Approved abstracts
Conference in the University of Jyväskylä, March 17–19, 2016
Populism as
movement
and rhetoric
References:
Garbagnoli, Sara (2014), ″’L’ideologia del genere’: l’irresistibile ascesa di
Leading up to the 2014 European Parliament elections, Nick Clegg and Nigel Farage
squared off twice to debate whether Britain should remain in, or exit out, the European Union. The ultimate goal of the two party leaders was to persuade the audience
that each represented the right course of action for Britain. The debates provide an
interesting opportunity to examine the rhetorical arguments of a prototypical populist (Farage) against a high-ranking official of the political elite (Clegg) that populists
tend to criticize.
The proposed paper, advocating the recent turn in conceptualizing populism as
a political style, seeks to explore how populism is mediated and performed through
classic rhetorical devices. I hypothesize that populists construct and deliver their
Panel: Populist dynamics 1
Keywords: Debate, populism, rhetorical analysis, crisis
Author(s): Michael Bosse a (University of Copenhagen)
Populism as the Performance of Crisis:
A Rhetorical Analysis of the 2014 Europe
Debates between Nigel Farage and Nick Clegg
un’invenzione retorica vaticana contro la denaturalizzazione dell’ordine sessuale″,
About Gender, 3(6), 250–263.
Giorgi, Alberta and Ozzano, Luca (2015), European Culture Wars & The Italian Case:
Which side are you on?, London: Routledge
Herdt, Gilbert (ed.) (2009), Moral Panics, Sexual Panics: Fear and the Fight Over
Sexual Rights, New York: University Press.
Mény Yves, Surel Yves (2002), ″The Constitutive Ambiguity of Populism″, in Y. Mény,
Y. Surel (eds.), Democracies and the Populist Challenge, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1–21.
van Dick, Teun A. (2001), ″Critical Discourse Analysis″ in Deborah Schiffrin, Deborah Tannen, Heidi E. Hamilton (ed.), The Handbook of Discourse Analysis, Oxford:
Blackwell, 352–371.
Wodak, Ruth and Meyer, Micheal (2001) (eds.), Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis, London: Sage.
[Populism ... 2]
In the last years, a relevant part of the public debate in Italy focused on issues relating to gender equality and LGBTQ rights. More specifically, since 2013 two law
proposals were presented with the aim to introduce the recognition of partnerships
and marriages of same-sex couples, educational programs on gender identities and
relations in schools (Giorgi and Ozzano, 2015). One of the most relevant voices in
this debate is represented by the neo-conservative Catholic movement that countered
all the law proposals, invoking the defense of the ″natural family″. My contribution is
aimed at the analysis of rhetoric and discursive strategies of this movement, considering the main relevant groups and formations. The paper, methodologically based on
the Critical Discourse Analysis (Wodak and Meyer, 2001; van Dijk, 2001), examines
the most relevant political documents (manifestos and press releases) of these political formations. The analysis of the documents allow to reconstruct topics and political
frame of what – in my opinion – can be defined as a new conservative and populist
wave. In fact, the public discourse of these groups present some typical populist traits.
i) The classical ″them and us″ opposition (Mény and Surel, 2002) that constructs the
″traditional and natural family″ as object of defeat by specific public threats. ii) The
construction of scapegoats in order to mobilise public opinion, producing what Herdt
(2009) calls ″sexual panic″, related in particular to the protection of the children’ innocence. iii) The evocation of nature as core of this theoretical architecture, with the
use of the so-called Gender Ideology (Garbagnoli, 2014). Finally, I will try to show
how this discourse is not a simple counter position against a socio-political change,
but rather the proposition of a proper socio-political project, nurtured by in the
seduction of nature and tradition.
Panel: Populism and Gender
Keywords: Gender Ideology, LGBTQI citizenship, critical discourse analysis , Italian
catholic movements
Author(s): Elisa Bellè and Barbara Poggio (University of Trento)
In the name of ʺour childrenʺ, in the name
of ʺnatureʺ: The new Italian populist wave
References:
Breen, M. J., Haynes, A., & Devereux, E. (2006). Citizens, Loopholes and Maternity
Tourists: Media Frames in the Citizenship Referendum. In Corcoran, M. and Peillon, M., Uncertain Ireland: A sociological chronicle 2003–2004. IPA: Dublin
Breen, M. J. & Devereux, E. (2003) Setting Up Margins: Public attitudes and media
construction of poverty and exclusion in Ireland. Journal of Irish-Nordic Studies,
Volume 2 (1).
Breen, M. J. (2006). Enough Already: Empirical data on Irish public attitudes to immigrants, minorities, refugees and asylum seekers. The Dialogue Series, Vol. 6.
Devereux, E. & Breen, M.J. (2003). No Racists Here: Media treatment of asylum
seekers and refugees. In N. Collins & T. Cradden (Eds.), Irish Political Attitudes
Today, Manchester University Press: Manchester.
Haynes, A., Breen, M. J. & Devereux, E. (2008). Public exercises in othering: Irish
media representations of asylum seeking. In Farago, B. Facing the Other: Interdisciplinary Studies on Race, Gender and Social Justice in Ireland, Cambridge Scholars
Press: Cambridge.
Haynes, A., Breen, M.J., and Devereux, E. (2005). ″Smuggling Zebras for Lunch″:
Media framing of asylum seekers in the Irish print media. Étúdes Irlandaises, printemps, 2005 N° 30–31
Haynes, A., Devereux, E., & Breen, M.J. (2004). A Cosy Consensus on Deviant
Discourse: How the refugee and asylum seeker meta-narrative has endorsed an
interpretative crisis in relation to the transnational politics of the world’s displaced
persons. In M. Kearney (ed.) Postmodernism: The Global Moment Conference
Kogakuin University, Tokyo, March 9th – 11th.
Haynes, A., Devereux, E., and Breen, M.J. (2005). Fear, Framing and Foreigners: The
othering of immigrants in the Irish print media. International Journal of Critical Psychology, Vol. 16, pp. 100–121.
migration and interrogate attitudes to levels of immigration, the criteria for accepting
migrants, attitudes to integration policy and multiculturalism, together with measures of explanatory concepts such as realistic threat and social distance. We look in
particular at the notion of symbolic threat and of how the reality of contact (or noncontact) with migrants and minorities impacts on public attitudes.
As well as considering these attitudes, we look at the factors that are markers for
anti-immigration sentiment, particularly in terms of age, education, religious belonging, ethnic identity and political orientation.
[Populism... 3]
The phenomenon of migrant workers, refugees, and asylum seekers across Europe
is often conflated into a single-themed populist perspective of ″undesirable aliens″,
to put it at its mildest. We have documented elsewhere the reality of media descriptions of asylum seekers and refugees in the mainstream media (cf Haynes, Breen and
Devereux, 2008, 2005; Breen, 2006; Breen, Haynes and Devereux, 2006; Haynes,
Devereux and Breen, 2005, 2004; Breen and Devereux, 2003; and Devereux and
Breen, 2003).
In this paper we turn our attention to the reality of attitudes toward migrants in
two European countries. Drawing on the European Social Survey data from Round
1 (2001) and Round 7 (2015) from Ireland and Finland, we examine the major
political, cultural, economic and demographic developments that have impacted on
Panel: Populism and immigration
Keywords: populism (University of Limerick)
Author(s): Michael Breen, Aileen Marron,
Amanda Haynes and Eoin Devereux
Understanding na onal responses to Europe’s
humanitarian crisis: Public A tudes towards
Migrants in Ireland and Finland
arguments through similar rhetorical devices: e.g. the employment of pathos, the
narration of crisis, and the use of figures of speech. On the other hand, I expect technocrats to appeal to ethos, narrate stability, and use concrete examples in structuring
their arguments.
I operationalize my expectations through a sequential, mixed-methods approach.
First, I perform a quantitative word frequency analysis (using WordStat) on the most
used phrases and pronouns during the debates to identify the main topics brought
forth by each politician. Then, I follow-up this analysis with a qualitative coding
scheme in order to elucidate how these most frequent discourses are arranged and
performed. I also code for instances of audience affirmation through applause in
order to see which topics, and how they were delivered by the politicians, resonated
with those citizens who were present.
″Every Muslim that you will talk to yeah, what really annoys us, what they hear from
source, could be a media or anything…say the Fox news, they love to talk about
anything anti-Muslim or anti-Islam yeah and without just processing it, without just
giving it a second thought. What could be right?? what could be wrong you know and
[people] just pass it on, you not only pass it on yeah [they] add up something. So that
really annoys me or even any Muslim you will talk to yeah, listen man there’s nearly
1.6bn people with this faith on this planet and they’re spread all over every single
corner of the world″
Anti-Muslim racism is no stranger to the Irish context (Carr 2016). Muslim men
and women in Ireland experience hostility and discriminatory practices that target
them on the basis of their presumed homogenous Muslim identity. These experiences
are informed by national but also by international racialising discourses of Muslimness, that shift across space to permeate into the popular imaginary of what ‘Muslim’
means in Ireland. This paper draws on recent fieldwork conducted with sixty-six Muslim men and women living in Dublin, Ireland. Using qualitative research methods,
in addition to revealing more insights on lived anti-Muslim racism, participants were
also asked about the perceptions of contemporary populist discourses of Muslimness
and how these impacted upon them. The findings reveal ‘glocal’ racialised themes
of Muslimness in the Irish context and perceptions amongst participants of a media
Panel: Populism and identities
Keywords: Ireland, Islamophobia, discourses, racialised, anti-Muslim
Author(s): James Carr (University of Limerick)
ʺListen man, there’s nearly
1.6 billion people with this faithʺ
References:
Edwards, D. and Potter, J. (1992). Discursive Psychology. London: Sage.
Wetherell, M., and Edley. N. (1999). Negotiating Hegemonic Masculinity: Imaginary
Positions and Psycho Discursive Practises. Feminism and Psychology, 9 (3), 335356.
[Populism ... 4]
This paper will present on a chapter from my PhD thesis that uses Critical Discursive
Psychology (CDP) to examine how the far-right organisation Britain First respond to
the Charlie Hebdo attack on Facebook. The Charlie Hebdo shooting has presented
the far-right with the challenge of portraying themselves as reasonable about anti-Islamic rhetoric, and my findings show that the main strategy is to use the Jewish community as a scapegoat to present Islam as a threat. I will present on a video posted by
Britain First on their Facebook Page, of a ″solidarity patrol″ in an area of London with
a high Jewish population, to show support for the Jewish community following the
shooting in the Kosher supermarket in Paris two days after the Charlie Hebdo attack.
I examine how Britain First align with the Jewish community, whilst distancing
themselves from Jewish people. Britain First separate being Jewish and being British,
which removes the British identity of British Jews. Britain First reject the classical
fascist, anti-Semitic ideology, but send out a concealed prejudiced message. By constructing Jewish people as vulnerable, this presents Jewish people as being in danger
of Islamic extremism. The separation of being Jewish from being British works to
make a distinction that Jewish people are not the same as the far-right, and works to
marginalise the Jewish community.
To analyse data I use CDP, which draws upon the principles of Discursive Psychology (Edwards & Potter, 1992) of focusing on ‘action’, what is being accomplished
through discourse, rather than what this indicates about cognition. A beneficial feature of CDP is that the relationship between discourse and the individual producing
the discourse is considered (Wetherell & Edley, 1999), which for my research is
important, as findings can be placed within the historical context of the far-right in
the UK.
Panel: Populism and hate speech
Keywords: Political, prejudice, anti-Semitism, critical discursive psychology,
Far-right
Author(s): Shani Burke (Loughborough University)
Ideology and Concealment in the
Britain First Solidarity Patrol
[Populism... 5]
This presentation is from two analytical chapters in my thesis, focusing on how politicians make claims and counterclaims in political debates regarding Britain and the
European Union and on the role that laughter plays in them. I apply an approach that
combines the rhetorical approach in social psychology (e.g., Billig 1991; 1996; Billig
et al., 1988) with epistemics (e.g., Heritage & Raymond, 2005; Raymond & Heritage, 2006; Heritage, 2013). The rhetorical approach to studying political discourse is
already well established, however including epistemics is novel.
Epistemics refers to the various phenomena in talk that relate to the participants’
use and orientation to knowledge, how they orient themselves and react to it, and
how entitled they treat themselves in relation to a particular type of domain. Much of
pre-existing research into epistemics tends to look at ordinary conversations, or those
with various types of institutional talk where the epistemic ‘domains’ of knowledge
are relatively well established and clear to all participants. However, this is not so clear
in a political debate, where the debaters are arguably battling over the same domains.
