The semantic drift: Images of populism in post‐war American historiography and their relevance for (European) political science

Jäger, Anton

doi:10.1111/1467-8675.12308

Cited by 33 publications

(19 citation statements)

References 41 publications

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“…Using the category of RWP requires a definition of 'populism', a term with a long and somewhat confused history (Jäger 2016). A widely accepted approach identifies a core definition of populism as an ideology in which the basic cleavage in society is between a 'pure people', and a 'corrupt elite', and where there is a belief that politics should be an expression of the will of the people (Mudde 2004(Mudde , 2007.…”

Section: Hobson and Niemeyer 2011)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Right-wing populism and the climate change agenda: exploring the linkages

Lockwood

2018

Environmental Politics

363

223

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Section: Hobson and Niemeyer 2011)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Right-wing populism and the climate change agenda: exploring the linkages

Lockwood

2018

Environmental Politics

363

223

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“…(The literature on nationalism, by contrast, has long been more self‐reflexive about its own history and about the construction of its object of analysis.) The lack of historical perspective has been remedied by some recent contributions to the conceptual history of the term ‘populism’ that situate the concept in the changing contexts in which it has been pressed into service (Houwen ; Jäger ; Jones ). Without seeking to make an original contribution to conceptual history myself, I point to ways in which the historical approach might be broadened to include the relation between populism and nationalism, and I gesture towards a twinned conceptual history that would follow the distinct trajectories of the two literatures but also trace their partial entanglement.…”

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confidence: 99%

Populism and nationalism

Brubaker

2019

Nations and Nationalism

228

124

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Few social science categories have been more heatedly contested in recent years than ‘populism’. One focus of debate concerns the relation between populism and nationalism. Criticising the tendency to conflate populism and nationalism, De Cleen and Stavrakakis argue for a sharp conceptual distinction between the two. They situate populist discourse on a vertical, and nationalist discourse on a horizontal axis. I argue that this strict conceptual separation cannot capture the productive ambiguity of populist appeals to ‘the people’, evoking at once plebs, sovereign demos and bounded community. The frame of reference for populist discourse is most fruitfully understood as a two‐dimensional space, at once a space of inequality and a space of difference. Vertical opposition to those on top (and often those on the bottom) and horizontal opposition to those outside are tightly interwoven, generally in such a way that economic, political and cultural elites are represented as being ‘outside’ as well as ‘on top’. The ambiguity and two‐dimensionality of appeals to ‘the people’ do not result from the conflation of populism and nationalism; they are a constitutive feature of populism itself, a practical resource that can be exploited in constructing political identities and defining lines of political opposition and conflict.

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“…A major point of contention has been that mainstream anti-populism constitutes a defence of a problematic status quo that lumps together left-wing and right-wing populist alternatives as one single threat to liberal democracy (e.g. Cannon 2018, 486;D'Eramo 2013;Jäger 2017;Katsambekis 2017;Stavrakakis et al 2017Stavrakakis et al , 2018. Others have argued that, even if the term populism is used in a derogatory fashion, discussing the radical right in terms of populism has turned attention away from these parties' nativism and authoritarianism (see Mudde 2017a, 2017b; Rydgren 2017), and has sometimes inadvertently confirmed the radical right's claim that they are indeed 'the representative of the people' (De Cleen et al forthcoming; Mondon 2017).…”

Section: Countering Reification 2: Interrogating Populism As Signifiermentioning

confidence: 99%

Beyond populism studies

Cleen

Glynos

2020

JLP

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‘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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The semantic drift: Images of populism in post‐war American historiography and their relevance for (European) political science

Cited by 33 publications

References 41 publications

Right-wing populism and the climate change agenda: exploring the linkages

Right-wing populism and the climate change agenda: exploring the linkages

Populism and nationalism

Beyond populism studies

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