratic means. And so we shouldn't just say that all forms of populism are extreme. And again, we have to be careful when we hear about there's a political earthquake taking place or that populist are gaining everywhere. We have to be critical here. Look at look at the newspaper and think, number one, how are they defining populism? Number two - Is this the left wing or right wing populist party? And number three, what's the level of support for this party - did they increase from the last election? And this is an important question, because when you look at European Parliament elections, for example, voter turnouts tend to be much lower here around 30%, or even 40%, which are much lower than national parliamentary elections in Europe. And so there's a lot of protest voting going on across the EU twenty-seven countries and populist radical right wing parties, for example, did very well in the 2019, in the last year's European Parliament's election, but there are still cases where right wing populist parties are not doing so well. For example, in Denmark at the moment, that's a case where the far right it's, you know, it's not doing so well, so you can tell that there's a lot of misconceptions about populism. And, you know, I don't want to kind of get into the other ones, I just want to really get into the four biggest ones, the media, number one, number two electoral success, the third one is about the far right party family profiting from times of economic crisis - they do much better during times of, for example, the 2015 to 2018 refugee crisis. That's when they can speak much more about the immigration, nationalism and national sovereignty type of argument. And then the fourth one is that not all forms of populism should be seen as extreme. 

AD: Thanks for that, James. And I think you made so many critical points there, and I know we are limited on time. So the one that I really want to focus on is, you mentioned that you see this a lot in the media where the rise of populism is everywhere, right? There's not a lot of nuanced - at times - with maybe populism, maybe right-wing  populism is on the rise in this one area, but perhaps it's in decline somewhere else. So can you walk us through maybe just to orient ourselves, where are some areas where you would say populism is on the rise and some areas where populism is in decline? Because it can be very overwhelming to read about this and think that this extreme populism that we're mostly talking about is everywhere.

JD: Definitely a really great question, Augusta because this is a very quick question to ask, and also a great question to answer but also a difficult question to answer in such a short space of time. But where exactly is populism on the rise in the world? Well, we could say definitely Western Europe is one such case we see populism on the rise. So if we measure populism being on the rise in terms of populist parties, increasing their vote shares, mainstream parties, you know, losing vote shares, so their vote has been going down quite a bit over the last, you know, five, five or ten years, particularly for the center left and to a lesser extent, for the center right parties. If we look at Western Europe, for example, we can see cases, pre COVID-19, at least, where the AfD in Germany, the Alternative f�r Deutschland, or Alternative Germany Party did incredibly well in 2017. They went, they essentially became the first far right party in post-World War II German politics to enter the Bundestag, the German National Parliament. And so the party actually, you know, wasn't no longer was in single digits in terms of the percent. So they actually gain their first seats in 2017, in the German Parliament, and they gained a massive amount of seats. And it's also the case, for example, in Western Europe, if you look at cases, let's say in France, for example, Marine Le Pen didn't win the 2017 French presidential election. However, she did do what you could say much better than most political scientists expected her to do. She forced the second round run-off with Emmanuel Macron. And this was a repeat of the 2002 French presidential election when her father Jean-Marie Le Pen, ran against Jacques Chirac, the former French president. And so Western Europe has been what we could say a hotbed of populist, radical right support. 

But actually Central Eastern Europe is the region in Europe, which tends to be often ignored, again by the mainstream media. And we have cases in Central Eastern Europe where the mainstream center right parties who are traditionally focused on conservatism and you know, very strict on law and order, as most conservative parties tend to be, transformed over the last five or ten years, and have become fully fledged populist, radical right parties. And so it's interesting when we look across Europe, Western Europe seems to have a much higher level of support for the populist radical right. Central Eastern Europe has been this ideological transformation and of course, the legacy of communism, the whole context of the of the previous Soviet Union period, we have to factor that in when we compare the west to the east in Europe. There�s important historical differences. 

But also a case which scholars really didn't pay much attention to, because there wasn't what was called, you know, very high levels of populism before is the U.S. with Trump and even Brazil, we've seen Bolsonaro, becoming the leader of the country becoming the president, and increasing support. So really, in Europe, it's only really Southern Europe or Mediterranean Europe, let's say Spain, Portugal, Greece, where the populist radical left parties such as Podemos, in Spain, SYRIZA in Greece, before it was really and became the, you know, the governing party, and they started to ideologically moderate, and some of these radical left parties in Portugal. So really, you've got these different variations. And so rather than breaking it down, let's say across, you know, America, for example, or Latin America, or across Europe, we really need to disaggregate the different regions across Europe to look at the different types of populist parties. And that's what I think is so fascinating when we, when we look at Europe, we can break it down into the different regions. And so I haven't mentioned Northern European or Scandinavia. Sweden as an example, where, in 2001-2002, there were literally no levels of support for the radical right party, the Swedish Democrats. Fast forward now to you know 2018 to 2020, the party has become essentially the third biggest party in Sweden, even sometimes becoming the second biggest party in Sweden. So clearly something is happening across Europe and also globally, particularly when we look at the election of Trump in 2016. Brexit is a bit of a different case in Britain, because of a type of electoral system, the �first-past-the-post� electoral system in Britain, the UKIP, or the British National Party before, which are different types of far right parties never really never gain any seats in the House of Commons in the British Parliament, because it just works against them the electoral system. 

