Populism is no longer a marginal anomaly—it has become central to understanding the dynamics of political and public leadership in the 21st century. From Donald Trump and Viktor Orbán to Giorgia Meloni and Nayib Bukele, populist leaders are reshaping institutions, discourses and leadership norms across continents and ideological divides. These developments demand that leadership scholars move beyond traditional frameworks to directly confront the challenges and insights posed by populist leadership. In populism, leadership is not incidental, it is the organizing principle. This special issue of the International Journal of Public Leadership argues that populism should not be seen merely as a political pathology but as a revelatory site for rethinking the foundations of leadership itself.
As the call for papers emphasized, populist leadership is multifaceted and resists reduction to a single explanatory lens. Different scholarly approaches illuminate not only distinct dimensions of populism but also offer contrasting visions of what leadership is and how it functions (Metz and Plesz, 2025). Ideational approaches portray populist leadership as the political embodiment of a moral worldview—one that sharply divides society into “the pure people” and “the corrupt elite.” Here, the leader is seen as a mouthpiece or vessel of collective moral will, legitimized by their capacity to articulate and defend the “will of the people” (Metz and Plesz, 2023, 2025).
Strategic perspectives, by contrast, understand populist leadership as a mode of political entrepreneurship, where leaders actively construct followership through calculated efforts to bypass mediating institutions and concentrate authority. This model emphasizes agency, tactical flexibility and the personalization of power—seeing leadership less as moral representation and more as strategic mobilization and control (Barr, 2019; Weyland, 2001, 2024).
Discursive and performative scholars shift the focus again, viewing leadership as a communicative and symbolic practice (Metz, 2024; Moffitt, 2016; Ostiguy and Moffitt, 2021). In this account, populist leaders craft affective bonds with followers through narrative, spectacle and emotional performance. They do not simply hold power; they stage it. Leadership here is theatrical, relational and contingent—shaped by media logics and the cultural repertoires of resonance, defiance and authenticity.
Rather than privileging one approach over another, this special issue brings these perspectives into dialogue to ask a broader question: What does populism reveal about the nature, practice and evolution of leadership today? By juxtaposing these lenses, we aim to deepen the conceptual toolkit of leadership studies and to foreground how populist leadership challenges conventional assumptions about legitimacy, authority and representation.
At its core, populist leadership forces us to rethink some of the most fundamental assumptions in leadership studies—about legitimacy, accountability, representation and the relationship between leaders and followers. Populist leaders do not simply speak for the people; they claim to embody the people. Their power often rests less on institutional authority than on affective identification and symbolic performance. This raises urgent theoretical and empirical questions: How do populist leaders build and maintain such intense loyalty? What discursive, emotional and organizational tactics allow them to override institutional constraints? How are norm violations rationalized—or celebrated—by followers? And what happens to democratic institutions when leadership becomes synonymous with performance and personalization?
This special issue offers six key insights into leadership derived from the study of populism:
Leadership is relational and identity-based. Populist leaders succeed by constructing collective identities that fuse personal charisma with group belonging. This reaffirms the importance of studying followership, emotional resonance and identity mobilization.
Norm transgressions can build legitimacy. Contrary to classical assumptions, violating established norms may enhance, rather than undermine, a leader’s appeal—particularly when positioned as a challenge to corrupt elites.
Populism blurs institutional boundaries. Populist leadership often erodes the distinctions between public and private, formal and informal, institutional and personal domains of authority.
Leadership is shaped by media logics. Populist leaders thrive in digital environments where speed, spectacle and directness are rewarded. Understanding leadership today requires engaging with platform politics and visual culture.
Populist leadership is not limited to executives. As several articles in this issue show, populist leadership can emerge in local government, party structures, and even private or hybrid contexts.
Context matters. Cultural, religious and institutional environments shape how populism manifests, calling for comparative and context-sensitive approaches to leadership analysis.
The contributions to this issue examine these dynamics from diverse methodological and theoretical vantage points. Below, I briefly introduce each article and its unique contribution to our collective understanding of leadership through the lens of populism.
Elcott’s (2025) article, “Populism and the political party: the enablers,” investigates how democratic political parties are transformed from institutional safeguards into enablers of authoritarian populist leadership. Elcott (2025) draws on mid-20th-century authoritarianism research to analyze two illustrative case studies: Donald Trump’s takeover of the US Republican Party and Benjamin Netanyahu’s consolidation of power within Israel’s Likud. In both cases, party members and elites abandoned core democratic norms and institutional loyalty in favor of personal allegiance to the populist leader. Elcott (2025) proposes a model of co-optation and complicity, arguing that populist leaders rise not solely on the strength of charisma, but through the instrumental support—or passive accommodation—of the very institutions they ultimately hollow out. This contribution reframes the concept of party capture as a leadership phenomenon, where rule-breaking and norm subversion are not anomalies but strategic tools.
