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AbstractHow and where is democracy 'hacked'? Studies examining the variability of the populist discourse rely on the—often tacit—assumption that global digital platforms are used similarly from one country to the other. By examining political rhetoric on Twitter, we show that populist communication is tailored to a particular audience profile rather than a particular social media (SM). More specifically, we compare Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's tweets with his addresses on multiple mediums. We describe how Modi uses wide‐reaching media such as radio to unfold a populist narrative based on institutional disintermediation, layman's language, counselling and the staging of an intimate conversation with the masses. Modi uses more elitist and cosmopolitan SM sites in India, such as Twitter, to mitigate his populist credentials, and introduce himself as a respectable democratic leader favouring multilateral collaborations, banal nationalism and Gandhian peace‐building. The variability of his political rhetoric across seven address formats indicates that Modi is populist tactically rather than ideologically, which complicates the tenets of the dominant 'ideational' populist paradigm. To further ground our argument empirically, we venture into comparing Modi's and Trump's tweets. We suggest that due to the popularity of Twitter in the United States, it was strategically useful for the former President of the United States to act populist on the platform, while that is not the case for Modi. This tends to indicate that not enough attention is given to intermedium studies that complement comparisons between states/regions with comparisons nested within a coherent political space.

Based on a discursive analysis of various media reports published in 2015–2018 by and about the Finnish right-wing street patrolling organization Soldiers of Odin (SOO), we explore the gendered dimension of contemporary vigilantism. We find that street patrolling as a practice of vigilantism, is justified in this case by using representations of the cityspace as a place of friction between locals and newcomers and of the street as a locus for enacting gendered and racial/ethnic identities. Our findings suggest that SOO's vigilant practices exhibit a mixture of traditional and new features of masculinity. We argue that the activities of anti-immigration groups such as the SOO in Finland demonstrate a feminist security dilemma concerning the way securitization of public gender-based violence is used to enhance militarized performance of white masculinity. We identify four recurring themes that are used by group members to portray themselves as part of a legitimate social movement: protective masculinity, militarized masculinity, supplement of the state, and indigenous masculinity.

There has been a burgeoning interest in the sociology of the Frankfurt School as well as the oeuvre of Theodor W. Adorno since the 2016 presidential campaign of Donald J. Trump. The objectives of this study are to both illustrate the enduring importance of Adorno and to provide an important theoretical outline in making sense of Trump's 2016 United States presidential campaign. Using Adorno's understudied textual analysis of the radio addresses of Martin Luther Thomas and data from Trump's 2016 US presidential campaign, we find that Trump's own discourse can be condensed into three of Adorno's rhetorical devices: (1) the lone wolf device or anti-statism/pseudo-conservatism, reflecting his criticism of "special interests" and his appraisal of business and (self-)finance; (2) the movement device, which amounted to glorification of action; and (3) the exactitude of error device which amounted to xenophobic, ethnonationalist hyperbole.

Responding to recent debates, this article challenges the presentation of Corbynism and Blue Labour as competing philosophical tendencies in the contemporary British Labour Party. It does so with reference to their shared mobilisation around post-liberal and national-populist notions of the relationship between nations, states, society, citizens and the outside world, and critiques of capitalism and liberal democracy that they hold in common. Uncovering a largely subterranean 'critical Marxist' counterpoint that seeks to 'hold the centre' rather than rhetorically or theoretically endorse its destabilisation, the article outlines the other paths available from within the intellectual traditions of the Labour Party and wider left, concluding that there is a real philosophical alternative to both Corbynism and Blue Labour.