Resurgence, Populism, and Politics ‘From Below’

The Politics and Power of Populism: A Response to the Recent Commentaries

Right-Wing Populism in Europe & USA: Contesting Politics & Discourse beyond ‘Orbanism’ and ‘Trumpism’

Through a number of theoretical and empirical contributions, this Special Issue of the Journal of Language and Politics addresses the recent sudden upsurge of right-wing populist parties (RWPs) in Europe and the USA. It responds to many recent challenges and a variety of ‘discursive shifts’ (Krzyżanowski 2013a, 2018 a,b) and wider dynamics of media and public discourses that have taken place as...

(Post)hegemony and the Promise of Populism: Reflections on the Politics of Our Times

Hegemony is a term both elusive and recurrent. It provides a theory of the social for a world in which all universalizing truth narratives have lost their fantasmatic hold over our lives and, in their withdrawal, we are forced to confront the fictions that they in fact always represented. In a certain sense, hegemony theory is the fiction of social fiction; a fiction designed to account for the...

Inefficient lobbying, populism and oligarchy

This paper analyses the efficiency consequences of lobbying in a production economy with imperfect commitment. We first show that the Pareto efficiency result found for truthful equilibria of common agency games in static exchange economies no longer holds under these more general conditions. We construct a model of pressure groups where the set of efficient truthful common-agency equilibria ha...

Anti-politics or the triumph of postmodern populism in promotional cultures?

Promotional cultures, to use Wernick’s expression, have transformed communication, as the ideology of the market seeps into every facet of social life. Promotional texts, whether verbal, written or visual, now have great impact upon cultural formation and are contributing to a reflexive transformation of both individual and collective political identities. Much commentary on political change (a...