Populist Narrative Research Articles

Authoritarian Populism in Indonesia: The Role of the Political Campaign Industry in Engineering Consent and Coercion

All around the globe, populism has become increasingly prominent in democratic societies in the developed and developing world. Scholars have attributed this rise at a response to the systematic reproduction of social inequalities entwined with processes of neoliberal globalisation, within which all countries are inextricably and dynamically linked. However, to theorise populism properly, we must look at its manifestations in countries other than the West. By taking the case of Indonesia, the third largest democracy and the largest economy in Southeast Asia, this article critically analyses the role of the political campaign industry in mobilising narratives in electoral discourses. We use the Gramscian notion of consent and coercion, in which the shaping of populist narratives relies on mechanisms of persuasion using mass and social media. Such mechanisms allow the transformation of political discourses in conjunction with oligarchic power struggle. Within this struggle, political campaigners narrate the persona of political elites, while cyber armies divide and polarise, to manufacture allegiance and agitation among the majority of young voters as part of a shifting social base. As such, we argue that, together, the narratives – through engineering consent and coercion – construct authoritarian populism that pits two crowds of “the people” against each other, while aligning them with different sections of the “elite.”

Place matters: Analyzing the roots of political distrust and Brexit narratives at a local level

AbstractBased on comparative qualitative research in five local authority areas, this article argues that local context is key to understanding the roots of the U.K.'s crisis of political trust and the result of the 2016 E.U. referendum. The competing cultural and economic causes of discontent suggested by the literature were found to be deeply intertwined when analyzed from a local perspective. The sense of political disempowerment and negative attitudes toward migration were ingrained in and reinforced by locally specific socio‐economic and political trajectories. These experiences were articulated and amplified by dominant discourses, which channeled frustration against the political elite and the E.U. These populist narratives, promoted by the Leave campaign and the tabloid press, became dominant in certain areas, decisively shaping citizens' voting behavior. Overall, the article highlights the value of studying how local experiences and interpretations mediate the interplay of cultural and economic causes of discontent and political distrust.

TOWARDS GREEN POPULISM? Right‐wing Populism and Metropolization in Switzerland

AbstractSwitzerland is an interesting laboratory for studying right‐wing populism. Populist movements, notably the Swiss People's Party (SVP), have undergone momentous development over the last few decades based on anti‐immigration and anti‐European discourses. This transformation has been commonly associated with an ethno‐nationalistic reaction against the globalization process and the defense of Swiss economic, political and cultural specificities. Based on an analysis of popular immigration initiatives in 2014, this essay identifies the rapid and intense metropolization of Switzerland as a correlative factor explaining the success of populist narratives in that country. The analysis shows that the strong and omnipresent metropolization process within a limited territory has created a fertile breeding ground for right‐wing populism in terms of urban development, housing scarcity, traffic, infrastructure development, energy consumption, pollution and transformation of the landscape. Thus the conventional nationalistic and identitarian narratives characterizing right‐wing movements can progressively combine with concerns and arguments associated with environmental discourse. This process of updating right‐wing populist narratives on the basis of environmental concerns can evolve under different modalities and in different contexts, leading to the emergence of a ‘green populism’.

The Weakness of Liberal Democracy a Lever to the Success of Anti-Establishment Parties: Chantal Mouffe on Challenges of the Political

Today in Europe we are witnessing a populist turn, we could even speak of a “populist moment” that signals the crisis of neoliberal democracy. According to Chantal Mouffe, “the populist moment” is the expression of a set of heterogeneous demands, which cannot be formulated in traditional right/left frontier. The battles of our time will be between right-wing and left-wing populism. Although the current state of liberal societies appears to favor the development of a Right project, Mouffe proves that just a left-wing one can uphold any kind of radicalisation of democracy. The aim of this paper is to examine the reasons for the increasing success of populist parties in European countries and to consider whether the way the present crisis is manifesting is conducive to the growth of a populist narrative, especially in its right-wing variant.

