Populism and localism: a new research agenda

Methodological nationalism - that is, the tendency to naturalize the nation and national politics – has long underpinned the study of populism.Footnote1 Although this has produced increasingly sophisticated country- and comparative-level analyses,Footnote2 populism’s methodological nationalism has come at the expense of research examining populism’s local and transnational footprint. Today, with the global rise of populism,Footnote3 new scholarship has begun to rectify this scholarly neglect at the transnational and international levels.Footnote4 But the same cannot be said of localist analyses of populism.