After the epistemological turn: A framework for studying populism as a knowledge phenomenon

Abstract

The recent epistemological turn in populism studies has produced many valuable insights pertaining to populist knowledge practices, conspiracy theories, information bubbles, and cognitive biases. However, various elements of populist epistemology are still studied separately, and there are no common theoretical assumptions that would arrange them into a comprehensive epistemic theory of populism. Thus, apart from presenting a preliminary mapping of recent changes in the field, the article proposes a basic theoretical framework for an epistemic approach to studying populism by conceptualising populism as a set of epistemic interventions: discursive and non-discursive practices that construe the people as a political subject and result in the emergence of a populist epistemic community. The article discusses how the latter concept may help to link discursive, performative, communicative, and cognitive elements of populism, along with describing key features of populist epistemic communities and indicating possible directions for future research on populist epistemology.

Introduction: Populism, post-truth, and the role of knowledge

The concept of populism has been used to analyse socio-political ruptures of various natures and ranges: from the deficiencies of political representation (Werner and Giebler, 2019) and the growth of nativism and prejudice (Rooduijn et al., 2021) to problems pertaining to violations of the rule of law and democratic standards (Pappas, 2019). What makes the concept of populism so attractive and instrumental in describing recent changes in democracies around the world is its capacity to integrate different social, cultural, political, and economic phenomena: in one term it evokes various interlinked socio-political crises and, depending on the scholar, it is considered to be either a major threat to democratic systems (Pappas, 2019) or a key restorative and pro-democratic force (Mouffe, 2018). However interpreted, populism is seen as a crucial term in analysing growing socio-political divisions.

However, what changed with the advent of the so-called post-truth politics era is how those divisions are studied. With the declining trust in established epistemological authorities, political and ideological polarisation increasingly translates into epistemological ruptures. As societies grow divided into various groups that have their own radically different visions of the socio-political (and sometimes even physical) reality, the way populist movements construct and nurture ‘alternative’ knowledge systems and visions of what is factual and true has become extremely relevant for scholars of populism. Thus, various authors have increasingly combined populism with a host of concepts that pertain to how knowledge (and so-called counterknowledge) is constructed and transmitted in various discourses. Moreover, numerous studies describe populists as spreading misinformation, distributing fake news, sowing doubt over man-made climate crisis or the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic, and profiting from conspiracy theories that often thrive in social media, incessantly repeated and reinforced in information bubbles and echo chambers. The field has become increasingly epistemologically oriented, especially in the last 3 years, a shift that, in reference to established discursive (Brubaker, 2017) and performative turns (Ostiguy and Moffit, 2021), may be called an epistemological turn in populism studies.

However, despite appearing among scholars adopting various theoretical approaches to populism, this growing epistemological orientation is yet to gain full recognition in the field. Thus, the first aim of this article is to provide a preliminary mapping of recent changes in populism studies, which increasingly focus on various knowledge practices, the topology of populist communication online, and cognitive processes that affect the reception of populist discourses. The other aim is of theoretical nature. The epistemological turn is a shift of scholarly interest that translates into an exploration of new research areas, rather than a change in how populism itself is conceptualised and defined. Various elements of populist epistemology are studied separately, and there are no common theoretical assumptions that would arrange all those elements into a comprehensive epistemic theory of populism. Moreover, populist knowledge practices are often pathologised, described as incomparable with any ‘normal’ epistemology, and understood as a purely distortive process, a perversion of ‘objective’ facts. Such an approach – one that ignores complex, generative, and dialectic epistemological processes vital for populist discourses – actually hinders efforts to understand how and why populist discourses are so convincing in establishing a particular vision of the social and political world. Thus, apart from describing the epistemological turn, this article proposes a basic theoretical framework for an epistemic approach to studying populism that is based on established discursive, communication, and socio-cultural approaches but goes beyond some of their assumptions and emphasises the need to study populism as a knowledge phenomenon. Drawing from the post-Laclauian theory of populism (Ostiguy et al., 2021b), Jacques Rancière’s (2006, 2015) theory of politics, and the recent constructivist turn in the study of political representation (Castiglione and Pollak, 2019; Disch et al., 2019), this epistemic theory proposes to study the groups of populists’ supporters as epistemic communities that share specific beliefs about the social world and heuristic interpretation patterns while trying to impose their worldview on others. In sum, this article makes three key contributions to the literature on populism and populist epistemologies:

1. The article provides a first detailed description of the epistemological turn in populism studies, indicating various recent research directions and key insights. Through a critical review of these recent studies, the article identifies several gaps and problems in the literature, with a particular focus on the current lack of an adequate conceptual framework to link various findings on populist epistemology, along with a scientifically unhelpful tendency to pathologise populist knowledge practices.

2. To address these issues, the article offers a reconceptualisation of populism as not only a political but also a knowledge phenomenon that is uniquely suited for an epistemic analysis.

3. Challenging the dominant ideational and discursive approaches to studying populism, the article introduces an original conceptual framework centred around the notions of epistemic communities and epistemic interventions and offers an integrative theory that links together four key dimensions of populist epistemic communities that include discursive practices, populist performativity, communication practices and topology, and cognitive, affective, and social psychological processes.

The article is organised as follows. First, I will discuss selected recent works in the field to describe the epistemological turn in populism studies. Second, while recognising valuable insights and the timeliness of these studies, I will indicate their main theoretical and methodological limitations. Third, to address these shortcomings, I will discuss how populism can be understood as a knowledge phenomenon and how populist representative relation combines political and epistemological elements. Finally, I will propose a basic framework for an epistemic approach to populism that goes beyond the limitations of recent, ideational-inspired research, links the supply and demand sides of research on populism hitherto explored separately, and provides a basis for a holistic and continuous analysis of populist epistemic processes.

An epistemological turn in populism studies?

Populism is a notoriously difficult concept to define as its understanding changes over time, ranging from approaches that view populism as a structural reaction to modernisation (Germani, 1978) to those abandoning structural determinism and emphasising its malleable nature (e.g. Hawkins and Rovira Kaltwasser, 2022; Laclau, 2005; Mudde, 2004). Over the years, populism studies have greatly benefitted from accessing expertise from other areas, including discursively oriented social studies, which led to the so-called discursive turn (Brubaker, 2017), cultural studies, which contributed to a relational and performative turn (Ostiguy and Moffit, 2021), and psychology, which helped to explore personality correlates and social psychological mechanisms of populism (Erisen et al., 2021; Forgas and Crano, 2021). Another recent development is the growing scholarly interest in the epistemic dimension of populism, namely, matters of knowledge practices and cognition, along with the roles they play in populist discourses. While research exploring various intersections of populism and knowledge remains in its infancy, it does indicate that issues of creating, grounding, and propagating knowledge are quickly becoming indispensable to understand populism itself – a shift so far largely unnoticed in the field. Thus, the following paragraphs seek to preliminarily map these new research directions.

