Rationale

Workshop -Media Populism and European democracy

With this workshop, we wish to set the research agenda for an investigation of media populism from a multidisciplinary perspective. If populism is primarily to be identified as a style of public communication, it surprises that so much emphasis has been put on the study of political parties and their leaders while the media environments through which populism unfolds remain unexplored. A media perspective on populism includes a focus on other actors and institutions than the populists themselves. It asks not only how populists use media but also how various media institutions might also use or construct populists and how various media dynamics may by themselves encourage populist frames of interpretations and populist styles of communication, for instance in journalism and social network media. It also addresses the role of audiences to which populists appeal not simply as a passive resonance body of the populist messages but as being actively involved in the production and distribution of populist media content. On newspaper and social media commenting sites, for instance,  we often find a logic of participatory populism unfolding in the way online users stage themselves as ‘angry citizens’ against elites and political representatives. Instead of a party centred approach there is thus a need to develop a media and audience approach to the study of populism.