https://at-ceu.studyguide.timeedit.net/modules/SOCL5895?type=COREPopulism and authoritarianism are persistent features of contemporary political life. They shape party systems and political mobilizations, transform state institutions, and profoundly affect everyday lives. Scholarly interest in these phenomena tends to rise and fall in waves, often closely tied to shifting political agendas and public anxieties-for example, current debates surrounding "democratic backsliding." This course traces these debates across Political Science, Sociology, and Anthropology, reconstructing how different disciplines conceptualize and explain the appeal and endurance of populist and authoritarian projects.We will compare a range of analytical approaches-political-economic explanations, party-centric frameworks, state- and media-centered perspectives, as well as cultural analyses that foreground ideology, discourse, and affect. Alongside these theoretical debates, a central component of the course is a sustained engagement with ethnographic scholarship. We will ask what fieldwork-based accounts can illuminate about political transformations that are often portrayed primarily through macro-structural or institutional lenses. In the second half of the course, students will develop their own case study, with an emphasis on historical depth. Much contemporary scholarship on populism and authoritarianism suffers from a strong "presentist" bias-treating these developments as novel or exceptional. By situating cases historically, students will identify longer genealogies that shape contemporary political formations. Projects may take diverse forms and may draw on different types of archives (digital, institutional, media, etc.), depending on students' interests and access. The goal is to cultivate historically sensitive analyses of populist and authoritarian politics.