Peter A. Kraus, University of Augsburg, participated in the international conference “Constitutionalism in the Age of Populism”, March 6-8, 2020. He gave a paper with the title: “Populism versus Popular Republicanism on the Battleground of Diversity”.

In his paper, Kraus notes that in problematic ways, populism seems to have become a catch-all formula used at discretion to capture all kinds of discontent with democratic politics today. This often implies conflating protest movements that aim at democratic renewal with opposite tendencies whose objective is a reactionary scaling down of democracy. Against this background, and taking the case of Catalan independentism as a starting point for a first comparative approach, his paper argues that, in the context of the current crisis of liberal democracy, cases of popular republicanism should be carefully distinguished from populism, both for analytic and for political purposes. The distinction becomes particularly relevant with regard to current debates on how to tackle issues of diversity and political integration in Europe and North America.

Short Bio

Peter A. Kraus is a German-Catalan political scientist who deals primarily with topics of political sociology, comparative democracy research and modern democratic theory. He is currently working at the University of Augsburg as Professor of Political Science and Head of the Institute for Canadian Studies at the University of Augsburg (Germany). Previously he has been the chair of ethnic relations at the University of Helsinki, an associate professor of political science at Humboldt University in Berlin, a John F. Kennedy Memorial Fellow at the Center for European Studies at Harvard University, and a visiting professor at the New School for Social Research and at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona.

Peter A. Kraus deals with cultural pluralism, nationalism, minority politics and the problems of European integration and European identity. He has published widely and in several languages on cultural diversity and identity politics, ethnicity, nationalism, and migration, the dilemmas of European integration, as well as problems of democratization and democratic theory.

You can read more about Peter Kraus’s current research here.