At the centre of populism is a problem of meaning. We could simply say it is a semiotic problem, but I would like to go further, and say that it’s a cognitive problem, one intrinsic to the human nervous system. It is a characteristic of our species that becomes highly active and significant in group action at certain social and historical conjunctures. The problem is the meaning of the word people, which on most accounts is centrally important for making out what the phenomenon called “populism” is about. It is unhelpful to say the word is meaningless or vague, because clearly something is going on in the minds of its users and their hearers. That something is not simply about denoting an entity; it is about activating a mental effect.
Carroll, Lewis. 1871. Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There. London: Macmillan. See also: [URL], based on the 1896 edition.
Chilton, Paul. 1994. “La plaie qu’il convient de fermer …” Les métaphores du discours raciste. Journal of Pragmatics 21 (6): 583–619.
Chilton, Paul. 1996. Security Metaphors. Geneva: Peter Lang.
Chilton, Paul. 2004. Analysing Political Discourse. London: Routledge.
Chilton, Paul. 2014. Language, Space and Mind. Cambridge University Press.
Chilton, Paul. 2017 forthcoming. Toward a neuro-cognitive model of socio-political discourse, and an application to the populist discourse of Donald Trump. Langage et société: 160–161.
Gallese, Vittorio. 2009. Mirror neurons, embodied simulation, and the neural basis of social identification. Psychoanalytic Dialogues 191: 519–536.
Gallese, Vittorio. 2013. Mirror neurons and art. In Art and the Senses, edited by F. Bacci & D. Melcher, pp. 441–9. Oxford University Press.
Gallese, Vittorio. 2016. The Multimodal Nature of Visual Perception: Facts and Speculations. Gestalt Theory 38 (2/3): 127–140.
Fillmore, Charles J.1982. Frame semantics. In Linguistics in the Morning Calm, Linguistic Society of Korea, pp. 111–37. Seoul: Hanshin Publishing Company.
Gallie, Walter B.1964. Essentially Contested Concepts. In W. B. Gallie, Philosophy and the Historical Understanding, pp. 157–191. London: Chatto & Windus.
Hart, Christopher J.2010. Critical Discourse Analysis and Cognitive Science: New Perspectives on Immigration Discourse. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Hart, Christopher2015. Viewpoint in linguistic discourse: Space and evaluation in news reports of political protests. Critical Discourse Studies 12 (3):238–260.
Hart, Christopher2016. The visual basis of linguistic meaning and its implications for critical discourse analysis: integrating cognitive linguistic and multimodal methods. Discourse and Society 3(27): 335–50.
Isenberg, Nancy, D. Silbersweig, A. Engelien, S. Emmerich, K. Malavade, B. Beattie, A. C. Leon, & E. Stern. 1999. Linguistic threat activates the human amygdala. Proceedings of the National Academy. of Sciciences USA 961: 10456–10459.
Johnson, Mark. 1987. The Body in the Mind. University of Chicago Press.
Kaal, Bertie. 2017. Worldview and Social Practice: A Discourse-Space \Approach to Political Text Analysis. PhD Thesis, Vrije Univesiteit Amsterdam.
Kopytowska, Monika. 2015a. Ideology of “here and now”. Mediating distance in television news. Critical Discourse Studies 12(3): 347–365.
Kopytowska, Monika. 2015b. Covering conflict: between universality and cultural specificity in news discourse genre and journalistic style. International Review of Pragmatics 71: 308–339.
Laclau, Ernesto & Chantal Mouffe. 1985. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. London: Verso.
Mudde, Cas. 2002. The Ideology of the Extreme Right. Manchester University Press.
Mudde, Cas. 2007. Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe. Cambridge University Press.
Müller, Jan-Werner. 2016. What is Populism? Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Pulvermuller, Friedemann. 2013. How neurons make meaning: brain mechanisms for embodied and abstract semantics. Cognitive Scences 17(9): 458–70.
Wodak, Ruth. 2015. The Politics of Fear: What Right-wing Populist Discourses Mean. London: Sage.
2024. Who are the ‘real’ people? The concept of relational popular identity and the self-identification of populist voters in Poland. International Sociology 39:6 ► pp. 672 ff.
Wang, Xiaomei, Andrew South, Brett Hashimoto & Clifton Farnsworth
2024. Six Connotations of Sustainability in Civil and Construction Engineering: A Corpus Linguistics Study. Sustainability 16:15 ► pp. 6271 ff.
GOKCEKUYU, Ertugrul
2023. A Bibliometric Analysis of Populism in Turkey. OPUS Toplum Araştırmaları Dergisi 20:55 ► pp. 550 ff.
2023. How to build a “Dream” in political speech? A critical discourse analysis of the discursive construction of the Chinese Dream speech. Critical Arts 37:3 ► pp. 95 ff.
2023. Sovereignty in Political Discourses of the European Populist Radical Right: The Right of the People and the Right of the Peoples. In Sovereignty in Conflict [Palgrave Studies in European Union Politics, ], ► pp. 211 ff.
Alekseev, Alexander
2024.
The (changing) concept of democracy in (transforming) European populist radical right discourses: the case of Polish
Law and Justice
. Journal of Contemporary European Studies► pp. 1 ff.
Helal, Fethi
2022. ‘The people want …: ’ the populist specter in the Tunisian President’s inaugural speech. Critical Discourse Studies 19:3 ► pp. 233 ff.
Keating, John
2021. Populist discourse and active metaphors in the 2016 US presidential elections. Intercultural Pragmatics 18:4 ► pp. 499 ff.
Stopfner, Maria
2021. Just thank God for Donald Trump – Dialogue practices of populists and their supporters before and after taking office. Journal of Pragmatics 186 ► pp. 308 ff.
Westberg, Gustav
2021. Affective rebirth: Discursive gateways to contemporary national socialism. Discourse & Society 32:2 ► pp. 214 ff.
Anna De Fina & Alexandra Georgakopoulou
2020. The Cambridge Handbook of Discourse Studies,
Demata, Massimiliano
2020. Populism and Nationalism in Jeremy Corbyn’s Discourse. In Discursive Approaches to Populism Across Disciplines, ► pp. 253 ff.
Li, Jianing & Min-Hsin Su
2020. Real Talk About Fake News: Identity Language and Disconnected Networks of the US Public’s “Fake News” Discourse on Twitter. Social Media + Society 6:2
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 9 january 2025. 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.