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Connections between populism and nationalism: Evidence from Jair Bolsonaro's speeches
Abstract
Recent studies have warned about the close relationship between populism and nationalism. This article offers an empirical contribution to the examination of this relationship by analysing the presence of populist and nationalist elements in the official speeches of the outgoing Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro. We make two contributions to this expanding literature. First, we show that the supposed ambiguity between populism and nationalism can be resolved by an approach that clearly separates the two concepts. Second, we find that Bolsonaro is more populist
than nationalist. His populism has elements in common with other European populist leaders (attacking political parties and the political class), but he distances himself from them by presenting authoritarian traits. Nativism is completely absent (unlike in Europe), but ‘sovereignism’ (‘us’ vs. ‘other nations or institutions’) and ‘civilisationism’ (‘us’ vs. ‘minorities’) sometimes overlap with populism. We conclude that a tension exists between populism and nationalism that can endanger the ‘good’ relationship between the populist leader and their supporters. This is something that future
research on populism should consider.
... Bolsonaro's international discourses were noted to be frequently more populist than his domestic speeches (Tamaki, 2021;Ricci & Venturelli, 2023). These findings, however, have not been explored in depth. ...
... And how has this influenced his overall populist rhetoric? This chapter seeks to build upon initial observations by Tamaki (2021) and Ricci and Venturelli (2023), and analyze the nuances of Bolsonaro's populism abroad. It tries to understand the hallmarks of Bolsonaro's international populism, and by doing so, offer a deeper understanding of how Bolsonaro's populist rhetoric traveled from different contexts and how it has influenced his overall populism. ...
... Likewise, Ricci et al. (2021) applied content analysis to Bolsonaro's 2019 official speeches and found that 12% of his speeches were populist. Finally, on a similar path, Ricci and Venturelli (2023) further used classic content analysis and classified 37% 1 of Bolsonaro's 2019 and 2020 official speeches as populist, although populism is present in low intensity on average. 2 Domestically, Bolsonaro's populism is characterized by a divisive discourse that pits "us" against "them." He frequently identifies certain groups, such as leftists, minorities, and the media, as enemies of the Brazilian people. ...
While, in theory, the populist radical-right ideology is hostile to international cooperation and sees International Relations as a zero-sum game, leaders from this camp have supported each other and adopted common elements in their anti-globalization and ultraconservative discourse across the globe. This chapter aims to analyze and discuss how Jair Bolsonaro, a populist radical-right leader, engaged in populism primarily through international discourses that go beyond regional particularities, combining Christianism, conservatism (through the idea of “traditional family”), and heteronormativity elements to create a common narrative that resonates among those disgruntled who feel betrayed and left behind. His construction of “people” follows international and transnational ideas of “us,” which encompasses those who share and identify with the same principles as him. The enemy, in turn, is treated as an overarching threat that expands beyond Brazil and targets other allied countries. This chapter presents a case study of the former Brazilian President, Jair Bolsonaro, applying a mixed man-machine content analysis method to classify his official speeches during his first two years as president. The study distinguishes between national and international discourses, focusing primarily on his international speeches and looking at how different elements come together under a single umbrella of populism, fueled with “culture war” and ideological elements.
When do politicians dog-whistle conspiracy theories (CTs), and when do they explicitly endorse – or ‘bark’ – a CT? Over time, does the use of dog-whistles shape the degree to which politicians bark? Drawing from the models of mass communication literature, we theorize that politicians who leverage CTs to garner political support have incentives to tailor their communication to their audience. When politicians speak to general audiences, they risk being punished for explicitly endorsing CTs. However, for parties that use CTs to rally their base, dog-whistling a CT may allow politicians to covertly signal support for a CT to party faithful. Conversely, amongst audiences primarily composed of party loyalists or CT believers, politicians have strong incentives to explicitly endorse CTs. We test our theory with data from Poland, where a series of CTs emerged following a 2010 plane crash in Smoleńsk, Russia that killed the Polish president and 95 other top officials. We draw on speeches and tweets discussing the crash from 2011 to 2022 by the Law and Justice (PiS) party, which sometimes endorses these CTs. We find descriptive evidence that PiS politicians both dog-whistle and ‘bark’. While they tend to dog-whistle more when the audience is more diverse, they tend to bark when the audience is more uniformly CT-supporting. We find some evidence that politicians bark more and dog-whistle less over time, which suggests that, with sustained use, dog-whistling may become understood by a wider array of audiences.
Are there populist parties in Brazil? Despite the common perception of personalistic electoral connections, the literature suggests that parties play a crucial role in legislation and voting choice. However, Brazilian parties are overlooked in populism studies. This article adds to the literature by analyzing populism in Brazilian election manifestos between 2010 and 2022. Through a man-machine content analysis application, it finds that populism is used by only a few parties, predominantly among radical left parties. The article also explores populism within mainstream parties during the 2018 elections. Despite not representing a threat to democracy due to limited influence, the existence of populist parties challenges the misconception that populism in Brazil is solely about leadership.
