What is Populism?

Chapter 1 begins with a concise overview of the ways earlier scholars have examined populism during consecutive waves of research on the topic, and goes on to expose common conceptual and methodological errors—such as obscuring the genus, overemphasizing essentialism while overlooking ontology, concept stretching, the incertitude about negative poles, and the difficulties with concept operationalization—before setting out to elaborate a truly minimal definition that can sufficiently account for the comparative study of modern populism. The chapter ends with a presentation of the book’s overall framework of analysis, which condenses the main methodological tools—such as indicators, variables, and concept properties—to be used later on during theory-building.

SQL Query Construction from Ontology Concept Descriptions

Based on the usage of previously proposed database concepts as mapping point to a database in a domain ontology, the present paper describes the process of constructing SQL queries from them. The proposed database concepts allow for the mapping of domain concept to the source of data from a database. The paper describes the process of traversing the class hierarchy in an ontology for gathering these database concepts and constructing the SQL query. The purpose of the constructed SQL query is to obtain data from a database to populate the ontology with instances related to a selected ontology concept. The described process begins with the selection of one ontology concept, obtaining all directly related concepts, filtering and collecting database concepts, and finally constructing the SQL query.