Last week the Cambridge Dictionary declared populism its 2017 word of the year. In many ways, that makes perfect sense. Since Brexit and Trump, virtually every political event has been couched in terms of populism, from the Dutch parliamentary elections to the French presidential elections earlier this year. New media catchwords such as “fake news” are linked to populism.

However, it has become the buzzword of the year mostly because it is very often poorly defined and wrongly used. Indeed, the Cambridge Dictionary’s definition perfectly illustrates this. It describes populism as “political ideas and activities that are intended to get the support of ordinary people by giving them what they want”.

Oddly enough, this is almost identical to the interpretation used by many populists themselves. However, rather than populism, it describes responsive politics, as exists in idealistic models of democracy. The only part of that description that has some overlap with more common academic definitions of populism is the reference to “ordinary people”.

Within European and US politics, populism functions as a fuzzy blanket to camouflage the nastier nativism

In its blog , the dictionary further claims that people tend to use the term with reference to “the implied lack of critical thinking on the part of the populace, and the implied cynicism on the part of the leaders who exploit it”. In other words, populism is a political ploy by cynical leaders who mobilise the “ordinary people” by promising them whatever they want.

While this might be the way that many of the members of the embattled cultural and political establishment use the term to disqualify it and (implicitly) its supporters, this is elitist, self-serving and unhelpful. It implies that non-populist politicians are genuine; non-ordinary people are politically sophisticated; and that populism has no true substance, and therefore no real critique of the political status quo. This might be a convenient definition for those who find themselves challenged by populists, but it has little to do with what populism actually is.

While there is no consensual definition of populism within academia – like all important political terms, it is contested – most scholars use the term to denote a specific set of ideas that juxtapose “the people” and “the elite” and side with the former.

In our new book, Populism: a Very Short Introduction, Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser and I define populism as an ideology that considers society to be separated into two homogenous and antagonistic groups, “the pure people” and “the corrupt elite”, and argues that politics should be an expression of the volonté générale (general will) of the people. While many colleagues debate whether populism is truly an ideology, or more a political discourse or style, their definitions are not much different.

However, the Cambridge Dictionary does not only get the definition wrong – its application is wrong, too. It argues: “What sets populism apart … is that it represents a phenomenon both truly local and truly global, as populations and their leaders across the world wrestle with issues of immigration and trade, resurgent nationalism and economic discontent.”

This conflates populism and the radical right. As elections in the Netherlands, France, Germany and Austria have this year been couched in terms of an epic battle between an emboldened populism and an embattled status quo, populism has became a synonym for what used to be termed the radical right. (The only left populist of relevance in the last year has been Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s challenge in the first round of the French presidential elections.) The populist radical right combines populism with two other core ideological features, authoritarianism and nativism.

If anything, 2017 was the year of nativism, or more correctly, yet another year of nativism, as we have had many of these years since the turn of the century. Nativism is an ideology that holds that states should be inhabited exclusively by members of the native group (“the nation”), and that non-native people and ideas are fundamentally threatening to the homogenous nation-state.

This year mainly stands out for the way in which nativism has been whitewashed as populism. This is not to say that populism is irrelevant to contemporary politics or to the populist radical right. But within the core ideology of the populist radical right, populism comes secondary to nativism, and within contemporary European and US politics, populism functions at best as a fuzzy blanket to camouflage the nastier nativism.

Journalists should not let the radical right get away with that. They should not allow the popularity of the term populism to mask the nativism of the radical right. Because it’s only when we know exactly what is threatening our liberal democracies that can we effectively defend them.

• Cas Mudde is the author of On Extremism and Democracy in Europe and The Populist Radical Right: a Reader