COVID-19 shocked the world and provided a particular challenge for populist radical right (PRR) forces. We lay out three research questions that this special issue addresses through case studies of the PRR in government in Brazil, Hungary, Turkey and the US and in opposition in France, Italy, Germany and Spain: (1) How have PRR actors responded to the pandemic? (2) How have PRR actors framed the politics of the pandemic? and (3) What have been the effects of the pandemic on the popularity of the PRR? We explain the case selection of this special issue and summarize the main findings of the eight case studies, which show that the pandemic did not severely damage the PRR and that they had very different responses to the challenge. This reinforces the idea that the PRR is not ephemeral but is rather the by-product of structural transformations of contemporary societies and is here for the foreseeable future.
This article analyses the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on Brazil's populist radical right (PRR), as well as the responses of PRR actors to the pandemic, during the period from March 2020 to October 2021. Despite high death rates and declining popularity in the final months of that period, the Brazilian president consistently maintained a denialist narrative that incorporated key aspects of populist ideology. Based on the analysis of opinion surveys, documents, online messages and secondary sources, we argue that explaining this denialism requires understanding Brazil's radical-right populism as more than an ideology: it is a social movement. The impacts of the pandemic on Bolsonaro's PRR government and its responses can only be understood by simultaneously analysing the top-down actions of the leader and the bottom-up role of bolsonarismo – that is, the broad coalition of actors who actively support the radical-right project. The case of bolsonarismo suggests that literature on populism in general would profit from taking right-wing movements more seriously as co-producers of populist rhetoric and practices.
In this article, we explore cruelty under populism, focusing on radical right populism. We develop our argument by introducing a two-dimensional model of cruel behavior in politics, in which cruelty is conceptualized as a dependent variable defined in terms of empathy (how the leader addresses those who suffer) and action (how the leader acts to alleviate suffering). This framework provides a nuanced understanding of how cruelty and populism connect, providing an original and cutting-edge contribution to both bodies of work. We use our two-dimensional model of cruel behavior to shed light on the different ways radical right populists (RRP) embrace cruelty as part of their political strategies. We have come to three “ideal” types of RRP cruel behavior: downplaying, blaming, and conspiring. In order to advance our ideas, we rely on the qualitative analysis of Brazil's far-right populist President Jair Bolsonaro and his (in)actions regarding COVID-19, who once asked about the soaring number of dead from COVID-19 simply answered: “So what? What do you want me to do?.” Using this case study, we empirically illustrate different ways in which how cruelty can manifest itself in practice and what real-life consequences it can have.
Current definitions of populism are insufficiently determinate. They fail to distinguish between populism and nationalism. We propose to remedy this problem by advancing a new definition of populism as the logic of democratic resentment. We apply this new definition to a comparison between Spain's Podemos and Portugal's Left Bloc (BE), which we classify as social carriers of populism. We make two contributions to the literature. First, our findings dispute existing characterisations of the Portuguese case, which fail to distinguish between populist and nationalist claim-making. Second, our analysis undermines depictions of Podemos as the consummate populist party in Iberia: in 2015, the little studied BE was a stronger populist carrier than Podemos. The analytical framework underpinning this conclusion offers a more refined approach to populism than the alternatives and sets a higher standard for empirical replication.
Between 2016 and 2020, a group of activist generals successfully plotted the Brazilian military's gradual return to the political center stage with powers unseen since the dictatorship. They achieved this without formally breaking the law, suspending the democratic process or overthrowing the government. We call this a “stealth intervention,” an incremental yet systematic attempt to redesign politics without causing a rupture, that fits neither in the existing typology of coups nor in the literature on democratic backsliding. We argue that Brazil’ stealth intervention, built upon the military’s existing tutelary prerogatives and driven by an unreformed praetorian worldview that resurfaced amidst a sustained crisis of democracy, challenges the prevalent view of the armed forces as a reactive force that intervenes in civilian politics only when its institutional interests are threatened. Finally, we show that democratic backsliding in Brazil started under Bolsonaro’s predecessor, Michel Temer, and point to the generals’ understudied role in this process.
Tensions concerning environmental governance have increased in Brazil since the far-right came to power in 2016. We offer insight into this process by analysing the first two years of Jair Bolsonaro's (2019-ongoing) environmental policies namely , how Brazil's environmental protection arrangements are being dismantled. We find that the Bolsonaro administration centralises environmental gov-ernance in Brazil through complementary authoritarian and populist means. First in restricting participatory decision-making spaces such as the National Environmental Council (Conama) and the National Council of the Legal Amazon (CNAL), and, second, by attacking indigenous and traditional peoples, NGOs, scientists, and other environmental defenders. To illustrate the authoritarian dimension of Bolsonaro's environmental governance, we carry out a political-institutional analysis of contemporary Brazilian environmental politics and then exemplify the ways and extent to which attacks against environmental defenders is a constituent part of Bolsonaro's environmental populism. We hold that such attacks are not merely rhetorical but a political tactic to legitimise Bolsonaro's authoritarian environmental governance in the promotion of 'total extractivism' while maintaining a populist appeal.