One may argue that the issues of knowledge and cognition have been present in populism studies from very early on, both as an interest in identifying a set of beliefs that would define a populist (Ionescu and Gellner, 1969) and as a reflection on how populism affects people’s understanding of society and politics (Hofstadter, 1964). Populism is variably conceptualised as an ideology that pits good, pure people against a corrupt elite (Hawkins and Rovira Kaltwasser, 2022; Mudde, 2004), a discourse that aims to establish people as a political subject through uniting unanswered social grievances (Laclau, 2005), a particular political strategy of attaining power (Weyland, 2021), and a political communication style (Jagers and Walgrave, 2007), while other approaches represent populism as a social movement (Jansen, 2011), study discursive frames pertinent to populist communication (Aslanidis, 2020), and analyse political performances of populist entrepreneurs (Ostiguy and Moffit, 2021). Most of these approaches at least imply the existence of an epistemic dimension of populism: they analyse populist beliefs, scrutinise how information is communicated by populist politicians, and study the framing mechanisms that may affect the reception of populist discourses. However, while the issue of knowledge is almost always present in reflections about populism, actual mechanisms of knowledge creation and grounding rarely are the focus of analysis.

This situation has changed recently as research on knowledge in populist discourses has become particularly salient in the so-called post-truth politics era. With established information sources and authorities progressively losing their influence, it is now, as Ylä-Anttila (2018: 2) puts it, ‘more relevant than ever to study the linkage between populism and the production and communication of knowledge’. A recent wave of studies exploring this linkage go beyond analysing populism as a system of ideas or a discourse and focuses on investigating populist epistemologies, that is, interconnected processes of belief formation and knowledge legitimisation. While this epistemological turn has thus far failed to produce a more complete description of populist epistemology, it has examined three areas of great importance for any epistemologically inclined analysis of populism: (1) populist alternative knowledge practices with a particular focus on populist denialism, anti-expert stances, and analysis of conspiracy theories; (2) communicational practices of digital populism; (3) cognitive mechanisms that play a role in the reception of populist discourses. As such, the epistemological turn includes macro, mezzo, and micro approaches to populism that analyse knowledge practices, social interactions, and individual dispositions. Importantly, while this article uses the term epistemological turn for convenience, the epistemology in question should not be understood in terms of classical or analytic philosophy, but rather as social epistemology (Goldman and O’Connor, 2021), that is, issues of how knowledge, understood as socially legitimised beliefs, is collectively constructed and maintained through various practices.

These knowledge practices – understood in this article as everyday socially structured actions that contribute to establishing a particular belief system – reveal which sources of knowledge and reasoning methods are seen as valid. In the case of populist knowledge practices in western democracies, the most fundamental characteristic that emerges from recent literature is that they form an epistemology of protest, a rejection of the system of knowledge founded by mainstream media, established institutions, third-sector organisations, and scientists (Enroth, 2021; Ylä-Anttila, 2018). This rejection stems primarily from the assumption that the truth about the world is purposefully concealed by the elite to the detriment of the people so that one must seek this truth in unofficial sources. Thus, two types of populist knowledge practices can be described: delegitimisation practices aimed at questioning and undermining established knowledge and counterknowledge practices that provide alternative, ‘truthful’ information.

The delegitimisation practice that recently undergoes closest scrutiny is the populist denialism of various factual phenomena, especially the climate change and the Covid-19 pandemic. There is an extensive body of research indicating that particularly right-wing populism is an important factor in scepticism towards anthropogenic climate change (Buzogány and Mohamad-Klotzbach, 2021; Huber et al., 2022; Lockwood, 2018; Otteni and Weisskircher, 2022). The growing consensus is that populist discourses – described as anti-intellectual and anti-elitist – undermine the trust in established institutions and expert knowledge, which in turn drives the rejection of evidence that points to man-made climate change (Buzogány and Mohamad-Klotzbach, 2021: 158; Huber et al., 2022: 13). Thus, while not inherently sceptical towards climate change, populist discourses serve as an intermediary: they sow generalised distrust towards any authority and rejection of information that cannot be personally verified (Lütjen, 2022). Similar explanations are proposed for the denialism pertaining to the Covid-19 pandemic (Eberl et al., 2021; Lasco, 2020).

Rejection of expert knowledge pertaining to global warming and the pandemic fits into a wider trend of anti-expert stances fostered by populist discourses (Adler and Drieschova, 2021; Brandmayr, 2021; Eslen-Ziya and Giorgi, 2022; Ylä-Anttila, 2018). Scholarship usually indicates two reasons for this populist challenge to established epistemic authorities. First, experts and academics are considered members of the ruling elite and therefore corrupt (Mede and Schäfer, 2020: 474). While specific scientific methods of reasoning may be valid in this view, experts’ conclusions are seen as intentionally skewed and formed to justify the decisions of the elite. Second, the value of expert knowledge itself may be contested, as populists lean towards the ‘common sense’ of ordinary people (Saurette and Gunster, 2011; Van Zoonen, 2012). Thus, experts are described as academics detached from reality and their expertise as purely theoretical and inapplicable to the ‘real world’.

Instead of relying on expert knowledge, populists are described as adopting conspiracy theories (Bergmann, 2018, 2020; Erisen et al., 2021; Morelock and Narita, 2022). The conspiracy mentality is seen as a vital component of populism (Erisen et al., 2021) and even a quasi-theory of populist knowledge and power (Bergmann, 2020). Thus, conspiracy theories are conceptualised as a populist way of making sense of the world, a simplification of the increasingly complex reality implemented to satisfy the need for cognition and understanding (Kruglanski et al., 2021). While various authors describe populist conspiracy theories differently, two related discursive frames vital for populist epistemology can be deduced from their insights. The first one, which may be called an adversarial identification frame, creates a clear boundary between ‘us’, the innocent people, and ‘them’, usually the conspiring elite (Aslanidis, 2020). Several studies that draw from the social identity theory (Tajfel, 1974) seek to describe how populist conspiracy theories influence and encourage in-group versus out-group thinking that fuels both nativist attitudes and political affective polarisation, effectively transforming political differences into moral ones (e.g. Harteveld et al., 2022; Rooduijn et al., 2021). The second discursive frame pertains to blame attribution and consists of three elements: an alleged crisis, the guilty (often the elites), and the proposed solution (usually support for the populist leader). This frame is used not only to make sense of the world by organising disparate information into clear, causal relations, but also to mobilise voters and create a sense of urgency (Aslanidis, 2020). It is used in a variety of conspiracy theories, from those relatively limited in scope – like the alleged US 2020 election fraud – to those wide-ranging like the ‘Great Replacement’ theory (Bergmann, 2018).

