Thrown around with abandon? Popular understandings of populism as conveyed by the print media: A UK case study

This article examines the use of the term ‘populism’ in the UK print media and compares this with the scholarly usage. It assesses whether there is truth in the claim that the media uses the term too freely and imprecisely. Our finding indicate that populism is used for a wide range of seemingly unr...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inActa politica Vol. 46; no. 2; pp. 111 - 131
Main Authors Bale, Tim, van Kessel, Stijn, Taggart, Paul
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published London Palgrave Macmillan UK 01.04.2011
Palgrave Macmillan
Subjects
Comparative Politics
Elections
European Politics
Language use
Mass Media
Media
Media studies
Original Article
Political parties
Political Science
Political Science and International Relations
Political Science and International Studies
Populism
Press
Public Opinion
United Kingdom
United Kingdom
populism
media
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Summary:This article examines the use of the term ‘populism’ in the UK print media and compares this with the scholarly usage. It assesses whether there is truth in the claim that the media uses the term too freely and imprecisely. Our finding indicate that populism is used for a wide range of seemingly unrelated actors across the world, that it is hard to find any logic in the set of policies that are associated with the term, and that populism is, more or less explicitly, regularly used in a pejorative way. Despite these findings, we refrain from labelling populism a useless term. We will, however, indicate that the inconsistent vernacular use of the term complicates a meaningful academic debate about the concept.
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ISSN:0001-6810
1741-1416
DOI:10.1057/ap.2011.3