In this article, I briefly present the multilateral discussion on ‘climate security’ and its relation to the protection of the Amazon. First, the text points out the importance of the Amazon for keeping global climate balance, the drastic change to the environmental agenda of Brazilian diplomacy, and the growing call in international public opinion for an internationally coordinated action to reverse deforestation in the region. Next, it introduces the concept of ‘climate security’, its development within the United Nations Security Council, and its relation to the principle of responsibility to protect (R2P). Finally, based on contextual evidence, I carry out a prospective analysis of the narratives that might be constructed to justify applying this principle to the Brazilian Amazon.
Some claim that an erosion of democracy is occurring worldwide. There are also questions on the scope of the crisis, which countries are affected, and how to reverse it. The Covid-19 pandemic may have fostered disagreements, deepened rifts, and contributed to the definitive crystallisation of the crisis, but it may also have engendered more moderate and compliant attitudes given the need to unify around the response to common threat. We explore the current dilemmas of democracy in the Brazilian case, focusing on how regime legitimacy, authoritarian attitudes, and support for a populist, authoritarian leader interact and are affected by the pandemic, using public opinion data from 2018 to 2020.
The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a vast research agenda focusing on how citizens acquire knowledge about the virus and the health expert guidelines to protect themselves and their close ones against it. While many countries and regions have been accounted for, there still remains a substantial gap with respect to public opinion about the virus in Latin America, most notably in Brazil, which currently has the second highest in number of fatalities in the world. In this article, we employ a national survey of Brazilians (n = 2,771) to measure and explain knowledge and misinformation about the coronavirus and its illness, COVID-19. Our focus concerns the role of political preferences in a context of high elite polarization with a sitting government that has systematically downplayed the risks associated with the coronavirus and its illness. Our findings are clear: political preferences play a substantial role in explaining differences in knowledge about the coronavirus and COVID-19, more than conventional determinants of learning like motivation, ability, and opportunities. Specifically, we find that supporters of President Jair Bolsonaro—an avid science and COVID-19 denier—know significantly less about the coronavirus and its illness and are more likely to believe in a conspiracy theory that claims that the coronavirus was purposefully created in a Chinese laboratory to promote China's economic power, when compared to Brazilians who are less supportive of him and his government. Our findings carry important implications for how Brazilians take informational cues from political elites in that—even in a major event like a global pandemic—supporters of the president are as likely as ever to “follow their leader” and deny expert-backed scientific evidence.
This study examines the effect of the country of origin of the vaccine on vaccination acceptance against COVID-19. More specifically, we show how the political context in Brazil has affected acceptance of vaccines produced in China, Russia, the US, and England at the University of Oxford. Our data come from a survey experiment applied to a national sample of 2771 adult Brazilians between September 23 and October 2, 2020. We find greater rejection among Brazilians for vaccines developed in China and Russia, as compared to vaccines from the US or England. We also find that rejection of the Chinese-developed vaccine is particularly strong among those who support President Jair Bolsonaro—a COVID-19 denier and strong critic of China and vaccination, in general.
In the last two decades, far-right populists have formed governments all over the world. However, systematic analyses on how far-right leaders recreate their countries' foreign policy identity are still underdeveloped. In this article, we analyse how far-right populist leaders use their conservative identity-set to align with other right-wing governments and how they use the same conservative repertoire to deal with ideological rivals. More precisely, we argue that these leaders tend to overemphasize a deep conservative identity-set towards other far-right populist governments, something we call ‘thick conservative identity’. This profoundly conservative identity-set is composed of three national role conceptions: anti-globalism, nationalism and anti-foe. However, they do not repeat this identity-set towards ideological rivals, preferring to use a more nuanced and contradictory one, something we call ‘thin conservative identity’. The trigger of such difference is the anticipated mutual expectation of conservatism between Ego and Alter, in which Ego mimics Alter's deep conservatism. We use Jair Bolsonaro's alignment with Donald Trump and Bolsonaro's relationship with China as illustrative cases. We use the main concepts of role theory to understand both how conservative alignments are created and how far-right governments deal with ideological rivals.
This article analyzes the effects of antipartisanship in explaining the Bolsonaro vote in the 2018 presidential elections. The expansion of the anti-Workers’ Party sentiment known in Portuguese as ‘antipetismo’ into an antipartisanship that accommodates a wider range of targets and a growing association between antipartisanship and political intolerance provide the context for and underscore the relevance of our tests. Our expectation is that the vote for Bolsonaro was strong related to both antipetismo and negative attitudes towards mainstream political parties, especially when such attitudes were intense. The empirical basis of the present work was data from the Barometer of the Americas (LAPOP), particularly from the 2018/2019 wave. Empirical tests indicate that antipartisanship in its varied forms is a relevant phenomenon and had a major role in defining the electoral choices of 2018, particularly in the vote for Bolsonaro.
https://brazilianpoliticalsciencereview.org/article/environmental-policy-in-the-bolsonaro-government-the-response-of-environmentalists-in-the-legislative-arena/
This article analyzes the response of Brazil’s National Congress to the Bolsonaro government’s actions in respect of environmental policy, with an emphasis on the role of the active members of the Congressional Environmental Coalition and the civil society organizations that support it. Congress’s three spheres of activity encompass lawmaking, legislative oversight and the budget.