In my data it is the EU and its relationship with Britain, where opposing debaters try
to mobilise knowledge and information about the EU to favour their ‘ideological’
positions.
Panel: Cultural aspects of populism and populist rhetoric
Panel: Populist dynamics 2
Terms of populist and populism generally use as ‘pejorative’ meaning and in many
research ‘new populist’ discussions based on generally ‘right wing’ political movements and rhetorics. However, ‘populism’ can be use in a broad sense. Especially in a
neo-liberal global capitalism age, new ‘left-populism’ can be seen in the political area.
In the last decades, not only grows up right-wing populist parties but also we can see
change and ‘in search of ’ process in left-wing.
Our paper focuses on Turkey’s main centre-left party’s (CHP- Cumhuriyet Halk
Partisi – Republican People’s Party) in search of rhetoric that based on ‘new left-populism’. In first, discuss in detail ‘populism’ term in Turkey, both ‘official state ideology’
and ‘daily’ politics is very important. Moreover, our paper based on CHP’s official
June 2015 election ‘Declaration’. Especially in economic area, party try to create new
‘approach’ that is quite different from start of 2000’s ‘social democracy’. In economic,
social and cultural dimensions, we try to analyzing CHP’s Declaration as a ‘new-left
populist’ approach.
Turkey has a long term right wing populism experience. Right wing populism
had been materialezed policies of main stream right politic parties since multi-party
system started in Turkey . After 2001 economic crisis rigt wing populism met Islamic
Keywords: EU, discursive psychology, epistemics, ideology, political debate
Author(s): Mirko Demasi (Loughborough University)
Epistemic and Rhetorical Ac on in Poli cians’
Disagreements in Broadcast Poli cal Debates
populism. AKP ( Justice and Development Party) with Islamic roots became new address of right wing populism. AKP was ruling party in Turkey since 2002. After 2010
AKP’s populism became more authoritarian. As a result of AKP’s authoritarian rule
confrontationed Gezi Resistance in 2013. Because Gezi Resistance showed the people, restraints of AKP populism. After Gezi Resistance many people started to think
Turkey needs to new left policies. At this point CHP’s new left populist rhetoric as a
response of AKP’s populism will be very vital next political decade of Turkey.
Keywords: CHP, neo-liberalism, populist rhetoric, new left populism
Author(s): Çağdaş ceyhan (Anadolu University)
and Mustafa Berkay Aydın (METU)
Is New ‘Le -Populism’ Possible? Analyzing
June 2015 Elec on Declara on of CHP
References:
Carr, J. (2016) Experiences of Islamophobia: Living with racism in the neoliberal era,
London: Routledge.
agenda, feelings of frustration and the impact these populist discourses have on the
lives Muslim men and women in Ireland.
Author(s): Ainur Elmgren (University of Helsinki)
Elec on Shockers: The Rise (and Fall?)
of Populism in Finland 1970–2015
In the early 21st century, the concept ″populism″ was appropriated by the Finns Party
as a positive self-definition (Elmgren 2015). However, the concept itself has been
in use in political debate for over a century. This paper explores the history of the
concept in a longer historical context, including the vehement resistance against the
concept as a pejorative label. What made the parties accused of ″populism″ embrace
the concept as their own? And how did this change become possible in the political
culture of parties where ″foreign words″ have previously been viewed with suspicion?
Political parties have tried to appropriate the concept twice: First, the Finnish Rural
Party (SMP), after resisting the label ″populist″ for decades, identified as such in the
1992 party programme. Second, the Finns Party, founded upon the dissolution of
SMP in 1994, declared itself ″populist″ in the 2011 election programme. Famously,
Timo Soini, SMP veteran and current leader of the Finns Party, formulated his version of the concept in his MA thesis in political science (Soini 1988).
By exploring the intersections of Finnish political discourse with political science
scholarship since the 1970s, this paper shows how the appropriation of a concept
functions as political agency. In the texts and speeches of the Finnish Rural Party and
the (True) Finns Party, ″populism″ becomes a concept of movement (Bewegungsbegriff, see Koselleck 1997) conveying political change and promising a future state
of harmony between ″people″ and ″politicians″. Populism is redefined as e.g. ″listening
to the people″ (1992) or having ″the same opinions as the people″ (2011) in a situation where mainstream political vocabulary is perceived as tainted and ″elitist″. Thus
populism needs the asymmetric counter-concept (asymmetrischer Gegenbegriff, see
Koselleck 1995) of ″elitism″ to gain new and constructive meaning.
Panel: Populism and history
Keywords: Finns Party, counter-concept, elitism, populism, conceptual history
[Populism ... 6]
Keynote Eoin Devereux (University
of Limerick): Folk Devils and Blonde
Angels: Media Framing of Those
Blonde Roma Children
References:
Billig, M. (1991). Ideology and Opinions: Studies in Rhetorical Psychology. London,
UK: SAGE Publications Ltd.
Billig, M. (1996). Arguing and Thinking – A Rhetorical Approach to Social Psychology,
2nd Ed. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Billig, M., Condor, S., Edwards, D., Gane, M., Middleton, D. & Radley, A. (1988). Ideological Dilemmas – A Social Psychology of Everyday Thinking. London, UK: SAGE
Publications Ltd.
Edelman, M. (1977). Political Language – Words That Succeed and Policies That Fail.
London, UK: Academic Press.
Heritage, J. (2013). Epistemics in Conversation. In Sidnell, J., & Stivers, T. (Eds.). The
Handbook of Conversation Analysis (pp.370–394). Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
Heritage, J. & Raymond, G. (2005). The Terms of Agreement: Indexing Epistemic
Authority and Subordination in Talk-in-interaction. Social Psychology Quarterly,
68, 15–38.
Raymond, G. & Heritage, J. (2006). The Epistemics of Social Relations: Owning
Grandchildren. Language in Society, 35, 677–705.
This analysis takes the position that political discourse is particularly concerned
about facts and values (Edelman, 1977). The role of that knowledge and the ways it
manifests in talk is paramount in this context. Regarding my data one can reasonably
posit that knowledge and information produced is not neutral, but, is produced in a
rhetorical manner to bolster one’s argument. As such epistemics provides a bridge
between the rhetorical context and the wider controversy the debate relates to, while
at the same time focusing on the nuanced details of the interaction.
References:
Bellah, R. (1975). The Broken Covenant: American Civil Religion in Time of Trial. New
York, NY: The Seabury Press.
Coy, P. G., Maney, G. M. & Woehrle, L. M. (2008). Blessing War and Blessing Peace:
Religious Discourses in the US during Major Conflict Periods, 1990-2005. In
O’Leary, R., Fleishman, R. & Gerard, C. (Eds). Pushing the Boundaries: new
Frontiers in Conflict Resolution and Collaboration. Research in Social Movements,
Conflicts and Change 29: 113–150.
Habel, P. & Grant, J. T. (2013). Demand for God and Government. The Dynamics of
Religion and Public Opinion. Politics and Religion, 6, 282–302.
Watt, D. H. (1987). Religion and the Nation: 1960 to the Present. In Wilson, J. F.
(Ed.), Church and State in America. A Bibliographical Guide. The Civil War to the
Present Day. (263–300). Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
Williams, R. H. (2013). Civil Religion and the Cultural Politics of National Identity.
Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 52 (2), 239–257.
politics, deploying religious symbols to legitimize war is a common practice (Coy,
Maney, Woehrle 2008). Is religious populism a source of inspiration by US presidents
when trying to justify war through their rhetoric? How do US presidents use religious
references in their war speeches when attempting to persuade the public opinion of
the need to go into combat?
Our paper investigates the use of religion in US presidential war rhetoric through
an observation of a sample of official speeches pronounced by five presidents in time
of war: Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon during the Vietnam War, George Herbert Bush on 1991 Gulf War and George Walker Bush and Barack Obama on the War
on Terror (Afghanistan and Iraq). Our study follows a methodology that combines
quantitative and qualitative textual content analysis.
As a main conclusion, we can assert that all presidents studied try to persuade people of this very basic idea: that, when going to war, the nation is following God’s will
because in fighting against the enemy the nation is fighting against evil. That assertion
finds its roots in the common (and very popular) belief that Americans are a chosen
people by a merciful God who gave them the gift of a promised land (Bellah 1975,
Watt 1987, Williams 2013).
[Populism... 7]
When the scourge of war convulses a society, politics may find themselves tempted to
fall in the easiness and the simplicity of populism. People’s religious beliefs is a field
that populist politicians may exploit in trying to find the popular approval they need
when taking such a hard decision as waging a war. Often politicians take advantage
of the fact that in times of adversity, religiosity increases (Habel and Grant 2013). In
Panel: Populism and Religion
Keywords: Religion, US presidents, populism, rhetoric, war
Author(s): Pere Franch, Miriam Diez (Ramon Llull University)
When Populism Turns Official: The Use of Religion in US Presiden al War Rhetoric
References:
Ainur Elmgren, ″The Nordic Ideal: Openness and Populism According to the Finns
Party″, in N. Götz & C. Marklund (eds.),The Paradox of Openness – Transparency
and Participation in Nordic Cultures of Consensus, Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2015, pp.
91–119.
Reinhart Koselleck, ″Zur historisch-politischen Semantik asymmetrischer Gegenbegriffe″, in R. Koselleck, Vergangene Zukunft. Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten.
Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1995, pp. 211–259.
Reinhart Koselleck, ″Temporalization of Concepts″, Finnish Yearbook of Political Thought, Vol. 1, 1997, pp. 16–24.
Suomen Maaseudun Puolueen Puolueohjelma 1992. <http://www.fsd.uta.fi/pohtiva/ohjelmat/SMP/smpyleis1992> (Accessed 15.10.2015)
Suomalaiselle sopivin. Perussuomalaiset r.p:n eduskuntavaaliohjelma 2011.
<http://www.fsd.uta.fi/pohtiva/ohjelmat/PS/psvaaliohjelma2011> (Accessed
15.10.2015)
Soini, Timo Juhani, ″Populismi - politiikkaa ja poltinmerkki. SMP:n roolinmuutos″,
1988.
Perhaps the clearest indicator of one’s partiality towards the Laclauian take on populism is the belief that it is an ever-present, constitutive dimension of politics without
which the latter ceases to exist. This is to say, the presence of, however minimal, frontier between ″people″ and its ″other″ is the precondition of politics. But what if this
frontier itself becomes the sole point around which those identities are articulated?
Is it still possible to speak of politics when there is ″too much″ populism, when versus
Panel: Populist dynamics 1
Keywords: AKP, Laclau, Turkey, polarization, populism
Author(s): Halil Gurhanli (University of Helsinki)
Populism on Steroids: Erdogan
and his ʺenemiesʺ in Turkey
Refernces:
Fryklund B (2008) ″Ett förändrat Sverige: Migrationen och dess konsekvenser″ Kapitel 14 in Bennich-Björkman L & Blomqvist P (eds) (2008) Mellan folkhem och
Europa – svensk politik i brytningstid. Malmö: Liber
Fryklund B & Peterson T (1981) Populism och missnöjespartier i Norden. Lund: Arkiv
Ignazi P (2003) Extreme Right Parties in Western Europe. New York: Oxford University
Press
Kiiskinen J Saveljeff S & Fryklund B (2007) Populism and Mistrust of Foreigners: Sweden in Europe. Integrationsverkets Skriftserie VI
Wodak R, KhosraviNik M & Mral B, Right-Wing (2013) Populism in Europe.
London:Bloomsbury
Mudde C (2007) Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe. New York: Cambridge
University Press
Schain M Zolberg A & Hossay P (eds) (2002) Shadows over Europe: The development
and Impact of the Extreme right in Western Europe. New York: Palgrave Macmillan
dled in the Swedish political system since its formation. The Swedish exception can
thus be compared with successful populism over a forty-year period in Europe, and
where adaptation to this has come a long way.
[Populism ... 8]
The objective of this draft paper is to improve the understanding of the development
of populism within the Nordic countries as part of the European context. Point of departure is a Nordic comparative perspective combined with an analysis of the Nordic
populist parties of yesterday and today. The history of Nordic populism can be described as a process, where different types of populism have been present in different
periods of time. In the early 1970´s focus was on taxation-issues in combination with
populist appeals of political discontent. From the beginning of the 1980´s and until
today, populist appeals evolve around aspects connected to questions of immigration.
