Given this context, here we delve into the study of populism, which is a central aspect of discourse theory, and directly related to the affective dimension of politics. It is important to note that, being one of the most commented concept in recent political studies, populism has been conceptualized through different approaches: populism as a particular form of political organization (e.g.
Germani, 1978; Taggart, 1995), populism as a political style (Canovan, 1999;
Mazzoleni et.al., 2003; Taguieff, 1995), populism as a ‘thin-centred ideology’
(e.g. Albertazzi & McDonnell, 2008b; Mudde, 2004; 2007; Stanley, 2008) or
‘discourse’ (Laclau, 2005). All different understandings of the term populism tend to be broad and vague, even in the academic debates. However, almost all these authors have focused on searching for minimal definition of populism.
Locating such a common core is, certainly, the holy grail of all theories of populism. The question is where exactly is this to be located: In ideological content, the organizational features of populist movements, or in political rhetoric and practices? In this attempt, it has been argued that populism is as a thin-centred ideology that has three core concepts – the people, the elite, the general will – and two direct opposites – elitism and pluralism, and can be attached to other ‘thicker’ ideologies (e.g. liberalism, socialism, nationalism, etc.). In this sense populist politics considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic groups, ‘the people’ and
‘the corrupt elite’, and which argues that politics should be an expression of the volonté générale of the people (Mudde, 2004: 543; 2007: 23; Mudde and Rovira, 2012: 8). According to Cas Mudde, populism is first and foremost a moral form of politics, as the distinction between ‘the elite’ and ‘the people’ is mainly based on moral principles – such as the pure politicians versus the corrupts politics, a particular kind of Manichean discourse that identifies Good with a unified will of the people and Evil with a conspiring elite.
Regardless of the approach one chooses, what becomes clear is that populism focuses on the ‘who’ of politics. In so doing, it contends that ‘the people’ is the true subject of democratic politics. According to Ben Stanley (2008), four interrelated ideas represent the core values of populism, and represent the lowest common denominator that all populist phenomena share:
1. The existence of two homogeneous units of analysis: ‘the people’ and
‘the elite’.
2. The antagonistic relationship between the people and the elite.
3. The idea of popular sovereignty.
4. The positive valorisation of ‘the people’ and denigration of ‘the elite’.
1. Populism is articulated in a particular vision of the political in which the division between ‘the people’ and ‘the elite’ plays a fundamental part in its rhetoric. In this sense, the complexity of society is undervalued. Moreover, the same concept of ‘the people’ is somehow ‘decontested’ and its conceptual ambiguity contributes the ontological perception of the society as essentially divided between the people’s will and, on the opposite front, the elite.
2. Dealing with the division between ‘the people’ and ‘the elite’, Stanley highlights the fact that the essential nature of the relationship between these two entities is their antagonistic and adversarial relationship, regardless of the concrete structure and configuration of the elite itself. Recognizing the Schmittean legacy, it seems that populists subscribe their doctrine according to which political actions and motives can be reduced to the relationship between friend and enemy.
3. Margaret Canovan remarks that popular sovereignty is the
‘foundation myth’ of modern representative politics. The concept of ‘we, the People’ is somehow the source of political authority. Drawing on this Stanley argues that the popular versus elite antagonism plays an ideational rather than structural role in populism, and contributes to the simplification of the complex task of ‘constructing’ the people. Although there is no substantial content within the notion of the people – a part of its being constituted through the antagonic logic –, what remains a key factor is the idea of its essential role in democratic politics.
4. Furthermore, populism has an evaluative task in attributing different political and moral values to both ‘the people’ and ‘the elite’. Similar to what Cas Mudde has argued, in this vision populism charges with positive moral significance the idea of ‘the people’, while it discredits those who belong to
‘the elite’. Hence, the same idea of popular sovereignty is articulated as the
ultimate and truly essential normative principle for democratic government.
In a ‘decontested’ manner, populism treats the general will of the people as if it could be somehow privileged over the elite, including over the representative role it often assumes.