The main decision-making processes related to these fields of activity are highlighted and analyzed using a qualitative approach. In general, there is evidence of an appropriate response by environmentalists, the results of which should not be underestimated,
but which should have greater reach in view of the gravity of the destruction of environmental protection policy that has taken and continues to take place. The Bolsonaro government has presided over an attempted evisceration of environmental policies by changing nonstatutory rules and cutting budgets, but Congress has put the brakes on nationally applicable laws and strengthened Congressional oversight.
This article analyzes the response of Brazil’s National Congress to the Bolsonaro government’s actions in respect of environmental policy, with an emphasis on the role of the active members of the Congressional Environmental Coalition and the civil society organizations that support it. Congress’s three spheres of activity encompass lawmaking, legislative oversight and the budget. The main decision-making processes related to these fields of activity are highlighted and analyzed using a qualitative approach. In general, there is evidence of an appropriate response by environmentalists, the results of which should not be underestimated, but which should have greater reach in view of the gravity of the destruction of environmental protection policy that has taken and continues to take place. The Bolsonaro government has presided over an attempted evisceration of environmental policies by changing non-statutory rules and cutting budgets, but Congress has put the brakes on nationally applicable laws and strengthened Congressional oversight.
The 2018 Brazilian elections saw the rise to power of Jair Bolsonaro, yet another conservative politician who won an election in recent years. What were the ideological underpinnings of the Bolsonaro vote? Was his support based exclusively on resentment toward the Workers’ Party? This article uses a unique public opinion dataset, the 2018 Brazilian Electoral Panel Study, to explore how positions on divisive issues related to social, political, and cultural factors influenced vote choice and Bolsonarismo —affection toward Bolsonaro supporters—in the 2018 Brazilian presidential elections. Results indicate that in addition to resentment against the Workers’ Party, a cultural backlash perspective, and strict views on law and order, as well as economic liberalism and rejection of social policies, were the characteristics of support for Bolsonaro.
The 2018 elections surprised most analysts and political scientists in Brazil and abroad. The competitive dynamic that opposed the PT and the PSDB in presidential elections since 1994 has been disrupted, resulting in a novelty for the Brazilian party system. The purpose of this research article is to identify the determinants of votes for Jair Bolsonaro in the two rounds of the 2018 presidential election from data collected by the Brazilian Electoral Study. By means of multivariate analyses of the two rounds of the presidential election, we found that flourishing 'antipetismo' (i.e. anti-Workers' Party sentiment), growing numbers of voters self-identifying as right wing and increased importance of variables linked to voters' political identification all underpinned the victory of Jair Bolsonaro.
In a recent article in this journal, Rogers Brubaker formulates a critique of the distinction we make in our work between populism and nationalism, and further develops his own, thicker conceptualization of populism, which integrates the nationalist dimension without however totally conflating populism and nationalism. In this article, we briefly respond to the critique of our work, further clarifying and refining our plea for clearly distinct conceptualizations of populism and nationalism in dialogue with the considerations formulated by Rogers Brubaker. More broadly, we see this response as a chance to contribute to the further development of a framework that allows for the rigorous study of populism's pivotal as well as complex and often troubling relation with nationalism.
Sovereignist claims are on the rise-in Europe, the USA, and beyond. In dealing with processes such as globalization and supranational integration, which have progressively shifted powers and competencies away from nation states, these transformations have created a fertile terrain for reactions against the sources of such insecurity, which find full expression in the sovereignist claims to 'take back control', that is to say to return to the traditional understanding of sovereignty being based upon mutually exclusive territories. These sources of insecurity and social unrest have also provided structures of political opportunity for the electoral success of populist parties. Despite its relevance for the understanding of the populist discourse, however, sovereignty has been largely under-theorised by scholars dealing with populism. Accordingly, we propose a new research agenda to study populist mobilization that focuses on the linkage between populism and sovereignism, while also encouraging further theoretical and empirical studies, focusing on both the demand side and the supply side. In particular, we suggest some crucial aspects with which the Special Issue seeks to engage, before pointing to some substantial implications that are likely to emerge from the findings of this research agenda.
When examining the decline of the leftist Partido dos Trabalhadores and the ascension of the right-wing extremist Jair Bolsanaro of the far-right Partido Liberal Social to the 2018 presidency, political scientists David Samuels and Cesar Zucco have argued that this shift is best understood not through positive characteristics of Bolsonaro’s candidacy but through antipetismo [‘anti-PT-ism’], an intensely personal resentment of the Partido dos Trabalhadores. We assert that popular right-wing Facebook groups and networks formed around the communication network WhatsApp-fueled antipetismo by channeling anger originating in the 2013 nationwide protests away from a variety of social, political, and issues and toward a villainous depiction of Partido dos Trabalhadores leaders and valorization of anti-Partido dos Trabalhadores activists like Bolsanaro, as well as some focus on his own conservative, nationalist agenda.
