The rise of the contemporary populist movements has challenged democratic orders while highlighting theoretically their dilemma. On the one hand, populism refers to a significant lack of inadequate inclusion. On the other hand, the formation of populism points to the retrieval of politics of exclusion driven by the polarization of political society. From this perspective, the present article focuses on the potential of democratic theory in dealing with this dilemma. It argues that this dilemma is intertwined with the ambiguity in the notion of ‘popular sovereignty. In this reading, ‘the people’ functions as the empty signifier filled with any ideological content. Therefore, to reach an updated perception of participatory democracy, the democratic theory should be open to any alternative interpretation of ‘the people’. In other words, the conceptualization of democracy should be concomitant with the contexts and intentions. In the following, the paper takes advantage of the opposing approaches of radical democracy and deliberative democracy. In the first step, the paper reconstructs the conception of democratic activism by utilizing the radical democracy theorists` vision of the role of affect/passion in the formation of political subjectivity. Hence, in contrast to the rational theorists who frame populism as a threat to the pluralist process, post-structuralism sees populism as a strategic possibility for deepening democracy. On the other hand, it seems that the realization of the positive facilities of populism for democracy has implicitly relied on pragmatic foundationalism which a deliberative approach can propose. In the end, the paper compares the relations between populism and democracy in the liberal democratic systems in the West with the Middle Eastern societies which are in transition to democracy. More practically, since the research is built on some presumed similarities between constituent forces of the populist rise of Fascism and Islamic fundamentali