Of special interest is also the development in Sweden where a successful populist
party has not been present on the Swedish political scene until the beginning of the
21st century. Understanding the development in Sweden could therefore be a key to
identify central aspects that either promotes or blocks populism. This could, in turn,
be essential to a more general understanding of populism as a political phenomenon
in the political discourse of today.
This paper discusses the kind of populist parties that are active in the Nordic countries as part of Europe, with a special focus on the Swedish case as a double anomaly,
and seeks to show the importance of continuous research connected to the continued
development of these parties. At best,the Swedish case could serve as something of an
ideal type or comparative yardstick for other countries, partly due to the long absence
of successful Swedish right-wing populism and partly due to how this has been han-
Panel: Populism and history
Keywords: Nordic comparative perspective, Nordic populism, anomaly, migration, political discontent
Author(s): Björn Fryklund (MIM; Malmö Ins tute for studies of
Migra on, Diversity and Welfare)
Nordic populism – changes over me and space.
A compara ve and retrospec ve analysis of
populist par es in the Nordic countries from
1965 – 2015. The Swedish case as an ideal type
or compara ve yards ck for the development of
populism in the other Nordic countries.
References:
Arendt, H. 1972. Crises of the Republic. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich cop. New York.
Jokinen, A. & Juhila, K. & Suoninen, E. 2012. Kategoriat, kulttuuri & moraali. Vastapaino.
Tampere.
Näre, S. 2009. Suomalainen väkivalta, joukkomurhat ja historian haamut. Teoksessa:
Hoikkala, T. &Suurpää, L. (toim.) 2009. Kauhajoen jälkipaini. Nuorisotutkijoiden ja
ammattilaisten puheenvuoroja. Nuorisotutkimusverkosto/Nuorisotutkimusseura.
Verkkojulkaisuja 25. 30–31.
Rinne, J. 2012. Vihapuhe verkkoilmiönä. Haaste. Helsinki : Oikeusministeriö. 12
(2012) : 1, s. 8–10.
Sakki, I. &Pirttilä-Backman, A-M. 2009. Social representations and intergroup relations. An indispensable alliance. Teoksessa: Jasinskaja-Lahti, I. & Mähönen, T. A.
(eds.) 2009. Identities, Intergroup Relations and Acculturation. The Cornerstones of
Intercultural Encounters. Gaudeamus: Helsinki.
Therborn, G. 2014. Eriarvoisuus tappaa. Vastapaino. Tallinna.
The data used in the dissertation consists of 2 parts; Roma beggar -articles in
newspapers and immigrant articles in web -based publications, which can be seen as
populistic (MV-lehti and Magneettimedia). Discourse analysis is used as the method
in the research.
In everyday life we categorize people, categorizations maintain and produce social
and moral order. At the same time social identities are created. Categorization is an
act with social and cultural consequences ( Jokinen&Juhila&Suoninen 2012, 20).
Categorizations attach images to the people we have categorized and place them in a
scale. (Sakki&Pirttilä-Backman 2009, 151). Therborn (2014, 62-63) speaks about existential inequality, which means for example the right to dignity and to be respected.
Hate speech knowingly produces this kind of social inequality among people. Hence
hate speech is about power division. Arendt (1972, 143) never sees power as individual, power belongs to a group and exists as long as group is together. Hate speech
is producing affect with a group and endeavour to gain power. Individual speech
echoes by the group of likeminded. Without that echo hate speech does not become
hate speech.
[Populism... 9]
Hate includes and excludes people. Societies can be tightened with the shared
understanding of whom to hate (Näre 2009, 30). Hate in society is concretized by
hate speech. The term hate speech is ambiguous, although it is frequently used. Hate
speech tends to simplify and create ″us against the others″ –settings and create images
of threat, emphasise the cohesion of the ingroup and encourage ingroup to act in a
desirable way (Rinne 2012, 8). I claim that hate speech is functional; it produces otherness, uses power and violence. Hate speech strives to actively function, to separate
people, to bind people, to build bridges and fences. The core of hate speech is not the
expression of emotion.
Panel: Populism and hate speech
Keywords: power, hate speech
Author(s): Elina Hakkarainen (University of Lapland)
Hate speech as a tool for power division
itself becomes the source of antagonism? Present paper aims to answer this question
through an analysis of the extreme polarization in today’s Turkey, focusing particularly on the discourse of governing AKP as it gets increasingly more populist.
International support that used to praise AKP as a model to be followed by other
Muslim governments for its determination to prioritize country’s democratization has
come to an end following the government’s turn towards authoritarianism since 2011,
radicalizing its Islamist discourse while consolidating control over various aspects
of society as well as openly criminalizing dissent. This coincides with the emergence
of the ″enemy″ figure in the party discourse, whose bearers shared little more than
explicit opposition to the government. Sole purpose of this ″enemy″ seems to be
overturning the popular will that finds its embodiment in the AKP. What is most
interesting for the focus of this article is that such an extremely polarizing discourse
constructing the frontier between the people and its other over the line of pro/against
AKP appears to have turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy, for it has been reciprocated
by virtually all the opposition figures in Turkish politics. Opposition discourse seems
to have been articulated solely around an ″anti-AKP″ frontier, risking to run the whole
political field into a zero-sum game between two polar opposites.
Keywords: culture, discourse, hegemony, migration, refugee
Panel: Populism and immigration
Author(s): John Hills (University of Helsinki)
Young populist politician, PhD Jussi Halla- aho gained a major group of followers,
mostly young or middle aged men with his far right ″Scripta – writings from the sinking West″ blog, since 2005. Nowadays Jussi Halla-aho is known as an EU parliament
Panel: Populism, art, performance
Keywords: Fandom, participation, media, cult figure, fan production Author(s): Irma Hirsjärvi (University of Helsinki)
Fandom of a far right poli cian?
The current migration influx into Europe is a politically and culturally salient topic.
The extensive media coverage dedicated to this crisis has an immense power to shape
people’s opinions and to mould their stance. For some it would seem that the words
”refugee” and ”immigrant” are synonymous with being poor and uneducated. To
what extent has the media helped cultivate this image of desperate, helpless migrants?
And what picture does it paint of the countries of origin, if many in Europe only seem
willing to accept those that come with an alm bowl in hand?
The implication is that everything has been left behind, including self-worth and
ambition. Consider, for example, the narrative surrounding migrants and smartphones. It was argued in some quarters that because migrants had smartphones, they
were not in need of help, and thus should not be welcomed (an empty argument but
one that nonetheless gained traction). And Syria, for instance, though ravaged by war
is by no means a poor country. It is ranked as a ”lower middle income” nation by the
World Bank.
Conservative media outlets tend to adopt a more negative, reactionary stance on
the issue, and the traditionally liberal press offer of a more progressive, humanitarian
response. But what of an a-political body such as the BBC? Is it possible to remain
neutral when reporting on such an emotionally charged topic, or does the corporation unwittingly further essentialist and reductionist stereotypes?
This paper will attempt to answer how the BBC represents migrants, what images
are selected, and the potential reasons for this. Hegemonic discourse and CDA will
be used as a theoretical framework, to understand the images and messages that are
formed. A month’s worth of material will be studied, including news articles, opinion
pieces, and audiovisual reports.
[Populism ... 10]
”A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words” An Analysis of the BBC’s Press Coverage of the Migra on
Crisis Between August and September 2015
The term ‘populism’ carries usually negative rather than positive connotations, even
though the etymological background of the word, deriving from the Latin noun
‘populus’ meaning ‘the people’, gives it an emancipative or empowering signification.
Pejorative meanings of the term are often taken for granted also among academic
scholars, even if the very construction of populism may have serious consequences to
the comprehension of the phenomenon as such. Inspired by Laclauian theorization
the paper approaches populism as a floating signifier whose meanings are contested in
various discursive struggles. The paper approaches public construction of populism
empirically by exploring the meanings given to the term in the Nordic press during
the first parliamentary elections of the 2010s in Finland, Sweden, Norway and Denmark. A combination of the quantitative content analysis and the qualitative frame
analysis of the leading quality and popular papers is favoured. The five major framings
of populism was found, namely ‘nationalism’, ‘nativism’, ‘empty rhetoric’, ‘political
movement’ and ‘voice of the people’ frames. However, emphasises on framings varied
between countries, paper types and genres, and can be fully understood just in their
specific contexts demonstrating the inherent link between the ‘discursive’ and ‘political’ in the construction of populisms.
Panel: What is populism? 1
Keywords: Laclau Ernesto, constructivism, floating signifier, frame analysis,
populism
Author(s): Juha Herkman (University of Helsinki)
Construc on of Populism: The Nordic Case
Author(s): Irem Inceoglu (Kadir Has University)
From Gezi to HDP: Populist Discourse
of Opposi onal Poli cs in Turkey
Panel: Populism, politics, and rhetoric
HDP (Peoples’ Democratic Party) is the successor of BDP (Peace and Democracy
Party) that is known as the Kurdish party in Turkey. HDP has been the first political
institution in Turkey that explicitly associated radical democracy as the discourse of
political demand. Radical democracy as a demand and a prospect was stated as the In
HDP’s political campaign of Demirtas’s presidential candidacy in August 2014 and
their party declaration of June 2015 general elections for many times. HDP positioned itself as the political party of all oppressed, subordinated, excluded, exploited
and ignored subjects. Their populist party program included identity groups such as
women, workers, peasants, youth, unemployed, retired, disabled, LGBTI, immigrants
and all ethnic and religious minorities of the country and declared that they would
create a ‘new life’ based on principles of radical democracy and they would call for the
electorate to support their call for ‘big humanity’. As a result of the elections, HDP
received 13 % of general votes and been the fourth political party of the Parliament in
Turkey, proving the success of their project to become the party of Turkey in general
rather than a Kurdish party. With a radical left agenda, and the populist discourse
aiming not only one ethnic identity but representing a coalition of marginalised
subjectivities of Turkish politics, I believe, HDP has been the representative of what
the activists of Gezi resistance called ‘the Gezi Spirit’. Looking into election materials,
including co-presidents speeches, the website, declarations and brochures, I aim to
scrutinise HDP’s populist discourse as a political manoeuvre to fight against the rightwing, conservative politics. In that sense, I would like to discuss the way HDP and the
Gezi resistance reclaimed the ‘people’ from a radical left perspective as opposed to the
nationalising and Islamising populism of the AKP government.
Keywords: Oppositional politics of Turkey, radical democracy, Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP)
[Populism... 11]
References:
Devereux, E; Breen, M (2003) ‘No racists here: Public Opinion and Media Treatment of Asylum Seekers and Refugees’ In: Neil Collins (ed.) (eds). Political Issues
in Ireland To-day.
Gatson, Sarah N & Reid, Robin Ann (2011) ‘Race and ethnicity in fandom’. Journal
of Transformative Works vol 8.Http://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/
twc/article/view/392/252
Hills, Matt (2002) Fan Cultures. London and New York: Routledge.
Laclau, Ernesto (2005) On Populist Reason. London: Verso.
member of the populist ’True Finns’ party, after a huge success in communal and
national elections. His writings then, and his facebook writings later create a series of
provocative statements, spread and commented by the followers of the ″Master″, as
the readrs and commentators of his writings call him. In this paper the fandom related
expressions of the followers of Halla-aho are analysed in the context of populism,
against the more general question of rasism in fandom, fan based cmmunity (eg.
Gatson-Reid 2011).
The concept of ″fandom″, enthusiasm and appreciation towards someone or something, is rarely used in political context, unlike for example ″political cult ″or ″cult
figure″. However, political weight in populism in case of the True Finns relies strongly
with the two main characters of the party: the chairman Timo Soini and Halla-aho.
Both have gained visible positions as verbally strong politicians, but among the followers of Halla-aho he is seen more as cult figure, and meaning making processes
seem to go deeper towards than the epressions and activities of the supporters – even
creating a subculture-like fan phenomenon with transculturally spread discourse of
violence, xenophobia and misogynia by the followers.
In the paper the questions of fandom related expressions of consumption, production, meaning making processes, critical reading and circulating of ″The Master″, Jussi
Halla-aho, are analyzed. The analyzed texts comes from the data collected in the Finnish Academy project Populism as rhetoric and movement (2012-2016), both blogs of
Halla-aho and the comments of his followers in newspapers.
