Logic Of Populism Research Articles

COVID-19: A Political Virus? VOX’s Populist Discourse in Times of Crisis

Spain has been one of the hardest hit countries by the COVID-19 pandemic, and this crisis presented a window of opportunity for VOX, as it has for other far right parties, to raise its visibility as opposition force. This paper investigates whether the discourse of VOX has evolved during the pandemic and affected the political dynamics in Spain. This article proposes a new multidimensional strategy to measure the degree of populism in political communications, via quantitative and qualitative content analysis. It dissects the parliamentary speeches of the leader of VOX, Santiago Abascal, in the debates for the approval and extension of the “state of alarm” to fight against COVID-19 between March and June 2020. In order to assess the changes and relative intensity of populist features in Abascal’s parliamentary speeches we compared them with his speech during Pedro Sánchez’s investiture session as the Spanish President of the Government, in January 2020, and VOX’s latest political manifestos—2019 European and Spanish General Elections—, as well as with speeches of the representatives of the five main parties and coalitions during the COVID-19 debates in the Spanish Congress.Our paper shows that populists’ discourses are context-dependent and that their performances are not only shaped by crisis but also constitutive of crisis. The density of populist references in Abascal’s speeches grew steadily during the period analysed. Morality and antagonism overshadowed sovereignty and society as key populist attributes, and the tone of the discourse became increasingly hyperbolic. Moreover, Abascal’s discursive performances had a sort of contagion effect in other parties in the parliamentary sessions studied. People’s Party (Partido Popular–PP) leader Pablo Casado chose to follow VOX and harshly criticized the government, meanwhile the discourses of the speakers of Together We Can (Unidas Podemos–UP) and Catalan Republican Left (Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya–ERC), adopted a demonizing rhetoric against VOX and PP also grounded on a populist logic of articulation. This polarizing dynamic between competing Manichean discourses contributed to reinforce the sense of crisis by adding a political dimension to the already existing health and economic problems.

Logics, rhetoric and ‘the blob’: Populist logic in the Conservative reforms to English schooling

A lot has been written about the lasting implications of the Conservative reforms to English schooling, particularly changes made by Michael Gove as Education Secretary (2010–2014). There is a lot less work, however, on studying the role that language, strategy and the broader political framework played in the process of instituting and winning consent for these reforms. Studying these factors is important for ensuring that any changes to education and schooling are not read in isolation from their political context. Speeches particularly capture moments where intellectual and strategic political traditions meet, helping us to form a richer understanding of the motives behind specific reform goals and where they fit into a political landscape. This article analyses speeches and policy documents from prominent politicians who led the Conservative education agenda between 2010–2014 to illustrate how politicians mobilised a deliberate populist strategy and argumentation to achieve specific educational goals, but which have had broader social and political implications. Concepts from interpretive political studies are used to develop a case analysis of changes to teacher training provision and curriculum reform, illustrating how politicians constructed a frontier between ‘the people’ (commonly teachers or parents) and an illegitimate ‘elite’ (an educational establishment) that opposed change. This anti‐elite populist rhetoric, arguably first tested in the Department for Education, has now become instituted more widely in our current British politics.

DISCURSO POPULISTA EM CONSTRUÇÕES JORNALÍSTICAS ACERCA DO CACEROLAZO ARGENTINO E DO PANELAÇO BRASILEIRO

RESUMO Este artigo debate a relação entre jornalismo, populismo e mídias digitais. Deste modo, observamos de que maneira os textos jornalísticos, ao produzirem narrativas acerca das manifestações sociopolíticas conhecidas como “cacerolazo”, em 2012/2013 na Argentina, durante o governo de Cristina Kirchner, e “panelaço”, em 2015 no Brasil, durante o governo de Dilma Rousseff, reforçam o processo de propagação de elementos discursivos que se imiscuem à lógica do populismo e se imbricam às dicções populistas do contemporâneo, que vêm sendo denominadas como populismo algorítmico e/ou populismo digital. Ao promoverem a circulação de certos dizeres (e não outros), partindo do efeito discursivo de evidência, como se fossem apenas “relatos de fatos”, baseados na ilusão de neutralidade e imparcialidade, as construções jornalísticas produzem uma determinação dos sentidos, filiando-se a dadas práticas discursivas, sócio-historicamente marcadas. A atividade jornalística, ao se apropriar do discurso populista, contribui para a instalação no cenário político de polaridades e dicotomias que resultaram, no contexto argentino, na derrocada do kirchnerismo em 2015 e, no contexto brasileiro, no impeachment da presidenta Dilma Rousseff em 2016. A fim de ilustrarmos nossa discussão, analisaremos, a partir da perspectiva teórico-metodológica da Análise do Discurso, algumas manchetes, trechos de reportagens e fotografias, disponibilizados nos sites dos jornais argentinos Clarín e La Nación e nos jornais brasileiros Folha de S. Paulo e O Globo, na época dos eventos mencionados.

