Construction of Populism: Meanings Given to Populism in the Nordic Press

There is an agreement that populist movements have grown during the last few decades – in Europe and elsewhere. However, scholars have stated that the meaning of populism is unclear due to the vagueness or slipperiness of the concept (e.g. Canovan 1999: 3; Taggart 2000: 1; Mazzoleni 2003: 4). In many political cultures and languages the term “populism” carries negative rather than positive connotations (cf. Canovan 2005: 75; Andersson 2009: 8–9), even though the etymological background of the word, deriving from the Latin noun “populus” meaning “the people”, gives it an emancipative or empowering signification (cf. Williams 1988: 66).

This article approaches populism by exploring the meanings given to the term's use in the Nordic press. This involves adopting a constructivist design to ask, How is populism signified? rather than an essentialist approach exploring, What is populism? Populism as an ideology or political style has been studied extensively, although analyses of the actual uses of the term in political discourse are rare. In fact, only Bale et al. (2011) have studied the use of the term by the press and compared it with scholarly usage, and their focus was solely on a quantitative content analysis of the UK print media. Therefore, this study brings comparative and qualitative approaches to research on the subject.

The context of the study is four Nordic countries: Finland, Sweden, Norway and Denmark, which provide an interesting framework for this approach for three reasons. Firstly, a political party that has often been defined as “populist” has gained remarkable success in all those countries during the twenty-first century. Secondly, the Nordic countries have remarkably similar media and political systems, and they are prominent representatives of the so-called Democratic-Corporatist Model in Hallin and Mancini's categorization (Hallin & Mancini 2004; Strömbäck et al. 2008). Thirdly, despite their similarities, the geopolitical, cultural and language contexts of the Nordic countries vary, especially in their political cultures and in the formation of their populist movements (e.g. Fryklund 2016).

The article examines the meanings given to populism through a combination of quantitative content analysis and qualitative frame analysis of the leading quality and popular papers of Finland, Sweden, Norway and Denmark. The main objective of the study is to find new insights into the discussion on populism as a universal but simultaneously local phenomenon by analysing the construction of populism as a term in specific contexts. The study is also important because the public meanings of populism have real effects on politics and the success of populist movements.

The research questions are:

RQ1. How is populism framed in its public portrayal within the Nordic press?

RQ2. How do frames differ between newspaper types and journalistic genres?

RQ3. How do different media and country contexts explain the framings?

The article starts with a short introduction to theories of populism and to the relationship between populism and the media. After introducing the contemporary Nordic populist parties, the method and materials of the study are discussed and the frame analysis of the usage of populism as a term in the Nordic press is reported (RQ1 and RQ2). The article ends with a discussion of the results (RQ3).

One way to define populism has been to consider it an ideology. As a political ideology, however, populism has been thought to be “a-political” (MacRae 1969: 157) or “thin” (Stanley 2008), since no solid ideological spine has been found from comparing different forms of populism (cf. Canovan 1981; Taggart 2000; Andersson 2009). Wiles (1969) described populism as “a syndrome” rather than “a doctrine” – a reaction to other political movements and their ideologies rather than an ideological starting point as such.

According to Canovan (1999: 3), an appeal to “the people” and opposing the establishment and its societal values have been the most common features of populism in modern democracies. Hence, populism differs from coherent ideological traditions or “full ideologies”, such as liberalism and socialism. Therefore, Stanley calls populism a “thin ideology”. For him, “the thinness of populism” – the fact that its core element is that of “anti-elite appeal” actually “ensures that in practice it is a complementary ideology; it does not so much overlap with as diffuse itself throughout full ideologies” (Stanley 2008: 106–107).

Another common definition of populism has considered it a political movement that arises during times of political crisis (see Laclau 2005; Andersson 2009). Thus, it can be defined as an anti-elite protest movement with no genuine ideological substance or political programme, carried out by a group calling themselves “the people” (see Rydgren 2005: 12–13). The problem of this definition is that the understanding of the people, the elite and the protest vary from context to context, thus the meaning of populism remains unclear.

One way to try to solve the vagueness of populism is to reduce it to a political rhetoric or style. Jagers and Walgrave (2006: 322), for example, define populism as “a political communication style of political actors that refers to the people”. This is a thin understanding of populism, in which “populism is totally stripped from all pejorative and authoritarian connotations” (ibid.: 323). However, Jagers and Walgrave also analyse the “thick” definition of populism with its anti-establishment ideas and its simultaneous exclusion of certain population groups (ibid.: 322). Thus, understanding populism primarily as a style or rhetoric seems simplistic (Mazzoleni 2014: 46), leading Jagers and Walgrave (2006: 336–337) to conclude their analysis by emphasising populism as a combination of style and ideology.

