Populists routinely stage the antagonism between ‘the people’ and ‘the elite’ through the language of local place, opposing ‘real communities’ and ‘forgotten peripheries’ to distant capitals, metropolitan centres, and supranational institutions. Yet despite this recurring spatial language, scholarship on populism still treats localism either as a sub-national setting in which populism unfolds or as an attitude associated with populist orientations. This paper reorients that debate by conceptualising localism and populism as distinct but articulable discourses of political authority: localism centres on where authority should reside, while populism centres on who should rule. Its central contribution is to distinguish between constitutive and inflective localist–populist interactions. In constitutive interactions, localist constructions help define who the ‘real people’ are; in inflective interactions, localist appeals modify or reinforce an antagonism structured on other grounds. The paper thus shows how localism can reconfigure populism’s representative logic and reshape how popular sovereignty is imagined and claimed.
