The Shape of Populism examines socialist Serbia, then part of Yugoslavia, which in the late 1980s witnessed popular mobilization and an emergence of a populist discourse that both constructed and celebrated “the people.” Author Marko Grdešić uses quantitative and qualitative analyses to show how “the people” emerge in the public sphere. This book examines over 300 protests and analyzes them in conjunction with elite events such as party sessions. It examines over 1,600 letters-to-the-editor and political cartoons to reveal the populist construction of “the people.” Grdešić also relies on interviews with participants in populist rallies in the late 1980s to examine the long-term legacies of populism.

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"Grdešić cracks open connections between these fields, demonstrates ways to borrow between the respective literatures to bring the state of the art forward, and further hone the ‘populist methodological toolkit’."
—Südosteuropa. Journal for Politics and Society

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"Marko Grdešić tackles the increasingly relevant, uniquely polarizing, and yet widely misunderstood topic of populism. Rather than offering a wholly theoretical discussion of populism, which usually graces the pages of current academic scholarship, Grdešić takes a refreshingly more pragmatic approach to unearthing how populism operates within a real-life context as both discourse and mode of mobilization."
-Southeastern Europe Review