Regarding historical forms of populism, many scholars have talked about neopopulism as a specific phenomenon in contemporary Western democracies (e.g. Taggart 2000; Mazzoleni 2003; Mudde 2007; Andersson 2009). Neo-populism is characterised as a protest movement that criticises bureaucratised states and the alleged corruption of established parties (Taggart 2000: 75; Andersson 2009: 48–54). It is also connected to anti-immigration policies, xenophobia and even racism promoted by extreme or radical right-wing movements (see Taggart 2000: 76–83; Rydgren 2004; Andersson 2009: 64–76). However, not all researchers agree that neo-populism should be defined by right-wing extremism or nativist ideology (e.g. Laclau 2005; Andersson 2009). This is true also of Nordic populist parties, which do not necessary fit directly such definitions of neo-populism (Andersson 2009: 73–76; Herkman 2015).

Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser (2012: 8) have tried to formulate a “minimal definition of populism”, and defined it as “a thin-centred ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic groups, ‘the pure people’ and ‘the corrupt elite’, and which argues that politics should be an expression of the volonté générale (general will) of the people”. Their definition eloquently combines most meanings given to the term in the research literature and it certainly helps to operationalise the empirical analyses of the phenomenon. However, even this definition does not encompass all cases under the title of populism and, as a scholarly endeavour, it does not fix the meanings given to the term in public discussions.

In the Nordic countries included in this study, political parties with backgrounds as anti-elite populist movements combined with nation-centric perspectives and criticism of immigration have enjoyed remarkable success in the twenty-first century. The Norwegian Progress Party (Fremskrittspartiet, NFP) was the largest party in Norway in the early 2010s, and joined the conservative government after the 2013 elections. The Finns Party (Perussuomalaiset, PS) was the second largest party in the 2015 parliamentary elections of Finland. In Denmark, the Danish People's Party (Dansk Folkeparti, DF) supported the conservative government between 2001 and 2011 and once again after the 2015 general elections. The Sweden Democrats (Sverigedemokraterna, SD) won seats in the Swedish parliament in 2010 and in the 2014 parliamentary elections gained an astonishing 12.9 per cent of votes, upsetting Sweden's political status quo.

Those parties cannot be directly compared to the neo-populist movements of Western and Eastern Europe since, according to the European Social Survey (ESS), their supporters are quite different and rely on a democratic society (Mesežnikov et al. 2008; Paloheimo 2012: 337). Populism in the Nordic countries has not been as radical or offensive as in countries where politics in general has been more confrontational (see Widfeldt 2010: 179). NFP and DF have become established political players, appearing to be more mainstream than traditional populist movements in domestic contexts (cf. Herkman 2015). However, all these parties have intensely questioned immigration policies since the 1990s, thus linking them to the European populist radical right-wing party family (Jungar & Jupkåps 2014).

The importance of the media for the rise and development of the neo-populist movements has been alleged and reported in several studies (e.g. Mazzoleni 2003; Boomgaarden & Vliegenthart 2006; Albertazzi & McDonnell 2008; Koopmans & Muis 2009; Roodjuin 2014). However, Bos and Brants (2014) indicate that the populist styles, ideas and policies represented in the media might be far less prevalent than often claimed. Some studies stress that media coverage is essential for the public images of all political leaders (Bos et al. 2011) and Pauwels (2010) reminds us that the media effect on the development of populist movements should not be overstated.

The meanings given to populism in studies on the Nordic countries have most commonly been tied to the ideological or social dimensions of the movements (e.g. Arter 2010; Jungar 2010; Rydgren & Ruth 2011; Jungar & Jupkåps 2014). The majority of the media-based research has considered Nordic populism in relation to right-wing extremism and anti-immigration rhetoric (e.g. Rydgren 2004; Hellström & Nilsson 2010; Horsti & Nikunen 2012). However, the style of populism has also been studied (e.g. Niemi 2013), and in Finland and in Sweden the media portrayal of the domestic populist parties has been analysed with regard to the overall coverage of the elections (Pernaa & Railo 2012; Ljunggren & Nordstrand 2011).

The multiple definitions of populism have been considered in academic theorisations for several decades (Wiles 1969; Canovan 1981; Taggart 2000; Laclau 2005), but actual uses of the term have rarely been studied. The alleged pejorative use of the term has been stated (e.g. Canovan 2005; Andersson 2009), but few empirical studies of the subject have been published. Elmgren (2015) has studied the term's use, but her focus was on the self-identification of the Finns Party. Only Bale et al. (2011) have explored the usage of the term in the media. They concluded that the term was used more or less explicitly in a pejorative way, although uses of the term varied and had no consistent logic. This study examines whether this is true in the Nordic context and considers the possible effects of the construction of the meaning of populism.

