Emilia Palonen
Senior University Lecturer in Political Science. Research on politics and cultural studies: Polarisation, identities and identification, populism, urban politics and memory, cultural politics and policy, and Europe. My background is in (East) European Studies specializing on Hungary and poststructuralist Discourse Theory (Laclau). First object of analysis were street names and memorials, which I regularly return to. Leading the Helsinki Hub on Emotions, Populism and Polarisation, HEPPsinki research group and several externally funded projects at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Helsinki. Research Programme Director in Datafication at the Helsinki Institute for Social Sciences and Humanities.In 2013-2016 researching Hungarian left-wing thinkers (Agnes Heller, George Lukacs and Lajos Kossuth) in transnational setting and populism as movement and rhetoric in Finland (and Hungary) based at the University of Jyväskylä.
Phone: +358405077198
Phone: +358405077198
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Papers by Emilia Palonen
Benjamin Moffitt, Global Rise of Populism: Performance, Political Style, and Representation. Stanford University Press. 2016. 224 pages. ISBN 9780804799331.
To compare these two books is a challenge, as one is a pamphlet by an estab- lished scholar of European history and politics, and the other is based on a doctoral thesis of a young political scientist hailed as one of the most impor- tant up and coming authors on populism. To start, I would agree with these judgments. Both have already made their name on their new books even if they are addressed to di erent audiences.
Jan-Werner Müller’s book is titled What is Populism? (For this review I have read the original German version Was ist Populismus? – Ein Essay). Ben- jamin Mo tt’s book seeks to answer the same question. Although its title is not equally conclusive or manifest, this book neither shies away with its title: e Global Rise of Populism. e crucial distinction between the two books is visible in the titles. It is on the nexus of essentialism and anti-essentialism. One sees populism as a question of what is and what not, while the other deals with its dynamics. e Global Rise has the subtitle: Performance, Politi- cal Style, and Representation. Populism is not a question of is or not but about articulation and representation. It is something performative rather than a state of a airs.
In his “essay”, Jan-Werner Müller is interested in establishing a concept and moral stance of populism rather than exploring its historical basis or articu- lations. Examples of populism are presented as support for the thesis. Meine ese is in short that populism is an anti-establishment attitude with exclusive claim to be representing the people. e evidence, that in a pamphlet is more anecdotal than rigorous, is interesting, well argued and clever. I share much of Müller’s concerns. But I worry that, perhaps in his need to de ne populism in a particular way, he is actually re-mystifying rather than demystifying what is going on under the heading of populism. e People (Volk) is a dangerous word, as he points out with reference to Claude Lefort and the French Revolu- tion (Müller, 2016: 86). [...]
Imagining Europe: myth, memory, and identity by Chiara Bottici and
Benoît Challand, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2013, xi + 220 pp., €18.99, $29.99 (pbk), ISBN: 9781107641648
Emilia Palonen (2016): Imagining Europe: myth, memory, and identity,
European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology, DOI:
10.1080/23254823.2016.1235775
The book introduces a new perspective in conceptualizing populism in comparative analysis, in which populism is understood rather as an antagonist logic of political identity formation than pre-defined political ideologies, movements or party cleavages. We approach implications of populist construction of ‘us’ and ‘not us’ in national contexts of 2019 EP election campaigns to find out the relationality between different political actors and parties. A special attention is paid to national/transnational and European/Eurosceptic tendencies in campaign rhetoric. By using a unique idea of ‘hashtag publics’ we approach the common Twitter discussions around the elections and ask: what particular topics and themes did different political actors distribute over Twitter during the 2019 EP elections, how were various topics and actors linked to each other, and how were campaign agendas and actors linked to populism?
Original research in the Introduction (including the typology of mainstream populism, fringe populism and competing populism) and Conclusions (including the Europhilic, Eurosceptic and Critical Europeans), Chapter-No.1,Chapter-No.4 and Chapter-No. 8 are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.