The Discursive Construction of Discontent: Varieties of Populist Anti-System Ideas and Discursive Interactions in Europe.
This recently published article comes out of my Guggenheim Fellowship project on the rise of populism. It builds on existing scholarship on populism while shifting the lens to focus on the ideational and discursive dynamics of populist power. It defines populism as, at its core, the discursive construction of discontent, as charismatic leaders claiming to speak for the people against the elites use post-truth language to give expression to peoples’ grievances, to mobilize them via real and virtual networks of support, and to disseminate their ideas via social and traditional media in order to win elections and then to govern differently. This article deploys the discursive institutionalist framework of analysis to consider the four main features of the discursive construction of populism – the message, the messenger, the medium, and the milieu. Throughout, the article illustrates by considering not only the rise of populist anti-system parties in European countries but also the special challenges this poses for the EU.