Abstract
Recent years have seen a growing scholarly interest in the meaning-making dimensions of populism, driven by its increasing prominence in contemporary politics (Brubaker, 2017; Mudde and Kaltwasser, 2017). Much of this scholarship approaches populism from a discursive perspective, examining how language is used to construct political identities and divide society into opposing groups with conflicting interests and values. From a discourse-theoretical standpoint, Laclau (2005) conceptualizes populism as a discursive logic that constructs ‘the people’ in an antagonistic relation to ‘the elite’. Similarly, Wodak (2015), working within Critical Discourse Studies, demonstrates how fear, exclusion, and political polarization are produced through specific linguistic and textual strategies. While these approaches have significantly advanced our understanding of populist meaning-making, they remain predominantly language-centered. More recently, a small number of studies have begun to examine other semiotic channels, such as visual imagery and bodily gesture, in the communication of populist leaders (Divita, 2023; Hart, 2024). However, these analyses often treat non-verbal modes in isolation, rather than examining how they interact with language. As a result, the field still lacks a comprehensive social semiotic framework that explains how populists construct meaning across multiple modes including speech, gestures, clothing, and media performance. This monograph addresses this gap by offering a systematic study of how populist actors generate political meaning through the coordinated use of linguistic, visual, and embodied resources.
The book is organized into eight chapters. Chapter 1 reviews the academic literature and theoretical frameworks on populism, outlines the structure of the book, and argues that clarifying the core characteristics of populism is essential for further research. The chapter highlights the concept’s ambiguity, noting how scholars, journalists, and political commentators apply the term ‘populist’ to a wide range of political actors across the political spectrum. Because the term carries multiple meanings and strong rhetorical connotations, defining what counts as populism remains analytically challenging. To address this problem, the author proposes to re-examine populism through the lenses of meaning-making and discursive practice, drawing on semiotics (the study of how signs and symbols create meaning) to develop new theoretical tools for populism research.
Chapter 2 traces the development of populism research since the 1970s and identifies three major analytical frameworks. The first is the ideological approach, which coins populism as a ‘thin-centred ideology’ that opposes the ‘pure people’ to a ‘corrupt elite’ (Mudde, 2004: 543). The second is the discourse-theoretical approach, which views populism as an articulatory logic that constructs ‘the people’ through their opposition to an ‘other’ (Laclau, 1977). The third is the performative approach, which understands populism as a political style enacted through media-oriented performances and appeals to crisis and authenticity (Moffitt and Tormey, 2014). The chapter concludes by proposing that populism is best understood as a discursive practice structured around the opposition between ‘the people’ and its ‘other’. This narrative structure is flexible and can be filled with different political meanings in different contexts. This then provides the conceptual foundation for the book’s subsequent analysis.
Chapter 3 introduces social semiotics—which examines how people use different semiotic resources like language, images, gestures, and spatial arrangements to communicate and produce social reality—as a framework for studying populism as ‘meaning in action’. The chapter traces the intellectual development of semiotics from early structuralist approaches, associated with thinkers such as de Saussure, to broader theories of semiosis, or ongoing meaning-making processes, developed by scholars such as Peirce and Eco. Building on this tradition, the author proposes a multimodal framework for analyzing populist language use, political performance, and affective mobilization (how political actors generate emotional responses among audiences). The chapter argues that existing research lacks such a systematic semiotic account and positions the book as filling this gap.
Chapter 4 approaches politics as an inherently semiotic process in which political actors use language and symbolic resources to persuade electorates and cultivate collective identities. Drawing on the discourse theory of Laclau and Mouffe, the chapter conceptualizes politics as a struggle over how collective identities are defined and represented. Within this perspective, populism intensifies political conflict by framing society in moralized terms, such as virtuous people vs. corrupt elites, and by mobilizing emotions such as fear, resentment, or hope. To explain how these oppositions become politically effective, the chapter identifies five semiotic mechanisms through which antagonism is transformed into powerful symbols and narratives that can motivate political mobilization.
Chapter 5 develops the concept of the Populist Narrative Structure, defined as a recurring discursive pattern that constructs political reality through the opposition between ‘the people’ and the ‘other’. Within this structure, ‘the people’ function as a flexible category that political actors adapt to different agendas, while the ‘other’ may appear as corrupt elites or immigrants. Drawing on Lotman’s (2005) semiosphere—a cultural space organized by boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’—the chapter shows how this antagonism is enacted through everyday political practices such as rallies, campaign speeches, and social media posts. By conceptualizing populism as a narrative structure, the chapter attempts to bridge ideological, performative, and framing-based approaches to the phenomenon.
The final three chapters apply this framework to empirical case studies. Chapter 6 examines how leaders like Donald Trump, Matteo Salvini, and Hugo Chávez activate the Populist Narrative Structure through multimodal semiotic resources, including clothing, gestures, and social media communication, to polarize society and galvanize support. The analysis finds that studying populism requires moving beyond written texts to consider how political meaning is co-constructed through interaction between leaders and audiences, as well as through audiences’ physical and emotional engagement during political events.
Chapters 7 and 8 examine how this narrative structure is filled with different ideological content. Chapter 7 shows how right-wing figures like Marine Le Pen and Donald Trump populate the structure with nationalism, nativism, and anti-immigration rhetoric, presenting themselves as protectors of the nation against external and internal threats. In contrast, the chapter argues that Jair Bolsonaro’s rhetoric, despite being conservative and religious, does not consistently construct this antagonistic logic and therefore falls outside the book’s definition of populism. Chapter 8 turns to left-wing populism, defined by anti-elite, anti-neoliberal, and pro-social justice narratives. Spain’s Podemos is presented as an example, whereas Bernie Sanders is described as engaging in mass politics without consistently mobilizing a populist antagonism.
This book develops a discourse-analytic framework grounded in social semiotics and applies it to the study of populism as a practice structured around the opposition between ‘the people’ and its ‘other’. The concept of the Populist Narrative Structure forms the core of this framework. By extending semiotic analysis beyond written language to include embodiment, performance, and audience experience, the study seeks to bridge semiotics with the phenomenology approaches that focus on how political events are experienced by participants.
Drawing on case studies from Europe and the Americas, the book identifies structural similarities in populist narratives across different political contexts. Although this geographical focus limits global generalization, it nevertheless demonstrates how a social semiotic perspective can shed light on the communicative dynamics of contemporary populism. In doing so, the book aims to contribute to ongoing debates in social semiotics, discourse analysis, and cultural studies.