Populist Discourse Research Articles

Populism on the Web: Presidential Elections in Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru, and Colombia (2020–2022)

Populism has become one of the main features of political action worldwide. This research aims to characterize the populist discourse in the tweets of presidential candidates in the Andean Community in recent elections (2020–2022). Accordingly, we analyze the characteristics of their social network profiles, as well as the content and latent discourse of their tweets. We demonstrate that the differences and similarities of their discourse go beyond their right and left association. The differences result from how they construct their identity and establish their relationship with their electorate. Our analysis reveals that this type of discourse is ideological as well as performative. It is ideological because, in the candidates’ discourse, they recontextualize the actual meanings of “us” and “them”. It is performative because it is carried out by a charismatic leader who acts in a specific way to define himself or herself as the embodiment of “the people” and “the good”.

The Impact of Populism on Scandinavian Labour Law: The Cases of Norway and Sweden

Modern populism has developed in Scandinavia since at least the 1970s, first in Norway and Denmark but more recently also in Sweden. Populist political parties have been well-established in Scandinavian Parliaments for many years. However, from a labour law perspective, the populist impact, if any, has been limited and populist discourse has primarily focused on issues such as migration and the European Union (EU), and to some extent ‘welfare tourism’. This article examines the development of populist movements in Norway and Sweden and analyses the possible impact of populist policies on national labour law. The conclusion is that Nordic industrial relations and labour market regulations, based on strong and representative trade unions and well-organized and responsible employer federations, act as a robust counterweight to populist policies on the labour market. Section 2 of the article consists of a discussion of how we understand the development of modern populism in a Norwegian and Swedish perspective. Section 3 explores the extent to which populist political ideas have directly impacted or indirectly influenced labour market regulations in the two countries. In concluding, section 4 monitors the potency of strong and well-established industrial relations as a countervailing force to populist political movements. Populist Policies, Labour Market Regulation, Scandinavia, Norway, Sweden, Resilience to Populism

The Populist Discourse of the Hungarian Prime Minister: The Case Study of Gyöngyöspata and Migration Crisis

Abstract The study aims to analyse if the Hungarian prime minister attempted to portray an ‘other’ image of the Roma ethnic minority group during the segregated primary school conflict in Gyöngyöspata. Moreover, the study will explore the Hungarian prime minister’s discourse on the migration crisis to understand if Viktor Orbán adopted the same communication strategy as in the Gyöngyöspata conflict. Comparing the two cases will allow us to identify the key similarities and differences in the discourse adopted by the Hungarian prime minister in different events. This research uses the qualitative content analysis methodology to examine the collected data. Besides this, the study concludes that Viktor Orbán attempted to portray an ‘other’ image of the Roma ethnic minority group during the Gyöngyöspata conflict. This study aims to fill a gap in the literature by analysing the Hungarian prime minister’s discourse on the Gyöngyöspata conflict and comparing his discourse on both cases.

The Right-Wing Perspective: Populist Frames and Agenda on Facebook in Central and Eastern Europe

Political and public debates unfolding online provide various spaces for interaction between political actors, citizens and media outlets. This environment can be employed for diverse agendas, frames and biases, especially within populist narratives. This work examines the discourse of Central and Eastern European right-wing populists from Austria, Germany, Hungary and Poland (2015-2021). To identify discursive patterns within public Facebook posts (n=192,057) by 31 party, movement and partisan news media pages, created by API interrogation, right-wing discourse is analyzed through semi-automated quantitative content analysis based on text mining, in conjunction with qualitative content analysis of messages that generated the highest engagement-rates (n=80). Key findings indicate both national and international narrative patterns with a focus on political, social and ethnic opponents, by incorporating Engesser et al.’s (2017) core elements of right-wing populist discourse within Master Populist Frame building (Heinisch & Mazzoleni, 2017), thus marking the contemporary agenda of European right-wing discourse.

The Process of The Transfer of Hate Speech to Demonization and Social Polarization

We are living through a time of major political changes due to the rise of populist leaders and the resurgence of extreme ideological movements. The emergence of this phenomenon is due, to a large extent, to the ease with which these political actors can disseminate and spread their messages without any limits through social networks, leaving aside the former “fourth power” of the media as filterers and reinterpreters of information. Generally, the formula used by these leaders and movements is usually based on symbolic social division and polarization through hate speeches that allow demonizing their adversaries while antagonizing the issuers: a discursive “us” against “them” based on verbal violence to dehumanize an “exogroup.” We want to discuss the importance of understanding the process of communicational transfer—which begins with hate speech and evolves into demonization and social polarization—as a strategic basis for creating an ideal scenario for the growth and strengthening of populist discourse, which is reductionist and simplifying in nature.