Hysteria in the squares: Approaching populism from a perspective of desire

This paper explores the productive potential in the psychoanalytic concept of hysteria in terms of the study of populism. A Lacanian framework is adopted to broaden our understanding of the (dis)identification structures at stake in a populist logic, stressing the constitutive role desire bears in relation to social meaning-making processes. Against a background of public discontent – the “square protests” – this paper exploits the emancipatory potential within the discourse of the hysteric as a crucial radical investment in the displacement of predominant socio-symbolic boundaries, leading to the production of social knowledge.

“Shame on the church of Sweden”: Radical nationalism and the appropriation of Christianity in contemporary Sweden

During the last decade, the populist radical nationalist party, the Sweden Democrats (SD), has gone from being a minor party to become Sweden’s third largest party in parliament. In this article, the author shows how the category of Christianity has come to play a pivotal role in the party’s political identification. Drawing on Ernesto Laclau’s analysis of populism, the author argues that Christianity should be understood as a projection surface for fantasies of an ethnically and culturally superior homogenous nation vis-à-vis constructed national others. In a populist logic, Christianity has thus become a way to distinguish the SD from its articulated external (e.g., Muslims, immigrants) and internal (liberalism, feminism) political foes. By appropriating Christianity, the SD articulates itself as the guardian of true Christianity, the future savior of a Church allegedly hijacked by external and internal foes, and in the long run, the Swedish nation.

The populist moment: affective orders, protest, and politics of belonging

ABSTRACT Populism of the twenty-first century, the paper argues, emerges from the aloofness of liberal democracy’s sober regimes of rationality. This results in political movements that are explicitly affective in their strategies, both on the right and the left of the political spectrum. However, while policy research claims that left- and right-wing populism ‘look alike’ (isomorphia), the paper shows that there is only one populist logic that exceeds demarcations of ‘left’ or ‘right’. Therefore, it introduces the concept of the populist moment to describe the structure of the populist logic that is shared by a variety of protest movements. As a feminist intervention in the field of populism studies, the paper, finally, discusses how Mouffe’s political theory conflates ‘left populism’ and radical democracy. In reference to Ranciére’s and Lorey’s conceptualizations of radical democracy the paper portrays how to democratize democracy beyond Mouffe’s hegemony theory.

Is left populism the radical democratic answer?

This commentary challenges views of left populism as the normative desirable path for radical democracy. It disentangles populist diagnosis of the failures and deficits of democracy from its solutions. It argues that the logic of populism so well analyzed by Laclau leads to the appropriation of people’s power by a clique of politicians and ultimately by a leader.

The logic of populism. Consequences of the clash between complexity and simple thinking

The logic of populism. Consequences of the clash between complexity and simple thinking

Medical populism

Medical emergencies are staple features of today's 24/7 culture of breaking news. As politics becomes increasingly stylised, audiences fragmented, and established knowledge claims contested, health crises have become even more vulnerable to politicisation. We offer the vocabulary of medical populism to make sense of this phenomenon. We define medical populism as a political style based on performances of public health crises that pit ‘the people’ against ‘the establishment.’ While some health emergencies lead to technocratic responses that soothe anxieties of a panicked public, medical populism thrives by politicising, simplifying, and spectacularising complex public health issues.To demonstrate the concept's analytical value, we offer four illustrative examples. Thabo Mbeki's HIV denialism and the Philippines' vaccination scandal are examples of the populist logic of forging vertical divisions between the people and the establishment (e.g. the West, big pharma, medical experts). Meanwhile, the Ebola scare and Southeast Asia's drug wars are examples of horizontal divisions that divide the ‘virtuous people’ against ‘dangerous outsiders’ (e.g. racial minorities, drug addicts) whose ‘threats’ have long been overlooked by out-of-touch members of the political and medical establishment. The article concludes by examining the implications of medical populism to health communication and democratic politics.

