Populism has been a critical concept for many years, occupying political debates and academic fields ranging from political science, sociology and philosophy to psychology, communication and anthropology, among others. Populism has become a term increasingly used to characterise the state of politics today. In 2017, the Cambridge Dictionary announced “populism” as the word of the year. But efforts to overturn the social order have a very ancient lineage throughout the world. Therefore, we can say that populism has been present in world politics for a very long time. However, since the term was initially employed in the USA and Russia in the XIX century and in Latin America in the 1920s, it has become an intriguing point of reference from the 2000s onwards.

The early debates were about the struggle against big landowner-merchant capital (the anti-imperialist struggle), which required an alliance of worker-peasant-middle classes. Later, the debates of the post-World War II period signalled increasing political participation of the masses to guide modern industrial developments in colonial societies struggling for political emancipation. This was a response within the framework of the modernisation paradigm. Since the masses in these societies predominantly lived in rural areas, the urban-rural divide, combined with a hatred for elites who collaborated with the colonial administration, gave rise to populist movements, which emphasised the elite-people divide as the main contradiction in the social structure. To retain some degree of autonomy, the rural areas have long sought to give political rights and status to newcomers, often targeting immigrants. Populists also sought to retain traditions, as well as stable hierarchies of age and land ownership. More recently populist logics have been mobilised by the Far Right, in Europe and elsewhere, to foster nationalist, xenophobic, and racist agendas.

Debates on populism evolved from the grounds of preserving small producers and traditional ways of life and developed into anti-elitism and a phenomenon dominated by exclusionary agendas. These approaches to understanding populism demonstrate the malleability of this concept, which is useful for explaining many different political developments. Populism has been perceived as an ideology, political style, strategic approach, political logic or sometimes even as a spectre or danger. This breadth of approaches has facilitated the production of literature in different disciplines and created a buzzword in Political Science. More recently, in response to the alleged irrationality of populism and building on the affective turn in the social sciences, the entanglement of populism and emotion has gained attention as an interdisciplinary field of research. However, modern understandings reject the ancient treatment of emotion as irrational. This shift has led to a richer and more dynamic perspective on the main roles of emotion in personal, social and political dynamics.

The academic attention to populism continues to grow in relation to issues within both democratic and authoritarian processes, for instance, regarding identity and political discourse. This strand of research focuses on the role and place of emotions in socio-political narratives, mythologies and identities, along with their reflection on political behaviour, populist movements and parties. These topics have been core to the research of the UNPOP project (UNpacking POPulism: Comparing the formation of emotion narratives and their effects on political behaviour) coordinated by Cristiano Gianolla at the Centre for Social Studies (CES) and Lisete Mónico at the Center for Research in Neuropsychology and Cognitive Behavioral Intervention (CINEICC) of the University of Coimbra. One of the main results of the project, the UNPOP International Colloquium, entitled “Emotions, Narratives and Identities in Politics, Populism and Democracy”, was organised between 23 and 26 January 2024 in Coimbra. The event started with a synergy meeting between five Horizon Europe projects focusing on political emotions and the social contract. The colloquium featured five keynote speeches, rich roundtable discussion and 22 panels where 44 papers were presented for extensive debate. The colloquium served to deepen the understanding of the articulations of populism alongside emotions, affects, identities and narratives.

The International Colloquium started with the UNPOP Research Showcase session which included an introduction to Emotion Narrative Theory. This proposal focused on long-term collective emotions that shape personal, social and political identities in order to study the impact of emotions on individual political behaviour. The UNPOP also presented: the Exclusionary Populist Attitude Scale, a systematic literature review, an examination of the family-related emotion narratives of the Portuguese radical Left, the analysis of the anti-immigration paradigm on the Italian far right, and the scrutiny of the discourse on merit/meritocracy as opposed to equality/participation, comparing populist and religious leaders. The showcase exemplified how this interdisciplinary research uses and applies a mixed methodology operated through systematic literature review, meta-analysis, scale-building, qualitative interviewing, text analysis and comparative research. This extensive research unpacks one understudied dimension of populist politics, namely “emotion narratives”, which are related to mobilisation and framing.