Neoliberalism or Else: The Discursive Foundations of Neoliberal Populism in the Czech Republic

This article examines the linkage of markets and democracy in the post-1989 Czech transition as a neoliberal populist discourse that delegitimized alternatives to the market as a return to authoritarianism. Using Laclau’s concept of equivalential linkages, I analyze Václav Klaus’ texts surrounding the voucher privatization program to determine how he formulated this linkage and communicated it to the public. Framing markets as natural, essential, and fundamentally Czech, Klaus constructed the people as a virtuous community of market individuals while othering those who opposed markets as communist holdouts and elitists. Klaus further legitimized marketization through identification with international neoliberal projects and thinkers. Through his moralized and dichotomized discourse, Klaus communicated to the public that there could be no freedom without markets, nor markets without freedom: a circular formulation that continues to influence Central and Eastern European political economy.

Islamist Civilizationism in Malaysia

Malaysia is known to have a diverse population across the racial and religious spectrums. However, a majority of the population identifies as Malays, and, thus, legally, as Muslims too. Although the development of the Malay identity had begun immediately after World War II, the stark division between Muslims and non-Muslims came out of the 1971 New Economic Policy that prioritized the Malay population in the name of reducing poverty and stabilizing the country. With the Malay-nationalist party United Malay National Organization (UMNO) being in power for six decades, the position of the Malays became undisputed. At the same time, international and domestic development such as the Islamic revival of the 1970s, the Global War on Terror and the splitting of Malay votes in the 2000s further pushed UMNO and, later, the Islamist PAS to redefine Malay identity as part of the larger Muslim ummah under the framework of ‘civilizational populism’. By conflating ethnicity and religion, Islamist and Malay nationalist parties together with their leaders used populist discourses to ensure the people’s continued support, even at the expense of non-Muslim Malaysian citizens. Using process tracing, this article shows that civilizationism is effective to unite the majority Muslim population in a divided country such as Malaysia when policies in place failed to engender unity. As a result, Malay-Muslims sought a community beyond its borders, and with the rise of Islamist politics around the world, it has become much easier for the Malay-Muslims to highlight the plight of Muslims over that of their own co-nationalists for the benefit of domestic politics.

Understanding Civilizational Populism in Europe and North America: The United States, France, and Poland

This article tests the salience of the concept of “civilizational populism” in the European and North American contexts. Right-wing populism is increasingly successful across a range of countries in Europe and North America. While right-wing populism is oriented toward nationalism and nativism, many right-wing populist parties increasingly perceive, as Brubaker puts it, the “opposition between self and other” and “the boundaries of belonging” not in narrow “national but in broader civilizational terms”. Yilmaz and Morieson describe this phenomenon as “civilizational populism”. Using Cas Mudde’s ideological/ideational definition of populism, Yilmaz and Morieson describe civilizational populism as “a group of ideas that together considers that politics should be an expression of the volonté générale (general will) of the people, and society to be ultimately separated into two homogenous and antagonistic groups, ‘the pure people’ versus ‘the corrupt elite’ who collaborate with the dangerous others belonging to other civilizations that are hostile and present a clear and present danger to the civilization and way of life of the pure people”. Civilizational populism appears to be widespread across Europe, and it is also present in the United States, although there is curiously little research on this phenomenon, and Yilmaz and Morieson’s conception of civilizational populism has not been extensively tested. To test the salience of this concept, this article examines three distinct manifestations of civilizational rhetoric in three different countries: the Trump administration in the United States, National Rally in France, and PiS in Poland. The article asks the following two questions. What role does civilizationalism play in populist discourses? How do the civilizational populists in France, Poland, and the United States define “the people”, “elites”, and “others”, and what are the similarities and differences between the parties/movements examined? The article finds that all three parties/movements may be termed “civilizational populists” under the definition given by Yilmaz and Morieson. It finds that the civilizational populists examined in the article posit that “elites” are immoral insofar as they have both turned away from the “good” religion-derived cultural values of “the people” and permitted or desired the immigration of people who do not share the culture and values as “the people”, instead belonging to a foreign civilization—Islam—with different and even antithetical values. However, the article finds that “the people”, “elites”, and “others” are described by Trump, Le Pen, and Kaczyński in significantly different ways.