Hotspots: The affective politics of hope and the “Corbyn phenomenon”

Jeremy Corbyn MP was elected as leader of the Labour Party in the United Kingdom on 12 September 2015, in a landslide victory. This paper explores the affective nature of the “Corbyn phenomenon” and the myriad reasons behind its emergence. Through adopting a lens that is attentive to the affective dimension of politics, the paper highlights how affect, in its diverse forms, mobilises people into political action. The paper aims to expand affective political thought by developing a new conceptual dimension, that of “hotspots,” as a way of considering the affective geographies of political movements. The main hypothesis is that “hotspots” – where political events take place – were integral to the production of affective atmospheres that fuelled the momentum of the Corbyn phenomenon. This argument is made in three parts. First, the paper explores how Corbyn triggered a “tipping point,” whereby negative affects – such as anger, frustration and despair – which had accumulated during a post‐political era, erupted and crystallised in support for Corbyn. It then addresses the core contribution of this paper, the role of “hotspots” – where the affective atmospheres of the Corbyn phenomenon were produced, which were characterised by hope, optimism and excitement – in galvanising Corbyn support. It concludes with a discussion of the figure of Jeremy Corbyn, himself, and alludes to how (1) his personality and (2) his politics moulded him into the symbolic leader of the grassroots movement, which maintains a populist logic. The paper thus contributes to ongoing discussions about the role of affect in politics.

Critical research on populism: Nine rules of engagement

This article formulates precise questions and ‘rules of engagement’ designed to advance our understanding of the role populism can and should play in the present political conjuncture, with potentially significant implications for critical management and organization studies and beyond. Drawing on the work of Ernesto Laclau and others working within the post-Marxist discourse-theory tradition, we defend a concept of populism understood as a form of reason that centres around a claim to represent ‘the people’, discursively constructed as an underdog in opposition to an illegitimate ‘elite’. A formal discursive approach to populism brings with it important advantages. For example, it establishes that a populist logic can be invoked to further very different political goals, from radical left to right, or from progressive to regressive. It sharpens too our grasp of important issues that are otherwise conflated and obfuscated. For instance, it helps us separate out the nativist and populist dimensions in the discourses of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), Trump or the Front National (FN). Our approach to populism, however, also points to the need to engage with the rhetoric about populism, a largely ignored area of critical research. In approaching populism as a signifier, not only as a concept, we stress the added need to focus on the uses of the term ‘populism’ itself: how it is invoked, by whom and to what purpose and effect. This, we argue, requires that we pay more systematic attention to anti-populism and ‘populist hype’, and reflect upon academia’s own relation to populism and anti-populism.

The populism of the\xa0Alternative for Germany (AfD): an extended Essex School perspective

This paper seeks to draw on the tools of Ernesto Laclau’s theory of discourse, hegemony and populism as well as recent Essex School work on populism to examine the discourse of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) and, in the process, come closer to a more systematic understanding of nature and limits of right-wing populism as well as the interplay and distinction between populist and non-populist discursive logics more generally. The paper situates itself in the context of existing Essex School work that has distinguished populism from institutionalism—and, more recently, from nationalism —in terms of either the length of the equivalential chain or the centrality of “the people” as nodal point in addition to the degree of antagonistic division between “people” and “power.” Building on this latter strand in the recent work of Yannis Stavrakakis and others, this paper proposes a formal distinction between populism and reductionism as internal to Laclau’s theory of populism. Reductionism, it is argued, tends to reduce “the people” onto a differential particularity that sets a priori limits on the equivalential chain as opposed to constructing it as a tendentially empty signifier attached to an open-ended chain—producing a tendential closure of the equivalential chain and thus undercutting the primacy of the logic of equivalence that is fundamental to Laclau’s understanding of populism and subsequent Essex School applications of it. It is argued that predominantly ethno-, cultural- or nativist-reductionist discourses may nonetheless deploy a populist logic of partial openings in the equivalential chain, especially through the selective equivalential incorporation of sexual or ethno-linguistic minorities against a common (often “Islamic”) constitutive outside. This is demonstrated empirically in a discourse analysis of the AfD and its development from a “competition populism” into an ethno-culturally reductionist conception of “the people” coexisting with partial openings in relation to the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community and Russian-Germans in the Berlin context in particular.

Civil society, populism and religion

This chapter addresses the paradoxical relationship of populist movements to civil society and to religion. It argues that while populist movements and religious associations emerge and flourish in civil society, the logic of populism and of politicized religion is antithetical to the underlying principles of civil society and, ultimately, to democracy itself. The chapter identifies the specific logic of populism ideal typically, and analyzes the difference between populist and other, self-limiting social movements. It explores the contemporary link between populism and religious identity politics. The chapter analyzes the tensions and affinities between populist logic and political religion. If the populist temptation and the lure of politicizing religion may be to stay, a vibrant open civil society remains the best hope for resisting these challenges and generating alternatives. Civil society is a contested concept. But every conception involves three parameters – plurality, publicity, and privacy, however variously they are interpreted.

