The rise to power of Viktor Orbán in 2010 has brought with it democratic backsliding and suppression of rights in Hungary, a country that in the early 2000s was seen as one of the most promising new democracies in Eastern Europe. In this thesis speeches held by Viktor Orbán during the period of 2011-2022 are examined and analyzed and further connected with identified populist strategies and framing analysis. Which tries to understand the relation between communication in the context of sender and receiver and how the receiver might interpret the message differently depending on how it is “framed”. In an attempt to understand how and which populist strategies and rhetoric has been used to justify and motivate three overarching developments during Fidesz’s period in power: the major constitutional changes of 2012 and 2013, the developments on migration and the “Stop Soros Law” as well as the suppression of LGBT rights. This paper concludes that Viktor Orbán has continuously used populist rhetoric to “attack” and undermine his opposition, whether this is in the form of the EU or domestically, championing the Hungarian cause and its people thus justifying the changes that Fidesz has implemented.

The term ‘affective politics’ is sometimes used to dismiss political strategies as being directed merely at affects at the expense of rational analysis (Massumi 2015: 65f). While such uses are meant to criticize certain politics, appeals to the affects – and consequently, forms of propaganda or populism – do not have to be bad at all. The point here is that affects not only play a role for manipulative governments or populist movements, but are a crucial factor for the political in general, which in a post-modern world can no longer be naïvely understood as being grounded in nature or reason (Massumi 2015: VIIIf). So, if politics are always entangled with affects, when do political affects become problematic? I will suggest that cultural materialism offers a few concepts that we can draw on to differentiate acceptable from harmful kinds of affective politics. More specifically, I am going to encourage a new reading of Raymond Williams’ concept of the structure of feeling and the way it is transformed in his later appropriation of Gramsci’s theory of hegemony.

This essay, named ”A critical discourse analysis on the debate in parliament; regarding the law of consent”, aimed to clarify whether the political debate that took place before the voting of the “law of consent” was a case of penal populism or not. The essay also aimed to find out how the victims of sex crime was constructed, as a discourse, and used in the political debate. The method used to perform this was the critical discourse analysis, by Fairclough (1995). The results show that a change has taken place in the political debate, regarding how sex crime is viewed and analyzed today. That’s because politicians used discourses based in conflict and feminist theory. This can be regarded as a change in the social practices and a change of the “status quo”. The essay presents that's not the case. That’s because the parts that have made up penal populism, in Sweden, since the 70s-80s are present in the political debate regarding the “law of consent”.

This dissertation challenges the populism paradigm, which is currently the most popular explanation of the developments of the past decade in Indian politics. Contesting this prevailing explanation, I offer an alternative diagnosis of the disease ailing democratic politics in India today—the rise of “political drama,” a degraded form of political practice that has arisen thanks to the rapid spread of news television. Through a study of three political campaigns, the Salt Satyagraha of 1930, the Anna Hazare movement of 2011, and Narendra Modi’s electoral campaign of 2014, I trace the advent and subsequent elaboration of this theatrical form of political practice. This historical study is, moreover, foregrounded against a theory of democratic practice that has been tailored especially for India, and which conceptualizes the democratic process in India as the process of “publicity.” Against this theoretical background, political drama is shown to be a degraded form of publicity.

The following paper aims to answer the question, how do national populist movements perceive an institutionalized approach to migration on an EU level? Maintaining International Relations relevancy, the puzzle at heart is eminent with its acknowledgement of national-populist parties in relation to EU collaboration, specifically in reference to the issue of migration. Thus, the paper establishes the central argument that populist discourse establishes the EU as a constituent of the elite, projecting a nationalist agenda on migration rather than cooperating and maintaining a collective identity through the institution. Constituting contra-camp identities between the institution and its citizens whilst addressing issues at the EU level, ultimately influences transnational relations. The paper presents the cases of Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia who have arguably held populist governments during or following the migration crisis 2015/2016. Implementing a poststructural framework in collaboration with a populist ‘theory’ or paradigm, a set of quantitative analyses are enlisted, featured as a ‘backdrop’ for the discursive practices and context stage of the prominent CDA analyses. Conclusively, the results find a noticeable critique toward the EU migration approach, where the institution is recognized as an ‘elitist’ establishment maintaining opposing values to ‘the people’ and favoring migration.

The present study explores the presence of religion in the political field in Brazil through a populist discourse. The aim of this study is to understand how religion is used in populist discourse, contributing to studies regarding populist rhetoric, in terms of the reasons as well as the effects of that. The base of this study is the analysis of the political discourse of the electoral campaign of Jair Bolsonaro, elected President of Brazil in 2018. The Theory of Critical Discourse Analysis or Tridimensional Theory of Norman Fairclough is used in a theoretical and methodological perspective, using the formal features of the discourse texts for explaining how religion is present in the political field. The data consists in the analysis of the videos published in the official YouTube Channel of the candidate during the period of the electoral campaign, considering also the three first speeches after winning the elections. The findings demonstrate that religion is not quantitatively present in the source material, however, the analysis suggests a possibility of the existence of a “religious populism”, since the centrality of religion would make this presence qualitative. This centrality is suggested through the verification of four perspectives, which consist in the presence of religion as Legitimacy of the Presidency; as Formal Content; through the Subjects who participate of the electoral campaign; and in the material form, through the Fundamentalist Content of the discourse. Finally, the study contributes to the field of political rhetoric in a sense of providing a partial analysis of a political discourse that had the power of convincing the largest country of South America, suggesting the reasons and effects it may promote in that society.

