‘Populism’ has become ever more ubiquitous in political analysis, to the extent that ‘populism studies’ appears on course
to establishing itself as a field of research in its own right. This article warns about the dangers of such a development. Taking a
discourse theoretical approach as our starting point – but also critically engaging with this tradition’s contribution to the hype about
populism – we suggest that ‘populism studies’ (and the preoccupation with populism this field embodies) risks reifying populism by focusing
on populism as a phenomenon ‘as such’, and through an over-reliance on the concept of populism to approach
that phenomenon. This, we argue, hampers a nuanced and contextualized understanding of the exact role populism plays in different populist
politics. This is not a call for abandoning the concept of populism altogether, but a call for de-centring the concept and for moving beyond
academia’s ‘populist moment’.
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2024. Populism of the Privileged: On the Use of Underdog Identities by Comparatively Privileged Groups. Political Studies 72:3 ► pp. 1005 ff.
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2023. Bound to fail? Assessing contemporary left populism. Constellations 30:3 ► pp. 290 ff.
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2023. The Populist Challenge to International Relations: Concept-Stretching, Methodological Nationalism and the Omission of Popular Sovereignty. In The Inter- and Transnational Politics of Populism, ► pp. 25 ff.
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2022. Beyond Duterte: Conceptualizing a Research Agenda of Populism Research in the Philippines. Philippine Political Science Journal 43:1 ► pp. 57 ff.
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2022. Populist performance(s) in contemporary Greek rap music. Popular Music 41:3 ► pp. 313 ff.
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2022. The Role of Experts in Populist Politics: Toward a Post-foundational Approach. In Populism and Science in Europe, ► pp. 43 ff.
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2022. The fantasmatic narrative of ‘sustainable development’. A political analysis of the 2030 Global Development Agenda. Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space 40:1 ► pp. 241 ff.
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De Cleen, Benjamin, Jana Goyvaerts, Nico Carpentier, Jason Glynos & Yannis Stavrakakis
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 20 october 2024. 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.
