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“Democracy is a form of government, not a steam bath of popular feelings”(Dahrendorf, 2005: 13). Heretical as these words seemed at a revolutionary moment, they lurked in the minds of the new political elite at the beginning of the democratic transition in Central and Eastern Europe. Many of those who set about transforming the political and economic systems of these states had directly participated in the revolutions that brought about the downfall of communism, and were acutely conscious of the destructive potential of an excess of popular mobilization. There was, of course, an initial period of optimism, goodwill, and consent for liberal-democratic and capitalist reforms, but a backlash against the technocratic elites of transition was inevitable once the public began to experience the hardships of transition. At first, the politics of populism was associated primarily with the fear that unscrupulous demagogues would seek to exploit the dissatisfaction of the masses with the painful outcomes of transition reforms, resulting in the emergence of ideologically radical populist challengers. However, in the context of new and volatile party systems, populism offered political entrepreneurs a means to aggregate support from a variety of groups who had different reasons to be discontented with mainstream political elites, avoiding the need to articulate a distinct, consistent, or even coherent political program. In the first section of this chapter, I outline two theories of radical and centrist supply-side populism that flow from these initial observations. According to the radical theory, populism in Central and Eastern Europe would consist in a backlash against the …