Mapping the Literature on Populism

The next speakers at the P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference are my QUT colleague Sebastian Svegaard and Samantha Vilkins, presenting the emerging findings from an ongoing literature review of the concept of populism, continuing on from our review of the polarisation concept. Contrary to polarisation, populism is rather more clearly defined, with works by Mudde and Laclau emerging as particularly central if somewhat competing definitions.

These variously define populism as a thin-centred ideology (Mudde) and discursive opposition between the elites and the people (Laclau); such definitions have been applied to populist phenomena in media, medicine, religion, and other fields.

The process of reviewing this literature involved an initial search of the literature, first-stage analysis in Covidence, and network visualisation and clustering in VOSviewer; to date, this has been completed for emerging topics based on keywords associated with these articles, and resulted in some 55 clusters.

Key cluster themes emerging from this are democracy; COVID-19; right-wing populism; and various country- and region-specific literatures (US, Brazil, Latin America, Turkey, Italy, etc.). In such clusters, the framing of the concept of populism differs considerably: democracy and right-wing populism aligns substantially with discussions of democratic backsliding, EU politics, and Central European countries, for instance; mis- and disinformation and conspiracy theories are strongly connected with social media and content analysis methods.

Key theoretical clusters also emerged: these prominently address hegemony, agonism, and media effects. Meanwhile, Brazil, Turkey, and Germany are most often mentioned in article titles, and Twitter and Facebook are most prominent platforms. Only in research on Latin America do we tend to see a significant focus on left-wing populism.

Overall, then, the boom in populism research has led to a diversification of populism research, and it is often connected to themes like polarisation and partisanship. Key themes emerging are party politics, religion, media effects, dark participation, and ‘fake news’. There seems to be substantial interest in the Global South, but that might also simply be an effect of a lack of distinct keywords related to the Global North being used.