All these theories predominantly thrive in Web 2.0, which is why another important dimension recently studied in the field is the role of the Internet and social media in proliferating ‘alternative’ worldviews, but also in providing a direct mode of communication between populist leaders and their supporters (Cassell, 2021; Hameleers, 2021, 2022). This direct link allows politicians to circumvent traditional media gatekeepers and express their views without any third-actor fact-checking (Lupien and Rourke, 2021: 59). Even more importantly, Web 2.0 has enabled the emergence of what some authors call digital (Prior, 2021) or algorithmic populism (Maly, 2018), one that makes use of the interactive and decentralised nature of social media. Thus, algorithms themselves are considered to be important actors with their own agency, as they regulate the proliferation and filtering of online messages and may be manipulated by various forms of ‘algorithmic activism’ to increase coverage or sow doubt (Maly, 2018: 16). Apart from intentional manipulations, there is also the issue of the structure of information on social media. Various scholars emphasise the role of social media topology as the one enabling and facilitating the formation of epistemic bubbles and echo chambers (Anderson, 2021; Nguyen, 2018; Schaub and Morisi, 2020). Social media algorithms function as filtering mechanisms that provide users with selected content, usually similar to what they previously accessed. However, users often have the conviction that they have a broad selection of information available on their social media feeds, when in fact it may be substantially limited (Anspach et al., 2019), which in turn contributes to forming a potentially skewed vision of events and society.

Finally, recent research on populism is increasingly analysing its cognitive dimension, namely, various mental processes that enable information processing and influence the reception of populist discourses (Bos et al., 2020; Hameleers, 2021; Hameleers et al., 2018; Hameleers and Fawzi, 2020; Schmuck and Matthes, 2017; Wirz et al., 2018). Much of this research stems from the assumption that populism exists on an individual level as a set of relatively stable attitudes (Hameleers and Fawzi, 2020: 614), which are said to mirror the basic elements of populist ideology (people-centrism, anti-elitism, a Manichean outlook on society) but are generally latent and need to be activated with populist messaging. Thus, the authors that adopt this approach aim to analyse – both in controlled experiments and in quantitative analysis of online behaviour – how specific instances of populist communication affect recipients’ attitudes. The most important, although not consistently observed, effect of populist communication is the widening of the perceived distance – both cognitive and affective – between the in-group (people) and the out-group (elites, immigrants; Hameleers and Fawzi, 2020; Wirz et al., 2018), which often relies on blame attribution (Hameleers et al., 2018) and heuristic processes that activate negative stereotypes and intergroup anxiety (Schmuck and Matthes, 2017).

Knowledge pathologisation and a constructivist alternative

Although necessarily brief and incomplete – given the diversity and dynamism of research on populism – the above description provides a broad overview of recent changes in the field. The latter’s focus on epistemological features of populism, fuelled by conspiracy theories and fake news associated with mainly right-wing populists, has produced a diverse body of research and resulted in many important insights. However, any type of populism may be fruitfully studied for its epistemological dimension, and, as will be argued in the following sections, populism as a political phenomenon is uniquely suited for an epistemological analysis.

That said, before discussing the possible framework for such an analysis, it is necessary to address certain unresolved issues in the study of populist epistemology. The most immediate problem is that the exploration of new research areas introduced by the epistemological turn engendered no more in-depth theoretical reconsideration of the concept of populism itself. Recent studies still understand populism as a concise set of ideas or attitudes that exist independently or latently and act as a factor that may influence human cognitive and epistemological processes. Thus, there is a growing amount of knowledge on how populism contributes to certain epistemic phenomena – such as conspiracy mentality or generalised distrust – but those insights do not translate into a novel understanding of populism itself. Consequently, various elements of populist epistemology are studied separately and there is no common theoretical framework that would arrange all those elements into a comprehensive epistemic theory of populism (for some attempts to create building blocks for such a theory, see: Lütjen, 2022; Saurette and Gunster, 2011; Ylä-Anttila, 2018). Moreover, many of the mentioned authors (for some notable exceptions see: Morelock and Narita, 2022; Ylä-Anttila, 2018) focus on describing how populism distorts knowledge, how it derails ‘normal’ knowledge practices and replaces them with its own ‘alternative’ ones. Populists in this view reject ‘objective facts’ and replace them with emotions (Prior, 2021), ‘undermine the notions of truth, expertise, reason, and logic’ (Adler and Drieschova, 2021: 361), seek to ‘erode trust in reality itself and to exhaust people so that they simply withdraw from the political realm entirely’ (Lupien and Rourke, 2021: 58), and are simple-minded or tribalistic, and possess ‘an endemic disrespect for the truth’ (Forgas and Crano, 2021: 10). Even the authors who adopt a less normative approach to populism (e.g. Bergmann, 2020) assume that the foundation of populist epistemology is the purposeful distortion of objective facts, a creation of a fictional image of reality.

The most important consequence of this simplification is the tendency to pathologise populist knowledge practices, which are often described as a completely distinct phenomenon, incomparable to any ‘normal’ epistemology. This tendency is rooted in Richard Hofstadter’s (1964) early accounts of populism that emphasised its propensity towards conspiracy thinking that results in a paranoid style of interpreting social and political phenomena, as well as its inherent anti-intellectualism. Hofstadter’s ideas influenced not only how conspiracy theories are linked with populism but also laid the groundwork for existing attempts at conceptualising populist epistemology that emphasise the role of everyday, ‘authentic’, common knowledge. In this vein, Saurette and Gunster (2011) define ‘epistemic populism’ as a positive valorisation of the knowledge of ‘common’ people, an affirmation of common sense, while Van Zoonen (2012) propose the concept of I-pistemology, a general tendency to view the self (own experiences and emotions) as a source of truth in absence of any credible external actors. Indeed, Lütjen (2022: 16) suggests that populism has a peculiar anti-authoritarian dimension in that it rejects any epistemological authority and is a ‘movement of institutionalised distrust’. All these accounts contribute to the assumption that populist voters reject facts and are prone to having a simplified view of reality. The tendency to pathologise populist knowledge practices is further reinforced by the fact that populism itself has often been seen as a form of a social pathology (Hirvonen and Pennanen, 2019; Zamora, 2022). Thus, if populism is a pathology, then understandably it resorts to harmful epistemic practices.