Populist Discourse beyond the Borders

Abstract Following the 2016 US elections, populism as a political discourse tactic surged worldwide and became critically examined by scholars as result of the anti-establishment rhetoric used throughout the Trump campaign. Yet despite the considerable amount of scholarly attention dedicated to this topic, its international dimension and ability to transcend beyond national borders has been rarely studied. To fill the lacuna in the literature on populism, in this article we examine how populist discourse is construed by leaders in an effort to appeal to an audience beyond their national borders. In doing so we examine the speeches and political rhetoric of Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Venezuela’s former president Hugo Chavez’s, both of which demonstrate obvious examples of populist narratives. We adopt a qualitative discursive approach to identify salient populist rhetoric in the speeches of both leaders, which ultimately create divisions over identity and politics among citizenry and in many instances create such divides within the international arena.

Populism, Competitive Authoritarianism, and Foreign Policy: The Case of Uganda's 2021 Election

Abstract Despite populism being a fast-growing field of inquiry, populist discourse in an African setting is understudied. This paper expands our knowledge of populist communication and foreign policy in a competitive authoritarian context, proposing an analysis of two Ugandan politicians—Bobi Wine and Yoweri Museveni—and their communication on Twitter before the January 2021 election. Counter to expectations, I find that thick ideology has a limited effect on the electoral discourses of both candidates in a competitive autocracy such as Uganda, and this applies also to their communication about foreign policy. When it comes to their position on foreign policy, strategic electoral communication is focused on positioning themselves in relation to the West, signaling a commitment to a strong future linkage with the West and democratization in the event of electoral victory. The content analysis of Twitter-based communication finds that the long-standing incumbent, Museveni, uses tried-and-tested populist tropes to reinforce his regime, emphasizing his government's allegedly strong capacity to maintain a linkage to Western donors and to conduct a successful foreign policy focused on receiving foreign aid and advancing its investment in economic development. In his turn, counter-candidate Wine is a contemporary populist who contests the long-standing regime and promises a truthful commitment to democratization and an authentic and corruption-free linkage with the West if successfully elected. This paper aims to broaden our understanding of how political leaders in competitive autocratic countries of the Global South make strategic use of populist communication about foreign policy to advance their political agendas.

Do Populist Leaders Mimic the Language of Ordinary Citizens? Evidence From India

Minimal understandings of populism focus on measuring explicit stances of antielitism and people centrism. What remains poorly understood is the way less overt forms of populist rhetoric enable leaders to emulate the language of common citizens to achieve electoral success. This article suggests that the study of the populist discourse also requires taking into account their implicit occurrences, that is, those conveying connect, closeness, commonness, and similarity with ordinary people. Expressed through performances of “layman likeness,” they enable populist politicians to dissociate from traditional ruling elites while enabling people leaders' identifications. Using a novel 261‐million‐word dataset of Indian political discourses—including the speeches of 11 Prime Ministers—to proxy such identifications, we argue that populist leaders rely on a mimesis of the common people. Three core mimetic speech items are quantified: intimacy, disintermediation, and simplicity. We use a replicable corpus‐contextual multiword collocation technique to populate lexicons of pretested psychometric profiles as well as a threefold validation method. The analysis finds that current Prime Minister Narendra Modi communicates mimetic identification around his persona, indexing the linguistic markers of his stylistic, ideological, and institutional populist politics. We indicate that our context‐aware method could also be of use to study the cross‐regional variability of mimetic populism.

Romaphobia in the UK Right-Wing Press: racist and populist discourse during the Brexit referendum

ABSTRACT This article investigates contemporary expressions of racism toward Roma in the context of growing populism in the UK. We focus on how and why Romaphobia becomes widespread in times of socio-political crises, especially during the 2016 referendum when the UK voted to leave the European Union. Drawing on content analysis and Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis, we provide an in-depth account of how Roma migrants have been represented in two British newspapers during the 2016 so-called “Brexit” Referendum campaign and subsequent vote. The textual and visual analysis demonstrates how racist tropes about Roma identity and culture are embedded into populist rhetoric, often taking subtle forms of expression, yet simultaneously manage to avoid accusations of racism. We argue that the scapegoating and demonisation of Roma migrants in the media contributed to shaping negative attitudes towards Eastern European immigrants and by proxy, to the EU. This plays out in a context of rising nativism and populism where Roma communities come to embody the perceived ills of the European integration project and are regarded as a threat to the fabric of the British nation. We draw attention to the danger of these representations which condemn an already vulnerable community to further socio-economic exclusion.