Democratic Education in the Mode of Populism

This paper seeks to bring John Dewey’s pragmatist philosophy of democratic education and the public into dialogue with Ernesto Laclau’s theory of populism. Recognizing populism as an integral aspect of democracy, rather than as its antithesis, the purpose of this paper is to provide a theoretical account of populism as being of educational relevance in two respects. First, it argues that the populist logic specifies a set of formal elements by which democratic education could operate as a collective enterprise. Second, it asserts that the notion of populism supplements any congenial understanding of democratic education by bringing political demands, conflicts and affects to the fore. Finally, the paper discusses the risks and possibilities inherent in visualizing populism as an educational modus.

The Logic of Populism

Over the past few years, Jan-Werner Muller, a professor of politics at Princeton University, has devoted his attention to articulating the nature of populism. His lectures, articles, and popular essays on the subject have been brought together in a small and very readable book titled, What Is Populism? Populism does not for Muller signify a political system so “rigged” that it must be overhauled. Rather it points to the failures of representative democracy, which for him nonetheless remains the best form of government the world has on offer. The way forward, according to Muller, must involve a plan to bring in those who are “currently excluded” while keeping the “very wealthy and powerful from opting out of the system.” Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins reviews What is Populism? by Jan-Wener Muller.

Toward an Inclusive Populism? On the Role of Race and Difference in Laclau’s Politics

Does the recent success of Podemos and Syriza herald a new era of inclusive, egalitarian left populism? Because leaders of both parties are former students of Ernesto Laclau and cite his account of populism as guiding their political practice, this essay considers whether his theory supports hope for a new kind of populism. For Laclau, the essence of populism is an “empty signifier” that provides a means by which anyone can identify with the people as a whole. However, the concept of the empty signifier is not as neutral as he assumes. As I show by analyzing the role of race in his theory, some subjects are constituted in a way that prevents their unmediated identification with the people. Consequently, Laclau’s view should be read as symptomatic of the problems with populist logic if its adherents are to avoid reproducing its exclusions and practice a more inclusive politics.

Obama's iPod: Popular Music and the Perils of Postpolitical Populism

This article examines how Barack Obama has used popular music over the last several years as part of a populist communication strategy. It argues that thinking about the aesthetics of popular music helps us understand how populist logic functions. Examining the music used during the campaign, the inaugural celebration, and the In Performance at the White House series, I show how the aesthetic problems of Obama's musical spectacles are symptomatic of a postpolitical populism that is potentially unstable. Using a number of theories of populism and popular music, in particular those of Ernesto Laclau, Slavoj Žižek, and Stuart Hall, I argue that while the Obama White House effectively utilized a heterogeneous populist aesthetic to structure identification with Obama as a leader to win the 2008 election, its postelection praxis has left it unable to articulate the agonistic pluralism necessary for sustaining an effective political movement, setting the stage for the recuperation of populist affect by the homogenous populism of the right.

Populist Transparency

This article is an ethnographic account of the politics of transparency in Paraguay that focuses on the circulation of a particular binder full of photocopies from the land registry during Paraguay’s embattled “transition to democracy.” The concept of transparency posits a representational relationship between documents and reality – i.e. governments are transparent to the extent that they generate faithful and accessible documentary representations of their activities. The article suggests that the difficulty of creating a critical analysis of transparency has less to do with representations than with contention over what counts as reality. The Paraguayan case suggests that we might benefit from rethinking transparency through the logic of populism, in which reality is itself created in the relationship between leaders and their followers.

Ethos, Agonism and Populism: William Connolly and the Case for Radical Democracy

This article explores William Connolly's call for a pluralist ethos and a politics of becoming as an antidote to the current malaise of liberal democratic governance. Evaluating Connolly's theoretical approach alongside Ernesto Laclau's logic of populism and Chantal Mouffe's advocacy of agonistic pluralism, it endeavours to synthesise these various post-structuralist interventions into a more encompassing proposal for radical democracy.

The power of populism: the Greek case

Abstract. PASOK's rise to power as well as its performance in office are analyzed in terms of the party's ability to construct a populist discourse. The political context and the structure of Greek society are presented as the main factors that enabled PASOK to articulate a populist discourse. It is argued that PASOK's performance in office served to expose its populist logic and that the party's policies in the field of the economy, labour and education show how populism affects political practice. PASOK's vagueness and contradictory policies are not accidental but the result of a populist logic that developed within specific social conditions and serves specific interests.