The latter assumption fits into a wider reflection on post-truth, in which populism is not only an attack on democracy but also on truth itself (D’Ancona, 2017). The responsibility for this attack and the resulting epistemological crisis is attributed to some degree to changes in the mediascape but also to postmodern and constructivist scholars (Lütjen, 2022; Van Zoonen, 2012), as they question the traditional view of the scientific method, problematise how knowledge is created in academia, indicate various relations between knowledge and power, and in general, describe truth and knowledge as emergent concepts that are produced, legitimised, and maintained through a plethora of social practices and continuous actions of various epistemic communities.

Thus, postmodernists and social constructivists in particular are described as having ‘opened the gates of hell’ by indicating social origins of truth and knowledge and criticising scientism, a critique that now supposedly fuels the populist rebellion against reason (Lütjen, 2022: 9). While this approach is understandable given the fact that postmodernists do in fact contest established epistemic authorities, it is nevertheless misguided. It is doubtful that postmodern theory significantly affected supporters of populist parties; on the contrary, especially right-wing populists eagerly describe postmodernists as proponents of both harmful ‘woke’ agenda and anti-scientific, subjective views that contradict ‘real’ science (Ylä-Anttila, 2018: 13). More importantly, there is no valid reason to treat populist epistemology differently from any other epistemology. Social constructivist scholars are right when they assume that irrespectively of whether a particular piece of information is factually correct or not, the process of establishing it as knowledge or truth is inherently social, meaning that something is labelled as knowledge through a series of social actions, interactions, and discursive practices conducted in a particular social and cultural context. The latter ranges from fundamental assumptions about the world and the self that emerge through a dialectical processes of objectivation, habituation, legitimisation, and institutionalisation (Berger and Luckmann, 1991) to complex ideas that are considered and legitimised by various epistemological communities, such as scientific communities that have the cognitive authority to explain a particular group of phenomena pertinent to their discipline (Elder-Vass, 2012). Various communities may have vastly different criteria of truth, hence knowledge – or what is considered to be knowledge – is always culturally situated. Moreover, the production of knowledge and truth through populist discourses is not limited to common sense or generalised distrust. Contrary to the above-mentioned approaches, populist epistemology is extremely varied and very often constructs different types of counterknowledge that may mimic the structure of scientific knowledge (Ylä-Anttila, 2018). Populists do not oppose science and reason per se. In fact they may argue for more ‘hard’ science and research (or, more precisely, for what they consider to be ‘hard’ science and research; see Eslen-Ziya and Giorgi, 2022: 9) and do not wage a war against truth, but they do reject established epistemological authorities and construe their own counterknowledge and counterexpertise (Meyer, 2023).

The selective constructivism of many populism scholars – equalling populist social construction of knowledge to social distortion of knowledge – contributes to creating a false dichotomy between ‘sane’, rational, and expert-informed knowledge and the madness of populist delusions. Neither are populists solely emotion-driven nor are non-populists completely rational as the differences between these groups are not psychologically based on the level of character traits (at least not in any clear or meaningful way; see Galais and Rico, 2021), but epistemologically based on the level of creating knowledge and interpretation patterns. Moreover, the categories of populists and non-populists are themselves increasingly questionable, with various political actors combining populist and technocratic traits in what can be called a technopopulist logic of political action (Bickerton and Accetti, 2021). Consequently, the dichotomous approach is not particularly useful for understanding how populist discourses create specific worldviews and how they form not only a distortive but also a generative knowledge phenomenon. Hence, I posit that research on populism requires more constructivist perspectives, not less. Populist epistemology should not be conceptualised as an evil twin of ‘normal’ epistemology but analysed in its own right as a comprehensive set of knowledge practices.

Adoption of such an approach, however, requires moving beyond the essentialist tendency visible in many recent studies of populist epistemology based on the ideational theory of populism. Ideational scholars usually divide their research into supply side (populist ideology expressed through political discourse) and demand side analysis (people’s attitudes). That in itself is problematic for any epistemologically inclined analysis, as creating and establishing beliefs and knowledge is a set of continuous, dialectic processes that involve constant communication and renegotiating of what is real and true (see Van Dijk, 2014). Moreover, populist discourses are far too often imagined as a domain of populist leaders and politicians and a one-way sender-receiver relation, while the discursive activities of populists’ supporters are at least as important in populist belief-making, especially in the context of digital and algorithmic populism. Similarly, the notion of populist attitudes that ideational scholars use is also a problematic one, especially since they are often conceptualised as latent attitudes that exist autonomously and are only activated through populist discourses. Ideational scholars do not indicate where these attitudes come from and how did they form; they are to simply exist as a hidden potential that can be activated through populist rhetoric. However, research on cognitive dimension of discursive practices suggests that establishing attitudes, views, and visions of the world is better described as reciprocal processes, in which discursive content, cognitive processes, individual experiences, and emotions, along with social and cultural contexts, all contribute to creating and subsequently modifying a specific attitude (Van Dijk, 2011: 29–32, 2014: 100). Thus, populist discourses do not just activate autonomously existing populist attitudes, but they draw from specific social and cultural contexts and people’s experiences to create a coherent interpretation of social phenomena.

Populism as a knowledge phenomenon

As has been argued earlier, many of the gaps and issues present within the epistemological turn stem from the fact that scholars are tackling problems that are epistemological in their nature while still maintaining a strictly political and ideational understanding of populism. Thus, construing an epistemic approach to populism first requires a reconceptualisation of the term itself, based on careful theoretical reflection on how populism can be understood as both a political and a knowledge phenomenon. Such theoretical analysis, however, faces three fundamental challenges. First, it is vital to find an alternative for the ideational perspective and thus move away from viewing populism as a set of pre-existing attitudes that are discursively activated. Second, the analysis of the epistemic dimension of populism requires a more general reflection on the relation between epistemology and politics. Third, the sheer diversity of recent research in the field indicates that, individually, the studies drawing from existing approaches are insufficient to provide a full description of populist epistemology. The latter must simultaneously consider a variety of factors that pertain to discursive meaning-making practices, communication processes online and offline, and socio-psychological processes that affect how people interpret new information or interact within and between social groups. Moreover, such an analysis necessarily includes macro, mezzo, and micro levels of study, which makes it even more complex. Recent research on populism offers no theoretical or methodological notion that would enable scholars to clearly connect all these distinctive levels and areas and outline the relations between them; a fact that significantly limits the reflection on populist epistemologies since all the processes studied separately actually closely interact to produce a specific vision of the socio-political world shared by a particular group of populist’ supporters. Therefore, finding such a core concept is essential for developing a coherent theoretical framework for future research. The central idea of this article, developed mainly in the next section, is that the concept in question is the epistemic community – a group of people with a set of shared beliefs, reasoning standards, and interpretation schemata that engages in various knowledge practices.