Panel: Populism, politics, and rhetoric
Keywords: New Turkey, Populism in Power, Rhetoric, The JDP
Author(s): Mahir Kalaylioglu (Middle East Technical University)
What Does the ʺNew Turkeyʺ Mean: Populism in
Power and its Rhetoric
References:
Laclau, Ernesto (2005) On Populist Reason. London: Verso.
Sipilä, Juha (2015) TV-puhe 16.9.2015. Viewable: http://yle.fi/uutiset/katso_ja_
lue_sipilan_puhe_tasta_kokonaisuudessaan/8311098.
Wray, L. Randall (1998) Understanding Modern Money. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.
simply presupposed that populist political rhetoric and discourse contains an essentially anti-elitist pretext. However, in the aftermath of the 2008 Great Recession
and the subsequent Eurozone crisis, precisely political elites have resorted to populist discourse - especially in the field of discussing public debt and finance. Finland’s
prime minister Juha Sipilä’s discussion of these matters in a recent TV speech offers a
case in point. His discourse on public debt seeks to naturalise propositions about the
alleged necessity of cutting public expenditures with the careful use of metaphorical
language. This paper presents an analysis of the metaphorical devices and strategies,
such as emphasising the morality of ″living within one’s means″, that elite politicians
casually deploy while conveying their statements on state expenditures. On the other
hand, the elite rhetoric seeks to rely on technocratic and economistic justification
strategies, but, as several economists have pointed out, the tropes do not hold against
scientific verification.
Building on theories of populist reason, money and finance, the paper argues that
obfuscating the issue of public debt and finance via the use of emotive and moralistic
metaphors is the core of elite economic populism. The goal is to justify austerity policies. Understanding the use of these metaphors is thus important both scientifically
and socially.
[Populism ... 12]
Populist political strategies are typically regarded a device operationalised rather by
the lower than the higher socio-economic classes. Thus, it is often either accepted or
Panel: Populism, politics, and rhetoric
Keywords: Elites, finance, money, public debt, populism
Author(s): Joel Kai la (University of Jyväskylä)
ʺRahat on loppuʺ: Public Debt
and Elite Populism in Finland
Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) is one of the most important political theorists of
the 17th century. Hobbes is usually known of his conception of social contract and
absolute sovereign. However, Hobbes should also be remembered of his strong opposition towards populism. In fact, for Hobbes the problem of populism, demagogy
and false rhetorics was at the centre of his critic towards his contemporary society. He
also claimed that all major classical societies, such as societies of ancient Greece and
Rome, had fallen due to populism. Hobbes connected populism to democracy and
saw that democracy will eventualy lead to the rule of skilful and charismatic orators,
while the truth and sound reason will fail in democracy. For this reason he supported
strong monarchy and absolute sovereinty as only solution to prevent the power of
misguided and falsely speech of the demagogs.
This paper will analyse Hobbes’s philosophy from the viewpoint of populism and
it aims to show how Hobbes constructed his theory of state as an opposition to the
power of populists.
Panel: Populism and history
Keywords: political theory, rhetoric, Thomas Hobbes
Author(s): Mikko Jakonen (University of Jyväskylä)
Thomas Hobbes and the Problem of Populism
Panel: Populism and identities
Keywords: National-populism, political party, populism
Author(s): Lazaros Karavasilis (Aristotle University
of Thessaloniki)
In an age of mediated politics, public performances of politicians have become central
to our attention. In late modernity the distinctions between serious and entertainment, party and identity politics have been blurred further. Overall the variation
Panel: Populist dynamics 2
Keywords: Comic, Humour, Performance, Politics, Populism
Author(s): Joonas Koivukoski (University of Helsinki)
Public performances of populist comic
The national-populist discourse has a notably perception of its subject, i.e. the ″people″, which revolves around the notion of the ″nation″ thus differentiating it from
other theoretical populist interpretations. Through this paper we will highlight the
particular characteristics that contribute to the formation of the populist subject in
the context of national- populist discourse, hence examining on what basis the construction of the people takes place.
Specifically, basing our research on New Democracy’s discourse (the prominent
conservative party in Greece) throughout the period between 2010 and 2012, we
will present the importance of the linkage between the people and the nation that
is so crucial for our analysis. The aforementioned linkage is the main component of
the national-populist interpretation of the people as the subject is comprehended
only in terms of the geographical, cultural, and political limitations of the nation. As
a direct effect of that hypothesis, we shall show how the inner identity of the national
people is formatted and the basic components that characterize it. On that basis, we
will examine the four main elements of that identity that help cultivate the nationalpopulist subject: the nobility and purity that is ascribed to the people, the resentment
that defines the emotions of the people, the conspiratorial perception of the world
and finally the role of the national-popular ″other″, the enemy of the people and his
dualistic nature (both internal and external regarding the aforementioned national
limitations).
The above analysis will provide useful clarifications regarding the constitution of
the people in national-populist terms, while it will also prove that through the nature
of the subject, national-populism can only be an exclusionary type of populism.
[Populism... 13]
The Construc on of the Na onal-Populist Subject: the forma on of the ʺpeopleʺ in na onalpopulist discourse and its characteris cs
The JDP ( Justice and Development Party), which uninterruptedly governs Turkey
since 2002, had emerged as the outcome of the attempts to reorganize the Islamic
discursive formation around a set of new points of articulation after the 28 February
military memorandum in 1997, by which the Islamist Welfare Party was removed
from power by the military. These attempts were to be named after a while as Conservative Democracy, which would also be used to frame political line of the party in
its first periods of rule.
However, as the party succeeded to maintain its power in successive elections, particularly after the Gezi Protests in June 2013, which was authoritatively suppressed by
the regime, it became clear that the label Conservative Democracy does not amount
to something more than an oxymoron. Rather, now the JDP regime, which might be
thought of under the notion ″Populism in Power″ in its authoritarianism, wish for a
strong presidency and etc., started to be considered through such terms as authoritarian populism and Islamist fascism. Yet, the regime continued to expand its rhetorical
arsenal through such terms as ″Advanced Democracy″, ″New Ottomanism″ and the
″New Turkey″ most recently, a set of signifiers successively sent the front line by the
party to consolidate its shrinking hegemony.
In this regard, this presentation will aim to analyze rhetorical arsenal of the JDP
regime in terms of its totalizing points as referred above and attempt to underline the
connection between particularistic structure of its recently well manifested politics
of Sunni Nation, rhetorical dimension of this politics as overtly concretized in the
totalizing points of its discourse and the representations concerning political enemy,
which exclusively rests upon the logic of ″theft of enjoyment″ in affective respect.
Author(s): Panos Kompatsiaris (Higher School of Economics)
Performing ar s c populism: The videos of Marc
McGowan as populist cri que and nega on
The field of aesthetics is traditionally grounded upon a binary opposition separating ‘art’, as a reflective and contemplative activity, from ‘popular culture’, as the brute
and philistine expressions of the masses. While art is almost always expected to have
a broadly-conceived educational mission, it has to simultaneously denounce popular culture attitudes and forms, involving propaganda, didacticism and immediacy,
in order to exist and legitimize itself socially. This essentially modernist idea that
conceives art as programmatically disassociated from popular forms and direct social
engagement (commonly associated with proponents of ‘high art’, and Author(s):
such as Clement Greenberg and Theodor Adorno) determines to a large extent, even
today, what is allowed to be called art and what is not. For instance, among numerous
similar cases, the work The Mosque, in which the artist Christoph Büchel converted
a catholic church into a mosque, was recently censored at one of the most visible
and tolerant art institutions, the Venice Biennale, for exceeding art’s representational
status and becoming a ″real″ place of worship.
This paper explores the tenuous and highly ambivalent relation between art and
populist forms through the work of the British artist Mark McGowan and his fictional
persona The Artist as Taxi Driver. Employing a direct language and an aggressive
anti-neoliberal rhetoric grounded on widespread populist binaries, such as the ‘oligarchs’ and the ‘people’, in his series of YouTube videos McGowan enacts the populist
nightmare of high art advocates. His daily commentary on subjects such as the Greek
crisis, the Scottish referendum and the Jeremy Corbyn election, perform a postmodern challenge to the modernist separation of art and popular culture, while at the
same time reclaim the fundamentally modernist role of art as a negation of capitalism
and consumer society.
Panel: Populism, art, performance
Keywords: High art, popular culture, propaganda, social media, contemporary art
[Populism ... 14]
Keynote Anu Koivunen (University of
Stockholm / University of Helsinki):
An -populist affects? The poli cal
promise of the performa ve in contemporary Finland
of accepted forms of political representation has increased in comparison to ″high″
modern era of more monotonic political performances. Thus, comical is one mode of
discourse to which politicians – in varying degrees – lean on in their performances.
There have been some studies analysing humorous public performances enacted
by politicians, but the topic has not been scrutinised in relation to populism or
populist rhetoric. This seems rather surprising given that comical performances and/
or mockery are essential to brand images of some of the mainstream populist party
leaders in Europe today (consider Beppe Grillo in Italy, Jón Gnarr in Iceland, Nigel
Farage in UK and Timo Soini in Finland).
Previous studies on politicians’ use of humour in the public sphere indicate
various functions to comic utterances depending on the contextual matters. Accordingly, humour can function as criticism toward other politicians, as distraction from
counter-arguments, and as seduction towards possible voters and own political block,
but as public comic performances are usually semantically and pragmatically complex, more nuanced analyses are required in relation to each specific case.
In my presentation I concentrate in one possible instance of ″populist comic″:
Timo Soini’s (head of the Finns party) parliamentary performances in opposition
in 2014 and in the government in 2015. I compare his performances to other Finnish party leaders in opposition and in the government at the same time. It is asked,
does ″populist comic″ differ from ″non-populist comic″, and does the governmental
responsibility reduce the amount and the quality of comical performances? The
fluid notions of ″comic″ and ″populism″ as analytical concepts are also critically reassessed.
The charismatic leader of the Finns Party (Perussuomalaiset) Timo Soini (today
Finnish Minister of Foreign Affairs) is famous for his colourful political rhetoric, e.g.
slogans and proverbs. In our presentation we are concentrating on a set of terms used
by Soini and some others in the Finns Party, with the intention of identifying their
connection to identity politics.
On the eve of the 2008 municipal elections, Timo Soini published a political life
history with the title Maisterisjätkä (literally ‘Master Bloke’). The title implies an
apparent contradiction: ″maisteri″ refers to Soini’s M.Sc. degree, and thereby to elites.
″Jätkä″, in turn, strongly connotes Finnish masculinity and the lower classes, referring originally to non-educated male workers, especially harbor or forest workers. In
contemporary usage ″jätkä″ also refers to a male person more generally. Sometimes a
woman can also be this kind of friend, a ″hyvä (good) jätkä″. Our focus in the presentation is on the word ″jätkä″, but we shall also be looking at two related words. ″Äijä″
is a word having partly the same implications as ″jätkä″. And a third word became
closely associated with the party in 2011 when the Finns Party gained a landslide victory in the parliamentary elections, the so called ″jytky″. The victory raised the Finns
Party for the first time among serious political parties.
The point we want to make in the presentation is that this set of words is interrelated and has certain implications of different degrees having to do with male bodily
robustness and plain and unaffected behavior. These implications are supported by
the body language of some of the leading politicians of the Party, notably Timo Soini.
In sum, they reinforce one particular identity political strand within the Finns Party.
[Populism... 15]
How should we conceive the critique of contemporary forms of populism? While
a great deal has been written on the topic of the critique of populism, there is little
consensus as to the ambiguous relation between populism and the paradigm of critical philosophy. On the one hand, there are traditional arguments on how the critical
paradigm offers a unique possibility to understand, deconstruct and resist populism
and the reasoning behind its power. On the other hand, it is clear that the problematic
nature of the critical paradigm itself has to be recognised: various discussions under
the titles of ”the critique of critique” or ”hyper-critique” have demonstrated that the
apparent neutrality of critical project is in fact the product of hegemony containing
various forms of violent and hierarchical situations.
My aim in this paper is to shed light on this paradox by explicating the origins of
the critical paradigm in Kant’s philosophy. The status of the popular in Kant’s thought
is ambiguous. On the one hand, Kant’s philosophical project constantly differentiates itself from the popular philosophy of its time and explores the rigorous conceptual ground, not only for philosophical discourse in itself, but also for the political
situation before the terrors of the French revolution. On the other hand however,
Kant considers the understandability of his own writings as a serious philosophical
problem and aims in his own words at ”the art of popularity”. Through a close reading
of Kant’s thought, with particular focus on the notion of the popular, this paper seeks
to explicate the complicate relation of the critical and the popular in its origin. The
aim is to demonstrate how Kant’s waver before populism casts light on our difficulties
with the critique of contemporary populisms.