From ‘Brexhaustion’ to ‘Covidiots’: the UK United Kingdom and the Populist Future

Boris Johnson’s electoral victory and the 2020 culmination of Brexit are accelerating Britain’s shift towards the right and towards open criticism of technocracy in the UK and EU. Since 2016 the UK’s political atmosphere has polarised into hostile extremes. The continuation of this toxicity beyond Brexit, the dominance of nationalist narratives as Britain’s new ‘politics of everything’ (Valluvan 2019). While the Conservative Party remains traditionally centre-right and the Brexit Party has ceased to be relevant, the UK continues to witness the growth of the far right and what is called here the ‘Radical Right’, which have been accelerating since 2016, rapidly gaining influence (Norris and Inglehart 2019: 443-472), and ‘mainstreaming’ (Miller-Idriss 2017) in the Conservative majority elected in December 2019. The past four years have seen growing British contempt for technocracy in London and Brussels, while the Leave vote has been represented as a “Will of the People” antithetical to a Remain/Revoke/Second Referendum position, often portrayed as an anti-democratic scheme by “the elite” to frustrate the will of “the people”. This ‘us and them’ populist narrative is deepening as the UK’s volatile political environment moves away from the political procedures and economic values by which the UK has operated since 1945. Since early 2020, this narrative has been significantly accelerated by Covid-19 countermeasures, with anti-EU parties and narratives on the left and right becoming anti-lockdown or anti-vaccine parties and narratives. This paper approaches the radical right as emblematic of British politics’ shift from centrism towards polarised factions defined not by party but by support or contempt for technical governance. In this paper we propose a new explanatory basis for studying the populist radical right not as a temporary phenomenon in response to specific political events and conditions, but as a fluid, amorphous, and heterogeneous set of groups, parties, and narratives whose strategies, appeal, and narratives make them extremely adaptable, and significant as a force with substantial influence of politics into the future.

Between Populism and Technocracy: How National Executives in Bulgaria and Serbia Manipulate EU Rule of Law Conditionality

This article explores how national executives in Serbia and Bulgaria address European Union (EU) rule of law conditionality by framing it within the populism/technocracy dichotomy. The rule of law remains one of the main problems of EU relations with the two countries. While acknowledging the nuances of pre- and post-enlargement Europeanisation, this article explores the technocratic and populist narratives exploited by the national executives in their interactions with the EU and their domestic public. Rather than positioning the current executives unequivocally either as populist or technocratic, we argue that the political elites act strategically in using both populist and technocratic techniques towards their publics when explaining interaction with the EU. We explore the extent this type of executive behaviour is determined by the countries’ formally different status. While we look for the levels of possible similarity and distinction in the two cases/countries stemming from their different EU membership status, our findings confirm the existence of strategic defensive populist and technocratic techniques applied towards the EU and the national public in both countries The aim of this strategy is to mitigate the impact of the EU rule of law pressure and to secure the persistence of the existing rule of law shortcomings within the process of European integration. Interestingly, our research did not identify substantial impact of the formally different status towards the EU of the two countries.

La costruzione dell'immaginario M5S attraverso i social media: qual è stato il ruolo del Direttorio? = The construction of M5S imaginary through social media: what has the role of the Directorate been?

Over the last decade, the term populism has become increasingly popular. However, due to the mutability of populist movements and the diversity of the contexts in which they have developed, it has been difficult to place the different manifestations of the populist phenomenon within a single ideology. In fact, a populist narrative seems to resort to the cultural toolkit at its disposal, drawing from time to time on different components of the social and cultural environment in which it is immersed, without being crystallized in a coherent and static ideology. From this perspective, populism can therefore be traced back to the type of discourse used to frame a political event, in which the narrative component of the discourse is used strategically – or adaptively – to constitute a multifaceted and contradictory political identity to which everyone can refer even if not all the instances are shared. To investigate the hypotheses regarding the role of online communication in the construction of such populist narratives, we will analyse all the tweets produced by the three best known representatives of the Five Star Movement (Alessandro Di Battista, Luigi Di Maio and Raffaele Fico) from 2013 to 2019 by means of computational techniques. Starting from the works that have already defined the communicative style of the founder Beppe Grillo, our goal is to shift the attention to the Directorate, the plural leadership of the Five Star Movement innovative organizational structure and understand its role in the construction of the social imaginary connected to the party.

