The next speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is my great QUT Digital Media Research Centre colleague Sebastian Svegaard, presenting progress findings from a large literature review on populism. We have previously observed how poorly defined the concept of polarisation is in the literature; there are many forms of polarisation that scholars have identified, but hardly and overarching perspectives.
This project took a similar approach to the concept of populism, which turns out to be better defined; dominant in this is Cas Mudde’s definition of populism as a thin ideology that highlights divisions between ‘us’ and ‘them’. Others also exist, though, especially focussing on populism as a rhetoric or discourse that attaches itself to divisions between ‘the elite’ and ‘the people’.
But populism research also has a range of flavours and focus areas: these include media and science populism; populism in specific regions; populism research methods; populism on specific platforms; and populism in particular fields. How does this intersect with research on polarisation and partisanship, then?
The team took a selection of some 20% of the total of 911 articles it identified, reading these closely to extract key definitions and approaches to polarisation from these articles in greater detail. Not all of these articles contain clear definitions of populism, in fact, and none defines polarisation; most work with some kind of more or less clearly articulated framework guiding their research, however.
Populism is generally described as both an ideology and a discourse (much as Mudde actually does, too, even though the second part is less recognised in studies building on his work); this is often streamlined in favour of a direct focus on far-right populism, in particular. Through this manoeuvre, the strength of populism definitions often breaks down, and the term is pushed into the background.
The concept of partisanship is sometimes present in these articles, but very much in the background, and often seen along very simplistic left-right lines. A concern with polarisation is increasingly common in studies published after 2016, and the us-vs.-them dimension of populism is often connected especially with affective polarisation.
Populism and polarisation and sometimes implicitly equated with one another, which undermines definitional specificity; the tendency to work with these terms as mere buzzwords might be useful for translating the research for broader impact, but lessens the clarity of its findings.
