Article published in:
Right-Wing Populism in Europe & USA: Contesting Politics & Discourse beyond ‘Orbanism’ and ‘Trumpism’Edited by Ruth Wodak and Michał Krzyżanowski
[Journal of Language and Politics 16:4] 2017
► pp. 523–534
Discourse theory in populism research
Three challenges and a dilemma
Yannis Stavrakakis | Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
‘Populism’ constitutes one of the most hotly debated topics in contemporary politics and academia. The concept is used to describe a series of heterogeneous phenomena: on the one hand, Donald Trump, BREXIT supporters and the European Far Right in government or in opposition; on the other, Bernie Sanders, the so-called Pink Tide of left-wing populist governments in Latin America and inclusionary populisms in the European South. Recent developments have undoubtedly generated significant research material and a new impetus to the scope and impact of populism research. However, major challenges have also been created, requiring urgent attention. This paper discusses three such challenges (reflexivity, definition, typology) from a discursive perspective. Starting from a double hermeneutic focus on the interaction between academic theorization and political orientation, it highlights the importance of discourse theory in populism research and concludes by formulating a crucial theoretico-political dilemma populism researchers are increasingly facing today.
Keywords: discourse, populism, reflexivity, typology, Essex School
Article outline
- 1.First challenge: Critical reflexivity
- 2.Second challenge: Minimal definition
- 3.Third challenge: Rigorous typology
- 4.To conclude: The dilemma
-
References
Published online: 12 June 2017
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.17025.sta
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.17025.sta
References
Barthes, Roland
1979 “Lecture in Inauguration of the Chair of Literary Semiology”, Collège de France, January 7 1977 October 81: 3–16.
Butler, Judith
2017 “Trump is Emancipating Unbridled Hatred”, Zeit Online 28 October 2016 Accessed 1 March 2017. http://www.zeit.de/kultur/2016-10/judith-butler-donald-trump-populism-interview/komplettansicht
Canovan, Margaret
1981 Populism. London: Junction Books.
Collins, Robert
1989 .“The Originality Trap: Richard Hofstadter on Populism”. The Journal of American History 76(1): 150–167. 
De Cleen, Benjamin and Yannis Stavrakakis
2017 “Distinctions and Articulations: Discourse Theory and the Study of Populism and Nationalism”. Javnost – The Public forthcoming.
De la Torre, Carlos
(ed.) 2014 The Promise and Perils of Populism: Global Perspectives. The University of Kentucky Press.
Diamandouros, Nikiforos
1994 “Cultural Dualism and Political Change in Post-authoritarian Greece”. Working paper 50. Madrid: Instituto Juan March.
Dyrberg, Torben Bech
2006 “Radical and Plural Democracy: In Defence of Right/Left and Public Reason”. In Radical Democracy. Politics Between Abundance and Lack, ed. by Lars Tønder and Lasse Thomassen, 67–84. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Fraser, Nancy
2017 “Against Progressive Neoliberalism, A New Progressive Populism”, Dissent, January 28 2017 Accessed 1 March 2017. https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/nancy-fraser-against-progressive-neoliberalism-progressive-populism
Germani, Gino
1978 Authoritarianism, Fascism, and National Populism. New Brunswick: Transaction.
Gilman, Nils
2003 Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Habermas, Jurgen
2013 The Crisis of the European Union: A Response. Cambridge: Polity.
Hofstadter, Richard
1955 “The Folklore of Populism”. In The Age of Reform. New York: Vintage Books.
Krugman, Paul
2016 “Our Unknown Country”, New York Times 9 November 2016 Accessed 1 March 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/cp/opinion/election-night-2016/the-unknown-country.
Laclau, Ernesto
1977 Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory. London: NLR Books.
2005 On Populist Reason. London: Verso.
Laclau, Ernesto and Chantal Mouffe
[1985] 2001 Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (2nd ed.). London: Verso.
Latham, Michael
2000 Modernization as Ideology. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Latour, Bruno
2016 “Two Bubbles of Unrealism: Learning From the Tragedy of Trump”. Los Angeles Review of Books 17 November 2016 Accessed 1 March 2017. https://lareviewofbooks.org /article/two-bubbles-unrealism-learning-tragedy-trump/
Lipset, Seyour Martin
1960 Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics. New York: Doubleday.
Mouffe, Chantal
2016 “In Defense of Left-wing Populism”, The Conversation 29 April 2016 Accessed 1 March 2017. https://theconversation.com/in-defence-of-left-wing-populism-55869
Mudde, Cas and Cristobal Rovira Kaltwasser
(eds.) 2012 Populism in Europe and the Americas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
2013 “Exclusionary vs. Inclusionary Populism: Comparing Contemporary Europe and Latin America”. Government and Opposition 48(2): 147–174.
