The populist problem: on the uses of populis* in public discourse
(2026) An Interdisciplinary Approach to Discourse on Populism — ISBN: [9781003610489], 175-198, accepted/in-press
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- Populism and its derivatives have become ubiquitous across academic scholarship, media commentary, as well as political communication. Yet, despite a vast political science literature devoted to defining populism and assessing its democratic implications, the concept remains marked by definitional instability. This instability becomes even more obvious in public discourse, where populis* is rarely defined in situ and can be stretched to cover heterogeneous phenomena, ranging from exclusionary nationalism and demagogy to egalitarian redistribution or stylistic transgression. As a result, the label ‘populism’ enables condemnation without specifying what is being rejected, which democratic norm is said to be violated, or why that violation matters. The chapter examines how populism is problematised in contemporary European press discourse and what these problematisations imply about contested democratic ideals. Drawing on a corpus of articles from several leading European newspapers produced in 2019 that contain populis*, the analysis reconstructs the explicit and tacit rationales that are mobilised to assign a negative valence to populism. Through qualitative close reading of a random sample of occurrences, the chapter develops a typology of recurring journalistic uses based on two dimensions: referential specificity and the degree to which normative commitments are articulated rather than merely implied.
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Rondiat, C. (2026). The populist problem: on the uses of populis* in public discourse. In Laetitia Aulit, Anaïs Augé, Barbara De Cock, Min Reuchamps, Sandrine Roginsky, Coline Rondiat (ed.), An Interdisciplinary Approach to Discourse on Populism (pp. 175-198). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003610489-11