Populism on the Loose

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. Second, populism gets entangled with gender, class and religion among other things. And third, the very concept of populism tends to get loose to the extent of justifying the term ‘floating signifier’, familiar from Ernesto Laclau’s approach to populism.

The title of this volume, ‘populism on the loose’, 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. We seek to outline the multifaceted phenomenon through several approaches from cultural, gender, and communication studies as well as political science. While the book as a whole explores populism in countries ranging from 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.

Index

I On Populism on the Loose
Foreword Emilia Palonen & Urpo Kovala: Populism on the loose: seminal preflections on the condition of differentiality

II Conceptualising populisms in national contexts

Björn Fryklund: Populism in the Nordic countries 1965–2015: The Swedish case as an ideal type or comparative yardstick for the development of populism

Halil Gürhanli: Populism on steroids: Erdoğanists and their enemies in Turkey

Virpi Salojärvi: Together with the people: framing populism in government and opposition newspapers in president Chavez’s Venezuela

Mihnea-Simion Stoica: Romanian populism: between radical nationalism and communist nostalgia

III Gender and populism

Elisa Bellè and Barbara Poggio: New faces of populism: the Italian ‘anti-gender’ mobilization

Jiri Nieminen: Populism and the Christian right in Finland: the political rhetoric of the Patmos foundation for world missions

Urpo Kovala & Jyrki Pöysä: The ‘jytky’ of the Finns Party: or, how to take advantage of masculinity in populist politics

Tuija Saresma: Gender populism: three cases of Finns Party actors’ traditionalist anti-feminism

IV Populism as a floating signifier?

Tuula Vaarakallio: The concept of populism in the Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat

Maria Ruotsalainen: Tracing the concept of hate speech in Finland

Emilia Palonen: Cultural populism: the case of Guggenheim Helsinki

Published in Nykykulttuurin tutkimuskeskuksen julkaisuja
Editors Kovala, Urpo | Palonen, Emilia | Ruotsalainen, Maria | Saresma, Tuija

Publisher Jyväskylän yliopisto
ISBN 978-951-39-7401-5

Peer-reviewed