However, Brexit can also be seen as a type of a populist political event that's often perhaps been misconceived to be driven by national identity and immigration. But of course, you can get, you know, a radical left populist supporting Brexit and also, let's say, a radical right, populist supporting Brexit. So populism is on the rise in the world in many cases. And Professor Cass Mudde wrote this excellent book last year that Eviane and Dr. Eviane Leidig spoke a little bit about in her podcast on the show, they're speaking about how the far right has gone global. And this is actually the title I believe, of the annual Center for Analysis of the Radical Right yearbook that's coming out quite soon - I think later on this year is about the radical right or the far right going global. And I think that's really important. When scholars tended to look at the far right, it was much more originally, let's say, in the early 2000s, even ten years ago, so looking at it more from a European angle or European lens. And clearly when we look at the far right across the world. We might also want to have a look at what's called localism in the context of Hong Kong, for example, where this is a different type of nationalism, more to do between this sense of Hong Kong as having the sense of being a �Hong Konger� versus Beijing. So there are different types of populism and they're called different things, you know, different terms in world politics as well. But of course, populism is on the rise. But there are some cases where, you know, populism has been what we could see on the decline. And so, again, when we say populism is on the rise or populism is on the decline, we need to add a left to a right ideological, political compass or a spectrum here. And so Britain for example, doesn't really have a strong populist radical right party. They did have in the European Parliament, the United Kingdom Independence Party, UKIP, but that's really since Nigel Farage left the party, UKIP has done really bad in the polls has become much more extreme. 

And a quick point that I also really want to make is that it's the populist radical right, which is the more electorally successful, far right party family in European terms, at least. The extreme right is, generally speaking, not very electorally successful. There's the extreme right party in Greece, Golden Dawn, Jobbik in Hungry, and a few others, but they don't tend to - Kotleba as well, and Slovakia is another one - but they don't tend to do so well, simply because they're seen as too extreme by a large section of voters. And I wanted very quickly speak about the mainstreaming effect, because the mainstreaming effect we're seeing, you know, traditional mainstream, conservative center right parties, such as in Hungary, and Poland, becoming much more, you know, perhaps becoming more radical, but they're not extreme to the sense that, you know, they want to overthrow a liberal democracy. They still want to be democratically elected. But some of these parties may challenge the liberal conception of democracy, which, of course, is freedom of expression and speech. And we've seen this in Hungary over the last six or seven months, in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, where the Hungarian Prime Minister, Viktor Orb�n, has essentially suppressed NGOs, you know, that this, this Central European University had to have its headquarters moved. And so there's this claim in Hungary that's been made, that liberal democracy is under threat, and now Hungary, on the Fidesz. Just getting around, you know, 51, 52 percent in the polls, which, of course, is a massive amount. S

So really, we've got a mainstreaming effect, where traditional conservative parties in the UK, the Conservative Party the VVD in the Netherlands on the current Dutch Prime Minister, Mark Rutte, have also been shifting more towards the right wing of the political spectrum. And this might lead us to a bit of a provocative debate or argument about all that viewers might want to tap into a little bit more after the listen to their switches. Is there a reverse wave of liberal democracies going on at the moment in the European context, at least? Is liberal democracy under threats, particularly from the populist radical right? And that's a question that's very much ongoing at the moment. 

AD: Thanks for that, James. And I want to focus with the time that we have left on the last one, the last points you made about how COVID-19 has impacted the populist right wing parties in Hungary. And can you talk to us a little bit about how this pandemic has influence these right wing populist parties? Specifically, I'm thinking about the German case and thinking about countries like South Korea that had a really strong mainstream political party response to COVID-19. Has that affected the appeal of the populist right? And in cases and thinking about the American context, where the establishment response has been so poor, that it's really led to this massive disinformation, misinformation, anti-government climate? So if you could just talk about the pandemic for a little bit, I think our listeners would really appreciate it. 

JD: Definitely. Thanks for that additional question, Augusta. So when we look at it, the COVID-19 pandemic has led to what we might say, a �rally around the flag� effect, particularly in a number of countries in Europe, I would say. So I've written a short kind of article on this topic with my co-author, also Senior Fellow from CARR from the Center for Analysis of the Radical Right, Dr. Valerio Alfonso Bruno. In this op-ed piece, which we're also developing into an article at the moment, we kind of argue that, you know, populist, radical right parties are really known for their focus on again, socio-cultural issues like immigration, nationalism. They're not really known for their focus on not just economic issues, but in terms of handling big types of health crisis or crises. And so we argue that public trust has actually shifted dramatically towards science and technical expertise, particularly towards combating the pandemic. In Germany, we've seen Chancellor Merkel, her CDU party doing, you know, much better in the polls, we see this in the Netherlands with Prime Minister Mark Rutte�s party, the VVD party. And interestingly, we see the far right or the populist radical right in Germany, the AfD, the Alternative for Germany Party, they've seen a reduction from 15 percent to 9 percent, in the polls of late, based on the latest polls over the last week. And interestingly, the Danish People's Party as well have not been doing so well, they're really doing quite poorly, they're now in single digits pulling around four or five percent. We've seen similar, or sorry, I shouldn't say similar but declined, slight declines for the far right in France and also for the Lega Party in Italy.