Viviani’s (2025) “The politics of manipulated resonance: personalised leadership in populism” offers a political sociological framework for understanding populist leadership as a distinctive form of representation. Rather than viewing populism as simply anti-institutional, Viviani (2025) situates it within broader processes of de-institutionalization and disintermediation. The populist leader, he argues, forges an emotionally intense and symbolically saturated bond with “the people” that substitutes representation by delegation with representation by identification. The article conceptualizes populist leadership as a response to societal fragmentation and affective insecurity. Leaders who master this politics of resonance become focal points of emotional projection and moral clarity, claiming legitimacy not through institutional procedure but through narrative and affect.
Koolma’s (2025) conceptual paper, “A behavioral foundation for understanding unethical populist leadership,” presents a psychologically informed framework for understanding how populist leaders engage in norm violations, emotional manipulation and power consolidation. Drawing on theories of personality, motivation and perceived control, Koolma (2025) explores how populist leaders secure influence by offering followers simplified narratives of control and belonging. The paper is especially notable for its integration of social comparison theory and the psychology of distrust to explain how followers become morally disengaged and complicit.
Casullo’s (2025) study, “When the strongman is a woman: female leadership in right wing populism,” addresses a paradox in the gender politics of populism: how female leaders rise to power in movements that exalt masculine aggression and anti-feminist rhetoric. Focusing on Melissa Martz (Republican Party, US) and Alice Weidel (AfD, Germany), the article shows how these women blend toughness with propriety and femininity with dominance, creating hybrid public personas that reinforce patriarchal norms while subtly reconfiguring them. Their success, Casullo (2025) argues, lies not in rejecting the aesthetics of right-wing populism but in mastering their contradictions.
Holt et al.’s (2025) “Resilient populism? The Sweden Democrats’ discourse in parliament, 2010–2024” offers a rare longitudinal study of populist discourse in a formal institutional context. Analyzing 14 years of plenary debate contributions from the Sweden Democrats, the authors trace the use of populist rhetorical elements—people-centrism, anti-elitism, popular sovereignty and antagonism—as the party transitions from outsider to institutional actor. While the frequency of overt populist language declines over time, its structural grammar remains intact. This suggests that populist discourse is not abandoned but rearticulated in institutionally acceptable ways. The study sheds light on the institutional resilience of populism and its capacity for adaptation under parliamentary constraints.
Arslan’s (2025) article, “Techno-populist leadership under techno-politics: the case of Musk effect,” explores how Elon Musk exemplifies a new form of populist authority rooted in digital communication and platform affordances. Through qualitative thematic analysis of Musk’s Twitter/X activity from 2022 to 2024, Arslan (2025) identifies a pattern of anti-elitist messaging, free speech advocacy and strategic irony. Musk’s leadership style is shown to blur boundaries between public and private, political and entrepreneurial, personal and algorithmic. The article proposes the concept of techno-populist leadership to describe how technological elites can circumvent traditional accountability structures and build unmediated relationships with global audiences. This piece expands the scope of leadership studies to account for new actors, new arenas and new forms of legitimacy.
Coşgun’s (2025) “Populism and political party typologies: the case of Türkiye” applies a typology of populist parties to Turkish political formations. Through descriptive and interpretative analysis of party documents and leader speeches, Coşgun (2025) finds that most Turkish parties align with existing typological categories, but none fit the “entrepreneurial anti-establishment” model. To address this gap, the paper proposes a new subtype for moderate, religion-oriented, non-radical right-wing populists—a category particularly relevant in the Turkish context. The article offers both theoretical refinement and practical implications, providing tools for comparative research and strategic political analysis alike.
Together, these articles deliver a clear message: populism is not an outlier to be studied from the margins—it is a prism through which to rethink what leadership is, how it operates and where it may be heading. Populist leadership exemplifies a broader shift toward emotionalized, personalized and media-driven authority. Leadership scholars can no longer afford to ignore this reality. By engaging with populism, we gain not only a better understanding of its dangers but also of the performative, affective and relational foundations of leadership itself.
This special issue invites scholars to continue this dialogue. If leadership is, at its heart, about meaning-making in conditions of uncertainty, then populist leaders—whatever else we may think of them—are among the most consequential meaning-makers of our time. Understanding how they succeed is essential for understanding the future of leadership.