Less than 30 years after Fukuyama and others declared liberal democracy’s eternal dominance, a third wave of autocratization is manifest. Gradual declines of democratic regime attributes characterize contemporary autocratization. Yet, we lack the appropriate conceptual and empirical tools to diagnose and compare such elusive processes. Addressing that gap, this article provides the first comprehensive empirical overview of all autocratization episodes from 1900 to today based on data from the Varieties of Democracy Project (V-Dem). We demonstrate that a third wave of autocratization is indeed unfolding. It mainly affects democracies with gradual setbacks under a legal façade. While this is a cause for concern, the historical perspective presented in this article shows that panic is not warranted: the current declines are relatively mild and the global share of democratic countries remains close to its all-time high. As it was premature to announce the “end of history” in 1992, it is premature to proclaim the “end of democracy” now.
Resumo O nacionalismo é a ideologia da formação e desenvolvimento dos estados-nação. O nacionalismo foi central no desenvolvimento dos países centrais ou de desenvolvimento original, mas é ainda mais importante nos países periféricos, assim denominados porque foram submetidos ao imperialismo moderno dos primeiros. O nacionalismo supõe uma história e um destino comum; não necessariamente uma etnia comum. Quando a etnia se torna definidora do nacionalismo, este deixa de ser econômico para ser étnico e populista. O nacionalismo está associado à imaginação criativa e ao pensamento crítico. O desenvolvimentismo é irmão gêmeo do nacionalismo econômico, enquanto é a ideologia do desenvolvimento voltado para a industrialização tendo como pressupostos uma intervenção moderada do Estado na economia e a defesa do interesse nacional em um mundo no qual a competição entre as nações é mais forte do que a cooperação.
This article examines the development of campaigns against “gender ideology” in Europe, leading to the emergence of a specific family of mobilizations that we call anti-gender campaigns. These campaigns, started in the mid-1990s as a Catholic project in reaction to the results of the UN conferences of Cairo and Bejing, but developed significantly in several European countries after crucial encounters with right-wing populism. While recognizing the importance of these crossovers, we contend the interpretation that mobilizations against “gender ideology” and right-wing populism are the two faces of the same coin, and we plead for a more complex understanding of the ways in which distinct—and sometimes competing—projects can converge in specific settings. We argue that research on the “Global Right Wing” should therefore disentangle the various components of this phenomenon, and locate them in concrete settings. We show that this research strategy allows us to better grasp the specificities of each project and the ways in which they interact. Opening our eyes on crucial developments in contemporary Europe, this strategy also prevents researchers from falling into the trap of a global and unqualified backlash against everything achieved in terms of gender and sexuality in the last decades.
Why did Americans vote for Donald Trump in the 2016 Presidential election? Social scientists have proposed a variety of explanations, including economic dissatisfaction, sexism, racism, Islamophobia, and xenophobia. The current study establishes that, independent of these influences, voting for Trump was, at least for many Americans, a symbolic defense of the United States' perceived Christian heritage. Data from a national probability sample of Americans surveyed soon after the 2016 election shows that greater adherence to Christian nationalist ideology was a robust predictor of voting for Trump, even after controlling for economic dissatisfaction, sexism, anti-black prejudice, anti-Muslim refugee attitudes, and anti-immigrant sentiment, as well as measures of religion, sociodemographics, and political identity more generally. These findings indicate that Christian nationalist ideology-although correlated with a variety of class-based, sexist, racist, and ethnocentric views-is not synonymous with, reducible to, or strictly epiphenomenal of such views. Rather, Christian nationalism operates as a unique and independent ideology that can influence political actions by calling forth a defense of mythological narratives about America's distinctively Christian heritage and future.
This article engages in a comparative analysis of populist parties across the West-European left-right spectrum. Conceptualizing populism as a 'thin ideology', we argue that populist parties show both similarities and differences, and that these are a product of the interaction of the core features of populism with the 'thicker' ideological traditions from which the different parties draw upon. We employ a qualitative method in analyzing the core ideational features of populism in four different populist parties, both left and right. We find that all four parties converge in particular on their conception of the elite as a separate 'caste', in relation to economic and European integration conflicts, operating on patriotism and in claiming that they represent the true interests of the sovereign people. They differ, however, in their conception of the 'true' people that they presumably represent and the nature of popular sovereignty and populist democracy.
Although the study of populism has traditionally been the domain of Latin Americanists, research here has become increasingly comparative. One of the most important payoffs of this comparative work is conceptual. Rather than defining populism in structuralist, economic, or political-strategic terms, a growing number of scholars around the world are using an ideational conceptualization that draws heavily from earlier discursive theories. By employing the ideational approach, scholars have been able to provide empirical measures of populist discourse. In this article we explain and show the advantages of this ideational approach to a Latin American audience by presenting a new historical dataset measuring the discourse of Argentine, Chilean, and Peruvian presidents across the twentieth century. Our main intent is to clarify the ideational approach as well as to enliven the conceptual debate. While we are critical of alternative definitions, we acknowledge and reassess their theoretical insights.
