Empty or overloaded? A comparative analysis of the keywords populism and populist in Belgian, French, and Spanish political and media discourses

Populism is a highly contested concept in academic and public debate which has been discussed within various fields as being "exceptionally vague" and used "in different contexts to a bewildering variety of phenomena" (Canovan, 1999: 3). Recent studies that analyse the uses of the term in discourse from the perspective of linguistics (Kranert, 2020; Thornborrow et al., 2021) have provided empirical results that present a challenge to a common view on populism as "empty" or "floating signifier" (Laclau, 2005). These studies suggest that populism is not used randomly, nor can it be perceived as... Mehr ...