ABSTRACT
To understand the communicative and discursive nature of populism, it is ¬necessary to take into account the many perspectives from which it has been examined so far. Almost half a century ago, Ionescu and Gellner addressed many of the questions that remain largely unanswered. They wondered whether populism was a recurrent frame of mind, an anti-phenomenon, or a subcategory of nationalism, socialism or peasantism. Mudde’s paper on the functioning of European right-wing parties identifies populism with an ideology deeply rooted in the social and political opposition between the elite and the people. This standpoint echoes Van Dijk’s analysis highlighting the polarisation characteristic of populist dynamics. Compared to Mudde’s conclusion as to the markedly bipolar nature of populism, Kazin’s analysis of American populism stresses that this is not an ideology but a language, as it has a lot more in common with how contents are expressed than with the contents themselves.