And this is really interesting, because the political effects of COVID-19 and Europe arguably have led to a rally around the flag effect for a number of governing mainstream parties such as Merkel in Germany, to a lesser extent for Macron - President Macron in France. And simply speaking, I would say that populist radical right parties, particularly in Europe, I've had the raison d'�tre, the whole, you know, reason of being taken away from them, and they�ve been left powerless politically, we would say, from our article, in the face of the pandemic. And it also just to very quickly tell the listeners - I've been doing some preliminary research into the overall electoral declines for far right parties within the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. And interestingly, interestingly, we found that there are some countries such as Belgium, particularly the Flanders region, where the far right have continued their kind of rise in the polls. But overall, it does seem to be the case that a number of far right parties, they're not on the massive decline, but what we can see is that they're polling at a much lower rate than before. And so clearly, you could say that this is due to a rally around the flag effect for mainstream parties doing better. But I wouldn't say that this is going to be the death knell for the populist radical right or even the radical left. What we may see once the COVID-19 pandemic is much more under control in European politics, at least, we may see because of the economic fallout, you know, high levels of unemployment, economic contraction, GDP contraction, we may see populist radical left parties performing better but populist, radical right parties may also, you know, post in a post COVID-19 world, they will probably come back and also benefit from this kind of climate of fear. 

And also, it's going to be very interesting in European politics to see what happens to the issue of immigration and migration because pre-COVID-19, emigration from 2015 to 2018, when we look at Eurobarometer polls, which are conducted by the European Commission, immigration was one of the most if not the single biggest, important issues in European politics. So we can look at this two ways. We can look at it from a comparative approach of doing large end studies in political science, where we look at patterns and trends. But then what we could do is we can see an overall trend of the decline for the populist radical right, but then we need to pick out some countries, for instance, for instance, Denmark, which is experiencing a significant decline, Germany as well, you know, the AfD, going from 15 to 9 percent. And we'd also want to have a look at some other populist radical right parties and other countries when that were on the decline and see a mainstream parties doing better or not. 

And what I always tell my students, when I'm teaching courses at the Chinese University of Hong Kong is that the real world is actually very messy. We try to make, you know, we want to uncover relationships and look at exciting political phenomena, when we're studying populism or when we're studying the extreme right, the radical right, or looking at ideology. But again, we have to take a step back, and realize that the real world is messy, especially just like when we tried to define populism, we need to really break down the different components. And I think that this is a very exciting time to be studying populism, but at the same time, you know, this is also a topic that's gone global now, it's not just seen from a European lens. And so the COVID-19 pandemic has completely transformed, you know, politics arguably for the next decade. You know when this pandemics going to end, or how long it's going to keep affecting different countries. So we should perhaps fasten our seat belts and expect to see more electoral volatility and, you know, different new parties rising and new parties falling. And that's, that's yes.

AD: No, I think I completely agree with your with your last point, James, my own research really looked at the globalizing effect of the far right, and how these groups really interact and feed off each other, especially in our 21st century, very digitally-connected world, things like the pandemic, they have ripple effects that go beyond a local context. And as scholars, we can make our best guesses of how this is going to turn out, but we really don't know the populist movement is so volatile and changes so rapidly that it's something that we'll have to not only pay attention to as scholars, but to be vigilant as citizens and voters, making sure that you're giving your support to parties that are really going to have your best interests at heart. 

So James, thanks so much for being here today. And where can our listeners find more from you? Are you on social media? Are you on the CARR website? Where can our listeners learn more about your work? 

JD: Yeah, thanks a lot Augusta, I just want to say again, it's a real pleasure to appear on the podcast. And it's really nice to speak about these terms in a in a broader setting, rather than just an academic setting. But we're really talking about the -

AD: Right, in a conference paper on it's just me and you.

JD: Exactly, you know, we don't have to get the theories are important. But then, of course, we don't want to get too much into the complexities of different theories. So I've got a Twitter page where I tweet quite a bit @DRJamesFDownes. And then I've also got the Center for Analysis of the Radical Right webpage as well. So just feel free to check out that that page also. And if any listeners have any questions as well, feel free to drop me an email, you can find my email on the website there on the Center for Analysis of the Radical rRght websites. If you have any questions about anything I've said, or about even a case of populism in your own country where you come from, feel free. 

AD: Thanks so much, James. And thank you for joining us today. 

JD: Thanks very much. 

AD: This has been another great episode of Right Rising, a podcast from the Center for the Analysis of the Radical Right, we'll see you all next time.