CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2024
| Author | Canimana, Eda |
|---|---|
| Title | New Wave of Mainstream Campaigning in Liberal Democracies: Adopting Populism as an Electoral Strategy |
| Summary | In established democratic regimes where populist right-wing parties and actors increase their electoral power and mass mobilization, mainstream political actors are pushed to reconstruct their political positioning and discourse as a response. Recent literature has previously studied it under the literature of mainstream adoption of populism or populist contagion. This thesis contributes to the literature by adopting a constructivist approach to the populist discourse of mainstream politicians by synthesizing Moffitt’s (2016) theory of populist style with Wodak’s (2009) Discourse-Historical Analysis to unpack the populist style in the presidential campaigns of Joe Biden in 2020 and Emmanuel Macron in 2017. By analyzing a sample of voter mobilization speeches of Biden and Macron, this thesis finds that Biden and Macron displayed similar discursive themes and strategies that comply with Moffitt's criteria of the populist political style. First, Biden and Macron mobilized a Manichean worldview with people-centrist and anti-elitist rhetoric. They appealed to the electorate by constructing the middle class as the pure people and portraying their populist electoral rivals as the devil elite. Second, Biden and Macron constructed a pro-democratic anti-exclusionary narrative of national values and used it to depict their populist right-wing rivals as threats against the country and national values. This thesis concludes that under pushing factors such as an appealing populist candidate in a presidential election and a growing public distrust of centrism in liberal democracies, mainstream centrist politicians may gain electoral benefit by adopting a populist political style against their populist electoral rivals. |
| Supervisor | Enyedi, Zsolt |
| Department | Political Science MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2024/canimana_eda.pdf |
Visit the CEU Library.
© 2007-2021, Central European University