Populism as a concept is elusive and has been connected to very different political movements. Generally, populism's connotations are rather negative and the term is often used pejoratively in the academic field as well. However, Ernesto Laclau has approached populism by arguing that populist reason is a manifestation of political logic in which group identification-formed through various signifiers such as 'the people', which are articulated as part of an 'equivalence chain'-eventually establishes political agency as a totality. This paper uses Laclau's articulation theory to analyse the public construction of contemporary populism in the Nordic countries of Sweden, Finland, Norway and Denmark. The analysis demonstrates that mainstream media frame populism rather negatively, although examples of the term's positive identification with 'the people' are available, especially in the tabloid media. Thus, the positive identification behind the forming of populist movements clashes with the media discourse that prioritises established journalistic views, practices and sources, making populism a 'floating signifier', i.e. a concept that has several meanings which are contested in various public discourses. A general pattern in the construction of populism in Northern European multi-party democracies can be discerned, thus identifying the central role of nationalist and nativist identifications in contingent populist articulations. However, the differences between the Nordic countries emphasise a context-driven approach.
The paper analyses political scandals connected to the contemporary populist parties of Denmark, Finland and Sweden. The dramaturgies of these scandals repeat the general patterns of political scandals identified in previous studies, but they also share special characteristics that make them a specific type of neo-populist scandal. The starting point of the typical neo-populist scandal occurs due to the moral transgression of a member of a populist movement, usually through the use of unacceptable language or behaviour; insulting non-native inhabitants or other minorities within the population. However, provocation and playing the role of the underdog are common strategies employed by populists, and a populist movement may even benefit a scandal, though the consequences of the scandal depend on the life phase of the movement and on the status of the member involved in the scandal. The moral transgressions and political consequences of neopopulist scandals may serve as an indicator of the condition liberal democracy enjoys but also reveal contextual differences in particular societies and their moral order.
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