Who calls whom a populist? A pragmatic analysis of the uses of populism(s) and populist(s) in French and Spanish parliamentary debates

Shchinova Shchinov, Nadezda [UCL]

In this comparative study, we analyse quantitatively and qualitatively the occurrences of the term populis* in two datasets containing parliamentary debates that took place in 2019 in the French National Assembly and the Spanish Congress of Deputies. The study examines populism as a keyword in discourse (Kranert, 2020; Schröter et al., 2019; Williams, 1985) and aims to determine the meanings and the functions of this widely used polysemic term claimed to be the “main political buzzword of the 21st century” (Mudde & Kaltwasser, 2017, p. 1). The token populis* is used as a search word that allows for a comparative analysis of all linguistic realisations of populism and refers to the following terms: populisme(s)/populiste(s) in French and populismo(s)/populistas(s) in Spanish. First, we examine the discursive contexts in which populis* occurs in order to determine the frequency of occurrence and the collocates of populis* in each dataset. Second, we focus on a sample of concordance lines and examine who labels whom as populist and what are the pragmatic functions of this label. We show that in both datasets, the term has a variety of uses. Furthermore, this study underlines some differences regarding the uses of populis* in the French and Spanish datasets (e.g., the choice of the linguistic form of populis*). In both datasets, the term is mainly employed with a negative value, and, thus, has a delegitimising function. Moreover, this study shows that the term is used to target political opponents, but not necessarily to label political actors that are classified as populist in academic literature.