Populist Research Articles

Introduction: ‘The Rise of the Far Right in Spain and Portugal’: A new chapter in Iberian politics?

This introductory article to the Special Issue on ‘The Rise of the Far Right in Spain and Portugal’, explores the far right’s ascent in the two countries within a broader European and global context, where nationalist and populist movements have gained significant momentum. It provides a brief overview of far-right politics in both countries and traces the legacy of authoritarian regimes under Franco in Spain and Salazar in Portugal. It examines the contemporary resurgence of far-right parties, such as Vox and Se Acabó la Fiesta (SALF) (‘The party is over’) in Spain and Chega in Portugal. The analysis explores the sociopolitical factors driving this phenomenon, including economic anxiety, national identity concerns, and reactions against globalization and immigration, and compares the factors driving the emergence of these parties in the two countries. The article introduces the chapters and interviews that follow. The introduction concludes by considering the implications of this far-right ascendancy for the future of democracy and political stability in the Iberian peninsula and beyond.

Beyond Binaries: The Complexity of Populist Politics in Historical and Contemporary Contexts

Beyond Binaries: The Complexity of Populist Politics in Historical and Contemporary Contexts

More than mercy: towards a better affective compromise in the Catholic pastoral response to transness

ABSTRACT Pope Francis’ pastoral response to trans people represents a compromise between his negative-affective political stance towards transness, and his positive-affective theology of pastoral welcome. By reducing away transness to sickness or sin, he can welcome trans people as individuals in a depoliticized personal sphere apart from the political – at the cost of a reductive ‘domestication’ of trans people, and the reproduction of right-wing populist politics evoked by his own negative-affective political transphobia. This paper argues for a better compromise, which enables positive-affective attitudes specifically in and amidst negative-affect, enabling trans people to be welcomed without reduction. It does this by reading Francis as championing a utopianism similar to that of José Esteban Muñoz. It argues that his recovery of a Franciscan ethic of self-subjection gestures towards an unimagined relationality in which trans people can be welcomed amidst the tensions of the present, and against theopolitical transphobia.

Populist politicians’ rhetoric in ‘Private’ communication: Evidence from a citizens’ enquiry experiment in Germany

Populist politicians’ rhetoric in ‘Private’ communication: Evidence from a citizens’ enquiry experiment in Germany

The haunting melody of loss in the racist imagination

This article aims to explore the appeal of racist narratives and how they are used in populist politics to manipulate and exploit, leading to a rise in xenophobia and race hate crimes. Beneath the surface of the rhetoric is a predictable constellation of thoughts and feelings that create a racist imagination whose emotional atmosphere is melancholic and potentially murderous. The entangling of grief with racism is exploited through political messaging which aims to create false narratives of hope that attempt to bring to life a regressive fantasy of a return to an idealised past, into the material reality of the present by racialising others and treating them with impunity. I consider the extent to which we can learn about the challenges of engaging with these forces by turning to the experience of working clinically with these states of mind to translate a psychoanalytic sensibility to the political, one that is sensitive to the complexity and conflation of race, class and biography.

CONJUNCTURES OF DEMOCRACY EROSION

The paper aims to examine and understand the recent developments in Brazilian democracy in a sociological perspective. It offers an analysis of the conjunctural preconditions for the recent rise of authoritarian populism, presenting ways in which Brazil can be viewed as paradigm of democratic erosion and/or resilience. The article describes the foundational premises that made the development of contemporary democracies possible, and it proceeds from this description to explain how features common to authoritarian populist movements in Brazil and elsewhere are detrimental to these premises. It is argued that democracies are likely to thrive when welfare provisions and access to human rights are open to increasing sectors of the population, generating an inclusionary citizenship effect. The political polarization regarding the Brazilian welfare system and the discourse against international human rights, culminated in the weakening of the Brazilian welfare net and setbacks in the recognition of human rights by courts. These processes preceded, and were aggravated by, the rise of authoritarian populism in Brazil, generating an exclusionary view of citizenship that tended to intensify social conflict, with increasing militarization at both governmental and social levels. Arguably, the absence of warfare or an imminent warfare threat in the most recent democratic transition in Brazil reduced the capacity of welfare and constitutional human rights provisions to limit the influence of the military on democracy. While the efforts to build up the welfare system and protect human rights are still ongoing, the militarization element remains latent, posing a constant threat to democratic consolidation in Brazil.