In a similar vein, discourse theory has developed a powerful approach to populism, which shares some elements and critical allegations with this vision of populism as a thin-centred ideology. Through the utilization of these analytical tools and formal criteria, discursive theory has focused particularly on the analysis of some kinds of discourses, movements, and political identities – those articulated around the nodal point of ‘the people’. Populism has been in this sense the main object of study and the terrain of application of discourse theory since the beginnings of this intellectual tradition (Laclau, 1977), further enhanced in his more recent work (Laclau, 2005a; 2005b) and still remains a key research horizon for those who operate within this theoretical framework (e.g. Panizza 2005; Stavrakakis, 2004; 2014b; Arditi, 2007).
Within the numerous definition of populism, discourse theory develops a particular approach in which the fundamental idea of populism is its logic, rather than its organizational or structural social features. Populism has been elaborated as a specific object of study, and the discursive framework has advanced a series of formal operational criteria, as we have seen, which have helped the understanding of differentiated political phenomena. The formalism suggested by the discourse research is indeed articulated around two theoretical assumptions: on the one hand, the nodal point – or empty signifier – ‘the people’ and, on the other hand, the antagonistic logic that divides the society into two main blocs along ‘equivalential’ lines, the establishment versus the underdog, ‘the people’. In a nutshell, populism is characterised by a political logic that considers society essentially divided into two opposed groups, ‘the people’ and ‘the elite’. This division of society into
two antagonic camps is the result of a process: firstly, different social and political demands are linked together; this leads to the formation of a collective identity and the creation of a common enemy – the establishment –;
and a consequent affective investment in the leader or political party that claims to represent ‘the people’.
With the aim of going beyond the limitations of other existing approaches, this formalism permits the framing of a concept of ‘populism’ that is at once rigorous and flexible and thus apt to be used for both theoretical and empirical analysis. Concretely, this formalism helps to overcome an important problem:
the geographical and political ‘ubiquity’ of populism. As Laclau has noted (Laclau 2005b: 44), populism can emerge from different points of the socio-economic structure, as well as be associated with radically different phenomena within the political spectrum, such as left-wing and right-wing movements and political parties (Laclau 2005b: 45).
“[W]e could say that a movement is not populist because in its politics or ideology it presents actual contents identifiable as populistic, but because it shows a particular logic of articulation of those contents – whatever those contents are”. (Laclau 2005b: 33).
It becomes clear that what Laclau is proposing is a rigorously formal approach.
Thus, Laclau’s viewpoint moves beyond the assessment of empirical contents – ideological, organizational, etc. – and focuses on form.
“the concept of populism that I am proposing is a strictly formal one, for all its defining features are exclusively related to a specific mode of articulation – the prevalence of the equivalential over the differential logic – independently of the actual contents that are articulated. […] Most of the attempts at defining populism have tried to locate what is specific to it in a particular ontic content and, as a result, they have ended in a self-defeating exercise whose two predictable alternative results have been either to
choose an empirical content which is immediately overflowed by an avalanche of exceptions, or to appeal to an ‘intuition’ which cannot be translated into any conceptual content”. (Laclau, 2005b: 44)
The lastest works of Laclau, in this sense, further highlight the formal character of the populist logics, to the point that the core reference to the signifier ‘the people’ is replaced by the production of empty signifiers in general. In other words, populism as a mode of discursive articulation is no longer essentially linked to the location of ‘the people’, rather the populist dimensions can belong to all political articulations opposing dominant hegemonic blocs. What remains a key feature is the antagonistic dichotomisation of social space. However, it becomes evident that this view also involves some risks, as remarked by Yannis Stavrakakis (2004). If the empty signifier ‘the people’ somehow loses the core value it had in the previous analysis of Laclau, thus populism seems to become identical with politics tout court. Here, however, in his attempt to advance a strictly formal approach to populism, Laclau puts in danger the same usefulness of the concept for political analysis. Therefore, if any signifier can potentially become the nodal point of a populist discourse, “the risk here is to lose the conceptual particularity of populism as a tool for concrete political analysis” (Stavrakakis, 2004: 263).
All in all, beyond the reference to the structural location of ‘the people’ and its role within the analysis of populism, what becomes clear is that the Essex School’s discourse analysis develops a fruitful approach to the study of the process of framing reality. We will further expand on these reflections in the subsequent chapters dedicated to the normative debates about the role of emotions in the democratic terrain. Here, we will develop our theoretical and methodological viewpoint, in the light of what we have argued up to now.