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Thrown around with abandon? Popular understandings of populism as conveyed by the print media: A UK case study

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Abstract

This article examines the use of the term ‘populism’ in the UK print media and compares this with the scholarly usage. It assesses whether there is truth in the claim that the media uses the term too freely and imprecisely. Our finding indicate that populism is used for a wide range of seemingly unrelated actors across the world, that it is hard to find any logic in the set of policies that are associated with the term, and that populism is, more or less explicitly, regularly used in a pejorative way. Despite these findings, we refrain from labelling populism a useless term. We will, however, indicate that the inconsistent vernacular use of the term complicates a meaningful academic debate about the concept.

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Notes

  1. But see Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser (forthcoming).

  2. Using a concept coined by Michael Freeden (1998), authors perceiving populism as a ‘thin’ or ‘thin-centred’ ideology, basically argue that populism in itself does not provide an all encompassing framework of how society should function. As a result, parts of existing, more rooted ideologies can and should be added to the populist core.

  3. With regard to the section in which the articles appeared and the person using the term only the articles in the second period (July–September 2008) were coded.

  4. The codebook and database of observations is available from the authors upon request.

  5. The remainder of this article will nevertheless use the terms ‘populist’ and ‘populism’ interchangeably.

  6. A reviewer, for instance, describes Scott McKenzie's classic song San Francisco as a ‘drippy piece of populist fakery [which] sold the hippie idyll to the masses’ (Observer, 13 July 2008, p. 8).

  7. Interestingly, in our sample The Mail is the only UK paper to provide a definition of ‘populism’ in an article answering readers queries and explaining Wizard of Oz as ‘coded political satire’: ‘Populism is a Left-wing political doctrine that proposes that the rights and powers of ordinary people are exploited by a privileged elite, and it supports their struggle to overcome this’. (Daily Mail, 2 September 2008).

  8. Which is an aspiration that needs to be fulfilled if, in Britain at least, academics are to score well in government-run research evaluations that drive university funding (see Collini, 2009).

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Carlo Ruzza, Jens Rydgren, Stefan Rummens and the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions.

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Correspondence to Stijn van Kessel.

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Bale, T., van Kessel, S. & Taggart, P. Thrown around with abandon? Popular understandings of populism as conveyed by the print media: A UK case study. Acta Polit 46, 111–131 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1057/ap.2011.3

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