The material analysed in this article comes from articles collected during the first parliamentary elections of the 2010s in Finland (April 2011), Sweden (September 2010), Denmark (September 2011) and Norway (September 2013). The articles in which the term populism, or its variants, was explicitly used during a 30-day period surrounding the parliamentary elections – polling day plus 16 days before and 13 after that date – were sieved out from the largest quality and popular newspapers of the countries by using different domestic press archives. The search word used was “populis*” because it allowed us to encompass all variations of “populism”, “populist” and “populistic” in the Nordic languages. The sampling of the material was carried out by native research assistants with good track records in media and political studies from a total gathering of 3337 journalistic articles discussing the elections (see Herkman 2015). In this study, news articles other than election stories, letters to the editor, readers’ comments and other non-journalistic articles were also included, thus increasing the total amount of articles in the search to almost 5000. In total, the material analysed here amounts to 170 articles sampled by using the search term “populis*”. After the assistants had collected and copied the articles from the archives, I proceeded with the coding and frame analysis.

Election campaigns create a particular moment for public discourse and may distort the material found by stressing political populism at the expense of, for example, “cultural populism” (cf. McGuigan 1992). The chosen elections were especially interesting, however, because a political party which was commonly termed “populist” gained remarkable success, consequently highlighting the term and the meaning given to it through the various public discussions in which it participated. PS attained 19.1 per cent of the votes in Finland, SD won seats in the Swedish parliament for the first time, and NFP joined the Norwegian cabinet for the first time in its history. Thus, the appearance of “populist parties” can be said to have increased the public debate on populism.

The differing approaches of the elite and the tabloid media have usually been discernible from each other in studies on populism (see Mazzoleni 2003: 8). However, the Nordic countries do not have tabloid papers similar to those found in the Anglo-American or Central European context. Sparks (2000: 15) defines Nordic tabloids as the “semi-serious press” in his pioneering analysis of “tabloidization” because they publish serious news content resembling that of the quality press. The term “tabloid” is also confusing, since many Nordic quality papers changed from broadsheet to tabloid format during the twenty-first century. However, according to their journalistic style and topics, the Nordic popular papers can be defined as a sort of tabloid media (cf. Jungar 2010: 215–216). Accordingly I use the terms “quality” and “popular” press.

The papers analysed are Helsingin Sanomat (quality) and Ilta-Sanomat (popular) from Finland, Dagens Nyheter (quality) and Aftonbladet (popular) from Sweden, Politiken (quality) and Ekstra Bladet (popular) from Denmark and Aftenposten (quality) and Verdens Gang (popular) from Norway. There are no clear political affiliations in these papers today, although the quality papers usually represent more “liberal” and the popular papers more “conservative” values. However, their historical backgrounds might reproduce some left-of-centre tendencies in Politiken and Ekstra Bladet and right-of-centre tendencies in Dagens Nyheter and Aftenposten. Aftonbladet is defined as “independent social democratic”.

The articles using the term “populism” are first analysed quantitatively, but the main research method here is a qualitative frame analysis. In media studies, framing usually means the various strategies, practices and techniques by which the media or journalism bring meanings to the fore and the way certain aspects of reality are stressed and others are deemphasised (Gitlin, 1980: 7; Entman, 1993: 53). Media frames can be separated from audience frames, meaning the ways journalism represents and frames reality (de Vreese et al. 2001: 107). Audience frames, in turn, refer to the ways audiences receive and interpret the media. In this study, the focus is on the media frames the Nordic press uses to underline the meanings of populism.

First, the sentences and statements where the term populism, or its variants, were used was identified. Next, those sentences were classified according to the main meaning they (and the context of the story) constructed of populism. These significations constitute the media frames of populism as a “floating signifier” (cf. Laclau 2005; Herkman 2016).

Five main frames were found to indicate the ways the Nordic newspapers constructed meanings of populism: (1) the nationalism frame, (2) the nativism frame, (3) the empty rhetoric frame, (4) the political movement frame, and (5) the voice of the people frame. However, the frames overlapped somewhat, and the coding of the main frame was not always unambiguous. The nationalism and nativism frames, for example, were sometimes difficult to separate. In such cases, primary and secondary (or supplementary) frames were coded.

