In November 2018, The Guardian launched ‘a six-month investigative series to explore who the new populists are, what factors brought them to power, and what they are doing once in office’. This, readers were told, was to respond to a new moment in politics where ‘populist leaders now govern countries with a combined population of almost two billion people, while populist parties are gaining ground in more than a dozen other democracies, many of them in Europe’.

The article launching the series was titled Why is populism suddenly all the rage?, and its subheading read ‘In 1998, about 300 Guardian articles mentioned populism. In 2016, 2,000 did. What happened?’. This set the tone for the series as at no point in this launch or in the following studies did the newspaper, its editors or guest contributors reflected upon the simple fact that that the rise in articles on populism was partly based on decisions that they were themselves in control of, nor that this ‘populist hype’ they contributed to might have played a role in the increased vote and its implications.

This research seminar will examine the ways in which The Guardian both bought into and contributed to the populist hype in diverse ways. The discussion will centre on four concepts we see as core to the impact of populist hype:

• a process of amplification, whereby so-called populist parties have received disproportionate coverage
• euphemisation where the signifier ‘populism’ has replaced not only more accurate descriptors, but also more stigmatising ones such as ‘racism’
• deflection, where public attention has been drawn towards populist movements, creating false dichotomies and equivalences, the former between liberalism and so-called populism, and the latter between left and right alternatives to liberalism
• a process of legitimisation whereby far right parties and ideas are wrongly attributed democratic support.

This seminar is part of the Department of Politics, Languages & International Studies (PoLIS) research seminar series 2019/20.

Speakers

• Katy Brown, PhD candidate in PoLIS
• Dr Aurelien Mondon, Senior Lecturer in PoLIS
• Dr Aaron Winter, Senior Lecturer in Criminology at the University of East London