A Conceptual and Empirical Analysis of Populism as a Form of Twenty First Century Fascism

<title>Abstract</title> <p>The resurgence of populist movements across Europe, the Americas, and Asia has reignited a long-standing scholarly debate: whether contemporary populism constitutes a functional equivalent or even a direct successor to classical fascism. This research examines the proposition that populism represents the "fascism of the twenty-first century" by analyzing the conceptual architecture of both phenomena, their shared mechanisms of democratic erosion, and their divergent historical genealogies. Drawing on the ideational approach to populism, comparative historical analysis, and recent empirical studies of democratic backsliding, the research argues that while populism and fascism share anti-pluralist foundations and exclusionary identity politics, they differ fundamentally in their relationship to institutional legitimacy, mass mobilization, and the use of political violence. Empirical analysis of V-Dem data, the European Values Survey, and electoral datasets from Parlgov and the PopuList project reveals that populist rule is associated with a 10 percent decline in democracy scores relative to the mean, with cumulative erosion accelerating non-linearly over successive terms in office (Mounk 2018). Right-wing populist voters justify political violence at rates 2.7 percentage points higher than other voters (Matsunaga 2025). The research proposes a typology of "hybrid authoritarian formations" that captures the interaction between outsider populist mobilization and insider-driven authoritarian consolidation, suggesting that the fascism-populism analogy is analytically imprecise but politically illuminating. The findings contribute to ongoing efforts to theorize democratic resilience in an era of systemic crisis.</p>