Panel: What is populism? 2
Panel: Cultural aspects of populism and populist rhetoric
Keywords: Timo Soini, identity politics, masculinity, rhetoric, Finns Party
Author(s): Urpo Kovala, Jyrki Pöysä (University of Jyväskylä)
Author(s): Ari Korhonen (University of Helsinki)
Keywords: Kant, critical philosophy, critique of populism
ʺJätkäʺ and ʺjytkyʺ: Some remarks on
he poli cal rhetoric of the Finns Party
”A science without honey”. Kant and the ambiguous rela on of cri cal philosophy and populism
[Populism ... 16]
Keywords: populism, social pathology, identity, recognition
Author(s): Arto Lai nen (University of Tampere), Onni Hirvonen (University of Jyväskylä), Joonas Pennanen (University of
Jyväskylä)
Populism as a pathological
form of iden ty poli cs
Both France and Hungary have seen a high level of penetration of extreme-right politics into the political mainstream. The Front National and Jobbik have both harnessed
important support and are seen as runners-up and challengers of governing parties,
with their electoral performance breathing into the neck, or even at times surpassing that of the established mainstream parties. This paper explores the parallels and
differences of how these two parties have gained such notable roles in their respective
domestic politics. The FN was a pioneer of right-wing extremism and populism, with
Jobbik joining the scene much later, but what Jobbik looses in time to the FN, it wins
it back by the ferocity of its discourse. The FN has lately adopted, under the leadership of Marine le Pen a softening and a sought normalization of its profile, why Jobbik
is becoming increasingly radical to challenge any hints of its alleged toning down.
Thus we have two successful extreme-right populist parties that try to remain popular
in different ways. What does it say about their political context and is one way more
successful than the other?
Panel: Populism in Europe
Panel: Populism in Europe
The paper examines the populist rhetoric of a subgroup of Hungarian mayors, the
leaders of so-called cities with county rank. Its main question is whether there is an
association between the position occupied in the national power structure (i.e. to be
pro-governmental or oppositional politician) and the populism of mayors’ rhetoric.
The hypothesis of the paper claims that ceteris paribus being in opposition provides a
positive incentive to include populist elements in one’s speeches and other utterances.
After defining populism theoretically and drawing up relevant findings of the existing
literature on problems faced by oppositional political elites, the paper elaborates its
pivotal concept, mayoral populism, and the methodology necessary for its operationalization. Using time as variable it performs content analysis on speeches and other
oral remarks of mayors, focusing on specific given issues and politicians, both overlapping governmental cycles thus providing us the chance of comparison, as speeches
differ only in the relationship of mayors with cabinets then governing the country.
Types of texts analyzed both qualitatively and quantitatively include interviews,
memorial speeches and instruments of parliamentary control (in case of mayors with
dual mandates). The paper establishes a representative sample of the subgroup examined and investigates rhetoric of seven mayors in four genres. Besides pursuing the
confirmation of the hypothesis, the paper also aims to contribute to the formulation
of new relevant research questions.
Keywords: Populism
Author(s): Ilona Lahdelma (ELTE Atelier Research Fellow, Budapest, Hungary)
Author(s): Dániel Kovarek (Central European University)
Keywords: Local politics, mayors, populist discourse, populist rhetoric, content
analysis
Hungarian and French right-wing
populism in compara ve perspec ve
Populists rhetoric of Hungarian mayors in regard
to their opposi onal/pro-governmental posi on
References:
Balibar E. and Wallerstein I. (eds.) Race, nation, classe; les identités ambiguës. Paris: la
Découverte, 1 vol. (II-307 ).
Collovald A. (2004) Le populisme du FN : un dangereux contresens, Bellecombe-enBauges: Ed. du Croquant.
Katsambekis G. (2015) The Place of the People in Post-Democracy. Researching ‘Antipopulism’ and Post-Democracy in Crisis-Ridden Greece. PostData 19: 555–582.
Mondon A. (2015) Populism, the people and the illusion of democracy – the Front
‘Populism’ has become a familiar term in the coverage of twenty-first century politics,
from the rise of the populist far right in Europe and parties as diverse as the Front
National and UKIP, to the left-wing movements and parties which have emerged in
the aftermath of the crisis, borrowing some of the tools and rhetoric from their Latin
American predecessors. Having witnessed a revival in academic circles at the turn of
the century, it is now a thriving field of research and is used by the media and the public as a catch-all term to describe anything against the ‘system’. Populism appears to be
here to stay yet the term, while widely accepted and propagated, remains contentious
in its meaning and limiting in its democratic potential.
The paper will argue that the uses and misuses of the term ‘populism’ have participated in the reduction of the full emancipatory potential of the ‘people’. On the
one hand, its association with movements and parties within the liberal democratic
system, albeit on its margins, has limited the scope for universality as it reduces the
‘people’ to a countable mass in the search for majorities. On the other hand, the people’s so-called penchant for irrational and unacceptable alternatives, dismissed either
on the grounds of their ethno-exclusivism or left-wing nostalgia and naivety, has comforted a broad elite in the troubling acceptance that democracy is better without the
people. Ultimately, this has led to a reduction in the scope for alternatives and politics
as an emancipatory concept in general.
Panel: What is populism? 2
[Populism... 17]
Keynote Mikko Lehtonen (University of Tampere): Finnish populist
na onalism. A conjunctural approach
Author(s): Aurelien Mondon (University of Bath)
This paper takes the Hegelian notion of recognition as its starting point and analyses
how the populist formulations of political goals in struggles for recognition are – despite their initial positive motivating force – pathological.
What is meant by recognition in this context is, firstly, positive affirmative attitudes that constitute personhood. In other words, our identities are shaped by the
perceptions and judgments of others. Secondly, recognition has political import as
lack of recognition is seen as a motivating force behind political and social movements. Related to this is the claim that historical and contemporary social struggles
are best conceived as struggles for recognition.
In this paper populism is taken as a political phenomenon that offers highly simplified but motivating formulations of the reasons and remedies for non-recognition and
misrecognition. It is argued here that, although populism is useful in the sense that
it aims to ameliorate real experienced lack of recognition through fostering political
movements, it is also harmful. The simplified populist representations of collective
identities are often guilty of essentializing and reifying identities. This can be seen especially in the case of nationalistic identity politics that rely on a homogenous picture
of an original identity – often manifested in the use of the concept of ‘the folk’ or ‘the
people’ – that is taken as the locus of political struggles. This often results in harmful
stereotypical views and exclusion of the other. Furthermore, populist identities are
also harmful for the populists themselves as the simplified view is applied also to oneself. This paper claims that these dynamics can be understood as a pathological way
of obstructing discursive identity-formation. Populism leads to the lack of genuine
mutual recognition between those who struggle to get their identities affirmed.
Keywords: democracy, elite discourse, far right, Populism
Populism or democracy without the people
Panel: Populist dynamics 2
Five stars Movement (M5S) had a huge success in 2013 italian elections getting
25,5% of votes (more than 8,7 millions of voters). Lead by the comic Beppe Grillo,
M5S made his appearance in the italian political arena provoking a real earthquake
and proposing a new style of political communication. Party structure is peculiar and
different from other traditional parties: local branch are created by internet groups
(called meetup), the selection of candidates has been made through internet vote,
proposals for policies are discussed and voted in the net by inscripts to the meet-ups.
M5S declares itself against all other parties and immediately started talking about a
revolution in italian political settings. Initially considered as a new libertarian party by
the international media, it reveals as a characteristic populist party with hew features.
Through analyzing the communication style of Grillo, the party structure and the
relations with other italian parties one can find what it can be considered a real new
generation of italian populism.
Panel: Populist dynamics 1
Keywords: populism
Author(s): Carlo Muzzi (Bologna University)
Il Movimento 5 Stelle. The new
genera on of italian populism
References:
Gideon Botsch, Die extreme Rechte in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland 1949 bis
heute. Darmstadt
2012, p. 90.
Reinfeldt, Sebastian. 2013. Wir fu&#776;r euch”: Die Wirksamkeit des Rechtspopulismus in Zeiten der Krise.
Auflage: 1., Auflage. Unrast., p. 50.
Priester, Katrin, Wesensmerkmale des Populismus in Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte
APuZ 5-6/2012.
Berlin: 2012.
[Populism ... 18]
The most recent local election in the year 2014 has seen the election of a group called
”Freiburg Lebenswert” (Lively Freiburg in English) into the city council of Freiburg.
The group has stirred some anger with its rhetoric. The Lord Mayor has accused
them of being a right wing populist group.
The Author tries to investigate this claim and identify if the usual markers, that are
identified as populist by political scientist can be found in its rhetoric. He uses the
models of populist speech provided by Katrein Reiser, Gideon Botsch and Sebastian
Reinfeldt. For this he analysis campaign material such as posters and leaflets, speeches
and press releases and other material. The material he uses for his investigation is from
2014 until January 2015. For the investigation he used only material that is publicly
available and in text format. The study concludes that populism can be found in the
rhetoric employed by this group, even though the populism is less crass then that seen
by other non local issue oriented movements. The publication of the initial study in a
local student paper caused an angry backlash by members of the group.
The paper confirms the hypothesis that populism is a relational category that can
applied to any host ideology.
Panel Populist dynamics 2
Keywords: local politics, nimby, planning, local government
Author(s): Sebas an Müller ((University of Turku / Albert-Ludwigs Universität)
Comparing Local populism in Freiburg (Germany)
to the populism of Alterna ve für Deutschland
(Alterna ve for Germany) Migra on Crisis Between August and September 2015
National and UKIP in a comparative context. French Politics 13: 141–156.
Rancière J. (2005) La haine de la démocratie, Paris: La fabrique éditions.
Stavrakakis Y. and Katsambekis G. (2014) Left-wing populism in the European periphery: the case of SYRIZA. Journal of Political Ideologies 19: 119–142.
As migration encroaches in all fronts, the task of teaching illiterate adult migrants
from the global South, who have migrated to ‘fortress’ Europe in search of jobs and
better life- how to read and write poses great difficult in literacy campaign. This is very
much so when such adults come from backgrounds with different ″script″ - that is un-
Panel: Populism, art, performance
Keywords: literacy and education, migration, Key words:Drama
Author(s): Charles Ogu (University of Jyväskylä)
Populism as performance:Rethinking Literacy In
The Age Of Migra on
Former executive director of Patmos mission foundation Leo Meller is known for his
prophecies of the end of age, and that he brought in 1980s American style of evangelicalism and especially sale pitch, religious making of money, to Finnish context.
Later on Patmos mission foundation’s research director and doctor of theology Juha
Ahvio has attempted to bring themes of Christian right of United States to Finnish
political discussion. He has written pamphlets that focusing on defending traditional
marriage, tracking ideological roots of cultural marxism, islamization of Europe and
Finland, threat of Russian and need of national revival etc. In my paper I will analyzing theologico-political rhetoric of Ahvio, its tropes, structure and effects as a part of
now-a-days populist movement.
Panel: Populism and religion
[Populism... 19]
The purpose of this presentation is to present the main findings of a study focusing on
the uses of the ‘Enlightenment’, as a reified, instrumentalized concept by Greek, (neo)
liberal public commentators in their articles at two popular Greek news/lifestyle websites, ‘AthensVoice’ and ‘Protagon’ during the years of the ‘Greek crisis’. I argue that
the ‘Enlightenment’ is a nodal signifier of denouncing and reformist discourses towards the Greek society, where Greece’s economic/social/political crises are viewed
as mere symptoms, underlined by the country and its citizens’ ‘pathologies’ that
according to the crisis’ hegemonic narratives, are the main causes of Greece’s profligacy. Such pathologies concern the Greeks’ (supposed) tendency towards corruption,
irresponsibility and idleness as well as their alleged inclination towards ‘populist’
rhetoric, demands and politics (as those expressed by leftist movements and parties).
