You know those annoying people who say they liked bands before they were popular? That’s me with populism. I’ve been working on it since I was a PhD researcher in the mid-2000s, even though my thesis was on something else (to the despair of my dear supervisor, Alfio Mastropaolo).
My research in this area has looked primarily at how populist radical right (PRR) parties organise and mobilise, both domestically and internationally. To that end, I’ve interviewed leaders, MPs, MEPs, officials, and grassroots members in countries across Europe, as well as in India, the United States, and South America. As far as I know, I’ve interviewed more right-wing populists than anyone else.
I’ve also studied how populists communicate in different languages with my old friend, Stefano Ondelli from the University of Trieste, whom I first met as an undergraduate on an Erasmus exchange a long, long time ago.
Since 2022, I have led an ARC Future Fellowship project, which looks at the transnational links between populist radical right parties and affiliated actors from around the globe. In a nutshell, it asks: how and why are they increasingly networking and collaborating with one another? To date, I’ve interviewed leading politicians and think tank representatives from multiple countries who are actively involved in transnationalisation processes, with further fieldwork to come in 2027.
My latest book on populism is Youth Wings of the Populist Radical Right, for which I’m the lead author of a team including Sofia Ammassari, Ann-Cathrine Jungar, Anders Ravik Jupskås, and Cas Mudde. We examine how 10 European PRR youth wings contribute to both the present and future of their parties. The book was published by Oxford University Press in June 2026.
Selected publications
Youth Wings of the Populist Radical Right (Oxford University Press, 2026)
International Populism: The Radical Right in the European Parliament (Oxford University Press, 2020)
The distinctive vocabularies of right-wing populists (Government & Opposition, 2025)
The language of right-wing populists: Not so simple (Perspectives on Politics, 2022)
The right-wing populism of India’s Bharatiya Janata Party (and why comparativists should care) (Democratization, 2019)
Differently Eurosceptic: radical right populist parties and their supporters (Journal of European Public Policy, 2019)
Right-wing populist party supporters: Dissatisfied but not direct democrats (European Journal of Political Research, 2017)
Populist leaders and coterie charisma (Political Studies, 2016)