Populism is a key feature of contemporary democratic politics, and is on the rise across the world. Yet current approaches to populism fail to account for its shifting character in a rapidly changing political and media landscape, where media touches upon all aspects of political life, a sense of crisis is endemic, and where populism has gone truly global. This book presents a new perspective for understanding populism, arguing that it is a distinct ‘political style’ that is performed, embodied and enacted across a number of contexts. While still based on the classic divide between ‘the people’ and ‘the elite’, contemporary populism’s reliance on new media technologies, its relationship to shifting modes of political representation and identification, and its increasing ubiquity has seen the phenomenon transform in new and unexpected ways. Demonstrating that populism as a political style has three central features – appeal to ‘the people’ versus ‘the elite’; ‘bad manners’; and crisis, breakdown or threat – the book uses a performative framework to examine its key actors, stages, audiences and mise-en-scène. In doing so, it draws on illustrative examples from across the globe, moving beyond the usual cases of Western Europe and the Americas to also take in populism in the Asia-Pacific and Africa. Working across the fields of comparative politics, media communications and political theory, it seeks to account for populism’s complex relationship to crisis, media and democracy, ultimately offering an important and provocative new approach for understanding populism in the twenty-first century.
What is populism? What is the relationship between populism and democracy? Populism: A Very Short Introduction presents populism as an ideology that divides society into two antagonistic camps: the “pure people” versus the “corrupt elite,” and that privileges popular sovereignty above all else. It illustrates the practical power of this ideology by describing populist movements of the modern era—European right-wing parties, left-wing presidents in Latin America, and the Tea Party movement in the United States—and charismatic populist leaders such as Juan Domingo Péron, H. Ross Perot, Silvio Berlusconi, and Hugo Chávez. Although populism is ultimately part of democracy, populist forces constitute an increasing challenge to democratic politics.
Populist leaders unfold anti-elite rhetoric to sustain the ‘in-group’ morale of the ‘people’ they represent. Populist projects contain an ‘us’ versus ‘them’ dimension constituted by the stereotyped images that serve to inform the role-selection process in foreign policy. When images shaping roles on the international stage are used against the ‘out-group’, they become stereotypes of other actors. Therefore, this article explores how anti-pluralist populist leaders such as Jair Bolsonaro and Donald Trump use stereotyped images, and how these images – which speak to intention, affective tags and the evaluation of options – shape the foreign policy role behaviour of the states in question. The article develops a framework at the interplay of images and roles to analyse how these two aspects are used by the leader in an oversimplified manner to delineate boundaries between self and other, and thus to identify the membership base of the populist project versus those who are seen as a threat to their populist foreign policy.
This article provides an empirical contribution into the discursive repertoire of seven populist radical right-wing parties. Within the context of the European Parliamentary elections of 2014 and 2019, we examine and compare how these parties discursively shape the content of social demands by assessing how ‘the people’, ‘the nation’, ‘the elite’ and ‘others’ are constructed, and how different demands are incorporated. In doing so we assess the specific role of populism and nationalism in these parties’ discourse. We apply a two-stage measurement technique, combining both qualitative and quantitative content analytical modes of research, with advantages over existing methods, looking at both levels and form of the populist and nationalist signifiers. Our results suggest that although parties often combine both populism and nationalism, there is a general disposition to construct the signifer ‘the people’, not primarily through staging an antagonism between ‘people/elite’ (populism), but rather through articulating ‘the people’ as a national community in need of protection from the EU (nationalism). In view of this, we highlight that populism does not operate as the differentia specifica of populist radical right wing parties’ discourse.
In this article, we present an analysis of narratives mobilised by extreme right-wing leader Jair Bolsonaro and his supporters in response to the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil, from March to December 2020. Our research indicates that, throughout that year, despite changes in the categories used, fear was continuously mobilised by the Brazilian president connecting an alleged ‘communist conspiracy’ to the coronavirus pandemic by creating narratives around the terms ‘Chinese virus’ and ‘Chinese vaccine’. Mapping these conspiratorial discourses, we hope to better understand (1) how Bolsonaro converts conspiracy theories into official state discourse as well as public policy, and (2) how Bolsonaro and his mediatic representatives weaponise tensions between individual freedom and public healthcare and the scientific community. Taking this scenario into account, we analyse how Bolsonaro uses social fear during the pandemic as part of his permanent campaign in a process resulting in serious risks to both public health and democracy.
Technocratic appeals to expertise and populist invocations of ‘the people’ have become mainstays of political competition in established democracies. This development is best understood as the emergence of technopopulism —a new political logic that is being superimposed on the traditional struggle between left and right. Political movements and actors—such as Italy’s Five Star Movement and France’s La Républiqe En Marche —combine technocratic and populist appeals in a variety of ways, as do more established parties that are adapting to the particular set of incentives and constraints implicit in this new, unmediated form of politics. In the first book-length treatment of the phenomenon of technopopulism, the authors combine theoretical and historical approaches, offering a systematic definition of the concept of technopopulism, while also exploring a number of salient contemporary examples. The book provides a detailed account of the emergence of this new political logic, as well as a discussion of its troubling consequences for existing democratic regimes. It ends by considering some possible remedies moving beyond the simplistic idea that in the right ‘dose’ populism and technocracy can counter-balance one another.
