Rethinking Populism: Politics, Mediatisation and Political Style

2013/05/15 by Benjamin Moffitt, Simon Tormey · 993 citations
Computer Science · Social Sciences · #Aesthetics #Democracy #Epistemology #Hate Speech and Cyberbullying Detection #History #Ideology #Law #Mainstream #Misinformation and Its Impacts #Performative utterance #Philosophy #Political economy #Political science #Politics #Populism #Populism, Right-Wing Movements #Social science #Sociology #Style (visual arts)

paper · open access · doi:10.1111/1467-9248.12032

published in Political Studies 62(2), 381-397 (SAGE Publishing)

openalex publication_date 2013/05/15 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05

Abstract

As a key feature of the contemporary political landscape, populism stands as one of the most contentious concepts in political science. This article presents a critique of dominant conceptions of populism – as ideology, logic, discourse and strategy/organisation – and introduces the category of ‘political style’ as a new compelling way of thinking about the phenomenon. We argue that this new category captures an important dimension of contemporary populism that is missed by rival approaches. In doing so, we put forward an inductive model of populism as a political style and contextualise it within the increasingly stylised and mediatised milieu of contemporary politics by focusing on its performative features. We conclude by considering how this concept allows us to understand how populism appears across the political spectrum, how it translates into the political mainstream and its implications for democratic politics.

Citations

• Trust the People! Populism and the Two Faces of Democracy
• Populism as political communication style: An empirical study of political parties' discourse in Belgium
• Clarifying a Contested Concept: Populism in the Study of Latin American Politics

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• Staging enmity: reading populist productions of shame with Jelinek's On the Royal Road . [europepmc]

Related

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• The thin ideology of populism
• Populism in world politics: A comparative cross-regional perspective
• The Oxford Handbook of Populism
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