‘Enemies of the people’: Populism and the politics of (in)security

Wojczewski, Thorsten

doi:10.1017/eis.2019.23

Cited by 45 publications

(20 citation statements)

References 37 publications

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“…Populist politics is not limited to presidentialism, but presidential systems facilitate populists’ access to executive power and aggravate the consequences of this style of politics. In federations, the scapegoating element intrinsic to populism ( Wojczewski 2020 ) presents strong potential for intergovernmental conflict because a populist president presenting himself as the “true representative of the people” can designate executive leaders of constituent units as enemies of such a people.…”

Section: Sketching a Theoretical Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

Explaining Intergovernmental Conflict in the COVID-19 Crisis: The United States, Canada, and Australia

Lecours

Béland

Fenna

et al. 2021

Publius: The Journal of Federalism

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The Covid-19 pandemic produced more significant immediate intergovernmental conflict in the U.S. than in Australia and Canada. This article considers three variables for this cross-national divergence: presidentialism versus parliamentarism; vertical party integration; and strength of intergovernmental arrangements. We find that the U.S. presidential system, contrary to parliamentarism in Canada and Australia, provided an opportunity for a populist outsider skeptical of experts to win the presidency and pursue a personalized style that favored intergovernmental conflict in times of crisis. Then, the intergovernmental conflict-inducing effect of the Trump presidency during the pandemic was compounded by the vertical integration of political parties, which provided incentives for the President to criticize Democratic governors and vice-versa. Third, the virtual absence of any structure for intergovernmental relations in the United States meant that, unlike Australian states and Canadian provinces, American states struggled to get the federal government’s attention and publicly deplored its lack of leadership.

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Section: Sketching a Theoretical Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

Explaining Intergovernmental Conflict in the COVID-19 Crisis: The United States, Canada, and Australia

Lecours

Béland

Fenna

et al. 2021

Publius: The Journal of Federalism

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…The contemporary study of rhetoric in foreign policy has tended to focus on the emotional content of the speech ( pathos ) as well as the establishment of the speaker’s authority ( ethos ), for example in securitization theory (Wojczewski 2020 ). By contrast, there has been less focus on the persuasive function of logic (logos) on foreign policy-making.…”

Section: Populism As a Political Argumentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Populist argumentation in foreign policy: the case of Hungary under Viktor Orbán, 2010–2020

Visnovitz

Jenne

2021

Comp Eur Polit

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There is a general scholarly consensus that populist governments undermine liberal democracy at home, but less agreement over how they behave abroad. While many scholars still subscribe to the view that populism has no consistent impact on foreign policy, we argue that populist leaders engage in a characteristic set of behaviors calculated to elevate the state’s status on the international stage. However, the mechanism by which populist elite-versus people rhetoric translates into concrete foreign policy action remains underspecified. To address this gap, we develop a model showing how populism serves as a political argument to enable status elevation on the international stage. To illustrate this mechanism in action, we analyze the foreign policy rhetoric and behavior of the 2010–2020 Fidesz governments in Hungary, showing how populist argumentation was used to justify revisionist foreign policy through (1) the politicization of diplomatic machinery, (2) confrontation with traditional allies, and (3), the pursuit of more flexible partnerships. In these three respects, we show how populist arguments were used by Orbán to achieve a revolution in Hungarian foreign affairs. Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1057/s41295-021-00256-3.

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“…This is an attempt to turn politics into a struggle between the forces of good and evil, where the good is represented by the populists who are the only legitimate representatives of the people. Notwithstanding its competing definitions, and leaving its ontological nature to the discussion in the extant literature, we see that populism is about constructions (construction, de-construction, and re-construction) of "the people(s)", and mobilization in an antagonistic fashion by populists, because the construction of "the people" is "the main task" of populists (Laclau 2006;Wojczewski 2020;Katsambekis 2020). Taguieff (1995, pp.…”

Section: Populism and Its Variants: Horizontal Vertical And Civilizational Aspectsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Religion in Creating Populist Appeal: Islamist Populism and Civilizationism in the Friday Sermons of Turkey’s Diyanet

2021

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Drawing on the extant literature on populism, we aim to flesh out how populists in power utilize religion and related state resources in setting up aggressive, multidimensional religious populist “us” versus “them” binaries. We focus on Turkey as our case and argue that by instrumentalizing the Diyanet (Turkey’s Presidency of Religious Affairs), the authoritarian Islamists in power have been able to consolidate manufactured populist dichotomies via the Diyanet’s weekly Friday sermons. Populists’ control and use of a state institution to propagate populist civilizationist narratives and construct antagonistic binaries are underexamined in the literature. Therefore, by examining Turkish populists’ use of the Diyanet, this paper will make a general contribution to the extant literature on religion and populism. Furthermore, by analyzing the Diyanet’s weekly Friday sermons from the last ten years we demonstrate how different aspects of populism—its horizontal, vertical, and civilizational dimensions—have become embedded in the Diyanet’s Friday sermons. Equally, this paper shows how these sermons have been tailored to facilitate the populist appeal of Erdoğan’s Islamist regime. Through the Friday sermons, the majority—Sunni Muslim Turks are presented with statements that evoke negative emotions and play on their specific fears, their sense of victimhood and through which their anxieties—real and imagined—are revived and used to construct populist binaries to construct and mobilize the people in support of an authoritarian Islamist regime purported to be fighting a “civilizational enemy” on behalf of “the people”. Finally, drawing on insights from the Turkish case, we illustrate how the “hosting” function of the civilizational aspect plays a vital role in tailoring internal (vertical and horizontal) religious populist binaries.

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‘Enemies of the people’: Populism and the politics of (in)security

Cited by 45 publications

References 37 publications

Explaining Intergovernmental Conflict in the COVID-19 Crisis: The United States, Canada, and Australia

Explaining Intergovernmental Conflict in the COVID-19 Crisis: The United States, Canada, and Australia

Populist argumentation in foreign policy: the case of Hungary under Viktor Orbán, 2010–2020

Religion in Creating Populist Appeal: Islamist Populism and Civilizationism in the Friday Sermons of Turkey’s Diyanet

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