Populism on the loose

Description

Rapid social change, multicultural challenges, social inequality, and the way different kinds of threat are disseminated by the media for public imagination, have given rise to populist protests and appeals to cultural values, usually combining anti-elite and anti-immigrant nationalism with nationally and locally bounded demands for social justice. Several theorists and empirical researchers have attempted to capture this phenomenon under the notion of populism. The title of this volume, ‘populism on the loose’ thus refers to two different tendencies at the same time to the fact that populism has become ubiquitous and to how it is being defined in many different ways. Instead of establishing a single vision, we seek to outline the multifaceted phenomenon through several approaches from cultural, gender, and communication studies as well as political science: this yields new insights to the phenomenon. while the book as a whole explores populism in countries including venezuela to italy, romania, and turkey, many of these papers reflect on finland especially in relation to the Finns Party and its emergence in the 2000s and 2010s, and makes a significant contribution in this less studied phenomenon. The origin of the articles in this volume is in the conference ‘populism as rhetoric and movement’ which was organised in Jyväskylä, finland, 17–19 march 2016 and which was based on the academy of finland research project (Grant Sa251730) with the same name. Speakers were invited to write for the volume, further elaborating on the papers delivered at the conference. while much of present-day populism studies have focussed on identifying features shared by populist movements or on populism as a social logic, this volume looks at the variability and intersectionality of populism. First, populist phenomena vary according to cultural context. Stock accounts of populism, more often than not, fail to pay due attention to the culture-specific features of populist movements. Second, populism gets entangled with gender, class and religion among other things. It therefore requires an intersectional study paying attention to the web of potentially relevant factors. And third, the very concept of populism tends to get loose – it is both without clear limits and its content is object of cultural and political negotiation and struggle – to the extent of justifying the term ‘floating signifier’, familiar from Ernesto laclau’s approach to populism. The authors are academics from a variety of fields such as political science, cultural studies, and gender studies. (See List of Authors in the end of the manuscript.) I on being on the loose 9 Foreword 11 Emilia Palonen & Urpo Kovala: Populism on the loose: seminal preflections on the condition of differentiality 13 II Conceptualising populisms in national contexts 27 Björn Fryklund: Populism in the nordic countries 1965–2015: the Swedish case as an ideal type or comparative yardstick for the development of populism 29 Halil Gürhanlı: Populism on steroids: Erdoğanists and their enemies in Turkey 53 Virpi Salojärvi: Together with the people: framing populism in government and opposition newspapers in president Chavez’s Venezuela 81 Mihnea-Simion Stoica: Romanian populism: between radical nationalism and communist nostalgia 99 III Intersecting populisms 117 Elisa Bellè & Barbara Poggio: New faces of populism: the Italian ‘anti-gender’ mobilization 119 Jiri Nieminen: Populism and the christian right in Finland: the political rhetoric of the patmos foundation for world missions 143 Urpo Kovala & Jyrki Pöysä: The ‘Jytky’ of the Finns Party: or, how to take advantage of masculinity in populist politics 161 Tuija Saresma: Gender populism: three cases of Finns Party actors’ traditionalist anti-feminism 177 IV Populism as a floating signifier? 201 Tuula Vaarakallio: The concept of populism in the Finnish newspaper Helsingin sanomat 203 Maria Ruotsalainen: Tracing the concept of hate speech in Finland 213 Emilia Palonen: Cultural populism: the case of Guggenheim Helsinki 231 List of authors 261 List of pictures, figures, and tables 267