Browsing by Subject "http://www.yso.fi/onto/yso/p1055"

“Populism” has become one of the most studied and contested concepts in contemporary political science. Whereas the standard explanation for the concept’s inadequacy tends to be its ambiguity, this thesis argues the contrary: it is not understood ambiguously enough. Considering that the contemporary academic field, known as populism studies, heavily relies on representationalist ontologies, this thesis argues for an ontological turn towards a performative, nonmodern and multiple ontology. In such an ontology, the multiplicity and diversity of concepts are taken as constitutive of the messiness of reality, rather than as errors of scientific representation. Reality is multiple and it is performed in multiple practices. This thesis demonstrates how a certain populist reality is performed in political science by doing, first, an allegorical praxiography of Cas Mudde’s study in European populist attitudes, and secondly, of the six Eurobarometer surveys, which Mudde references as his data. The analysis outlines the methods and practices by which Mudde, and the multiplicity of issues in his analysis, enact certain concepts associated with populism, and conversely, how the concept of populism enacts Mudde and the analysis. In regard to the Eurobarometer surveys, the analysis demonstrates that the surveys do not represent attitudes “out there”, rather, they perform not only the attitudes, but the conception of an out-thereness in form of a European public opinion. The survey questionnaires can be seen as inscription devices, which perform the multiple realities out there to be represented in the surveys. As a conclusion, in line with the ontological premises of this thesis and following the analysis of Mudde’s study of the Eurobarometer surveys, this thesis argues that instead of understanding the concept of populism as an object, or as a representation of an object out there, it should be understood as a multiple Thing — simultaneously an actor being made to act and a subject enacting others. The concept does not represent; it collects a multiplicity of entities to perform a certain populism. Instead of treating the concept as a particularity, it should be understood as a multiplicity constituting a mess.