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In their pursuit of being elected, politicians might not provide their constituents with independent viewpoints, but just try to outguess popular opinion. Although rational voters see through such populism, candidates can not resist resorting to it when the spoils of office are too large. For an intermediate parameter range, both populism and its opposite, "candor", can be sustained as equilibria. This means that the public's trust or distrust in politicians may be self-fulfilling prophecies. Importantly, the more informed politicians are about public opinion, the more likely it is that populist behavior can be avoided.

Explores populism and neo-populism in Argentina, radical populist Right in Western Europe, "Lukashism" and authoritarian populism in Belarus, liberal reforms and institutional democracy in Argentina, election speeches and legislative practices of the Maurice Duplessis government in Quebec, and rise of the radical Right in Turkey; 6 articles. Summaries in English.

Asserting that politics has the capacity to shift negative societal directions & revive democracy, it is contended that civic populism is required to merge everyday politics with electoral politics to foster that improvement. Civic populism calls for citizen participation & the blending of interest group bargaining with broader civic ideals, which requires work, a concept absent from theories of participatory democracy. Flaws in communitarian & liberal theories are laid out before presenting an alternative to underpin US civic life in civic populism. Civic populism embodies a conception of everyday politics, ie, the interaction of citizens with basically equal, horizontal relationships with each other across settings; this results in alliances of diverse citizen groups that organize based on a philosophical orientation to politics rooted in democratic & religious values. Attention turns to public work as a theme of civic populism. Public work is viewed as the sustained effort by a blend of citizens to create material or cultural goods of lasting civic value. It also sheds light on the democratic potential of knowledge power. It is concluded that civic populism stresses the productive & distributive aspects of politics as key resources for citizen empowerment. 37 References. J. Zendejas

Daniel Patrick Moynihan once argued, "The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society." Today, politics, as conventionally understood, illustrates the unspoken danger in Moynihan's point. Politics itself reflects larger trends that point not toward success but toward social failure. Superficial sloganeering, domination by marketplace modes of thought, and bitter sectarian divisions—cultural patterns also evident in politics—made "being political" an accusation of choice in the 2002 elections. These patterns are creating a civic illness that seems both all-pervasive and ineluctable.