Regarding the first issue indicated above, I argue that the best way to move away from viewing populism as an ideology or a set of attitudes is to draw from the recently proposed post-Laclauian theory of populism that defines populism through its political praxis (Ostiguy et al., 2021b). Inspired by Laclau, the post-Laclauian approach assumes that populism is a discursive practice operating with a particular logic: the core populist aim is to create the people as a sovereign political subject with its own identity and political agency (Ostiguy et al., 2021a: 3). Where the post-Laclauians diverge from Laclau is in how the popular subject comes to be. Laclau (2005) defines the latter in and through its antagonistic relation with the elite. Thus, the concept of the people is constructed through vertical delimitation, meaning the elites are the Other against whom the people unite. The post-Laclauian theory, however, assumes that the notion of the people is always relational and multidimensional; thus, the people may be defined in relation with various Others, be it the elites, immigrants, or ethnic, religious, or LGBT + minorities (Ostiguy et al., 2021a: 7). Therefore, populist discourses are flexible and variable in how they operate, but they are always distinguished by ‘the performative staging of a wrong’ (Ostiguy et al., 2021a: 3), meaning that they centre on unfulfilled promises of democratic representation and political agency, which have not only a political dimension but – as I will show below – also an epistemological one. Populist assertion that the ‘real’ people are not represented and have no influence over politics (or, when populists are in power, that they may swiftly lose their voice) is the foundation for the populist construction of community and identity that reconstitute the people as a political subject.

Another important insight from the post-Laclauian theory pertains to analysing discourse. While this approach shares Laclau’s interest in discursive meaning-making, it also emphasises that discourse should be understood very broadly, not only as a set of textual and oral utterances but as all meaning-creating practices (Ostiguy et al., 2021a: 6), including performative styles, such as transgressive, ‘low’, or bad-mannered behaviours, as well as – body language, appearance, visual communication, and subtextual messages. Moreover, Ostiguy et al. (2021a: 6) rightly indicate that discursive events – to name it in a Foucauldian way – do not exist in a vacuum: they are embodied practices that interact not only with other discursive events but also draw from and influence a broad set of social and cultural beliefs and orientations. In other words, they exist both in a narrower political discursive space and in the broad cultural toolbox of embodied, habitual, and institutionalised practices (Berger and Luckmann, 1991; Swidler, 1986). This observation is especially important because it further reinforces populism as something that is done, rather than something that exists as a system of specific ideas. Therefore, populists can be understood as those who frequently ‘perform’ populism but there is no clear boundary between populists and non-populists: politicians of every orientation may use populist discourse from time to time. Finally, let us note that the post-Laclauian approach is not normative like the ones described above; instead, the former approach assumes that constructing the popular subject and indicating the wrongs is always situated and contextual, while the subject’s relation with democracy or pluralism depends on the specific case and articulation.

If populism can be conceptualised as a set of embodied meaning-creating practices that indicate the deficiencies of political representation and construct a popular community with its distinct identity, relations, attitudes, and a vision of the social world, then what becomes even more relevant is the question of how political and epistemological divisions come to be and interact. This politico-epistemological assemblage is perhaps best described in the works of Jacques Rancière (2006, 2015). Rancière (2015: 27) observes that various definitions of politics usually centre on the issues of exercising and attaining power; so political theories explore how political actors operate and interact in a distinct space, one that pertains to what is public and common, thus in need of governance. According to Rancière, such a perspective completely misses the essence of politics as it effectively presupposes the existence of the domain of the political by assuming that there is a specific a priori set of political actors, issues, language, and spaces, while the core of politics hides precisely in the act of defining what is a public, common matter and who has the capacity to discuss it or have a voice. If politics was compared with a discourse, obtaining and exercising power (‘the police’ in Rancière’s terms) could be thought of as intra-discursive relations and occurrences, while proper politics would pertain to establishing the discourse itself, indicating its boundaries, subjects, and modalities, thus configuring what can possibly be said and thought. In this sense politics structures not only relations between various social groups but also how people experience and understand the social world, thus always having a distinct epistemology (though Rancière prefers to speak of aesthetics).

Moreover, politics is always closely related to a specific distribution of the sensible (partage du sensible), which Rancière defines as ‘the system of self-evident facts of sense perception that simultaneously discloses the existence of something in common and the delimitations that define the respective parts and positions within it’ (Rancière, 2006: 12). Thus, the distribution of the sensible is an implicit way the world (de monde) and the people (du monde) are seen and defined, a mode of perception and cognition that both establishes and constrains what is common. The ‘sensible’ here has a particular ambiguity in that it pertains both to what is perceptible and to what is reasonable. The distribution of the sensible is indeed both the configuration of what is accessible to the senses (so it turns some things invisible) and what can be understood, what can be considered as making sense (so it makes some things ‘absurd’, not worth listening to, or being discussed). Thus, politics proper is always ‘an intervention in the visible and the sayable’ (Rancière, 2015: 37), a reconfiguration in both the epistemic (transforming the image of the social world) and epistemological (transforming modes of viewing) sense. In other words, doing politics necessarily involves constructing new political subjects that were hitherto deprived of their voice, introducing new issues that were not considered to be political, common, public matters, and depicting a world where they indeed are political and open to debate and (dis)agreement. Politics is a space of not only subjectivation but also creation of new subjectivities.

What plays a key role in both the post-Laclauian approach and Rancière’s theory is the concept of representation. In the former, the deficiencies of representation provide the ground and motivation for populist performances, while the latter centres on representation understood as making someone or something present, introducing specific entities into public discourse and framing them as a political subject or a common matter. Thus, the political and the epistemological dimensions of representation make it an extremely useful concept for the kind of approach presented here.

However, to fully use its potential one has to go beyond classic definitions of representation (Pitkin, 1967), which usually assume that it is a relation between pre-existing actors. In the epistemic approach, both the relation and the identity of actors must be established and continuously negotiated. Thus, populist representation can be best described by drawing from the works of scholars involved in the constructivist turn in the study of political representation (Castiglione and Pollak, 2019; Disch et al., 2019). In their approach, representation is defined as a two-way, relational activity, one that effectively creates the community and identity of those who represent and those who are represented (Disch et al., 2019: 32). Moreover, as these authors further argue in a Rancièrian manner, the representative relation always includes a reconfiguration of what is visible and salient:

what is represented are not persons as such, but some of the interests, identities and values that persons have or hold. Representative relationships select for specific aspects of persons, by framing wants, desires, discontents, values and judgments in ways in which they become publicly visible, articulated in language and symbols, and thus politically salient (Disch et al., 2019: 36).