Authoritarianism, Governmentality and the COVID-19 Response

ABSTRACT The COVID-19 pandemic raises important questions about biopolitics and governmentality, not least, what are the limitations of governing through not governing too much? Important questions concern the role of the state, citizenship, privacy, and concerns about populist movements and personal freedom. The pandemic challenges the idea that liberal government is the most effective way to care for populations while raising the spectre of an underlying authoritarianism. Indeed, the triangle of governance, sovereignty and discipline remains the most effective way to conceptualise the current situation. The article will explore how authoritarian elements underlie liberal governmentality while noting the paradox that this might not necessarily be such a bad thing if it enhances pastoral care for the population.

Stoking hate: configuring loss in explanations of racially aggravated crime

Why do some people racially abuse others? In this article, I revisit fieldwork conducted in the early 2000s in Stoke-on-Trent in North Staffordshire with people implicated in racially harassment and racially aggravated crimes. I consider how Keval’s (2024) concept of a ‘haunting melody of loss’ can be used to capture the psychosocial dynamics apparent among people who directed their animosity towards migrant and minority ethnic groups in the midst of their own experiences of loss of face, reputation, health, financial security, control and a sense of community. The article contemplates how such dynamics subsequently became more pervasive features of the British political land, capitalised on by parties of the political right and far-right in the decade that followed. It also invites psychosocial reflections on the harms caused to migrant and minority ethnic populations demonised, misleadingly, as to blame for the losses of encountered by large sections of the ethnic majority white population and notes the enduring dangers cultivated by misdirecting the grief of loss posed by populist politics.

Ideology as a Commodity. Authoritarianism in a Populist Form

The subject of the article is the phenomenon of successes of alt-right parties and their leaders. The contemporary rise of radical populism and its geopolitical scope are reflected in the discourse of its new features. Such a discussion offers a wealth of concepts and notions. Most of them describe practices of “dismantling” democracy, threats of dictatorship or even fascism. The presented analysis focuses on the question of the ideological identity of cases that can be specified as consolidated populism. The thesis I advance shows that the source of the durability of electoral support is a specific narrative based on a thinking style which Zygmunt Bauman termed “retrotopia.” This popular world view functions as a legitimizing myth, which the process of limiting democracy hides in the form of culture war. I conclude that the concept of retrotopia as a popularistic ideology adds more to the distinction between today’s different varieties of populist movements and political leaders.

The Blasphemous Divide: News Media Coverage of Politics and Religion in the Philippines

ABSTRACT The news media use the logic of us-versus-them divide in covering politics and religion, but this case alone is insufficient a precondition to label the media as populist. Rather, it is the extensive and unchallenged accounts of official sources including populist politicians that reinforce the pro-populist tendency of media. The article examines the way the news media outlets cover the rhetorical exchanges between the Rodrigo Duterte administration and the church especially the Catholic Church in the Philippines. Based on textual analysis of news articles, the narratives of politics and religion are presented: “hypocritical church” mainstreams the conflict-centered pronouncements of the political leader against the church, “political church” covers the anti-populist but also the nostalgic oratory of the Catholic Church, and “alternative voice” underscores the views of faith-based formations on the fringe of dominant media sources. The narratives of politics and religion matter to the contentious relationship between journalism and democracy as they characterize the capability of news media to amplify, interrogate, and defy populist politics.

Populist Politics in Pakistan: Case Study of Pakistan Tehreek-I- Insaf Regime

The advent of right-wing populist parties in Europe and America has given populist politics in South Asia more clout. There has been a lot of discussion among political analysts about how the rise of populist governments around the world is likely to undermine established democracies and eventually impede democratic advancement in developing countries. The research paper gives deep insights of populist regime of PTI and shedding light on frequent democratic decline in the country owing to this style of politics and also exploring that democracy has been inflicted by the populist politics is critical discourse of contemporary times and particularly in the context of Pakistan. The paper finds out that owing to its populist politics, the PTI government subverted the process of democratic development in the country, stifled the dissenting voices and curtailed the freedom of media.

IDENTITY POLITICS IN PROGRESS: A CRITICAL EXAMINATION OF SYAFII MAARIF’S IDEAS

In Indonesia’s political landscape, there is a current tension between identity politics and populist ideologies. Identity politics is a broad term used to describe political movements and actions related to religious identities and institutions, particularly in an Islamic setting. However, it raises concern about how we will investigate identity politics as part of a contextual, constituent-based approach to politics. The current study investigates Syafii Maarif’s political views. By employing a social hermeneutic approach and interpretive methodologies, this thought is elaborated in this study. The investigation reveals three primary elements of identity politics based on Maarif’s analysis: 1) ethnicity, 2) religion, and 3) political ideology. According to Maarif, any political activity that has these three characteristics is intrinsically saturated with identity politics. As a result, Muslim politics are often limited and narrowly defined. To address this constraint, the findings of this study advocate the actualization of the notion of identity politics to make space for populist politics. While religion, ethnicity, and political ideology coexist, a populist approach is still relevant in Islamic politics, persuasion methods, and specific constituency-based political connections.

