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Frontmatter -- Contents -- Figure and Tables -- Acknowledgements -- 1. Introduction: The Global Rise of Populism -- 2. The Problems with Populism -- 3. Understanding Contemporary Populism: Populism as a Political Style -- 4. The Performer: Populism and the Leader -- 5. The Stage I: Populism and the Media -- 6. The Audience: Populism and 'The People' -- 7. The Stage II: Populism and Crisis -- 8. Populism and Democracy -- 9. Conclusion: The Future of Populism -- Appendix -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index

What was the 'alt' in alt-right, alt-lite, and alt-left? Tracing these controversial terms' development over the 2010s, this article interrogates the construction, meaning, and utility of the 'alt' modifier in US politics. Contextualizing the emergence of 'alt' among wider debates about how to spatially conceptualize anti-system politics beyond the left-right spectrum, it argues that 'alt' was used to name a tendency that moved beyond traditional ideological questions about what society should look like, and instead signified a preference about how politics should be done: namely, a rejection of the mainstream norms of political conduct, and an embrace of vulgarity, incivility and an extremely adversarial approach to political opposition. It shows how a popular-cultural understanding of 'alternative' was used to give this approach a countercultural sheen, and maps out the cleavages between groups that the alt/mainstream binary opened up. Finally, it considers the legacy of the 'alt' modifier in contemporary politics.

How do populists visually represent "the people"? While the literature on populism has tended to focus on text- and language-based documents, such as speeches, policies, and party documents to consider how populists characterize "the people," in this article I undertake a systematic visual content analysis to consider how populist leaders on either side of the ideological spectrum visually represent "the people" in images from their official Instagram accounts ( N = 432). Comparing the cases of Donald Trump on the populist right and Bernie Sanders on the populist left, I code for the majority gender, race, and age of "the people" in each image, and supplement this with a discussion of the depictions of these categories. I find that Trump's images of "the people" are significantly more homogenous across all categories—specifically more white, more masculine, and with less young people—than Sanders', and situate these findings in the context of the literature on the differences between left and right populism. This article contributes to the study of populist communication by highlighting the role of images in representing "the people"; analyzing how left and right populists do this differently; and developing a method for measuring the demographic characteristics of "the people" in populists' images that can be used in future studies. In doing so, it seeks to push the literature forward by highlighting that images are not something "extra" to be studied in populist communication, but rather are a central battleground for the construction of populist identities.

AbstractHow does a political party become 'mainstream'? And what makes some parties receive arguably the opposite designation – 'pariah party'? This conceptual article examines the processes by which parties' mainstream or pariah status must be constructed, negotiated and policed, not only by political scientists in the pursuit of case selection, but by several actors actively involved in the political process, including media actors and political parties themselves. It explains how these actors contribute to these processes of 'mainstreaming' and 'pariahing', considers their motivations and provides illustrative examples of how such processes take place. As such, the article moves beyond the literature on the ways in which mainstream parties seek to deal with or respond to threats from a variety of pariah parties, instead paying attention to how those parties have been constructed as pariahs in the first place, and how these processes simultaneously contribute to the maintenance of mainstream party identities.

While the rise of populism in Western Europe over the past
three decades has received a great deal of attention in the academic and
popular literature, less attention has been paid to the rise of its opposite—
anti-populism. This short article examines the discursive and stylistic dimensions
of the construction and maintenance of the populism/anti-populism
divide in Western Europe, paying particular attention to how anti-populists
seek to discredit populist leaders, parties and followers. It argues that this
divide is increasingly antagonistic, with both sides of the divide putting forward
extremely different conceptions of how democracy should operate
in the Western European political landscape: one radical and popular, the
other liberal. It closes by suggesting that what is subsumed and feared under
the label of the "populist threat" to democracy in Western Europe today is
less about populism than nationalism and nativism.

Populism, particularly in its radical right-wing variants, is often posited as antithetical to the principles of liberalism. Yet a number of contemporary cases of populist radical right parties from Northern Europe complicate this characterisation of populism: rather than being directly opposed to liberalism, these parties selectively reconfigure traditionally liberal defences of discriminated-against groups—such as homosexuals or women—in their own image, positing these groups as part of 'the people' who must be protected, and presenting themselves as defenders of liberty, free speech and 'Enlightenment values'. This article examines this situation, and argues that that while populist radical right parties in Northern Europe may only invoke such liberal values to opportunistically attack their enemies—in many of these cases, Muslims and 'the elite' who allegedly are abetting the 'Islamisation' of Europe'—this discursive shift represents a move towards a 'liberal illiberalism'. Drawing on party manifestoes and press materials, it outlines the ways in which these actors articulate liberal illiberalism, the reasons they do so, and the ramifications of this shift.

Populism, particularly in its radical right-wing variants, is often posited as antithetical to the principles of liberalism. Yet a number of contemporary cases of populist radical right parties from Northern Europe complicate this characterisation of populism: rather than being directly opposed to liberalism, these parties selectively reconfigure traditionally liberal defences of discriminated-against groups—such as homosexuals or women—in their own image, positing these groups as part of 'the people' who must be protected, and presenting themselves as defenders of liberty, free speech and 'Enlightenment values'. This article examines this situation, and argues that that while populist radical right parties in Northern Europe may only invoke such liberal values to opportunistically attack their enemies—in many of these cases, Muslims and 'the elite' who allegedly are abetting the 'Islamisation' of Europe'—this discursive shift represents a move towards a 'liberal illiberalism'. Drawing on party manifestoes and press materials, it outlines the ways in which these actors articulate liberal illiberalism, the reasons they do so, and the ramifications of this shift.

Populism, particularly in its radical right-wing variants, is often posited as antithetical to the principles of liberalism. Yet a number of contemporary cases of populist radical right parties from Northern Europe complicate this characterisation of populism: rather than being directly opposed to liberalism, these parties selectively reconfigure traditionally liberal defences of discriminated-against groups—such as homosexuals or women—in their own image, positing these groups as part of 'the people' who must be protected, and presenting themselves as defenders of liberty, free speech and 'Enlightenment values'. This article examines this situation, and argues that that while populist radical right parties in Northern Europe may only invoke such liberal values to opportunistically attack their enemies—in many of these cases, Muslims and 'the elite' who allegedly are abetting the 'Islamisation' of Europe'—this discursive shift represents a move towards a 'liberal illiberalism'. Drawing on party manifestoes and press materials, it outlines the ways in which these actors articulate liberal illiberalism, the reasons they do so, and the ramifications of this shift.