Consequently, all these negative features that cause Greece to ‘lag behind’ ‘Europe’
are symptoms of a Greek people’s ‘lack of Enlightenment’, as diagnosed by (neo)
liberal commentators. This supposed ‘lack of Enlightenment’ is caused by various
historical particularities of Greece, such as its Ottoman past that appears responsible
for Greece’s modernity lag, as well as its more recent, so-called ‘ideological hegemony
of the Left’ that produced a populist political culture with detrimental effects to the
economic, social and political system of Greece. Critical discourse analysis informed
by discourse theory is deployed to analyze such discursive constructions. The article
concludes that dogmatic and undemocratic discourses are launched in such texts
relating to the mainstream crisis/austerity rationales and their culturalist/psychologist understandings of the economic crisis and its biopolitical solution in Greece and
elsewhere. Post-colonial literature is deployed to explain the accounts of the Greek
liberals and their relation to the Enlightenment and other western-centric discourses.
Panel: Populism and history
Keywords: Christian right, Finnish politics, Populism, Rhetorical analysis
Author(s): Jiri Nieminen (University of Tampere, Comet)
Author(s): Yiannis Mylonas (the Na onal Research University
‘Higher School of Economics’, Moscow)
Keywords: EU, enlightenment, Greece, biopolitics, neoliberalism
Chris an right of United States and Finland – poli cal rhetoric of Patmos mission founda on
‘Liberal’ ar cula ons of the ‘Enlightenment’ in
the Greek public sphere during 2007-2015
Populism, here seen as a rhetorical style (Taguieff 2007), uses religious rhetoric in
many ways. From Silvio Berlusconi to Marine Le Pen populist leadership is based
to same rhetoric model as evangelical preach has used. Populist leadership is based
to charismatic leadership and language. How and which way populism and religion
are related is very important question when we try understand a complex term as
populism is.
Religious rhetoric involves far more than the study of ″God-talk″; the study of
religious rhetoric can be extended to apply to all areas in which religion’s language of
transcendence seeps into symbolic action, even when religion itself does not explicitly appear.
However, there is not much relevant study of relation between populism and religion. Traditionally in European research politics and religion and separated. In France
there is principle of laicite from 1905 that means that state don´t have any religion
and to wear religious symbols in public places (kindergarten, schools) is not allowed.
Panel: Populism and religion
Keywords: Religion, populism, rhetoric
Author(s): Laura Parkkinen (University of Turku)
Religious rhetoric of populism
– towards a new sect?
effects of the fringe populist party were achieved. The data includes opinion pieces
and editorials published in the national daily newspaper Helsingin Sanomat, from
2002 to 2011 and again from 2015.
The development confirms the idea of contingency at the core of Laclau’s theory:
the logic of populism may be replaced by a different mode of representation. Could
the idea that institutional identities are replaced by populist identifications be reversed? In the case of the Finns Party the move to the stark opposition to between the
immigrants and the natives, could be that – or is it just another bipolar articulation
of the people? It is possible that in the case of Finns Party – which is now in government, we are no longer talking about populism, but nationalism and racism. A crucial
distinction to be made.
[Populism ... 20]
This paper discusses the rather paradoxical movement of the Finns Party from a fringe
populist to mainstream populist position and from a populist position to the radical
right. Rather than taking for granted the idea of party families and ideologies, it is
based on the anti-essentialist or postfoundationalist reading of populism by Ernesto
Laclau. To make use of the somewhat universalist theory of politics and populism to
analysis of transformations and moves in politics, it develops the concepts of populist
of mainstream and fringe populism as particular populist dynamics.
Exploring Finnish politics in the 2000s, it demonstrates how the Finns Party had
fitted from the 2002 to the Laclaudian concept of populism. This understanding was
actively promoted in the Finnish daily newspaper Helsingin Sanomat, paving the way
to the landslide for Finns Party in the 2011 elections – the mythical event, ″Jytky″, in
the Finns Party rhetoric. The paper also observes how there had always been a tension between radical right and populist elements in the Finns Party discourse. These
radical right elements surfaced and overtook the Finns Party discourse in the party’s
rhetoric and the public image generated on the party in 2015. Simultaneously the
discursive elements had already spread to other parties’ rhetoric and the hegemonic
Panel: Populist dynamics 1
Keywords: Populism, radical right
Author(s): Emilia Palonen (University of Helsinki)
From the margins to the mainstream,
from populism to radical right
touched by reading and writing culture, thereby problematising as it were, this class
of migrants insertion into a new modernity fitted with a different literacy regime; this
paper approaches populism from the point of drama, not only as a form of popular
resistance, but also as a way of ridding-off the term of the informality, non-elitism and
negativity associated with it, by privileging visual practices(pictures, images and other
popular media ) as a teaching strategy which is ‘popular’ with their mode of learning.
This is done in contrast to the ‘dominant’ way of knowing that is ‘bookish’;which is
known with conventional language classroom . References:
Bourdieu P (1984) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (R. Nice,
Trans) Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
Hallin D (1992) The Passing of the ‘High Modernism’ of American Journalism.
Journal of Communication 42:3 (Summer).
Kazin M (1998) The Populist Persuasion: an American History, Revised Edition. Ithaca,
New York: Cornell University Press.
Laclau E (2005) On Populist Reason. New York: Verso.
Laclau E and C Mouffe (2001) Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical
Democratic Politics (2nd ed). London: Verso.
Örnebring H & Jönsson A (2004) Tabloid Journalism and the Public Sphere: a Historical Perspective on Tabloid Journalism. Journalism Studies 5(3): 283–295.
Peters C (2010) No-Spin Zones: The Rise of the American Cable News Magazine
and Bill O’Reilly. Journalism Studies 11(6): 832–851.
Prior M (2007) Post-Broadcast Democracy: How Media Choice Increases Inequality
in Political Involvement and Polarizes Elections. New York: Cambridge University
Press.
journalism, with its more thorough theorization of narrativity and visual rhetoric, can
help counter the excessively linguistic focus of populist political theory and reveal
how populism involves a broader range of discursive resources and media techniques.
This presentation takes the cable network Fox News as a case study for illustrating how American news organizations, particularly conservative ones, appropriate
populist styles as both marketing tools and political weapons. Fox’s populist methods
for attaining cultural authority forces journalism scholars to consider epistemological
strategies that challenge the empirical knowledge tradition and work outside liberal
theories of deliberative democracy.
This study uses empirical data I collected at the UCLA Cable Television archive
and examines programming content from September 2008, the financial collapse,
to the 2010 Midterm elections. My analysis reveals how Fox’s populist imaginary of
American news and politics is ideologically useful, as it serves to re-present ‘sectorial,’ partisan demands as universal, popular demands (Laclau, 2005). This project
develops a theoretical framework for understanding populist journalistic styles that
synthesizes Habermasian public sphere theory, Laclauian theories of populism, and
Bourdieuian theories of taste.
[Populism... 21]
For nearly two centuries, the ‘populist rhetorical tradition’ has provided American
politicians with a vernacular language for describing class tensions (Kazin, 1998).
News organizations, particularly tabloid ones (Ornebring & Jönsson, 2004), have
used populist discourses to invoke similar antagonisms as well. However, much of the
focus on populism has been devoted to the study of political movements and charismatic politicians. Less attention has been paid to populism’s relationship to journalism, especially the pronounced role populist discourses play in the partisan, ‘high
media choice’ environment of today (Prior, 2007).
Theories of populism can enhance research on political journalism by providing concepts that elucidate the moral logics news personalities utilize to legitimate
ideologies of race, class and cultural status. Conversely, scholarship on television
Panel: Populism and media
Keywords: Fox News, Great Recession, populist political theory, post-broadcast
news, partisan journalism
Author(s): Reece Peck (College of Staten Island, CUNY)
Fox Populism: Theorizing Populist Styles of Journalism through the Case of Fox News
References:
Aristoteles, 1970: La rhetorique.
Burke, Kenneth 1970: The rhetoric of religion.
Taguieff, Pierre-André: L´illusion populiste. Flammarion 2007.
The aim of this paper is study religion in rhetoric of Timo Soini (True Finns) and
Marine Le Pen (Front National). Material is blog of TS (timeline 2010-2012 before
and after ″jytky″) and speeches of MLP (timeline 2013–2014) before and after big
″tsunami″ in European elections 2014). I use classical rhetoric theory from Aristoteles
and Burke. How and which way a populist leader uses religion, religious rhetoric and
own faith? Is populism becoming a new ″sect″ that is true to the belivers? How and
which way ″other″ (muslims, Jews) are excluded?
Author(s): Ma
Pohjonen (University of Hamburg)
ʺThe ʺdarkʺ side of Internet freedoms:
hate speech, populism and can we do
anything about it?ʺ
Author(s): Nicole Richter, Jane Haid, Dorothea Horst, Benjamin Marienfeld ((European University Viadrina, Frankfurt
Oder)
Mul Modal Construc ons of Threat: Conceptualizing danger and enemies in populist discourse about the EU in Germany and Poland
The Snowden revelations signalled an end to ecstatic pronouncements on digital
media as the harbinger of citizen participation, democracy and open dialogue. In its
place, we have seen an increased focus on the ″dark side″ of Internet freedoms: as a
platform promoting hate speech, terrorist recruitment, right wing populist mobilisation and increased government censorship and surveillance. Such ″extreme speech″, it
is argued, now threatens many taken-for-granted freedoms commonly associated with
digital media. While such volatile speech restricts and suspends open dialogue, it is
also used by governments across the world to legitimise increased securitisation and
control over its citizen’s communicative practices, often rhetorically justified by the
fear of extreme speech and its negative consequences. This paper looks at the challenge posed by this ″dark side″ of internet freedoms. Through a comparative perspective to the debates on populist anti-immigrant and anti-Islamic mobilisation in the
social media in Europe, and in Finland in particular, it analyses some of the conceptual, methodological and legal challenges posed by such ″extreme speech″ online – and
the measures possibly needed to counter and mitigate it.
Panel: Populism and hate speech
Keywords: ″hate speech″, ″populism″
[Populism ... 22]
In Sweden, the populist radical right party the Sweden Democrats (SD) has been
steadily increasing its popularity among the foreign-born population. This phenomenon is indicated not only by rising support figures for the SD among foreign-born
citizens; but also by the fact that this anti-immigration party has begun to attract
politicians with immigrant background or ethnic minority belonging to join its ranks.
In the present study we delve into this paradoxical matter by exploring how politicians with immigrant background or ethnic minority belonging accommodate their
ethnic as well as their anti-immigration political identity within their discourse. Our
critical discursive psychological analysis of blog accounts by four SD politicians
found three distinct identifications or subject positions that these politicians claimed
for themselves: that of the Swede, the good immigrant and the victim of (political)
racism. We analysed the discursive and rhetorical construction of these positions,
identifying the rhetorical resources and tools that the bloggers drew upon in the creation of their subject positions. Ultimately, we elaborated on the discursive functions
of the positions. These were: opposition to immigration; the division between ’good’
and ’bad’ immigrants; the denial of the existence of structural racism; and the reversal
of racism to the political opponents of the SD. We concluded that as politicians, the
bloggers in this study have profound impact on the public debate on immigration and
a multicultural versus ethnically homogeneous society. As politicians belonging to
ethnic minorities, they could promote a discourse that supports inclusion of various
ethnic groups into a broad, open definition of Swedishness and of who can be part of
the Swedish nation. In light of our research findings it seems, however, that they have
chosen a rather different path.
Panel: Populism and immigration
Keywords: Critical discursive psychology, Ethnic identity, Political blogs, Subject
positions, Sweden Democrats
Author(s): Katarina Pe ersson, Karmela Liebkind,
Inari Sakki (University of Helsinki)
’You who are an immigrant – why
are you in the Sweden Democrats?’
political discourse: A comparison from the 2008 elections in the United States
and Italy. Cognitive Perspectives on Political Discourse. Special issue of Journal of
Language and Politics 13(2): 255–288.
Cienki, Alan and Cornelia Müller (2014). Ways of viewing metaphor in gesture. In:
Cornelia Müller, Alan Cienki, Ellen Fricke, Silva H. Ladewig, David McNeill and
Jana Bressem (eds.) (2014). Body – Language – Communication: An international
Handbook on Multimodality in Human Interaction. (Handbooks of Linguistics and
Communication Science 38.2.), 1766–1781. Berlin/ Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.
Haid, Janett (2012): Das politische Wir – Multimodale Ausdrucksformen bei nordund lateinamerikanischen Politikern in öffentlichen Reden und Interviews. EUV.
(unpubl. MA thesis)
Jagers, Jan and Stefaan Walgrave (2007): Populism as political communication style:
An empirical study of political parties’ discourse in Belgium. European Journal of
Political Research 46(3): 319–345.
Latifi, Veton (2014): The Populism of the Political Discourse. Metamorphoses of
Political Rhetoric and Populism. South-East European Journal of Political Science
II(1/2): 173–192.