Thus, the representative relation is a specific way of articulating and expressing social identities that both draws from pre-existing identities, values, and relations and reconfigures them to create new subjects and subjectivities. Importantly – and populism scholars often overlook this crucial element – those represented are not passive in this process; representation is not antithetical to participation, as it ties both sides in a dialectical relation in which the identity and agency of those represented are actively negotiated (Disch et al., 2019: 37).

Understanding how a specific political subject is constituted through a representative relation and how a shared vision of the socio-political world comes to be demands a simultaneous reflection on discursive, communicational, and psychological processes that are necessarily involved in creating and establishing knowledge. As I remarked above, any analysis that singles out one of these levels in its conceptualisation of populism cannot adequately describe populism, since as Rancière (2015: 38) argues, it ‘presupposes partners that are already pre-constituted as such and discursive forms that entail a speech community, the constraint of which is always explicable’. Thus, to go beyond the constraints of ideational, discursive, or communicational approaches, we must consider how this emergent community constitutes itself and analyse its reciprocal relation with all of its founding meaning-making practices. In the light of the above, an epistemic theory of populism should focus not on the level of particular ideology, communication practice, or even discourse, but on the level where all those notions intersect: an epistemic community, thus a community of knowledge and knowing.

Populist epistemic community and its features

The notion of epistemic community is explored by various scholars (e.g. Elder-Vass, 2012; Nelson, 1993; Van Dijk, 2011), who generally characterise it as a group of people that share particular knowledge as well as associated knowledge practices and standards of reasoning. Of particular interest for the epistemic approach to populism presented here is Elder-Vass’s (2012) concept of epistemic and epistemological norm circles. Elder-Vass (2012: 30) assumes that every epistemic circle can be described as a norm circle, namely a social entity made of people that seek to uphold and impose a particular norm. In the case of epistemic and epistemological circles, these norms pertain respectively to how the image of the world – or its specific part – is perceived and to appropriate modes of reasoning. The normative underpinnings of knowledge are expressed not only in the form of initial – often arbitrary – assumptions and categories that guide individual perception and cognition but also in the inherently social act of establishing particular information as knowledge and defending its status as such (Elder-Vass, 2012: 226). This observation suggests that while the moralistic dimension of populist epistemology may be of high intensity, it is not fundamentally different from other epistemologies, as they too possess a normative foundation.

Importantly, epistemic circles are circles because they potentially intersect to form a cluster, so an individual may be at once a member of many epistemic circles, as long as they are not contradictory (and even then, it remains possible, albeit one risks a cognitive dissonance). Thus, epistemic circles are usually interdependent, and their boundaries may be fuzzy (Elder-Vass, 2012: 229). Finally, what is also useful in the theory of norm circles is its consideration of the relations between individual belonging to a group and the group itself. Elder-Vass (2012: 223) assumes that possessing knowledge or a belief is a trait only an individual can have, but it is the group that validates those beliefs as knowledge, provided it conforms to assumptions and standards of a particular epistemic circle. In other words, while only individuals can know something, it is the group in which they partake that enables knowing (as holding a socially authorised belief).

Before describing in detail the concept of an epistemic community and indicating how it can be combined with all the above theoretical reflection and why it is so vital for studying populism, let us recapitulate the most important points thus far. The epistemic approach shares the post-Laclauian understanding of populism as a set of discursive and non-discursive embodied practices, which advance the claim that ‘real’ people lack democratic representation; a morally charged accusation which entails a call to action to regain or maintain the popular sovereignty threatened by some hostile Others. Seeking to establish a representative relation in which they represent the ‘real’ people, populists effectively create and define both themselves as a political party and the people as a political category with a distinct identity and agency, along with construing the others against whom the people should unite. Thus, these practices seek to transform and reorganise the political (understood, drawing from Rancière, as a politico-epistemological assemblage) through processes of subjectivation (constructing a political subject, i.e. the people) and creating new subjectivities (new depictions of the social world in which this subject acts). The latter is instrumental: constructing a new political entity always entails proposing a new image of the world, one that legitimates the political subject, establishes its relations with other parties (e.g. by questioning the authority and legitimacy of existing institutions), and provides basic assumptions and interpretation frames to make sense of its surroundings. This image is not made from scratch, as populists draw from existing cultural and linguistic resources, practices, discourses, and identities (and therefore may claim that the subject they construct or reinterpret is primordial), make some of them salient, and articulate them in a specific way. Accepting this particular vision of the socio-political world and treating it as truth and reliable knowledge is always political: it reflects the acceptance of an epistemic authority and aspirational promises of a particular group and the rejection of others. Thus, populism has its basis in both the sense of not being represented and recognised and in the conviction that current democratic promises of a better world have been exhausted. Consequently, the contestation of established knowledge and ‘alternative’ production of truth becomes not only a tool of identity politics but also the very essence of reconfiguring the political, namely, the way to introduce new identities, communities, and issues.

This connection between the political and epistemological dimensions is the key point that makes populism so uniquely suited for an epistemic analysis. Populism effectively combines two different meanings of representation: political representation, understood both as a relation and as a core democratic promise that populists claim to fulfil or protect, and epistemic representation, understood as mental operations that construe a specific image of politics, society, or the entire world. As was argued earlier, representation is never a relationship between predetermined actors that just happened to connect. It is always fluid and grounded in a particular social, political, and cultural context. Not only does it involve constant negotiation and readjustment of the identities, beliefs, and goals of both the represented and those that represent, but, crucially, it also involves both of these parties in the joint process of defining their communal identity and the vision of the socio-political world they stand for. Thus, in the case of populist epistemic communities, these two meanings of representation converge, as these communities are centred around the representation of the ‘real’ people, understood both as a political relation and a mental image. Consequently, while voters or sympathisers of any political party may be conceptualised and fruitfully studied as an epistemic community, populists’ supporters are a type of community that demands such analysis in particular.

