āHow can you spot a populist?ā asked the website of the British newspaper The Guardian in December 2018 (Rice-Oxley and Kalia December 3, 2018), introducing its readers to the complexity and ambiguity of the matter. This is but one example of a broader discussion of the meaning and evaluation of āpopulismā that is so widespread in politics, media and academia these days. At a time when protesters against the āIslamisation of the occidentā in the streets of Dresden have shouted āWir sind das Volkā (āWe are the peopleā) and the newly elected British Prime minister Boris Johnson spoke from a lectern announcing āThe Peopleās Governmentā, the use of the keywords āpopulistā and āpopulismā has become a daily occurrence (see Kranert, Chapter 2 in this volume), and in academia publications with āpopulismā in the title are reaching a new peak.
This volume contributes to this debate by presenting a cross-disciplinary and international conversation about the discursive nature of āpopulistā politics. Its chapters are based on the idea that language and meaning making are central to politics. Political discourse analysts assume that politics is a performative act and the main tool of politicians is language. This sentiment, though certainly not shared by everyone interested in researching politics, has had a significant influence on thinking about populism. Ostiguy (2017: 74), for example, stresses that āpopulism as an ideology can only be studied through discourseā.
Political discourse analysis is part of a broader cross-disciplinary project called discourse studies (Kranert and Horan 2018b: 4). For decades now, the connection between semiosis and power has been approached from both a social and a linguistic perspective. The social sciences have long focused on discourse as a social practice of meaning-making which is shaped by and shapes power structures in society. These paradigms have undergone a linguistic turn towards the analysis of social reality as constructed in language, while linguistics took a discursive turn, moving from a structural analysis of language to the question of language use in context.
These two strands have recently been brought together by efforts to establish Discourse Studies as a āfully fledged field in which a number of currents meetā (Angermuller et al. 2014: 3). Here, the concept of ādiscourseā has become a common denominator for theoretical and empirical research and allows an exchange between these different traditions, similar to the concept of āgenderā in āgender studiesā and ācultureā in āculture studiesā (Angermuller 2014: 18). The core assumption of the field is the (post)structuralist idea that reality is accessed and formed through language. While physical objects certainly exist without language, they only gain meaning through discourse (JĆørgensen and Phillips 2002: 8ā9).
This volume brings together researchers who share ādiscourseā as a common denominator in their effort to understand the phenomenon of āpopulismā in its different shapes, forms, geographies, and from different disciplinary backgrounds. It therefore gives credit to the variety and context dependence of both populist discourse and its analysis, and introduces the reader to a broad toolbox of discourse analytical theories and methodologies to grasp the wealth of discursive phenomena in populist discourse in future research. Although it cannot possibly be representative of this complex field, the aim was to sample the broadest possible representation of ideas on populism, on discourse as well as on the geographical and political location of the research.
In this Introduction, I will give a very brief but by no means all-encompassing overview of the variation of the research object of populism across disciplines as well as approaches to discourse within the cross-disciplinary project of discourse studies. Table 1.1 gives an overview of the disciplinary, methodological, political, and geographical context of the different contributions. The final section of this Introduction will introduce the core problems that structure the volume.
Table 1.1
Contributions and their disciplinary, methodological, and political contexts
Disciplinary affiliations | Methods and theoretical approaches | Political spectrum | Geographical location |
|---|---|---|---|
Political Science (Baysha, Cadalen, Gaul) Linguistics (Demata, Deumert, Issel-Dombert, Kantara, Knoblock, Kranert, Fenton-Smith, Schoor) Education (Brandmayr) Gender Studies (Kahlina) Sociology (Venkov, Mabandla) Journalism (Kelsey) | Anti-Colonialism/Decolonization (Mabandla & Deumert) Argumentation Analysis (Fenton-Smith) Critical Discourse Analysis (Demata, Gaul, Kahlina, Schoor, Brandmayr, Knoblock) Conversation Analysis (Kantara) Corpus Linguistics (Demata, Kranert, Knoblock) Essex School of Discourse Theory (Baysha, Cadalen, Venkov) Frame Semantics (Knoblock) Interpellation (Brandmayr) Multimodality (Issel-Dombert, Brandmayr) Political Myth (Kelsey) | Right-Wing (Baysha, Brandmayr, Gaul, Fenton-Smith, Kahlina, Knoblock, Venkov) Left-Wing (Cadalen, Demata, Issel-Dombert) Transcending LeftāRight (Kantara, Kelsey, Kranert, Schoor) Anti-Colonialism/Decolonization (Mabandla & Deumert) | Australia (Fenton-Smith) Austria (Brandmayr) Bolivia (Cadalen) Bulgaria (Venkov) Croatia (Kahlina) Ecuador (Cadalen) Greece (Cantara) Germany (Kranert) Netherlands (Schoor) South Africa/Pan-African context (Mabandla & Deumert) Spain (Issel-Dombert) Sri Lanka (Gaul) Ukraine (Baysha) UK (Demata, Kelsey, Kranert, Schoor) USA (Knoblock, Schoor) |