Mühlhäusler, Peter und Rom Harré (1990): Pronouns and People: The Linguistic Construction of Social and Personal Identity. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Müller, Cornelia and Susanne Tag (2010): The Dynamics of Metaphor: Foregrounding and Activating Metaphoricity in Conversational Interaction. Cognitive Semiotics 6: 85–120.
Neuber, Baldur (2002): Prosodische Formen in Funktion. Leistungen der Suprasegmentalia für das Verstehen, Behalten und die Bedeutungs(re)konstruktion. Frankfurt/M. et
al.: Lang.
Reisigl, Martin (2012): Zur kommunikativen Dimension des Rechtspopulismus. In:
Sir Perter Ustinov Institut (Hg.): Populismus. Herausforderung oder Gefahr für die
Demokratie? Wien: new academic press.
Richter Nicole (2014): Structuring discourse: Observations on prosody and gesture
in Russian TV-discourse. In: Cornelia M., A. Cienki, E. Fricke, S. H. Ladewig,
D. McNeill & Jana B. (Eds.): Body-Language-Communication: An International
Handbook on Multimodality in Human Interaction. Handbücher zur Sprach- und
Kommunikationswissenschaft (38.2), 1392–1400. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter
Mouton.
Schoor, Carola (2015): Political metaphor, a matter of purposeful style: On the rational, emotional and strategic purposes of political metaphor. Metaphor and the
Social World 5(1): 82–101.
[Populism... 23]
References:
Cameron, Lynne et al. (2009): The discourse dynamics approach to metaphor and
metaphor-led discourse analysis. Metaphor and Symbol 24(2): 63–89.
Cienki, Alan and Gianluca Giansante (2014): Conversational framing in televised
In the field of linguistics populism is not yet as thoroughly investigated as in social sciences. Nevertheless, linguistic discourse analysis can provide fruitful insights into the
communicative strategies and mechanisms that are exploited by politicians and parties (e.g., Schoor 2015, Wodak 2013, 2015), especially from a multimodal perspective
(e.g., Cienki & Giansante 2014, Cienki & Müller 2014). Conceiving of populism as a
communication style and rhetoric ( Jagers and Walgrave 2007, Reisigl 2012) provides
a theoretical background taking account of the dynamics of the phenomenon that is
pervasive across all parties (Latifi 2014). Likewise, it offers the necessary framework
for analysing different linguistic aspects characterising populist discourse.
One such aspect is that particular linguistic means, especially figurative language,
personal pronouns and prosodic marking, are used in populist discourse among different types of communication (e.g., political speeches, interviews) in order to create
an effective image of threat. We suggest that such an image links the understanding
of EU-related topics to a subjectively constructed framework that is persuasively exploited. Considering communication to play out in various modalities (e.g., verbally,
gesturally and paraverbally), we aim at investigating multimodal manifestations of
personal pronouns, metaphors and metonymies in populist discourse (Haid 2012;
Mühlhäusler and Harré 1990; Richter 2014; Neuber 2002; Cameron et al. 2009;
Müller and Tag 2010). We assume that these linguistic means are used to constitute
an ingroup (mostly being conceptualised as we) and an outgroup (deviating from
the ingroup and presented as threatening to its members). Communicative strategies of constructing in- and outgroups play an important role in EU-critical populist
discourse, as they can evoke particular emotions like fear and anger. Furthermore, we
ask for the cultural expression of populism by comparing the constructions of threat
expressed by political actors in two neighbouring European countries: Germany and
Poland.
Panel: Populism and media
Keywords: Poland, threat, Germany, multimodal communication,
populist discourse
Venezuela was a highly polarized country, economically and politically, during President Chavez’s last years. This was also reflected to the media as the private media
became the spokesperson of the anti-chavistas and the state media represented the
government’s point of view. Chavez is often described as populist but how did the
prevailing populism reflect to the media content.
In the research populism is approached from Laclau’s (2005a; 2005b) point of
view as a political logic, which is about constructing the people. The base of populism
is antagonistic divide, which causes a gap between the people and power holders. In
Foucauldian sense power is everywhere in different levels. Thus, media contents are a
site of discursive struggles.
The research focuses on the political conflict of Venezuela during President
Chávez’s last years in power. The data includes 817 articles gathered between
2010– 2012 around three different media events from four national newspapers
Panel: Populism and media
Keywords: Populism, Venezuela, media
Author(s): Virpi Salojärvi (University of Helsinki)
Together with the people – Framing populism in
government and opposi on newspapers in President Chávez’s Venezuela
References:
Ahmed, Sara. 2004. Cultural Politics of Emotion. London: Routledge.
Laclau, Ernesto. 2005. On Populist Reason, London
be critically evaluated how the raise of digitalization has played a role in the construction current landscape for the discussion about the freedom of speech and hate
speech to arise and how the internet as a medium both facilitates and molds these
discussions. It will be analyzed how the circulation of texts and concepts in online
spaces creates intensified economies of hate (Ahmed, 2004) and how the ambiguity
of these spaces as both and neither public and private facilitates a new kind of popular
(and populist) understanding what ″freedom of speech″ is expected to signify.
[Populism ... 24]
Due to the internet, the rise of 21th century populism, and the globalization, hate
speech and freedom of speech have become central themes in multiple locations and
discussions. This holds true also in Finland. In the 14th of October 2015 the Finnish
parliament held a discussion hour about the topic, under the title ″Racism and hate
speech″. The discussion hour was live streamed. Afterwards, the event was widely
commented and discussed in different kind of online platforms, such as discussion
forums and commentary sections of the online sites of newspapers.
In the paper, the focus is on these discussions which followed the parliament’s
discussion hour and the usage of the populist rhetoric and meaning making practices, such as usage and creation of ″floating signifiers″ (Laclau, 2005), in them. Posts
related to the event in the Suomi24, the biggest Finnish discussion forum, and the in
the commentary sections of multiple newspaper online sites are analyzed. In these
discussions the line between hate speech and criticism, as well the perceived lack
of the freedom of the speech, are the central themes. Moreover, multiple rhetorical
devices used by the members of the Populist Party ″the Finns″ during the discussion
hour and beyond it are reapplied in the online discussion commenting the event.
These are examined through the Parliaments discussion hour, the commentaries on it
and through the ″Perussuomalainen″, the official newspaper of the party.
In addition to analyzing the content of these discussion and commentaries, it will
Panel: Populism and hate speech
Keywords: Populist rhetoric, internet
Author(s): Maria Ruotsalainen (University of Jyväskylä)
’I am not a racist, but…’- The freedom of speech,
hate speech and populist rhetoric in the era of
internet.
Wodak, Ruth (2015): The Politics of Fear. What Right-Wing Populist Discourses Mean.
London: Sage.
Wodak, Ruth (2013): ‘Anything Goes!’ – The Haiderization of Europe. In: Ruth Wodak, Brigitte Mral and Majid Khosravinik, Right-Wing Populism in Europe: Politics
and Discourse, 23–37. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
It was only in the early 2000s that the academic debate on tele/media populism
emerged as a sub-field in populism studies being specifically focused on the effects
that mediacentric – or else mediated – politics have on democracy. This essay aims
at combining the two most popular approaches to tele/media populism, namely one
falling on the side of political science and another drawn from communication stud-
Panel: Populism and media
[Populism... 25]
Gender has been marginalized in the study on populism (Mulinari & Neergard 2012; Akkerman 2015; de Lange & Mügge 2015). Although we are now witnessing an academic interest in issues (see e.g. the theme number of Patterns of Prejudice, 2015), the analysis of gender as intersecting with other hierarchical differences,
such as ethnicity, sexuality, and social class (Crenshaw 1989) is still mostly missing.
In this presentation, I look at the ways a traditionalist gender order is performed
Panel: Populism and Gender
Keywords: media, telepopulism, populist discourse
Author(s): Thomas Siomos (Populismus / Aristotle
Univeristy Thessaloniki)
Author(s): Tuija Saresma (University of Jyväskylä)
Keywords: Gender, populism, intersectionality, media
Τele/media populism: reflec ons
on populist discursive media ons
in in the media. In the contemporary digitalized media publicity, two simultaneous
trends co-exist, namely the democratization of the public sphere, and the promotion
of repressive ideologies and mobilizing people in e.g. racist action in the internet.
Various discussion fora and blogs serve as meeting places for similar-minded, or as
‘echo chambers’ (Abbas 2013), while enabling the emergence of ‘new political modes,
norms, and forms of action and inaction’ (Keren 2006, 10). I am interested in how the
internet functions as a site for promoting both progressive and counterproductive,
prejudicial ideologies, and particularly in how populist rhetoric is used in promoting
antifeminist opinions, often intertwined with racist and other reactionary currents.
I analyse the workings of ‘gender populism’ in traditional print media (using the
vast materials gathered in the research project Populism as movement and rhetoric
from Helsingin Sanomat and Perussuomalainen) and in the explicitly antifeminist internet discussions. The concept of gender populism refers to a simplifying understanding of gender as a ‘natural’, essential dichotomous order, based on positioning men
and women in hierarchical locations in terms of power (Saresma 2014). I analyse the
way gender populism is used to validate unequal power hierarchies related to gender,
ethnicity, sexuality, and class, and to mobilize certain unmarked categories of men
(white, heterosexual) against the ‘others’, be they women, feminists, LGBT-people, or
immigrants. Gender populism and intersec onality in Finnish media
References:
Laclau, E. (2005a) On Populist Reason. London: Verso.
Laclau, E. (2005b) Populism: What’s in a name? In F. Panizza (ed.) Populism and the
Mirror of Democracy. London: Verso. 32–49.
Samet, R. (2013) The Photographer’s Body: Populism Polarization, and the Uses of
Victimhood in Venezuela. American Ethnologist 40:3, 525–539.
representing different political and economic backgrounds. In each of the news events
framing of one central populist concept – the people, leader and the other – is studied. This way the question of how political power-blocs are able to push their agenda
despite different journalistic principals is approached.
As some previous research (Samet 2013) has already suggested both of the
power-blocs – Chávez and his government, and the opposition – may be described
as populist in Venezuela. The current research remarks that both of the power-blocs
are battling against hegemony – just against different one. The research also notes that
both the Chávez supporters and the opposition are competing over who knows what
the people want and, in fact, that they themselves represent the people. Newspapers
report the populist politics in different manners depending on the editorial style and
by using certain editorial techniques.
Keynote Yannis Stavrakakis
(Aristotle University of
Thessaloniki): Populism,
an -populism and crisis
Author(s): Mihnea-Simion Stoica (Babes-Bolyai University,
Cluj-Napoca)
Populism in Eastern Europe: from radical
na onalism to communist nostalgia
References:
A number of recent studies assess that populism in Western Europe is quite different
from the same political movement in the Eastern part of the continent. However, the
literature still offers an unbalanced view. The difficulty of studying politics in Eastern
Europe stems from the complex political situation in the former communist countries, most of which underwent lengthy transitions from dictatorship to democracy.
Our study focuses on Romania, an Eastern European country in which the evolution of populism reveals an interesting situation, both before and after the country has
become a member of the European Union in 2007. In this particular case, populist
movements went from being marginal to almost winning the presidential elections
and then having their main messages incorporated in the communication strategies of
the mainstream parties.
The current paper has two aims: firstly, to deconstruct the populist message in
Eastern Europe, and secondly to create the profile of those voting for populist parties.
By using data from different Vote-Advice Applications, we tap into the background
characteristics of those who have declared themselves convinced by the populist
rhetoric in Romania. But we will also show similarities and differences between the
electorate of such parties in other Eastern European countries (i.e. Bulgaria, Hungary). This will enable us to understand if these parties constitute similar phenomena
or if they represent different stands of politics ‘at the margins’.
Our first findings indicate that such political movements in Romania, as well as in
most countries of Eastern Europe, constitute what we call ″the populism of contradictions″. They have conflicting and confusing attitudes towards the state, the EU, the
church, towards ethnic and sexual minorities, using messages which combine elements of communist legacy with violent nationalist rhetoric.
Panel: Populism in Europe
Keywords: Eastern Europe, Romania, communist legacy, nationalism, populism
[Populism ... 26]
ies. This perspective will highlight convergences and divergences in the proferred conlusions regarding tele/media populism as well as postulate new directions for further
research. The approach suggested here gives an account of tele/media populism from
the perspective of right-wing and left-wing populist discourse. The main research
question is whether the global, multifaceted rise of tele/media populism acquires
features that are peculiar not only to right-wing populism, as usually claimed, but also
to left-wing populist discourse.