In the nationalism frame populism is understood as a project emphasising national traditions, history, language and culture. Within this frame, hostility towards “outsiders” is not important, instead populism is identified mainly as a nostalgic yearning for the “good old days”. Thus, the nationalism frame resonates intimately with Taggart's (2000: 95–97) idea of “heartland” as the core dimension of populism.

The nativism frame is close to the nationalism frame, but instead of positively identifying with the nation, the nativism frame is focused on the negative and even hostile exclusion of others. Consequently, it is closely linked to definitions of contemporary neo-populism associated with the extreme or radical right, which attributes to populism xenophobic, racist and anti-immigration connotations (see Mazzoleni 2003: 4–5; Mudde 2007; Andersson 2009: 48nn).

The empty rhetoric frame constructs populism as a political style that appeals to people through a down-to-earth rhetoric (cf. Jagers & Walgrave 2006; Niemi 2013). However, it also carries with it strong negative connotations connected to irresponsible policymaking and is commonly used pejoratively (see Bale et al. 2011). In this frame, populism refers to statements that do not result in actual political acts, trust or responsibility.

The political movement frame approaches populism in a more neutral manner. In this frame populism is used as a descriptive label to separate different political movements or parties from each other (cf. Andersson 2009: 5).

The voice of the people frame is the only clearly positive framing of populism. It accords with Laclau's (2005) idea of populism as a manifestation of a political logic whereby a group of people identifies itself as “the people” in the meaning of political agency. This frame is also used by some (populist) politicians, when they announce themselves to be the voice of “the real people” (see Elmgren 2015).

In general, the words “populism” or “populist” and their variants were seldom used; only about three per cent of the articles explicitly used the terms during the sample period. The result is similar to that found by Bale et al. (2011: 117) in the UK context, who state that “populism is almost never the central concept in news coverage”. It is also justifiable to argue that both journalists and politicians avoid using the term in the Nordic consensus-seeking context because it is a pejorative term rather than a neutral notion (Andersson 2009: 8–9).

More than one third of the articles mentioning populism were news articles (36.5 per cent). Editorials, opinion pieces, commentaries or columns amounted similarly to 37 per cent. If we take into account letters to editors and comment articles (13 per cent), then half of the story types mentioning populism were genres in which subjective evaluations and critique are typical. Similarly, the British press used the term more pejoratively in opinion pieces and commentaries than they did in news articles, which were usually neutral in style (Bale et al. 2011: 124).

The Swedish and Finnish press used the term more often than Danish and Norwegian press – 120 mentions in the Finnish and Swedish papers, but only 50 articles in the Danish and Norwegian papers (see Table 1). If we take into account the fact that Finnish papers published the fewest election articles during the sample period and Danish papers the most (cf. Herkman 2015), the relative share of populism discussions was significantly higher in the Finnish press than in the other countries, especially Denmark.

A total of 167 primary and 52 secondary framings could be coded. The analysis was focused on political populism, but 12 articles (six in Sweden, three in Denmark, two in Finland, and one in Norway) of the 170 approached populism predominantly through the meaning of “cultural populism” (McGuigan 1992). In Sweden, for example, it was reported that the cultural taste promoted by political institutions or the media had become hostile towards the high arts and was more supportive of popular taste.

Cultural populism was also linked to politics through secondary framing, however. For example, in Dagens Nyheter politicians were criticised for favouring easy-going popular culture (16 September 2010) or being populist in their national film industry policies (23 September 2010). Thus, cultural populism did not appear as an independent frame as such but was diffused with the framings of political populism. Except for two articles (published in Aftonbladet and in Verdens Gang), cultural populism was only discussed in the quality papers.

In general, the quality papers favoured slightly more critical frames than the popular papers (see Table 2). Quality papers also concentrated more on the populism discussion, especially after polling day in both Sweden and Denmark. The dominance of the quality papers regarding negative or critical framings (nationalism, nativism and empty rhetoric) supports the alleged difference in paper types and their relationship to populism (cf. Mazzoleni 2003: 8).

The national emphases found in the framings are shown in Table 3. However, more substantial qualitative analysis is needed to explore the ways the press constructs the meanings of populism. Therefore, a qualitative frame by frame analysis of the 170 articles is made below.

As in the British context (Bale et al. 2011), the Nordic papers seldom used the word populism, even though a political party generally termed a populist movement gained a significant share of the vote in the first elections of the 2010s. The avoidance of the term becomes clear when considered in comparison with all the other election stories published during the same period, in which more than 40 per cent discussed the domestic populist parties (Herkman 2015). Thus, most of these stories discussed the parties without using the term populism. The avoidance of the term would perhaps be an even more accurate observation during periods when no electoral campaign was in progress. Furthermore, when the term populism was used, its meanings were mainly constructed within negative framings. The word's negative and pejorative connotations, in turn, limit its use by politicians and journalists, especially in Nordic consensus democracies, which have a modest political style and a rather “politics friendly media” (cf. Nord 2007).