(De-)legitimating Differentiated (dis)integration in the European Union: Between Technocratic and Populist Narratives

Differentiated integration and disintegration are considered key processes of the European project’s dynamics. Opt-outs and disintegration pressures are typically associated with laggards or proponents of ‘less Europe’ who do not wish to integrate further, but prefer to maintain status quo or take a step back. However, differentiation also serves the needs of champions of ‘more Europe’ who wish to move forward despite lack of unanimous support to do so. Both types of claims are constantly justified and contested as they constitute a deviation from a more traditional and uniform way of ‘doing integration’ in Europe. This article aims to deal with the differentiation/legitimation nexus in the EU and shed light on the politics of differentiation, while empirically examining legitimating and de-legitimating practices of differentiation as revealed in technocratic and populist narratives produced by major political actors in France, Poland and the United Kingdom. The article highlights flexible and complementary usages of both populist and technocratic narratives that allow to (de-)legitimate differentiation in line with domestic political agendas.

Post-feminist German heartland: On the women’s rights narrative of the radical-right populist party Alternative für Deutschland in the Bundestag

This essay sketches out the post-feminist narrative employed by the radical-right populist party Alternative für Deutschland in the German national parliament between October 2017 and July 2018. Striving to establish a hegemonic ontology, the Alternative für Deutschland conjures up a social imaginary of a German heartland, where equal rights between ‘naturally’ different women and men have long been achieved – a heartland that has to be protected from ‘Muslim culture’ as much as from the ‘leveling down’ imposed by a ‘radical feminist elite’. Between these frames, the Alternative für Deutschland presents itself as the only true champion of women and, while never asserting to be feminist, implicitly lays claim to a particular and exclusivist post-feminist position. I argue that the Alternative für Deutschland’s capabilities to promote this populist narrative have become further enhanced by its election to the national parliament, presenting a serious challenge and also a chance for German feminism to self-critically engage with issues of intersectionality and representation in public discourse.

Populism, violence and authoritarian stability: necropolitics in Turkey

The literature on populism overwhelmingly deals with the factors behind the rise of populism: the supply factors, and the economic and political crises. However, there is a lack of engagement in the literature on the construction of populist narratives and especially on the relations between populist narratives and violence. This paper addresses these gaps. Based on an empirically rich case study of Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and its leader President Recep T. Erdoğan, it shows that the populist narrative of the party and its leader is necropolitical as it is based on narratives of martyrdom, blood and death. The paper also shows that to maintain authoritarian stability, the incumbents instrumentalise these populist necropolitical narratives for repression, legitimation and co-optation. We analyse this complex case by combining the literatures on populism, necropolitics, politics of martyrdom and authoritarianism, and contribute to all of them.

Populism as the Cause of Legitimising Racism in Western Societies

The article aims at demonstrating that a spike in populist narratives (fear management in order to evoke fear of the Other) in Western societies leads to the legitimization of a new type of racism, xenoracism. Societies belonging to the so-called Western culture in the second half of the 20th century were attached to the liberal values where every sign of racism was negatively perceived as pejorative and attempts were made at eradicating it. In the 21st century, in turn, various economic and social crises caused by, inter alia, globalizing processes, were attributed to liberal values which contributed to doing politics through fear management towards the Other. The difference between racism and xenoracism lies in the fact that the former was an ideology focused on biological differences while xenoracism abandoned such differences in favour of socially and culturally imbuing them with objective and unalterable character. Populist narratives evoking fear of the Other question that behaviours triggered by this fear result from racism despite the fact that these actions are virtually identical to the ones motivated by the ideology of racism. Therefore, such behaviours and activities are more commonly perceived as positive and not pejorative and as in effect acceptable.

An ambiguous tool of demos accountability: taking the metaphorical concept of majoritarian tyranny seriously

ABSTRACT Even before the invention of modern democracy, political theorists have warned about the dangers of ‘majoritarian tyrannies.’ While the concept has been perennially suspicious of serving as an antidemocratic stratagem, I propose to revalue it as an antipopulist tool of horizontal accountability among citizens (‘demos accountability’). Subverting the populist narrative of popular unity and virtue, it allows aggrieved minorities to call their majoritarian fellow citizens to account for the injustices they help to produce. Given its metaphorical quality, however, its rootedness in the image of the personal tyrant, the idea of majoritarian tyranny carries deep democratic ambiguities. To recognize these ambiguities, I argue, we need to resist the suggestive power of its animating metaphor and take the empirical complexities of its logical building blocks seriously: the exercise of tyranny, the exclusive targeting of minorities, and collective action by the majority. My stepwise analytical reconstruction of these three constitutive elements of majoritarian tyrannies reveals two metaphorical pitfalls that threaten the democratic fertility of the concept: its vilifying and its simplifying assumptions.

