Although there is still an ongoing debate how ‘populism’ should be defined exactly, there is broad consensus among political scientists that populist discourse has certain distinguishing traits. One of its key characteristics is that populists present themselves emphatically as political outsiders who stand up for the will and interest of the common man (e.g. Rooduijn & Akkerman 2017; Moffitt 2016; Jagers & Walgrave 2007). In order to create and maintain such an image, populists are claimed to make use of a range of rhetorical strategies, like ‘putting the people in the centre of interest’, ‘appealing to the will of the people’, ‘positioning oneself as anti-establishment’, employing ‘bad manners’, using ‘colourful’, ‘direct’, ‘adversarial’ and/or ‘emotional’ language, etc. Such characterizations are of an impressionistic nature: they do not specify the concrete linguistic ‘building blocks’ that make the discourse of populists ‘people centered’, ‘adversarial’, etc. This lack of insight in the exact ‘building blocks’ of populist discourse is seen as one of the most important lacuna’s in the study of populism (Block & Negrine 2017; Stanyer et al. 2016).
In my talk, I will argue that a linguistic-stylistic approach (Stukker & Verhagen 2019; Van Leeuwen 2015) offers the tools for analyzing the linguistic ‘building blocks’ of populist rhetorical strategies in a systematic, in-depth and nuanced way. Linguistic stylistics starts from the insight that language users almost always have a choice in describing objects or states of affairs in reality, and that such stylistic variants steer the hearer in the direction of drawing different conclusions. In a linguistic-stylistic analysis it is made plausible, on the basis of linguistic analysis, that stylistic choices create particular effects.
In order to demonstrate what a linguistic-stylistic approach can offer to the study of populism, I will provide, as a case study, a detailed analysis of the linguistic choices that the Dutch populist politician Geert Wilders makes to violate the decency standards of Dutch parliamentary debate in order to distance himself from the political elite. I will show that this goes much further than the use insulting, person-directed expressions.
This lecture is part of the Forum SLS. MA and PhD students who would like to receive ECTS (0.25) for attending the talk, please contact Christoph Neuenschwander right after the lecture or leave your name in the Zoom chat.