The keynote speakers addressed different approaches to understanding the intricate connections between politics, emotions and social relations. While George E. Marcus emphasised the enduring and ever-present roles of emotion, reason and narrative as sustaining and changing political structures, Paolo Cossarini examined how the concept of “popular sovereignty” is maintained in everyday life, arguing for the perception of populism as a claim rather than inherent truth. Tereza Capelos explored the impact of emotionally charged grievance politics in contemporary democracies and discussed democratic responses to these emotionally driven claims. João Figueiredo analysed the role of past elites in the creation of a right-wing common sense, as well as the challenges faced by emancipatory left-wing decolonial interventions and discourses, demonstrating the current ethical responsibilities of the narrative about the Portuguese overseas expansion. Finally, Emilia Palonen elaborated on populism as a logic rather than a form, highlighting affectively loaded constructions of the “us-building” and “othering”, processes which involve linking the ideas of contingency and temporality to the democratic ethos. The Round Table discussion moderated by Gaia Giuliani brought together all these speakers and approaches as well as one of the most renowned populist scholars of the event, Paula Diehl. The broad debate touched on different key points at the intersection of emotions with politics, history, social identities and social relations.

The papers presented a diverse range of methodologies, from (critical) discourse analysis to visual analysis, from linguistic perspectives to qualitative protest event analysis, from analysis of interviews to the analysis of data mined from social media. Papers dealt with the rhetoric, discourse, narrative and storytelling of political ideas, movements, parties and leaders sometimes labelled as extremist, right-wing, far-right, left-wing, far-left or anti-establishment. In relation to populist politics, the focus was on emotional engagement, affective investment, emotional work, emotional modulation and affective repertoires at the periphery.

Those who view the growth and acceptance of democratic discourse as detrimental, seek to justify authoritarian forms of government in order to better protect their values and ways of life, despite insufficient public support. Thus, current populist movements use the language of grievance to marshal support. Herein, emotion becomes a unifying language of common understanding and expression. It is important to continue the research presented at the UNPOP International Colloquium for the sake of revisiting the debates on authoritarianism and democratic backsliding (also known as de-democratisation or democratic erosion). Stuart Hall adopted the term Thatcherism and emphasised the notion of authoritarian populism, drawing attention to the practices of the Thatcher government, which relied heavily on populist discourses. As Hall highlighted, Thatcher’s anti-state rhetoric contradicted her government’s implementation of policies that worsened the conditions of the workers, ultimately creating a new – neoliberal – common sense in British politics.

We observe the authoritarian nature of neoliberalism and, therefore, it is urgent to analyse the relationship of “neoliberal populism” to the emotions of the oppressed segments of society in contemporary politics. Ümit Akçay’s work, for example, demonstrates that neoliberalism is kept alive by creating temporary welfare regimes, but at the same time oppressing the people. The mechanism of inclusion is financialisation, which gives loans to the lower strata of society and creates fear of survival. Akçay points to the social aid of the AKP rule in Turkey with the emotional discourses of the government. Rather than helping people, this legislation has paved the way for precarisation and flexibilisation through subcontracting, temporary and part-time, precarious working conditions. Neoliberal populism enables the poorest people to acquire cheap loans for social and financial inclusion in societies with a limited welfare regime. In other contexts, populism gives governments the ability to secure support by benefiting (e.g., through government funded pensions, housing, social security among others) those they favour. Especially for those depending on such benefits, this practice can generate resentment and distrust of what many see as a remote, unpredictable and unresponsive government. Thus, social welfare and rights translate into financial aid managed thorough loans and welfare. Moreover, poverty is reverted to a problem of the poor and decision-makers resort to solutions that actually create a structural dependence system, recreating poverty and structural division in society.

Liberal democratic regimes today suffer gradual decline in the quality of democracy and the establishment of undemocratic common sense. In order to revive the debates on democratic backsliding research should focus on “longer-term strategic harassment and manipulation”, especially of electoral processes in relation to populism. Moreover, future research needs to closely examine democratic processes that are capable of unpacking the responses – however (un)acceptable – given by populism to the systemic failures of liberal democracy. Regardless of the conflicting conceptions of populism, most of the scholarship agrees that populism indicates political failures that need to be addressed. It remains to be seen if and for how long liberal democracy is able to either ignore, diminish or misconceive these issues exploiting the ambiguity of populism.