The notion of an epistemic community has already been outlined earlier, but now, with the use of Elder-Vass’ concepts, it can be defined more precisely. An epistemic community is a specific configuration of epistemic and epistemological circles that together encompass a group of people that not only share some fundamental beliefs and ways of reasoning but also define themselves as a community. An epistemic community is fluid and a particular configuration of circles may change, with some beliefs and ways of reasoning increasing or decreasing in their importance or salience, as, for example, with the ongoing change of Trump’s supporters, many of whom have embraced anti-wax or QAnon stances at various points of time. However, there is always a sense of belonging that binds the group together, and in the case of populist epistemic communities, it is a sense of belonging to the group of ‘real’ people that deserve political representation in their country. Thus, the uniqueness of an epistemic community comes both from a particular combination of epistemic and epistemological circles and from the way the community in question self-defines.

While an epistemic community can be described as a group of people with a specific configuration of shared beliefs and ways of reasoning, the latter are construed and maintained through a variety of knowledge practices and cognitive processes. This is why populist epistemic communities are at the centre of any epistemologically inclined analysis of populism: all the discursive, communicational, and cognitive phenomena that have recently been explored in the scope of the epistemological turn can be understood as either properties of epistemic communities or elements of their knowledge practices. While these communities may vary greatly because they draw from differing cultural and socio-political resources in different countries, some of their features are always of great importance to the epistemic approach. Those key elements of populist epistemic communities – some increasingly explored by populism scholars while others still meriting a closer examination – include discursive practices, populist performances and truth performatives, communication practices and topology, and cognitive, affective, and social psychological processes. These four facets of epistemic communities are, in turn, influenced by epistemic interventions, which will be discussed near the end of this section.

Discursive practices

Populist epistemic communities are established and maintained by discursive practices that select and articulate various existing cultural and linguistic resources to produce the people as a political subject and interpretation frames (e.g. adversarial identity, blame attribution) to induce moral and emotional responses. While populist discourses have been studied with a variety of qualitative and quantitative methods, scholars have largely focused on politicians’ speeches. However, populist discourses are produced and reproduced by entire populist epistemic communities as populists’ supporters discuss everyday matters, both pertaining to politics and not, with other people. Consequently, there is a largely unexplored area of discursive practices of populists’ supporters that – because of their decentralised and scattered nature – are much harder to study yet could be examined through interviews and ethnographic methods (the latter especially in the case of online communication). Moreover, analyses of populist discourses are often descriptive and include mainly one-way communication. Thus, there is a need to study populist discourses as a dialogue and to explore its logic, frames, assumptions, and implicatures as it is performed between people, online or offline, with methods such as the observation of discussions and behaviour online, experimental methods, and focus groups that blend discursive and conversational analysis (Potter, 2012; Van Dijk, 2011).

While the epistemic approach emphasises the understudied role of discursive practices of populists’ supporters as well as the reciprocal nature of populist meaning-making, it still acknowledges the role populist leaders play in constructing, influencing, and maintaining the epistemic community of their supporters. Populist leaders, as supposed representatives of the people, hold a position that is privileged both discursively and communicatively, and thus they simultaneously express beliefs that are to be legitimised through their supporters’ endorsement and legitimise beliefs voiced by their supporters. This double role is especially visible in the way populist leaders, such as Donald Trump, engage with their sympathisers online, posting their own messages and re-posting those of their supporters, thus making them noticeable and legitimising their content (Nguyen, 2020). This privileged position makes populist leaders instrumental in propagating discursive frames and narratives among their supporters, but it is the latter that process, interpret, and ultimately accept those narratives (or not, as, for example, with Law and Justice’s supporters’ very mixed reception of the party’s near-total ban on abortion in Poland; Tilles, 2023). This is why the current rich scholarship on populist leaders’ communication (e.g. De Luca, 2022; Lacatus and Meibauer, 2022; Löfflmann, 2022) needs to be complemented with equally thorough research of their supporters’ discursive practices.

Populist performances and truth performatives

Populist meaning-making has not only a semantic and syntactic dimension (through discursive practices) but also a pragmatic one, studied mainly by analysing embodied political performances (e.g. Moffitt, 2016; Ostiguy and Moffit, 2021). How speech acts are performed – along with a plethora of non-verbal communication (gesticulation, appearance, visual communication, and so forth) – is equally important in construing and consolidating an epistemic community and inciting its members. One element that is vital to the epistemic approach yet understudied is the practices of ‘performing truth’: characteristic ways of speaking and presenting information to establish it as truth. These truth performatives may be specific expressions (e.g. ‘in my own experience’ or ‘we all know how it went’), coupled with certain ways of delivery that activate and fit into a specific community’s frames and scripts used to assess information. There are already studies that address issues very similar to truth performatives, such as populist performances of authenticity (e.g. Lacatus and Meibauer, 2022; Wood et al., 2016). While related more to sincerity and cohesion than truthfulness, these analyses still uncover how populist leaders connect with the epistemic community of their supporters through performances that are consistent, immediate, emphasise the leader’s ordinariness, and build a sense of intimacy (Lacatus and Meibauer, 2022), or through their skilful blending of ‘superstar’ and ‘everyday’ celebrity status (Wood et al., 2016). Other works (e.g. Harsin, 2017) discuss the role of emotions in gaining political trust, emphasising the importance of aggressive, seemingly spontaneous, and authentic emotional performance (so-called ‘emo-truth’) to connect with the audience. Further analyses of this type, perhaps addressing also the performances of populists’ supporters, would surely help to uncover various epistemic standards of populist epistemic communities.

Communication practices and topology

That populist meaning-making is performative means establishing beliefs and attitudes occurs through communication. What is communicated and how it is performed have already been largely addressed in the discursive and performative dimensions discussed above, but there are also issues of communication practices and the topology of epistemic communities. The latter consist of epistemic and epistemological circles, which are made up of interacting individuals. Thus, there are several issues that should be considered to adequately describe those interactions: How do epistemic circles interrelate, and how can this be mapped? How do communication flows (Hilbert et al., 2017) occur between them? What are the proportions of communication that is one-step (politicians communicating directly), two-step (through opinion leaders or Internet personalities), or multi-step (conversations between members of the epistemic community)? What means of communication (online or offline) are employed, and how are they used? Where do populists’ supporters hold their discussions, and in what groups? Together, these elements form a specific communication topology that influences how knowledge is created and shared, for example, through processes of filtering information or the existence of information bubbles and echo chambers. Importantly, while there are already studies that address populists’ supporters’ communication online (e.g. Capdevila et al., 2022; Jungherr et al., 2022; Stier et al., 2020), there is virtually no data on their communication practices offline, mainly because they are much harder to track and observe. Thus, there is an important role in future research for social and political scholars who specialise in qualitative, ethnographic, and experimental methods. The study of populist communication offline through interviews, focus groups, and onsite ethnography, though arduous, may offer a unique insight into communication practices and media diets beside online sources and, in particular, of those audiences that are less present online but still an important part of a particular populist epistemic community, such as elderly voters.

