In this study I search for the real understanding of the Lauclanian concept of ”populism” from both the viewpoint of William Connollys essentially contested concepts and the conceptual historian Reinhart Koselleck. My starting point for the analysis takes its inspiration from the more contemporary notion of ”constructing the social” but tries to focus on a result that can be free from the highly abstract discourse theory put forward by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. The result is a peculiar paradox in which the concept of populism reconstructed by Laclau not only is contested but contested in such way that even the meaning of the word could lose its contextual use in place of another – the political. At the same time, the concepts favorability through a more common usage (or in Koselleckian terminology, its more democratized meaning) must be acknowledged, and in relation to the leftist political parties that uses this theoretic, strategic and analytical conceptual category it instead becomes much clearer why its usage is applied but also favoured by Laclau. It could be said that it is the most effective concept in determining the strategic discursive landscape and to shape it in favour of a future left-wing populist movement. At the same time, the concepts claim of being more democratic is not entirely as convincing in regard to the signifier that must be as empty as possible to fulfill the populistic demands of its political subjects. This means that its value entirely comes from the political subjects meaningful projection, and in one way only can be said to engage with these subjects through the channeling of the already expected dissent and disaffection of the people behind the discursive and overdetermined identities.

This master thesis explores how the use of relatively new conceptual compositions such as "virtue signaling" and "social justice warriors" can alter and/or change the original connotations of "virtue" and "social justice". The study proposes that these compositions can become carriers of ideological structures. Further, it examines what effects these compositions have on the public debate. Using quantitative and qualitative digital text analysis on a selection of articles in Swedish alternative and mainstream media, the thesis finds the new compositions of the words "virtue" and "social justice" to be essentially contested concepts and that they have migrated from alternative media into the mainstream media. The thesis concludes that 1) the new compositions are carriers of the prevailing ideology in alternative media and that 2) the polemic and locked positions in the debate about virtue signaling calls for a discussion about language and its use.