Engaging Populism? The Popularity of European Populist Political Parties on Facebook and Twitter, 2010–2020

ABSTRACT Scholars have argued that populists disproportionately benefit from social media, and there is evidence that they attract more engagement than other politicians and parties in several countries. We systematically evaluate the relationship between populism and online popularity using a novel dataset covering over four hundred parties active on Facebook and Twitter in thirty European countries between 2010 and 2020. We use Bayesian hierarchical models to assess the relationship between populism and three types of engagement on each platform. We find that populists received more engagement than other parties on Facebook, but there was no consistent relationship on Twitter. Among these parties, only right-wing populist parties had any widespread advantages. Our results highlight considerable heterogeneity across countries and over time, providing new insight into the scope and scale of populists’ online popularity. This includes evidence that left-wing and centrist parties attracted more engagement in a handful of countries. We evaluate several explanations for these results, finding that negative macroeconomic indicators and increased migration are positively correlated with populist engagement, while internet and social media adoption have mixed impacts that benefit right-wing populists.

The syntactic position of the “people” in the political discourse of left and right populism (NLP-based syntactic analysis experience)

This paper attempts to measure populism in English-language speeches of politicians using computational linguistics methods. The relevance of this study is related not only to the rise of populism in the world and the importance of understanding the mechanisms of political discourse, but also to the lack of linguistic research in the context of corpus studies. Most of the methods proposed to date require significant resources or suffer from structural limitations, especially when they rely heavily on the human annotation process to analyze extensive corpus data. The material for the study was public speeches and interviews of right-wing populist politician and 45th President of the United States Donald Trump and political rhetoric of left-wing populist politician Senator Bernie Sanders. The corpus analysis was based on transcripts downloaded from The American Presidency Project and Miller Center websites. The syntactic position of key lexical units is determined using a comprehensive method based on dependency grammar combined with natural language processing (NLP) and van Leeuwen’s linguistic theory. The application of natural language processing methods confirms the assumption that the frequency of politicians’ reference to the people is not the only relevant indicator for measuring people-centrism in (populist) political discourse, as usually proposed in the political science literature. The results of the study indicate that there is no predominant role of the people in the discourse of Trump and Sanders. In most cases, the people appear in a complementary or adjunct position, indicating their secondary importance in their rhetoric. Given that populism implies proximity to the people and is positioned as “vox populi” – “the voice of the people”, it can be assumed that for both Trump and Sanders, addressing the people is only a way to achieve their political goals.

The shift to authenticity: a framework for analysis of political truth claims

Abstract It is often claimed that political disinformation is more abundant than ever, that populists are particularly prone to lying, and that we live in an era of post-truth or epistemic relativism. Contrary to these views, we interpret this historical trend as a shift from objective to authentic forms of political truth claims. We develop a diagnostic framework that captures different types of political truth claims and their distinct elements. This framework enables interrogation and understanding of the current state of epistemic contestation and change. The rise of both populist and deliberative approaches to democracy, which we use as key examples, are indicators of a gradual shift towards a greater importance of authenticity in the public sphere. We nuance this proposition by distinguishing between different forms of authenticity employed by populist and deliberative politics: communicative authenticity in deliberative politics and original and personal authenticity in populist politics.

Producerist populist attitudes and electoral support for populism in the USA and Western Europe

Abstract This article aims to clarify the importance of producerism as a socio-economic dimension of contemporary populism. Building on the existing literature about the supply of producerism by populist politicians, we adopt a demand-side perspective to investigate whether producerism consistently manifests among the general public and how it may affect populist voting. We draw on an original set of items and a cross-national survey conducted in Western Europe and the USA to identify clusters of citizens with distinct left-wing and right-wing producerist attitudes. Our findings show that such attitudes are no longer exclusive to American politics but also found in Western Europe, albeit with country-specific modifications. Moreover, producerist citizens show distinct socio-cultural and economic attitudes and are more likely to support populist parties and candidates, particularly on the right side of the political spectrum.