POPULISME, PILKADA DAN MASA DEPAN DEMOKRASI

Abstract
 Populism has risen to become a contemporary political phenomenon at both the global, national and local levels. Electoral contestations, including the election of district heads or “Pilkada”, were infiltrated by populist political practices. In this paper, I mostly use the perspective of political philosophy on populism. The main thesis of this paper is that populism threatens the existence of democracy when populist actors and politicians exploit the ethnic and religious sentiments of the voters, or exploit the people's vulnerabilities as mere populist narratives and rhetoric to win the electoral support. On the other hand, the discourse on antagonism in left populism is able to make a positive contribution to democracy as long as it is always placed within the framework of an antagonistic democratic discourse. Within the framework of antagonistic democracy, left populism consistently exposes the depravity of power, constructs the “people” as a group that opposes the oligarchic and neoliberal elites, and struggles for the right to social justice of the oppressed. This politico-philosophical analysis of populism is relevant in reflecting on the moments of electoral contestations such as the election of district heads (Pilkada) and on the fight for a better future of democracy.

Популизм в Великобритании в контексте современного политического процесса

The article analyzes the development of populism in the UK. It is found that, in general, the European Union has experienced three «trust crisis» in the EU institutions over the past ten years, which have also had an impact on the emergence of populism in the United Kingdom. The British vote in the brexit referendum in favor of leaving the European Union was an important manifestation of established populist forces in Europe. Using the methods of comparison and case study, the essence and dynamics of the development of populism in the UK are determined, and the degree of influence of populism on modern British domestic policy is determined. The author concludes that the main support for populist politicians comes from people who are «losers from globalization», who are the key electorate of the Conservative party of Great Britain. The current state of development of populist forces in the United Kingdom is based on the appeal of the Conservative party to the key problems of British society: health, climate change, etc. The conclusion about the continuing triumph of populist forces in the UK is based on the victory of the Conservative party in the parliamentary elections in 2019, when the party's leader B. Johnson actively used the populist narrative in the election campaign. The author also concludes that the electorate is shifting away from the populist forces represented by the United Kingdom Independence Party in favor of the Conservative party. This research adds to the previous knowledge about the development of legal populism in the European Union and, in particular, in the UK, and also allows you to form an idea of the role and place of legal populism in modern domestic politics in the UK.

Separation of Powers in the United Nations System?

This article contends that separation of powers offers a mitigating force in answering questions about the limits of the authority of the UN’s primary organs and provides a tool through which one can identify where the rule of law is under threat. Whether or not one agrees that separation of powers as such has legal applicability to the UN in a strict sense, there is value in casting the separation of powers lens over the organization as it operates now. This exercise is worthwhile not just for posterity but also because evolution of law ought to be carefully monitored, particularly at a time when regard for the fundamental norms of international law are subject to increasing derision and even direct challenge. That contemporary political tensions have slowed the Security Council from its earlier activism is precisely why this article is timely, because it is in these times that institutional memory gets lost, the boundaries of authority blur, and populist narratives bring the rule of law under threat.

Three waves of hate speech spreading faster than the pandemic in Malaysia: An analyses of outgroup populist narratives and hate speech during the COVID-19

Societal responses in disquietude circumstances during the corona virus (COVID-19) has been diverse, choosing to express themselves by engaging in online hate speech depending on the locality and pre-existing state of affairs of individual nation states. This exercise argues that there were three waves of hate speech in Malaysia during the COVID-19 pandemic. The first was a nationalistic form narrative targeting the mainland Chinese. The second one was in the form of defending the ummah because the Tabligh cluster was a large gathering which caused a significant number of infections during the initial stages of the pandemic. The last one was against the global ummah , defending the sovereign state and other Malaysians from being infected by foreign and migrant workers, especially the Rohingya refugees. We argue that they are all not in contradictory of each other, but in actual fact, glued by populist narratives of local leaders. The relativist approach, using the qualitative content analysis method was adopted to better understand the underlying factors which led to these manifestations of hate captured online and sometimes its spillover effects expressed in real life. This study concludes that there is an abstract corelation between populist exclusionary statements by political leaders and the responding hate speech sentiments being shared online during the pandemic. Keywords: Malaysian politics, political communication, political science, refugees