After seven presidential elections that had a centre-left candidate facing a centre-right adversary in the second round, Brazil experienced radical change in the 2018 run-off. An extreme-right candidate, Jair Bolsonaro, from a very small party, won the first round of the elections. This chapter analyses the rise of Bolsonaro focusing particularly on his relationship with big media. In doing so, the authors test the pertinence of applying the concept of populism to the case of Brazil. Following a brief historical overview, João Feres Júnior and Juliana Gagliardi examine how the politics of media corporations changed over recent years, creating a strong antipolitical sentiment which was successfully appropriated by Bolsonaro’s populist agenda. The final section reflects upon the chapter’s contributions to understanding the Brazilian case and also the academic discussion on the concept of populism.
This study analyzes the visual self-representation of current Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who is considered to be one of the exponents of the recent rise of rightwing neopopulism. Despite the growing body of literature analyzing contemporary populism, little has been said about the deployment of images in the construction of public meanings relevant to popular understandings of populist leaders. This research draws from the social media analysis of Casullo to investigate how the images posted on Bolsonaro’s Instagram account show him (1) as a mirror of the people, (2) someone extraordinary, and (3) quick to appropriate symbols of power. Referencing the work of Butler, we document how the visual self-representation of Bolsonaro is marked by eccentricity and unsophistication, which makes his demeanor, body, and appropriation of institutional power function as a series of parodies. His performance hyperbolizes the transgressive aspect of populism, producing a vertiginous and pleasurable ambiguity toward the figure of the leader. In emptying the presidency from its extraordinary dimension, the parody paradoxically does something extraordinary by reestablishing the distance that it seeks to eliminate. His eccentric rejection of basic social standards, over-the-top masculinity, and impromptu use of everyday objects as props work to construct an image that he is just an ordinary man, extraordinarily occupying the presidency.
This article provides an empirical exploration of the relation between nationalism and populism on the left of the political spectrum. The Spanish party Podemos is a key case study for such an analysis, as it is a left‐populist actor that has made extensive use of nationalist rhetoric in its discourse. Through a discourse analysis on a corpus that includes speeches by Podemos leadership and primary data such as interviews and original unpublished material, this article studies the nationalist dimension of Podemos and its relation with the party's much‐discussed populism. The analysis shows that the Podemos leadership deliberately embeds nationalism in its populist strategy: Nationalism is a central element of the party's populist project and serves to advance an alternative form of national identification that challenges that of the right wing. Through a resignification of national pride and belonging, Podemos constructs an image of Spain that refers to an inclusive welfare state, to people's mobilization, and to a moral community that is not delimited by lingual or ethnic particularisms.
Research on immigration politics has been focused on countries of the Global North. Latin America is often discussed only as a migrant‐sending region. This study offers a comparative‐historical analysis of Brazilian immigration policy from national independence to the present day. Based on archival research and synthesis of multiple documentation sources, the study finds an affinity between authoritarian politics and immigration restrictionism in the country, which is consistent with theories that link liberal democracy to pro‐immigrant policies. Brazilian authoritarian leaders have framed immigrants as threats to the security, order, and culture of the nation to justify tighter controls on immigration. The study concludes that immigration restrictionism can develop in the Global South with discourses strikingly similar to those circulated in the Global North. The findings also suggest that Brazil is still far from the ideal of a multiracial liberal democracy.
This essay examines the conditions that enable a ‘gay rights backlash’ through a comparison of the United States and Latin America. The United States, the cradle of the contemporary gay rights movement, is the paradigmatic example of a gay rights backlash. By contrast, Latin America, the most Catholic of regions, introduced gay rights at a faster pace than the United States without much in the way of a backlash. Collectively, this analysis demonstrates that a gay rights backlash hinges upon organisationally-rich ‘backlashers’ and an environment that is receptive to homophobic messages, a point underscored by the American experience. But the Latin American experience shows that the counter-framing to the backlash can minimise and even blunt the effects of the backlash.
During the last four decades, Latin America has witnessed the political strengthening of collective actors with conflicting agendas: feminist and LGBTQ+ movements on one side, and Catholic and Pentecostal Evangelical sectors on the other. While the first two movements focus on gender equality and the extension of sexual and reproductive rights, the Pentecostal and Catholic sectors have also adopted a political identity, but with an agenda prioritizing the defense of religious freedom and Christian sexual morality. Far from being a holdover from the past, the political strategies employed by these religious sectors continue to affect public debate across much of Latin America today.
