ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author proposes considering populism not as a specific political system, ideology, or discourse or as the property of extreme political forces but as a policy situation. The author shows that populism can be analysed as the outcome of specific policy configurations which themselves predetermine the scope of public speeches, their content, salience, and effectiveness. In the case studied—the fight against school absenteeism in France—this configuration of sayability led to a strong politicisation of the policy debate, which itself permitted the emergence and permanence of a true educational populism on the topic. This populism is not only ‘educational’ because it is deployed in the education sector but also because it conveys a simplified vision of education and allows for a part of the population traditionally far from school governance processes to be socialised into educational policy issues. Resolutely sociological and empirical, this approach broadens the field of analysis of populisms. It allows the researcher to take into account the least salient cases and go beyond the analysis of the radicalisation strategies of political actors to address the overall set of interdependencies between policy actors which produces this populism.