Right-wing and left-wing populism in the EU and their impact on democratic processes

Contemporary European populism, which has become particularly widespread in the last decade of the 21st century, is a complex and multifaceted phenomenon whose impact on democratic institutions has not been fully studied. The aim of this research was to conduct a comprehensive analysis of the ideological foundations, electoral successes, and impact of populist movements on the functioning of democratic institutions in the EU. The study employed a comparative analysis method to identify the differences between right-wing and left-wing populism, an analysis of the programmatic documents of populist parties, a statistical analysis of electoral data, and the activities of populist governments. The main results of the study demonstrated the ambivalent nature and multivariate manifestations of populism in contemporary Europe. Significant ideological differences were identified between right-wing and left-wing populism, particularly in interpreting the concept of “the people”, the perception of fundamental societal divisions, and approaches to economic policy. An analysis of electoral successes demonstrated a growing support for right-wing populists in many EU countries, while left-wing populist forces showed a more ambiguous dynamic. The study of the impact of populist governments on the functioning of democratic institutions revealed serious challenges to the rule of law in Central and Eastern European countries, but less radical consequences in Southern Europe. It was established that the activities of right-wing populist governments in Hungary and Poland led to a systematic undermining of the principles of the rule of law through restrictions on the independence of the judiciary, freedom of the media, and the rights of the opposition. In contrast, left-wing populist governments in Greece and Spain primarily focused on socioeconomic reforms, avoiding the systematic undermining of democratic institutions. The research results revealed a growing trend towards polarisation of the political spectrum in many EU countries, which creates new challenges for the functioning of democratic institutions and maintaining the unity of the European Union. It was established that the impact of populism on democratic processes in the EU is contextually dependent and varies depending on national characteristics and the ideological orientation of populist forces. The research results can be used by public and governmental organisations and programs that promote political education and a critical approach to political choice

Intercultural Relations and Attitudes towards Immigrants – The Case of Slovenia

Abstract The paper analyses public opinion towards immigrants in Slovenia, especially in terms of openness and acceptance. It begins by providing some key theoretical background on the topic and then draws on selected empirical data from the European Social Survey from a cross-temporal perspective. According to survey data, respondents in Slovenia have become more open towards immigrants in recent years. However, there are significant tensions between those who are more open to and those who oppose immigration. This divide between immigration supporters and opponents is a persistent social tension that characterises political orientations in Slovenia in general. Despite the shifting public opinion towards greater tolerance, right-wing populist politicians may still target and mobilise those who remain sceptical or hostile towards immigrants.

Between the People and the Populists: Safeguarding Judicial Independence in a Changing World

This article examines the impact of social media on the dissemination and influence of populist ideology, as well as the strategies populist movements have employed to erode the independence of the judiciary, including public resistance, constitutional amendments, and the expansion of the judiciary. This article analyzes strategies and solutions designed to preserve and safeguard judicial independence. The in question strategy includes strengthening the legal and institutional framework, cultivating a culture that upholds the supremacy of law, increasing judicial accountability, and encouraging collaborative dialogue between judicial institutions. This paper employs a case study methodology to examine the resistance of the judiciary to populist pressures in South Africa, Colombia, and Indonesia. This article’s conclusion demonstrates that the court faces a dilemma between the importance of maintaining judicial independence from populist interests over legal requirements and the necessity of popular opinion for public legitimacy. In the context of populism, this is a challenge for judicial independence. Therefore, this paper encourages collaboration between academics, practitioners, and policymakers to safeguard judicial independence in an increasingly interconnected and rapidly developing world.

Discontent, Populism, or the Revenge of the “Places That Don’t Matter”? Analysis of the Rise of the Far-Right in Portugal

This research delves into the territorial nuances of political populism, examining Portugal’s CHEGA party as a case study. Through a comprehensive analysis of survey data and correlational studies, this study reveals that discontent, manifesting in the rise of populist movements, is intricately linked to the economic decline and neglect of specific regions. The unexpected success of CHEGA is not merely a socio-economic phenomenon but a product of deeply rooted territorial dynamics. The findings underscore the importance of adopting place-sensitive development policies that address the unique challenges of overlooked territories, steering clear of traditional compensatory measures. The urgency to counteract long-term economic decline, industrial decay, and brain drain demands innovative strategies that tap into latent economic potential and provide tangible opportunities. As we confront the rise of anti-establishment voting threatening European unity, this research advocates for a paradigm shift towards place-sensitive policies to navigate the crossroads of discontent and foster a more resilient, inclusive future.