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QUALITATIVE APPROACHES IN POPULISM RESEARCH

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... This study employs a qualitative exploratory descriptive design. In the context of violence and abuse, qualitative research is helpful because it offers greater insight into the motivations for and meanings and dynamics of violent relationships (Ellsberg & Heise, 2005). This is made possible by allowing the researcher to understand the world of the concerned individuals (Grobbelaar, 1994). ...
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Populizm jest kategorią budzącą spory od początku naukowej refleksji nad tym zjawiskiem. Jak pokazuje niniejszy artykuł jest to nie tylko pochodną różnicy między badaczami, odmiennie hierarchizującymi znaczenie poszczególnych elementów konstytutywnych. Co ważniejsze, badacze często różnią się nawet co do tego, które elementy są koniecznymi elementami zjawiska. Różnice te wynikają więc z odmiennych spojrzeń na status ontologiczny populizmu. Pociąga to za sobą skłonność do korzystania z innych danych empirycznych oraz odmiennej metodologii. Celem niniejszego tekstu jest krytyczna analiza najbardziej typowych, jak i nowych pomysłów dotyczących statusu ontologicznego populizmu. Artykuł usiłuje ponadto wskazać na potencjalne obszary zgodności pomiędzy poszczególnymi ujęciami populizmu: jako ideologii o cienkim rdzeniu, dyskursu, strategii i organizacji, stylu politycznego, mobilizacji, dyskursywnego i stylistycznego repertuaru, ramy interpretacyjnej.
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This chapter presents salient dimensions of the Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) in CDA while analyzing visual argumentation strategies from a recent Austrian election campaign, in February 2008. The posters are deconstructed by applying pragmatic means and by investigating the topoi and fallacies employed in such a multimodal genre. Moreover, the history of the DHA is briefly summarized. Frequent criticism brought forward against work in CDA by prominent scholars is discussed and refuted in detail. The DHA also offers a precise and retroductable step-by-step methodology; this is elaborated while presenting a possible example for further and future analysis.
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Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser is currently a post-doctoral fellow at the Social Science Research Center Berlin (WZB). He is the recipient of the Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowship for a two-year research project on populism in Europe and Latin America, which he will undertake at the University of Sussex during the 2011–2013 academic years. With research interests that include populism, democracy, and Latin American politics, he has published in Democratization and the Latin American Research Review, among others. He holds a PhD from the Humboldt University of Berlin (2009). the two anonymous reviewers. Of course, all errors are ours alone.
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Ghiţa Ionescu and Ernest Gellner (1969: 1) began their classic edited collection on populism by paraphrasing Marx and Engel’s famous opening line: ‘A Spectre is haunting the world — populism’. However, it was not quite the entire world that was being haunted in the late 1960s. Looking through the case studies in Ionescu and Gellner’s book, we find chapters on North America, Latin America, Russia, Eastern Europe and Africa, but nothing on that part of the world in which most of the contributors lived and worked: Western Europe. By contrast, the present volume focuses exclusively on that area. This reflects the fact that while the likes of Ross Perot in the United States, Preston Manning in Canada and Pauline Hanson in Australia have all attracted sporadic attention as new populist leaders, the main area of sustained populist growth and success over the last fifteen years in established democracies has been Western Europe.
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In recent years two populist regionalist parties have emerged in the alpine region, the Lega dei Ticinesi (LDT) in Switzerland and the Lega Nord (LN) in Italy. However, while typical populist themes such as the constant attacks against professional politicians and appeals to the ‘people’ resonate in the rhetoric of both movements, what differentiates them is the style of their propaganda, as the LDT's paper, Il Mattino della Domenica, constantly strives to shock its readers in ways that are alien to the Italian leghisti. Following a discussion of the strength, organisation and rhetoric of the two parties, this articles addresses the reasons why they have adopted different strategies of communication by considering the parties’ constituencies, the nature of their media and the personalities of their leaders.
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In this paper I apply the definition of populism that I laid out in P. Taggart, Populism (Buckingham: Open University Press, 2000) and argue that recent developments in Europe provide a fertile ground for the emergence of populism. Europe is taken to in its widest sense to include the European Union as well as the ‘wider Europe’. The argument of the paper is that populism will emerge (and has already appeared) in many different forms and will appear as a series of fractured instances. Combined with the self‐limiting effects of populism this means that populism will not amount to a wider ‘European’ force but its appearance does highlight dilemmas of representative politics in Europe.
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Political theorists do not in general pay much attention to populism; are there any good reasons why they should do so? This paper will consider a number of positive answers to this question. Most attention has so far been paid to issues of methodology—can we define ‘populism’? Recently there has also been some interest in the relation between populism and democracy, but there are two further topics that may be worth investigating, first the possibility of a distinctive political ideology that might be called ‘populist’, and second the meanings and significance of populism's core concept, the elusive ‘people’.
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The concept of populism has in recent years inspired much debate and much confusion. It has been described variously as a pathology, a style, a syndrome and a doctrine. Others have raised doubts as to whether the term has any analytical utility, concluding that it is simply too vague to tell us anything meaningful about politics. Drawing on recent developments in the theoretical literature, it is argued that populism should be regarded as a ‘thin’ ideology which, although of limited analytical use on its own terms, nevertheless conveys a distinct set of ideas about the political which interact with the established ideational traditions of full ideologies.
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The measurement of populism – particularly over time and space – has received only scarce attention. In this research note two different ways to measure populism are compared: a classical content analysis and a computer-based content analysis. An analysis of political parties in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Germany and Italy demonstrates that both methods can be used to measure populism across countries and over time. Recommendations are presented on how to combine these methods in future comparative research on populism.
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