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The aim of this paper is twofold. Firstly, a systematic theology of the Sweden Democrats is reconstructed from the party’s party program (Valplattform 2021) and Swedish Church election pamphlet (En kyrka för Sverige). This theological reconstruction is limited to the categories of ecclesiology (the Church), theological anthropology (the Human Creature), and soteriology (Salvation), which together serve to detail the party’s theological vision for the Swedish Church, its members, and in turn, Swedish society. The aforementioned theological concepts are selected and consequently examined on account of the thematic attention and allocation they receive by the party. A qualitative method is further employed in an effort to explore to what extent the Sweden Democrats not only define their theological foundations but also utilize this basis in their political discourse. Secondly, the salience of religion, along with other works on populism in Europe, provides this paper with a theoretical framework to explore the populist underpinnings that support and inform the Sweden Democrats’ theological beliefs. This research concludes by demonstrating how the reconstructed theology in the election material provides utility for the party’s populist ambitions and empowers the Sweden Democrats to develop a Christian justification for their own vision of a homogenous social order.

Technocratic-Populism in India: How Modi and the BJP Maintain Their Vast Winning Coalition Abstract Sabyasachi Saikia ID - 98898503 The politics of both technocracy and populism are viewed as hostile to representative democracy and pluralistic politics. The study of technocratic-populism in politics has proliferated in recent times, with researchers examining how both seemingly contradictory ideas combine to form a distinct political outlook or even a political logic. Furthermore, one has emerging literature examining the adverse impact of technocratic populism across various democracies. Applying Friedman's paradigm of democratic technocracy, and Ostiguy and Moffitt's performative-relational approach towards populism, this study explores technocratic- populism in Indian politics. The administration of Narendra Modi and the BJP has been widely studied and critiqued for their authoritarian, Hindu nationalist, and populist politics, with concerns over increasing religious polarization of the public and democratic backsliding. This study employs a demand-supply model to show the importance of technocratic-populist appeal in Modi and the BJP's broader political practice and discourse in impressing the voting public. With the use of survey data on the demand-side of politics, involving the examination of public...

This dissertation problematizes the populism – national identity relationship looking at contemporary Turkey, where populism was combined with an increasingly Islamic, conservative nationalism under the rule (2002-present) of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) and its personalistic leader R. T. Erdoğan. It demonstrates how populism can play a strategic role in the elite-led promotion of alternate conceptions of national identities. The underlying premise is that the issues of populism, its effects and implications on political institutions and competition, when and how populism becomes successful cannot be understood independently of nationalism as a sociological and political phenomenon and of the specific ideas populism serves. Combining data collected on the field through elite interviews and participant observation with other sources, I show that populist (people-worshipping and anti-establishment) leadership and mobilization have been primary agents in the AKP’s construction of a competitive-authoritarian political landscape in Turkey and in the government-sponsored imposition of a religiously-colored nationalism. With inter-temporal and within-case comparisons and process-tracing, I first put AKP dominance in Turkey in historical perspective, and then identify a central causal mechanism that accounts for the pace and intensity of Turkey’s authoritarian drift since the party’s second term. I situate AKP’s abandonment of initial promises of European Union-oriented pluralist reforms in (two) major power struggles that significantly heightened the costs of losing power while diminishing incentives for genuinely democratizing reform. I demonstrate that mutual distrust between Turkey’s secular state elite and Islamist political elite spiraled into an acute political confrontation starting in 2007, wherein the incumbents de-legitimized and pacified opponents with a combination of legal and extra-legal methods, and a populist meta-narrative that framed this struggle in terms of Turkey’s democratization and prosperity versus the privileges of a narrow elite alien to the values of the heartland. I then evaluate critical implications, like how the incumbents and their partners crossed a critical threshold for state-capture and top-down Islamization by 2011, subsequently attaining a proto-hegemonic orientation (i.e. towards the replacement of the existing pluralistic democracy) and cartel party status (i.e. privileged access to state-regulated channels of communication). I explain that the particular ways in which this new elite achieved their supremacy and their arbitrary transformation of society led to cross-class civic opposition, erupting in 2013 at the Gezi Park protests (and more recently culminating in a grassroots appreciation of secularism). Third, I discuss the impact of the intra-Islamist conflict that also surfaced in 2013, after the colluding parties started fighting over the spoils of state-capture. In the face of such crises and souring relations with the West, the AKP leadership employed a strategic narrative combining populist antagonism and polarization with suspicious-minded, anti-Western nationalist perspectives which frame pro-democracy opposition as foreign-orchestrated initiatives aiming to suppress the national will, foment instability, and derail AKP’s quest to end Western domination over Turkey. Late-stage populist rule, in this case, is characterized by the equation of party survival to national survival and the manufacturing of consent for authoritarianism through nationalism. The findings advance the limited literature on populism in power, showing that the disappearance of an establishment to rally against does not mean that populism withers away and that populism can remain potent thereafter via attachment to various ideologies, and that we are better off seeing populism as something that actors do (as opposed to what they are); e.g. to differentiate themselves from alternatives, to win or securitize elections, to rationalize the reorganization of power relations, to avoid accountability, to keep party ranks unified, and critically, to promote new identities. / 2023-10-25T00:00:00Z