Populism and Nationalism: Constructing and Representing ‘the People’ as Underdog and Nation, Vol. 24 - 2017, No. 4

Guest Edited by Benjamin De Cleen and Yannis Stavrakakis

Distinctions and Articulations: A Discourse Theoretical Framework for the Study of Populism and Nationalism

Benjamin De Cleen, Yannis Stavrakakis, pages: 301-319

The close empirical connections between populism and nationalism have naturalised a rather misleading overlap between the concepts of populism and nationalism in academic and public debates. As a result, the relation between the two has not received much systematic attention. Drawing on the poststructuralist discourse theory originally formulated by Laclau and Mouffe, this article differentially identifies populism and nationalism as distinct ways of discursively constructing and claiming to represent “the people”, as underdog and as nation respectively. These distinct constructions of “the people” can also be identified and highlighted from a spatial or orientational perspective, by looking at the architectonics of populism and nationalism as revolving around a down/up (vertical) and an in/out (horizontal) axis respectively. Building on this framework, the article then concludes that the co-occurrence of populism and nationalism should be studied through the prism of articulation. Again, a focus on discursive architectonics allows grasping how different political projects construct different discourses by connecting the building blocks of populism and nationalism in particular ways. The study of these articulations, based on a clear distinction between populism and nationalism, is a necessary step in further deepening our understanding of the complexity and variety of populist politics.

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