*Originally published in 2022 and preserved as part of our archive project. E-International Relations is free to read. We rely on reader support to make this possible.

Cas Mudde is the Stanley Wade Shelton UGAF Professor of International Affairs and a Distinguished Research Professor at the University of Georgia (USA) as well as a Professor II at the Center for Research on Extremism (C-REX) at the University of Oslo (Norway). He is a world-renowned scholar of both the far-right and populism, focusing specifically, but not exclusively, on political developments in Europe and North America. He is a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW). His book Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2007) won the Stein Rokkan Prize for Comparative Social Science Research in 2008. His recent books include (with Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser) Populism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2017), which has so far been translated into almost 20 languages, The Far Right Today (Polity, 2019), which has almost 10 translations, and (with Sivan Hirsch-Hoefler) The Israeli Settler Movement: Assessing and Explaining Social Movement Success (Cambridge University Press, 2021). Dr. Mudde is also a prominent voice in the public debate, being consulted by various non-state and state actors and interviewed by media around the world. He is a columnist for Guardian US, a regular contributor to VoxEurope, and host of the podcast RADIKAAL, which focuses on the radical aspects of music, politics, and sports. He tweets at @casmudde.

Where do you see the most exciting research/debates happening in your field?

This depends a bit on which field. In terms of European (party) politics, which I consider my main field of study, there is finally some work emerging on the transformation of European party politics, such as the book by Sarah Hobolt and Catherine de Vries on “challenger parties”, articles by people like Tarik Abou-chadi and Simon Hix on the electoral support of social democratic parties, and more and more work on affective polarization and negative voting, inspired by US studies. In terms of the far right, the field is finally taking gender, race/racism, and sexuality more seriously, while there is also more research on far-right social movements. Finally, in terms of populism, a field I follow much less, I think there is some good work on populism at the mass level, through surveys, and at the elite level, focusing on discourse. However, at the same time, there are far too many publications with the term “populism” in the title that are either not about populism at all or only about a specific form of populism, i.e. the populist radical right, for which populism is at best a secondary issue.

How has the way you understand the world changed over time, and what (or who) has prompted the most significant shifts in your thinking?

I was trained as a qualitative scholar in a positivist tradition, which means that, while I was taught to study politics in depth, and holistically, I was also taught to be “neutral” and that there was a “truth”. Along the way, I have become more (consciously) constructivist, accepting that different “truths” exist for different people, that “facts” are created, and that true neutrality is neither possible nor desirable. It is impossible to pinpoint who influenced me on what. I have had the privilege to be mentored by, and work with, phenomenal scholars and thinkers, including my late supervisor Peter Mair, my former department chair Stefano Guzzini, and many professors at Leiden University like Joop van Holsteyn, Margo Trappenburg, and the late Koen Koch. I have learned a lot from the works of great scholars like Hans-Georg Betz, Margaret Canovan, Nonna Mayer, Giovanni Sartori, Ruth Wodak. And finally, I have learned from my hundreds of students, in particular my graduate students Jakub Wondreys, Jan Jagers, Lien Warmenbol, Sarah de Lange, and Sivan Hirsch-Hoefler.

More broadly, over the years, but particularly since........

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