A meaningless buzzword or a meaningful label? How do Spanish politicians use populismo and
populista on Twitter?
While there is substantial research on populism and populist discourse, research on discourses about populism is
still developing. Scholars highlight the need to understand why populism is so widely used and what the rapid
spread of this socio-political keyword tells us about political and media discourse. The main objective of this paper is therefore
to understand discourses on populism. To this aim, we examine for what purpose the terms populism and
populist – henceforth populis* – are used and what they allow to do in discourse. Based on
the analysis of a corpus of tweets produced by political figures in Spain, we show that, contrary to previous analyses,
populis* does not have the sole function of being a randomly used buzzword or of proposing an anti-populist
discourse. Indeed, our analysis shows that political actors resort to different patterns of use of populis*
depending on their political and communicative strategy.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Background
- 2.1
Populism, from empty signifier to socio-political keyword
- 2.2The Spanish case study
- 2.3Political communication on Twitter
- 3.Data and method
- 4.Analysis
- 4.1Overview of the occurrences of populis* in the corpus
- 4.2What happens when Spanish politicians talk about populismo(s) and populista(s) on
Twitter?
- The abstract use of populis*
- The concrete use of populis*
-
Populis* in the reported speech of an opponent
- 5.Discussion and conclusion
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
-
References
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This list is based on CrossRef data as of 7 august 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
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