Patterns of populist mobilization: comparing narratives on COVID-19 in the global South

Abstract This article explores the narratives shaping the official discourse on COVID-19 in five countries governed by populists in different world regions. It is based on the assumption that a crisis like the pandemic constitutes a perfect occasion for populist mobilization, allowing populist leaders to construct reality in their favour by deliberately promoting own narratives about the pandemic, its origin and management. Analyzing 357 original-language speeches and statements by representatives of the populist governments of Brazil, Israel, India, Mexico and Turkey, the article shows that populists in power use crises to mobilize support in very different ways. Surprisingly, most populist governments neither resorted to anti-scientific claims or conspiratorial discourses attributing the crisis to obscure elites, nor blamed minorities not belonging to the ‘true people’. By contrast, except for Bolsonaro in Brazil, all other populist governments tried to mobilize support by emphasizing the strength of the ‘people’ or even by promoting an inclusive discourse of national unity, leaving aside the more divisive elements of their general populist discourse. Based on the cases analysed, the article concludes by developing hypotheses on the possible drivers of such variations in patterns of populist mobilization.

Populism à la Carte: The paradoxical political communication of Narendra Modi on Twitter

AbstractHow and where is democracy ‘hacked’? Studies examining the variability of the populist discourse rely on the—often tacit—assumption that global digital platforms are used similarly from one country to the other. By examining political rhetoric on Twitter, we show that populist communication is tailored to a particular audience profile rather than a particular social media (SM). More specifically, we compare Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's tweets with his addresses on multiple mediums. We describe how Modi uses wide‐reaching media such as radio to unfold a populist narrative based on institutional disintermediation, layman's language, counselling and the staging of an intimate conversation with the masses. Modi uses more elitist and cosmopolitan SM sites in India, such as Twitter, to mitigate his populist credentials, and introduce himself as a respectable democratic leader favouring multilateral collaborations, banal nationalism and Gandhian peace‐building. The variability of his political rhetoric across seven address formats indicates that Modi is populist tactically rather than ideologically, which complicates the tenets of the dominant ‘ideational’ populist paradigm. To further ground our argument empirically, we venture into comparing Modi's and Trump's tweets. We suggest that due to the popularity of Twitter in the United States, it was strategically useful for the former President of the United States to act populist on the platform, while that is not the case for Modi. This tends to indicate that not enough attention is given to intermedium studies that complement comparisons between states/regions with comparisons nested within a coherent political space.

“Representing this Ossi-thing”

In this article, we argue that German rap music can open up insights into current social negotiation processes surrounding the topic of post-migration. By emphasizing “ost” (literally “East”) in “p-ost-migration”, we propose adding a regional perspective to current debates on the concept of post-migration. Such a perspective considers the specific lifeworlds that characterize the living-together in diversity in Eastern Germany. Based on an exploratory study, we put our empirical focus on the growing Eastern German rap scene and show that “Eastern Germany” is playing an increasing role for rappers as identity-forming spatial category, especially since the migration summer of 2015. Our analysis will propose that a reference to “the East” can be used both as a means to take a stand against racism and as a means to feed into current right-wing populist discourses and excluding definitions of “Heimat” (“one’s home turf ”).

As metáforas no discurso de/sobre André Ventura: as metáforas que constrói André Ventura e as que constroem sobre ele

Through an interdisciplinary approach between Cognitive Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis, we aim to identify and analyse conceptual and situational metaphors present in the interventions of MP André Ventura in the Portuguese Parliament and in tweets both from the MP’s official account and from other accounts that publish comments about him. For this purpose, we collected data from 15 reports of the Assembly of the Republic Diary and from 98 tweets, then proceeded to manually annotate the metaphors and to search them by target domain. The results show many conceptual metaphors in their interventions, where they function as an attack on the political opponent, and of situated metaphors in Twitter comments, discursively and cognitively constructed by network users based on cultural assumptions. It was also concluded that metaphori-cal rhetoric in populist discourse represents a powerful discursive strategy, allowing power plays in political interactions, discursive manipulations and triggering emotions.

Predicative use of the personal pronoun him in Sur La Braise by Henri Djombo

This article studies the predicative use of the personal pronoun him in Sur La Braise by Henri Djombo. Thus, the objective is to describe the kinetics of him, as anaphora and cataphor of the represented element. The study demonstrates that the presence and absence of indices of subjectivity, which reinforce the thematization of this pronoun, would contribute to distinguishing the style of Djombo, to aestheticize his text and to convert his fiction into populist discourse. With a dual psychomechanical and pragmatic approach, we analyze the syntactic figures used and the stylistic effects targeted by the author. We show that the author avoids three-element structures for the sake of brevity and literality. It mobilizes exclusively the elliptical structures with a single element (lui + Ø) and with two elements (lui + SN + Ø / SN + lui + Ø) in which lui is sometimes reinforced by means of a prepositive locution (as for), d an indefinite adjective “even” or an adverb (also), to get as many readers as possible to adhere to his vision of the world that he shares. Keywords : Henri Djombo, predicative pronoun, dislocation, double marking, expressive values.

