Populism and populism studies Theories and contributions

In this chapter, we will lay the foundation for the case studies in the subsequent chapters. To this end, we will make explicit our understanding of populism, which links the individual contexts discussed in the remainder of this book. In this book, we define populism as a political strategy and/or practice, realised in discourse, that is based on a dichotomy between "the people", who are unified by their will, and an outgroup whose actions are not in the interest of the people, with a leader safeguarding the interests of the people against the outgroup. In addition, we will discuss relevant previous literature to identify the research gap in the study of populism and language, and argue how our book contributes to filling that gap. To achieve these two aims, we will first sketch the common theoretical background that informs all chapters of the book. We will develop a definition of populism and populist parties, paying particular attention to differences between right- and left-wing populism and indeed the validity of those terms themselves. Following on from those general considerations, we narrow the focus to the question how populism is realised in discourse and language use. We ask how populism and discourse are related and discuss the notion of populism as discourse. To conclude our theoretical discussion, we ask why populism has become a globalphenomenon and review what we know so far about voters and supporters of populist parties, candidates and causes. Moving from theory to a review of relevant previous works, the second main section of this chapter will position the book in relation to past discourse analytical research on populism. We start with a review of works on populism as it is enacted on social media, before proceeding to discuss what we already know about populism and language in European contexts. As this book is specifically about the way supporters of populist parties use language, we round off the second section of this chapter by reviewing work on that aspect. We conclude the chapter by demonstrating how the present book draws together three important aspects of populism - its expression on social media, its character across Europe and the role of supporters - and investigates them from a discourse analytical and linguistic point of view. First, however, let us turn to theoretical frameworks.