Historical legacies and the political mobilization of national nostalgia: Understanding populism’s relationship to the past

The goal of this introduction to the special issue is threefold. First, we map a nascent research field on connections between populism and the past and, in so doing, point to gaps in existing work. Second, we develop the contours of an integrated analytical framework that, addressing these gaps, reconstructs the relationship between populism and the past comparatively and on multiple levels. Our approach pays special attention to the interlinked dynamics of populist political agency, the way they employ particular, idealized, and historically embedded narratives about a nation’s past, as well as contextual and structural factors that help facilitate the success of populist nostalgia. Third, we pose novel research questions induced by our process-oriented, multi-level framework and discuss how the articles in this special issue advance this line of research.