When disinformation makes sense: Contextualizing the war on coal in Appalachian Kentucky

Recent scholarship indicates that populist rhetoric can profoundly shape commonsense understandings of global energy crises. While scholars often depict rural, working‐class communities as objects of right‐wing disinformation, posttruths, and alternative facts, how rural communities interpret or experience populist narratives is far from adequately understood. This research examines the recent coal industry recession in coal‐producing areas of Appalachian Kentucky, which contributed to ten thousand job losses since 2010. Amid the downturn, politicians and pro‐coal lobby groups riled the public by blaming the recession on an alleged “war on coal.” This article illustrates how neoliberal disinformation underpins war‐on‐coal narratives claiming that deregulating industry is the only way communities can save the industry and access economic well‐being. Drawing from qualitative interviews, participant observation, and discourse analysis, I explore how war‐on‐coal disinformation becomes a commonsense explanation for many dealing with coal industry recession. While findings suggest that the war on coal “makes sense” for many living in coal‐mining communities, this does not indicate an indeterminate embrace of the industry or pro‐coal rhetoric. Communities negotiate commonsense narratives against complicated relationships with the industry, the many dangers of mining, and the challenges coal poses for alternative economic futures.

The Russians are Laughing! The Russians are Laughing! How Russian Diplomats Employ Humour in Online Public Diplomacy

ABSTRACT In recent years, diplomats have increasingly employed humour online. This study sought to understand why diplomats use humour on Twitter and to investigate whether humour can serve as a public diplomacy resource. The study adopted the prism of “the digitalisation of public diplomacy”, which asserts that the norms and logics of the digital society have altered diplomats’ working routines. Employing advertising humour typologies, the study analysed humorous tweets published by the Russian Embassy to the United Kingdom. Results suggest that by adopting a humorous and abrasive tone, and resonating with populist narratives, the Embassy was able to craft a unique iBrand online. This iBrand also depicted Russia as a confident world leader whose diplomacy is blunt and understandable to “common” people. Humour also enabled the Embassy to summon the attention of social media users, set the media agenda and identify the values that underscore Russia’s image.

Interviewing a right-wing populist leader during the 2019 EU elections: Conflictual situations and equivocation beyond borders

Populist leaders and their radical policies attract the interest of the media across borders. The aim of the current article is to uncover whether interviews centered on one populist leader, but involving interviewers located in different European countries, lead to the same production of populist equivocation across the EU. In addition, two types of journalistic elements that can explain potential differences are investigated: the broad interactions between the media and politicians in a given country, or the reporters belonging to a specific media segment such as the tabloid press or public broadcasters. The research is based on interviews given by Viktor Orbán during the 2019 EU election campaign. Critical discourse analysis is carried out to investigate the equivocal populist narratives produced.

Neoliberal postfeminism—or some other sexier thing: gender and populism in the Spanish context

The project of developing a contemporary critical populism requires us to discriminate between uncritical populisms that ultimately reinforce unequal social relations, and popular discourses capable of generating counterhegemonic projects. In the field of popular feminisms, this means discriminating between the pseudo-feminist distortions that saturate popular culture and the feminisms that are radically committed to social justice. From this point of view, what has been called neoliberal feminism or postfeminism are clear examples of culturally populist feminisms can be developed in decidedly uncritical ways. As a new populist narrative, neoliberal postfeminism, has gobbled up feminism to regurgitate it as some other thing, which is sexier and more profitable in political, commercial and symbolical terms, and which adapts the rhetoric of neoliberal entrepreneurial subjectivities – free, empowered, sovereign of themselves and their choices – to these new post-recessionary times of popularised feminism. Against this, and with a particular focus on the Spanish context, this paper makes an intersectional case for a truly critical popular/populist feminism, capable of normalising the values of equality, justice, diversity, wellbeing and freedom, as well as of developing a progressive social project for everyone.