Lay representations of populism: Discursive negotiation of naturalized social representation

Abstract

Despite the importance of naturalized representations for explaining, creating and recreating social reality, little empirical research has examined the resistance to and change in naturalized representations in talk. By approaching populism as a naturalized representation, this article examines the dialogical construction of populism in 55 Finnish lay interviews. Our analysis consists of two parts. First, we conduct a reflexive thematic analysis to identify the meanings of the naturalized representation of populism. Additionally, by relying on work in critical discursive psychology, we perform a more fine‐grained analysis to illustrate how the naturalized representation of populism is used in talk to construct social reality and intergroup boundaries. Second, by relying on critical discursive psychology, we illustrate the discursive strategies that allowed some of our interviewees to contest the naturalized representation of populism in talk. This study offers novel contributions to the existing literature on populism and social representations by analysing the meanings and functions of the term ‘populism’ in lay discourse, responding to the call to combine social representations theory and the discursive approach, and offering insights into the changes in naturalized representations. Please refer to the Supplementary Material section to find this article's Community and Social Impact Statement.