Towards an uncertain future: Brexit satirised in Ian McEwan’s The Cockroach

Ian McEwan’s 2019 novella, The Cockroach, which is considered a product of “brexlit,” is a bitter satire of British politicians’ Brexit project. According to the author, the rising waves of ultranationalism, seasoned with British politicians’ unreasonable populist discourse, drifted Britain out of the European Union. In the novella, McEwan’s chosen medium in criticising Britain’s status quo ante Brexit is satire. Due to its corrective nature, satire tends to repair and/or reform prevailing ills. However, in The Cockroach, McEwan does not intent to correct the troubles brought to Britain by Brexit, which he sees as the manifestation of stark irrationality. Indeed, political humour accompanies McEwan’s exclusive satirical style, for the author was aware of the fact that the British Conservative Party’s political slogan – “Get Brexit done” – had already fulfilled its mission by the time he was writing The Cockroach. Thus, this article follows the fictional route drawn by McEwan in The Cockroach in presenting how the bilateral association of populism and jingoism can darken the future vision of a country whose parliamentary democracy has a history of almost two centuries.

Scroll culture and authoritarian populism: how Turkish and Greek online news aggravate ‘refugee crisis’ tensions

ABSTRACT News consumers are more likely to inform themselves through digital news outlets and social media ‘newsfeeds’ than physical newspapers [Ofcom. (2022). News Consumption in the UK: 2022. https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0027/241947/News-Consumption-in-the-UK-2022-report.pdf]. Guided by our thumbs, we scroll through news outlets’ homepages and down newsfeeds for information (and entertainment) in what Way. (2021. Trump, memes and the Alt-right: Emotive and affective criticism and praise. The Russian Journal of Linguistics, 25(3), 789–809. https://doi.org/10.22363/2687-0088-2021-25-3-789-809) calls ‘scroll culture’. On 27 February 2020, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan announced that he would no longer stop refugees trying to cross into Europe from Türkiye to Greece, ending a 2016 agreement with the EU. In response, the Greek authorities closed their border with a resultant congregation of thousands of refugees. Both Turkish and Greek politicians blamed each other for the crisis, leaning on authoritarian populist discourses prevalent in both countries. Online news outlets on both sides of the border covered the ‘crisis’. In this article, we compare how the openings of stories from online news sites that are widely shared on social media lean on governmental authoritarian and populist discourses. This comparative analysis reveals how nations on different sides of a ‘crisis’ articulate discourses that inflame tensions externally whilst promoting internal power structures.

Unmasking the Twitter Discourses on Masks During the COVID-19 Pandemic: User Cluster-Based BERT Topic Modeling Approach.

The COVID-19 pandemic has spotlighted the politicization of public health issues. A public health monitoring tool must be equipped to reveal a public health measure's political context and guide better interventions. In its current form, infoveillance tends to neglect identity and interest-based users, hence being limited in exposing how public health discourse varies by different political groups. Adopting an algorithmic tool to classify users and their short social media texts might remedy that limitation. We aimed to implement a new computational framework to investigate discourses and temporal changes in topics unique to different user clusters. The framework was developed to contextualize how web-based public health discourse varies by identity and interest-based user clusters. We used masks and mask wearing during the early stage of the COVID-19 pandemic in the English-speaking world as a case study to illustrate the application of the framework. We first clustered Twitter users based on their identities and interests as expressed through Twitter bio pages. Exploratory text network analysis reveals salient political, social, and professional identities of various user clusters. It then uses BERT Topic modeling to identify topics by the user clusters. It reveals how web-based discourse has shifted over time and varied by 4 user clusters: conservative, progressive, general public, and public health professionals. This study demonstrated the importance of a priori user classification and longitudinal topical trends in understanding the political context of web-based public health discourse. The framework reveals that the political groups and the general public focused on the science of mask wearing and the partisan politics of mask policies. A populist discourse that pits citizens against elites and institutions was identified in some tweets. Politicians (such as Donald Trump) and geopolitical tensions with China were found to drive the discourse. It also shows limited participation of public health professionals compared with other users. We conclude by discussing the importance of a priori user classification in analyzing web-based discourse and illustrating the fit of BERT Topic modeling in identifying contextualized topics in short social media texts.