Nugent, Walter
[1963] 2013 The Tolerant Populists: Kansas Populism and Nativism. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Ostiguy, Pierre
2009 “The High-Low Political Divide: Rethinking Populism and Anti- Populism”. Kellogg Institute Committee on Concepts and Methods Working Paper Series 3601. Accessed 1 March 2017. http://nd.edu/~kellogg/publications/workingpapers/WPS/360.pdf
Panizza, Francisco
(ed.) 2005 Populism and the Mirror of Democracy. London: Verso.
Piketty, Thomas
2017 “Long Live Populism!”, Le Monde 17 January 2017 Accessed 1 March 2017. http://piketty.blog.lemonde.fr/2017/01/17/long-live-populism/
Pollack, Norman
1962 The Populist Response to Industrial America. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.
Stavrakakis, Yannis
2004 “Antinomies of Formalism: Laclau’s Theory of Populism and the Lessons from Religious Populism in Greece”. Journal of Political Ideologies 9(3): 253–267.
2014 “The Return of ‘the People’: Populism and Anti-Populism in the Shadow of the European Crisis”. Constellations 21(4): 505–517.
2016 “Debt Society Consolidated? Post-democratic Subjectivity and its Discontents”. In Henrietta Moore, Nicholas Long and Joanna Cook (eds) The State We’re In: Reflecting on Democracy’s Troubles, 167–189. Oxford: Berghahn Books.
2017 “Populism and Hegemony”. In Paul Taggart, Cristobal Róvira Kaltwasser, Paulina Ochoa Espejo and Pierre Ostiguy (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Populism, forthcoming. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Stavrakakis, Yannis and Giorgos Katsambekis
2014 “Left-wing Populism in the European Periphery: The Case of SYRIZA”. Journal of Political Ideologies 19(2): 119–142.
Stavrakakis, Yannis, Ioannis Andreadis and Giorgos Katsambekis
2016 “A New Populism Index at Work: Identifying Populist Candidates and Parties in the Contemporary Greek Context”. European Politics and Society, advance online publication.
Stavrakakis, Yannis, Giorgos Katsambekis, Alexandros Kioupkiolis, Thomas Siomos and Nikos Nikisianis
2017 “Extreme Right-wing Populism in Europe: Revisiting a Reified Association”. Critical Discourse Studies, advance online publication. .
.Vann Woodward, Comer
1981 “Who Are ‘the People’?”. The New Republic 16 May, 32–34.
Wodak, Ruth
2015 The Politics of Fear: What Right-Wing Populist Discourses Mean. London: Sage.
Cited by
Cited by 45 other publications
No author info given
2021.
In Political Identification in Europe: Community in Crisis?,
► pp. 1 ff.
Aiolfi, Théo
2022. Populism as a Transgressive Style.
Global Studies Quarterly 2:1
Baysha, Olga
2020.
In Discursive Approaches to Populism Across Disciplines,
► pp. 63 ff.
Capelos, Tereza & Alexia Katsanidou
2018. Reactionary Politics: Explaining the Psychological Roots of Anti Preferences in European Integration and Immigration Debates.
Political Psychology 39:6 ► pp. 1271 ff.
Casiraghi, Matteo C. M. & Margherita Bordignon
2022. The rhetorical contestation of populism in four European parliaments (2010–2020).
West European Politics ► pp. 1 ff.
Casiraghi, Matteo CM
2021. ‘You’re a populist! No, you are a populist!’: The rhetorical analysis of a popular insult in the United Kingdom, 1970–2018.
The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 23:4 ► pp. 555 ff.
Cossarini, Paolo
2021.
In Catalan Independence and the Crisis of Sovereignty,
► pp. 57 ff.
Custodi, Jacopo
2021. Nationalism and populism on the left: The case of Podemos.
Nations and Nationalism 27:3 ► pp. 705 ff.
De Cleen, Benjamin & Jason Glynos
2021. Beyond populism studies.
Journal of Language and Politics 20:1 ► pp. 178 ff.
De Cleen, Benjamin, Jason Glynos & Aurelien Mondon
2018. Critical research on populism: Nine rules of engagement.
Organization 25:5 ► pp. 649 ff.
Etl, Alex
2022. Liminal Populism—The Transformation of the Hungarian Migration Discourse.
Journal of Borderlands Studies 37:1 ► pp. 115 ff.
Fenton-Smith, Ben
2020.
In Discursive Approaches to Populism Across Disciplines,
► pp. 339 ff.
Font, Nuria, Paolo Graziano & Myrto Tsakatika
2021. Varieties of Inclusionary Populism? SYRIZA, Podemos and the Five Star Movement.
Government and Opposition 56:1 ► pp. 163 ff.
Grainger-Brown, Lucas
2021. Anti-populism in action: a case study of the Remain argument during the EU referendum.
Policy Studies ► pp. 1 ff.
Hamo, Michal, Zohar Kampf & Naama Weiss-Yaniv
2019. Populism as a keyword and as a meta-discursive resource for positioning in mediated political discourse.
Discourse, Context & Media 29 ► pp. 100283 ff.
