Articulations of populism: the Nordic case

Abstract

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.

Right-wing populism and the dynamics of style: a discourse-analytic perspective on mediated political performances

“…Morano's final turn in the extract, 'that makes you laugh' (line 75), is her response to this non-verbal activity, not to anything he has said. This sequence illustrates a specific communicative context referred to in the introduction (Charadeau 2013, Herkman, 2016 in which Philippot engages in the consistent undermining of his coparticipants, making fun of them for the viewers in an interactional performance that goes against the normative rules of the mediated speech event. He talks more than the other two politicians, despite the strict time allocation.…”

“…Style is always part of a communicative context and is put to work and made meaningful within that context. Both Charadeau (2013) and Herkman (2016) have argued that in order to fully understand how populist reason is constructed and becomes meaningful, we need to analyse not just its socio-historical context, but also the situated communicative context within which it is discursively produced. Pierre Bourdieu also describes style as systems of social distinctiveness, as "a set of systematic differences, apprehended syncretically" (1991, p. 38), and our aim is to show how the success of populist performances is dependent on the shift of focus to these distinctions, which are often discursive, and contextually situated, rather than on conventional political ideological differences.…”

Construction of Populism

“…These significations constitute the media frames of populism as a "floating signifier" (cf. Laclau 2005;Herkman 2016).…”

Finland

“…These dualisms of racism and workers’ identity and representative democracy and social media are crucial dynamics in the Finns Party (c.f. recent Herkman and ; Hatakka ; Hatakka, Niemi & Välimäki ). The defection also annulled the one‐seat difference between the two junior coalition partners after the national elections in April 2015 (Grönlund & Wass ).…”