Cognitive, affective, and social psychological processes

One of the strengths of the notion of epistemic communities is that – instead of just focusing on ideological or discursive concepts – it brings individuals and groups into the centre of analysis. Establishing beliefs and attitudes and creating a specific vision of the world are processes that simultaneously stem from cognitive, affective, and social psychological mechanisms and influence said mechanisms. Thus, to adequately describe a populist epistemic community, we must understand how the contents of populist discourses and political performances are received, interpreted, and incorporated into a particular individual’s wider knowledge. Studies mentioned earlier (such as Hameleers and Fawzi, 2020; Schmuck and Matthes, 2017) suggest that cognitive processes such as heuristic processing, attribution, or stereotype-induced reasoning play an important role in the reception of populist discourse, while the latter may also be intentionally crafted to utilise certain stereotypes, escalate affective polarisation, or induce strong emotional responses. Moreover, subjectivation usually has a social psychological dimension: discursive practices are often aimed at intensifying intergroup anxiety and may strengthen in-group favouritism (see Nawrocki 2021). One of the best examples here is the use of conspiracy theories, which often serve to unite populists’ supporters: they demand taking sides and merge epistemic choice with identity declaration (see Kleeberg, 2019), such as with Trump’s ‘Big Lie’ or Law and Justice’s Smoleńsk conspiracy. Importantly, the epistemic approach assumes that it is the interplay of cognitive, affective, and epistemic mechanisms that may produce effects such as prejudice or wilful ignorance of certain information and not some ‘natural’ disposition of individuals belonging to a populist epistemic community. Moreover, it is the interaction between individual and social dimensions, such as in the case of ‘emotional governance’, that is, legitimised ways of experiencing and expressing emotions that are felt both individually and collectively in a specific community (Kinnvall and Svensson, 2022), that ultimately decides how those cognitive and affective processes occur.

Epistemic interventions

The theoretical framework outlined thus far is centred around epistemic communities and their four foundational elements. As shown above, these four elements are intertwined and work in concert to create a specific epistemology of a particular community. While focusing on just one of them for the purposes of conducting an in-depth study of a populist epistemic community is sound, the actions and practices of both populist leaders and their supporters almost always affect more than one of these dimensions. Thus, as the last element of the presented conceptual framework, I propose to understand populist discursive and non-discursive practices jointly as epistemic interventions: various meaning-making practices that seek to influence what people know and believe to be true. The core aim of the majority of populist epistemic interventions is to establish a vision of the world in which the people must regain or defend their sovereignty, thus de facto construing and grounding the popular subject.

The most immediate, but far from the only, example of an epistemic intervention are populist leaders’ discursive practices: speeches, tweets, or interviews aimed at influencing their supporters’ beliefs. These interventions operate simultaneously on all four levels: having content that uses particular discursive frames, being a performance that has to meet specific requirements to be recognised as authentic and truthful, being a communication action between specific people, and being processed and potentially activating cognitive biases or specific affective responses. Thus, to analyse an action as an epistemic intervention, one must consider all these different dimensions. While discursive practices are perhaps the most visible, there are other types of interventions that are no less important. For example, Bolsonaro’s construction of an entire Telegram ecosystem with a network of linked groups and channels (Cavalini et al., 2023) or Trump’s creation of Truth Social are clear examples of epistemic interventions aimed at crafting a specific communication topology to establish more direct and immediate communication without any external supervision. Liking or re-posting messages is another type of intervention in which populist politicians, media personalities, or celebrities effectively have an agenda-setting function among their followers. The above is just the tip of the iceberg, as most populist epistemic interventions are performed by members of the epistemic community themselves, with discussions online and offline, creating, sharing, and liking content, and commenting news or YouTube videos being just a few examples of actions that, while limited in their scope and potential audience, are vital due to their sheer numbers. In an ideational approach all of these interventions would be studied separately, with a division between the supply and demand sides and different types of practices. The concept of an epistemic intervention, however, enables a joint analysis of all these factors that together create a vision of the world adopted by members of a populist epistemic community.

Conclusion

This article indicates that the current epistemological turn in populism studies – the growing interest in the analysis of phenomena pertaining to social epistemology, knowledge practices, and cognitive processes – is not accompanied by a corresponding change in how populism itself is understood and conceptualised. Thus, while offering many valuable and timely insights, this shift has so far produced a highly fragmented body of knowledge. Without a proper theoretical and conceptual framework to explore the epistemic dimension of populism, scholars in the field are currently limited to studying specific cognitive processes or discursive practices without considering how they fit into a wider populist epistemology.

To address this issue, the article proposes to conceptualise populists’ supporters as an epistemic community: a group of people with a specific configuration of beliefs and ways of reasoning. A populist epistemic community is construed and maintained through epistemic interventions, that is, various discursive and non-discursive meaning-making practices that seek to influence what people know and believe to be true. These interventions can influence any of the four key elements that characterise every epistemic community: its discursive practices, performances and truth performatives, communication practices and topology, or cognitive, affective, and social psychological processes. Importantly, both populist leaders and their supporters are involved in epistemic interventions, and it is through their reciprocal relation that a specific vision of the people and the world is created.

The key contribution of the epistemic approach is its integrative potential and the ability to link otherwise isolated concepts and studies into a coherent description of an epistemic community of populists’ supporters. Thus, this approach offers the theoretical framework to combine existing studies on populist epistemology and conduct new, multidimensional research to create detailed case studies of specific communities. The latter is vital as populism is always situated; even though they share the assumption that the ‘real’ people lack representation and sovereignty, the members of various populist epistemic communities may differ significantly on other issues, whether compared internationally between countries or intranationally between voters of two different populist parties. This need for sociological, cultural, and epistemological specificity in populism research is even more pressing, since, as many scholars argue (e.g. Marody, 2017; Touraine, 2014), postmodern identities are complex, with individuals selecting and reinterpreting elements of traditional sources of identification (nation, class, vocation and so forth) and defining themselves increasingly through their values. Ultimately, populism thrives because specific individuals and groups of people adopt particular beliefs and interpretation frames, along with moral judgements and emotional responses they may induce. Understanding how the epistemic community’s worldview emerges, how it is negotiated, and how it interacts with individual experiences involves a careful analysis of what populists’ supporters say and how they interpret the information they receive, establish facts, and use media, but also how and with whom they interact. Thus, these are the key areas for future studies of populist epistemology.