Harvey, Andy
2021. Sport in the Novels of James Joyce: A Discourse Theoretical Approach.
Sport, Ethics and Philosophy ► pp. 1 ff.
Jacobs, Thomas
2018. The Dislocated Universe of Laclau and Mouffe: An Introduction to Post-Structuralist Discourse Theory.
Critical Review 30:3-4 ► pp. 294 ff.
Jetten, Jolanda, Frank Mols & Hema Preya Selvanathan
2020. How Economic Inequality Fuels the Rise and Persistence of the Yellow Vest Movement.
International Review of Social Psychology 33:1
Kefford, Glenn, Benjamin Moffitt & Annika Werner
2021. Populist Attitudes: Bringing Together Ideational and Communicative Approaches.
Political Studies ► pp. 003232172199774 ff.
Kettell, Steven & Peter Kerr
2020. From eating cake to crashing out: constructing the myth of a no-deal Brexit.
Comparative European Politics 18:4 ► pp. 590 ff.
Kim, Seongcheol
2021. Taking stock of the field of populism research: Are ideational approaches ‘moralistic’ and post-foundational discursive approaches ‘normative’?.
Politics ► pp. 026339572110070 ff.
Kranert, Michael
2019. Populist Elements in the Election Manifestoes of AfD and UKIP.
Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 67:3 ► pp. 265 ff.
Kranert, Michael
2020.
In Discursive Approaches to Populism Across Disciplines,
► pp. 3 ff.
Kranert, Michael
2020.
In Discursive Approaches to Populism Across Disciplines,
► pp. 31 ff.
Lamour, Christian
2021. Right-wing populist media events in schengen Europe.
Journal of Language and Politics
Panayotu, Panos
2021.
In Imagining Europe,
► pp. 117 ff.
Ragragio, Jefferson Lyndon D.
2021. Strongman, patronage and fake news.
Journal of Language and Politics 20:6 ► pp. 852 ff.
Salgado, Carolina & Paula Sandrin
2021.
In Financial Crisis Management and Democracy,
► pp. 265 ff.
Salgado, Susana & Yannis Stavrakakis
2019. Introduction: populist discourses and political communication in Southern Europe.
European Political Science 18:1 ► pp. 1 ff.
Sandrin, Paula
2021.
In Financial Crisis Management and Democracy,
► pp. 227 ff.
Schaefer, Johannes
2020.
In Populismus – Staat – Demokratie [Staat – Souveränität – Nation, ],
► pp. 179 ff.
Serafis, Dimitris, E. Dimitris Kitis & Stavros Assimakopoulos
2022. Sailing to Ithaka
.
Journal of Language and Politics 21:2 ► pp. 344 ff.
Sorensen, Lone
2021.
In Populist Communication,
► pp. 39 ff.
Stavrakakis, Yannis
2018. Paradoxes of Polarization: Democracy’s Inherent Division and the (Anti-) Populist Challenge.
American Behavioral Scientist 62:1 ► pp. 43 ff.
Stavrakakis, Yannis
2021. The (discursive) limits of (left) populism.
Journal of Language and Politics 20:1 ► pp. 162 ff.
Stefanowitsch, Anatol
2019.
Delivering a Brexit Deal to the British People: Theresa May as a Reluctant Populist.
Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 67:3 ► pp. 231 ff.
Stengel, Frank A., David B. MacDonald & Dirk Nabers
2019.
In Populism and World Politics,
► pp. 1 ff.
Stengel, Frank A., David B. MacDonald & Dirk Nabers
2019.
In Populism and World Politics,
► pp. 365 ff.
Stewart, Craig O.
2020. Populist linguistic tone in recent U.S. presidential campaign discourse: a DICTION analysis.
Communication Research Reports 37:1-2 ► pp. 11 ff.
Venizelos, Giorgos
2021. Populism or Nationalism? The ‘Paradoxical’ Non-Emergence of Populism in Cyprus.
Political Studies ► pp. 003232172198915 ff.
Venkov, Nikola A.
2020.
In Discursive Approaches to Populism Across Disciplines,
► pp. 199 ff.
Wodak, Ruth
2018. Vom Rand in die Mitte – „Schamlose Normalisierung“.
Politische Vierteljahresschrift 59:2 ► pp. 323 ff.
Zappettini, Franco
2021. The tabloidization of the Brexit campaign.
Journal of Language and Politics 20:2 ► pp. 277 ff.
Zienkowski, Jan & Ruth Breeze
2019.
In Imagining the Peoples of Europe [Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture, 83],
► pp. 1 ff.
ÖZBEY, Ebru Ece & Özgehan ŞENYUVA
2021. “ONLAR KALSIN, BİZ GİDİYORUZ!” BİRLEŞİK KRALLIK BAĞIMSIZLIK PARTİSİ’NİN SÖYLEMLERİNDE POPÜLİZM VE AVRUPA ŞÜPHECİLİĞİ.
Ankara Avrupa Calismalari Dergisi 20 ► pp. 119 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 19 april 2022. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.