Bale et al. (2011) indicate that the term “populist” was used pejoratively in the UK press by many commentators but that the meaning of populism varied so much that no common definition could be found. The use of the term in the Nordic press finds a similar range of meanings. However, five dominant frames – nationalism, nativism, empty rhetoric, political movement and voice of the people – reveal recurring themes. The empty rhetoric frame was most often linked with populism and a broad range of subjects. The other frames usually connected populism to contemporary political movements. In particular, the nationalism and nativism frames linked populism to Europe's extreme-right movements and/or assessed domestic populist parties from this perspective. However, the differences between the countries and the newspapers emphasise that the meanings given to populism can only be fully understood in their political and cultural contexts.

The Finnish and Swedish papers explicitly discussed populism more often than their Norwegian and Danish counterparts. This is explained by the different life phases of the domestic populist parties; PS and SD were experiencing their “insurgent phases” (Stewart et al. 2003: 219–220) in entering parliament, whereas DF had assisted conservative governments for two terms and NFP had been a prominent player in Norway's political arena for decades. Therefore, DF and NFP were experiencing their “established phases”, suggesting their populism was no longer an issue as their media attention had been “normalised” (ibid: 223).

The Swedish papers stressed the nativism frame, which anchored populism to xenophobic and racist extreme right-wing movements (cf. Mudde 2007). That can be partly explained by the fact that SD differs from other Nordic populist parties as its roots lie in the National Socialist movement (Baas 2014). Another explanation is that populism, in the Swedish political discourse, is mostly used to refer to right-wing populism (högerpopulism), linking populism with racist and fascist connotations (Andersson 2009: 14, 54) and leading Sweden's quality and popular papers to agree a cordon sanitaire – an exclusion of SD from the agenda setting (Andersson 2009: 47; Rydgren 2005: 117).

In the Danish press the nationalism frame connected discussions about populism to domestic political decision-making, but the extreme-right connotations of nativism were uncommon and not used in relation to DF. This is interesting because this study's Danish newspapers had left-of-centre tendencies, which might have been thought to increase their use of populism in a pejorative way against right-wing movements (cf. Bale et al. 2011: 125). In general, populism terminology was rare in Denmark, either because it was unusable or was purposely avoided. This might indicate that the long-term influence of DF on immigration policies had, for example, normalised such policies, meaning they were no longer discussed in relation to European neo-populism (cf. Rydgren 2010; Bay et al. 2013).

The nativism frame was relatively common in Norway, but was used to prove the anti-nativism and thus anti-populism of NFP rather than to frame the party as xenophobic or racist. Consequently, most debates on populism in the Norwegian press reflected the domestic political environment, which was, according to the debaters, “misunderstood” abroad.

The Norwegian case reveals the “here–elsewhere” dimension in public discussions on populism. Due to populism carrying negative connotations, it is located outside the domestic environment. This contrasts with the British case, where the pejorative use of the term was more common in the domestic than the foreign news context (Bale et al. 2011: 124), possibly resulting from the different journalistic and political cultures of the UK and the Nordic countries. In Swedish and Finnish quality newspapers, populism was critically approached in the pre-election period through foreign examples of European right-wing radicalism, but after the election, the approach focused on domestic right-wing radicalism.

The Finnish press differed from other countries in often favouring the neutral and positive frames of political movement and the voice of the people. However, the positive meanings of populism were promoted almost solely by the popular paper Ilta-Sanomat, while Helsingin Sanomat favoured neutral frames. Thus, the Finnish case demonstrates that a clear difference between the quality and tabloid media could be made (cf. Mazzoleni 2003: 8).

The public meanings of populism are interesting not only because they reveal differences in national political and journalistic cultures, but also because they may have real political effects. Firstly, since the media have power in political agenda setting (see Walgrave & Van Aelst 2006; Van Dalen & Van Aelst 2013), media frames can influence politics because they assess political actors through populism, especially during election campaigns. Secondly, the analysis of the public or vernacular use of populism contextualises the academic usage of the term, in which negative and normative connotations are generally more frequent (Bale et al. 2011: 115). Thus, this analysis of the meanings given to populism increases our understanding of the phenomenon on both a theoretical and an empirical level, even though further study is required to obtain knowledge from different contexts.