Our initial purpose is to reach a definition of tele/media populism as a ″remote
populism″ that raises the function of mediation to a core feature, yet equating it with
immediacy. Considering immediacy as a constitutive element of every populist expression, the prefix ″tele″ does not refer only to the medium of television but rather to
the ″remote″ formation of the ″people″ as a collective political subject.
Furthermore, we discuss the ideological aspect of tele/media populism, claiming
that ideology is not only costituted in verbal formations, but it is also being performed; an ideology in action. Media themselves are not free from ideology, whereas
their technological means are also well connected to their ideological framework.
Panel: What is populism? 1
The concept of populism is ambiguous and even controversial and has a wide variety
of academic, political and other interpretations. Taken as a given that concepts have
no self-evident definitions or fixed meanings, the paper will focus on the concept
of populism in its use in a specific context, namely in the daily Finnish newspaper
Helsingin Sanomat.
The starting point for the paper is the Wittgensteinian idea according to which the
meaning of a word is its use in the language. My approach is not, however, philosophical, but conceptual, as I will examine the concept of populism through the lens of
conceptual history. The conceptual approach emphasises how the concept is used
within context and how it is defined and constructed in it. Among the main questions
are, for example, whose concept ’populism’ is, for whom and against whom it is used?
What categories does it include and exclude? Is populism seen as a simplifying and
un/nonpolitical factor or even as a re-politicising concept? How it is defined in relation to other concepts such as the people or democracy? Is it possible to trace shifts in
Keywords: Populism, media
Author(s): Tuula Vaarakallio (University of Jyväskylä)
The concept of populism in the
Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat
the Programmatic Character of Six European Parties. (working paper, VU University, Amsterdam).
Skolkay, A. (2000). Populism in Central Eastern Europe. (Working paper, Institut für
Wissenshaften vom Menschen, Vienna).
Smr&#269;ková, M. (2009). Comparison of Radical Right-Wing Parties in Bulgaria
and Romania: The National Movement of Ataka and the Great Romania Party.
Central European Political Studies Review, 11(1), 48–65.
Taggart, P. (2000). Populism. Buckingham: Open University Press.
[Populism... 27]
Aslanidis, Paris (2015). Is Populism an Ideology? A Refutation and a New Perspective. Political Studies. doi: 10.1111/1467-9248.12224
Canovan, M. (1999). Trust the People! Populism and the Two Faces of Democracy.
Political Studies, 47 (1), 2–16.
Gilberg, T. (1993). Ethnochauvinism, Agrarian Populism, and Neofascism in Romania and The Balkans. In Merkl, P. (Ed.). Encounters with the Contemporary Political
Right. Westview Press: Oxford, 95–110.
Giordano, B. (2000). Italian Regionalism or ”Padanian Nationalism” – the Political
Project of the Lega Nord in Italian Politics. Political Geography, 19, 445– 71.
Golder, M. (2003). Explaining Variation in the Success of Extreme Right Parties in
Western Europe. Comparative Political Studies. 36(4), 432–466.
Hooghe, M, and W. Teepe (2007) ‘Party Profiles on the Web: An Analysis of the
Logfiles of Nonpartisan Interactive Political Internet Sites in the 2003 and 2004
Election Campaigns in Belgium’, New Media & Society 9(6), 965–985.
Ignazi, P. (1992). The silent counter-revolution. Hypotheses on the emergence of
extreme right-wing parties in Europe. European Journal of Political Research, 22(1),
3–34.
Kitschelt, H. (2002). Popular Dissatisfaction with Democracy: Populism and Party
Systems. In Meny, Y. & Surel, Y. (Eds.), Democracies and the Populist Challenge (pp.
179–196) Houndmills: Palgrave.
Kriesi, H., Grande, E., Lachat, R., Dolezal, M., Bornschier, S. & Frey, T. (2006). Globalization and the Transformations of the National Political Space: Six European
Countries compared. European Journal of Political Research, 45, 921–956.
Laffan, B. (1996). The Politics of Identify and Political Order in Europe. Journal of
Common Market Studies, 34, 81–102.
Meguid, B. (2005). Competition Between Unequals: The Role of Mainstream Party
Strategy in Niche Party Success. American Political Science Review, 99, 347–359.
Mitten, R. (2002). Austria all Black and Blue: Jörg Haider, the European Sanctions,
and the Political Crisis in Austria. In Wodak, R., & Pelinka, A. (Eds.). The Haider
Phenomenon in Austria. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers.
Mudde, C. (2007). Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Norris, P. (2005). Radical-right: Voters and Parties in the Electoral Market. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Raadt, J., Krouwel, A. & Hollanders, D. (2004). Varieties of Populism: An Analysis of
Current discourse on immigration in Finland concentrates on asylum seekers, for
evident reasons. Still, even among the most recent immigrant groups, homogeneity
does not prevail: as one volunteer worker described the situation to me, the groups
arriving in Finland today resemble their original societes – all groups are represented.
The diversity of countries of origin is also often ingored in discourse on immigration.
My ongoing research is on how educated adult Latin Americans learn and know Finnish after a relatively long stay in Finland. I have interviewed people whose original
reasons to come to Finland vary, but all of them have arrived in Finland at an age over
18 years and have lived here at least five years. Their linguistic skills in Finnish also
vary. The interviews picture a system of teaching Finnish without taking into account
individual differences between migrants. Latin Americans are a rapidly increasing
minority group in Finland, the number has more than tripled in the last ten years.
Most Latin Americans live in the Helsinki Metropolitan area. In my paper, I want to
Panel: Populism and immigration
Keywords: ethnicity, language, Latin America, victimization
Author(s): Sarri Vuorisalo-Tii nen (University of Helsinki)
Educated La n American adults challenging
the popular discourse on migra on in Finland
concrete instances of ″lack″ as nonsequiturs and breaches in satements and argumentation. This makes it possible to question such ruptures at once in terms of discursive
meaning and ideological fantasy. Similarly, Laclau’s notion of the empty signifier is
considered from these two perspectives.
Ideological fantasy formation is at the same time endlessly expanding and affectively present. It has to do with bodies, the libidinal body of - in this case - the nation
state as the corporate symbolic order made present in its symbols, and its negative
counterpart, the enemy, internally embodied as the scapegoat. Scapegoating, too, will
be dealt with in both its discursive and fantastic dimensions, the former obviously
serving only as a ″rationale″ for the latter.
The main emphasis is on the role and functioning of ideological fantasy, with the
important proviso that it can only exist on the ground of discursive meanings.
[Populism ... 28]
In the proposed paper I shall be looking into the ways that discursive reasoning and
fantasies with an ideological grounding interact as different ingredients in populist
rhetoric. Theoretically this draws mainly on Laclau and Žižek, and textual examples
are taken from a blog (Scripta) and discussion forum (Homma-foorumi) connected
to the True Finns party. The chosen texts come from the nationalist right wing of the
party, which also orients my theoretical discussion of the role of ideology in populism.
I use the term ″rhetoric″ basically in the Laclauan sense of the functioning of populism as a particular social logic. Apart from this ″positive″ use I also look at rhetorical
procedures in terms of ideological dissimulation. This brings together a symptomal
reading on the discursive level (including ideological connotations) and a Žižekinspired reading of ideology as structured by fantasy. I shall do this with reference to
Panel: What is populism? 1
Keywords:
Author(s): Erkki Vainikkala (University of Jyväskylä)
Discursive meaning and ideological fantasy
as elements of populist rhetoric
meaning of the concept?
Primary sources of the research are editorials, columns and letters from public in
Helsingin Sanomat before and after the year 2011. This political moment was chosen
because the populist ’Finns’ party, Perussuomalaiset, gained historically large electoral victory in the parliamentary elections of April 2011 and became suddenly the
third largest party in Finland. At the time populism was the topic of the day. Therefore
the views on populism in the leading newspaper Helsingin Sanomat can be seen as a
modest ’representative anecdote’ (Kenneth Burke) about how populism was at the
time perceived in the Finnish print media discussion
References:
Bürger, Peter (1974) Theorie der Avantgarde. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
McGuigan, Jim (2003/1992) Cultural Populism. London & New York: Routledge.
the everyday life of ordinary citizens or the lower class. These kind of poets were cultural radicals such as Pentti Saarikoski, Claes Andersson and Matti Rossi. The cultural
theorist Jim McGuigan writes in his Cultural Populism (2003/1992) that critical
populism ″can account for both ordinary people’s everyday culture and its material
construction by powerful forces beyond the immediate comprehension and control
of ordinary people″. Cultural populists, instead, assume that the practices of ordinary
people are more important than high culture. The poets of the 1960s and the 1970s
can’t be called cultural populists, because many of them emphasized their belonging
to intelligentsia.
One goal of the poets was to give a voice to the proletariat or ordinary citizens.
It was a challenge especially for those writers who didn’t have a working-class background. In Pentti Saarikoski’s collection Ääneen (1966), the speaker calls himself ″a
kid of the bourgeois″. He’s unsure about the masses’ reaction to his will to cooperate
with them, but he’s trying to convince them of the superiority of socialism.
Some of the poets of the 1960s and the 1970s got influenced by the political avantgarde of the beginning of the 20th century. According to the literary scientist Peter
Bürger (1974), the avant-gardists wanted to bring art back to everyday life. Along
with Bürger’s theory about avant-garde and McGuigan’s views about populism, my
presentation leans theoretically on the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s thoughts about
intellectuals and class.
[Populism... 29]
The presentation examines the Finnish poet-intellectuals’ relationship to the ″ordinary people″ in the 1960s and the 1970s. I suggest that there were features of critical
cultural populism in the intellectuals’ ways of appealing to the folks and writing about
Panel: Cultural aspects of populism and populist rhetoric
Keywords: 1960s, 1970s, intellectuals, poets, critical populism
Author(s): Riikka Ylitalo (University of Jyväskylä)
Voices of the Masses? Cri cal Cultural
Populism of Finnish Poet-Intellectuals
in the 1960s and the 1970s
References:
Anthias, Floya. 2012. Transnational Mobilities, Migration Research and Intersectionality. Nordic Journal of Migration Research 2(2): 102–110. Accessed 29.9.2015.
DOI: 10.2478/v10202-011-0032-y
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1991. Language and Symbolic Power. Thompson, John B (edit.).
(Raymond,Gino ja Matthew Adamson trans.). Cambridge: Polity Press.
Brubaker, Rogers. 2004. Ethnicity without Groups. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
Dervin, Fred. 2013. Rethinking the Acculturation and Assimilation of ‘Others’ in
a ‘Monocultural’ Country: Forms of intercultural Pygmalionism in two Finnish
novels. Journal of Intercultural Studies 34(4): 356-370.
Hannerz, Ulf. 1996. Transnational Connections: Culture, People, Places. New York:
Routledge.
Piller, Ingrid. 2011. Intercultural Communication: a Critical Introduction. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press.
Weiss, Gilbert and Ruth Wodak, (eds.) 2003. Critical Discourse Analysis: Theory and
Interdisciplinarity. Hampshire, New York: Palgrave Macmillan
reflect lived experiences of migration and of significant factor for succesful integration
on popular images of migrants, to discuss the prevalence of stereotypes on migration
in the Finnish media, but also clearly present in the educational system.
[Populism ... 30]
In Finland, as elsewhere in Europe, rapid social change,
multicultural challenges, social inequality, and the way
different kinds of threat are disseminated by the media for
public imagination, have given rise to populist protests and appeals to cultural values usually combining anti-elite and anti-immigrant nationalism with nationally and
locally bounded demands of social justice. In the conference, the populist movement and populist rhetoric are in the focus. The papers presented study populism
as a phenomenon with multiple sources and multiple agendas. Issues of nationality,
Europeanness, ethnicity, gender, and environmental issues can be explored against
the backdrop of the new public sphere and the intermingling of the private and the
public in it. Conference is part of three year research project on populism, founded
by the Academy of Finland.
Populism as movement and rhetoric
Join and enjoy – for free.
No registration needed!
On stage: Eoin Devereux, Anu Koivunen,
Sirpa Leppänen and Eila Tiainen. Music
by Leena Pyylampi.
In Poppari (Aren aukio, Puistokatu
2–4, Jyväskylä), Sat 19 March, 3–5 pm
Populism
a ermath