Who is entitled to have rights? This essay examines how right-wing movements attempt to prevent individuals, especially women and members of LGBT groups, from accessing equal rights through the use of terms such as “moral worth” and “family values.” At the core of our discussion of the backlash against social rights in Latin America is the need to compare and contrast the case examined here with similar movements outside the region. The vast enterprise of studies on right-wing movements in Western Europe rarely travels outside a few national boundaries. Eastern Europe and the United States are occasionally included. For the most part, right-wing movements are not seen as comparable. Sometimes the reason for excluding Latin America is expressly stated, particularly because the historical experiences are so distinct—for example, the long duration of personal or military dictatorships. Interpretations of right-wing movements in Latin America by scholars outside the region tend to view them as associated with the period of authoritarian rule in the 1970s and 1980s or misunderstand them as having little impact on political life (Meyer and Staggenborg 1996, 1630). Analysis within the region has tended to focus on right-wing political parties, religious groups, or the military (Fortes 2016, Goldstein 2019; Hunter 1997; Luna and Rovira 2014). There are few studies of right-wing movements comparing regions. Latin America is thus seen as largely irrelevant to the comparative study of right-wing movements.
This essay analyses the use of the term “gender madness” and “lost manliness” in the discourse of the right-wing populist Alternative für Deutschland (AFD). It draws on analyses of public statements, policy papers, manifestos and public speeches. It argues that the “gender” theme constitutes a discoursive cluster that is used link otherwise eclectic policies. Furthermore, it is utilised to articulate certain folkish and ethno-nationalist ideas while at the same time helping to avoid open references to extremist language. By presenting itself as the custodian of traditional heterosexuality and family values the AFD creates yet another dimension of the populist dichotomy of “us” versus “them”. This is underpinned by a sophisticated media strategy that seeks create an image of authenticity and immediacy between party and supporters. On the whole, the piece analyses and explains the central importance of “anti-genderism” in the discourse of the populist right in Germany.
Despite the centrality of national identity in the exclusionary discourse of the European radical right, scholars have not investigated how popular definitions of nationhood are connected to dispositions toward Muslims. Moreover, survey‐based studies tend to conflate anti‐Muslim attitudes with general anti‐immigrant sentiments. This article contributes to research on nationalism and out‐group attitudes by demonstrating that varieties of national self‐understanding are predictive of anti‐Muslim attitudes, above and beyond dispositions toward immigrants. Using latent class analysis and regression models of survey data from 41 European countries, it demonstrates that conceptions of nationhood are heterogeneous within countries and that their relationship with anti‐Muslim attitudes is contextually variable. Consistent with expectations, in most countries, anti‐Muslim attitudes are positively associated with ascriptive – and negatively associated with elective (including civic) – conceptions of nationhood. Northwestern Europe, however, is an exception to this pattern: in this region, civic nationalism is linked to greater antipathy toward Muslims. It is suggested that in this region, elective criteria of belonging have become fused with exclusionary notions of national culture that portray Muslims as incompatible with European liberal values, effectively legitimating anti‐Muslim sentiments in mainstream political culture. This may heighten the appeal of anti‐Muslim sentiments not only on the radical right, but also among mainstream segments of the Northwestern European public, with important implications for social exclusion and political behaviour.
Few social science categories have been more heatedly contested in recent years than ‘populism’. One focus of debate concerns the relation between populism and nationalism. Criticising the tendency to conflate populism and nationalism, De Cleen and Stavrakakis argue for a sharp conceptual distinction between the two. They situate populist discourse on a vertical, and nationalist discourse on a horizontal axis. I argue that this strict conceptual separation cannot capture the productive ambiguity of populist appeals to ‘the people’, evoking at once plebs, sovereign demos and bounded community. The frame of reference for populist discourse is most fruitfully understood as a two‐dimensional space, at once a space of inequality and a space of difference. Vertical opposition to those on top (and often those on the bottom) and horizontal opposition to those outside are tightly interwoven, generally in such a way that economic, political and cultural elites are represented as being ‘outside’ as well as ‘on top’. The ambiguity and two‐dimensionality of appeals to ‘the people’ do not result from the conflation of populism and nationalism; they are a constitutive feature of populism itself, a practical resource that can be exploited in constructing political identities and defining lines of political opposition and conflict.
Cambridge Core - Latin American Government, Politics and Policy - Religion and Brazilian Democracy - by Amy Erica Smith
As a result of the steady rise of populist parties and politicians all over the world – and particularly since the Brexit referendum and the election of Donald Trump – populism research has become increasingly popular and widespread. The field, however, also faces some tricky challenges. First, it is easy to confuse populism with related concepts like, for instance, ‘nativism’ and ‘Euroscepticism’. This brings the risk of sloppy conceptualisation, and, as a result, invalid inferences. Second, populism research remains relatively detached from adjacent fields, and fruitful fertilisation across literatures is still rather uncommon. In order to deal with these challenges, populism research should become both more and less focused. How can these two seemingly conflicting recommendations be reconciled? When it comes to conceptualisation/categorisation strategies and drawing conclusions from studies by other researchers, populism scholars should employ a narrow framework and be precise, distinctive and consistent. Yet when it comes to exploring the literature in search of new hypotheses, scholars should employ a more open mind‐set. After all, theories developed in adjacent fields can inspire populism scholars to formulate innovative new questions and expectations.
Cambridge Core - Political Economy - Partisans, Antipartisans, and Nonpartisans - by David J. Samuels