Abstract
Despite growing scholarly interest in anti-populism, the remedies proposed by anti-populists to counter ‘populism’ remain underexplored. I address this gap by examining how anti-populists prescribe cures for the ‘populist’ malady in a corpus of newspaper opinion pieces, academic books and popular non-fiction from the UK and US contexts (2014–2024). Through a mixed-methods frame analysis, I identify four dominant frames: political, economic, cultural and epistemic. These frames diagnose ‘populism’ as authoritarian, economically reckless, nationalist/xenophobic and irrational, respectively. Correspondingly, their prognoses prescribe the cures of restoring liberal-democratic norms; fiscal prudence accompanied by economic growth and a (limited) degree of redistribution; controls on migration flows paired with a reclamation of patriotism and an emphasis on education alongside plainspoken political communication to immunise voters against ‘populism’. Overall, these cures, cohered by an anti-populist master frame, are elite-centric in their scepticism towards popular political engagement and embolden reactionary politics by reproducing the very (‘populist’) far-right discourses which anti-populists claim to oppose.
Introduction
In September 2023, former think tank head turned UK government minister, Torsten Bell (2023), declared that ‘populists are like cigarettes. It is not the first one that does you in, but getting addicted to them that kills you’. Anti-populists in media, academia and politics, who see ‘populism’ as a serious, if not existential, threat to liberal democracy, often rely on medical metaphors, describing it as a disease, illness or pathology (Galanopoulos and Stavrakakis, 2022; Galanopoulos and Venizelos, 2022; Stavrakakis et al., 2018). 1 Nevertheless, the cures which these anti-populists prescribe for the ‘populist’ malady remain underexplored. Put simply, although anti-populists are united in their belief that ‘populism’ must be defeated, how they intend to do so remains unclear. Anti-populism is widespread amongst the ‘intensely politically involved’ (Dean, 2022): figures in the political, media and academic classes who have the power to influence dominant political norms (Allen, 2020), and thus shape how ‘populism’ is (pejoratively) understood in public discourse. Compared to populism, however, anti-populism remains relatively understudied. This gap in the literature must be addressed to understand a political scene characterised by the hyping of ‘populism’ as an ever-growing threat to liberal democracy (Goyvaerts et al., 2024). To fill this lacuna, I investigate the diagnostic and prognostic frames deployed in the intensely politically involved’s anti-populist discourse in a corpus of newspaper opinion pieces, academic books and popular non-fiction books from the UK and US contexts during the so-called ‘populist moment’ (Kim, 2024). Whilst this article is not the first to use frame analysis in the study of anti-populism (see Ietter, 2023), its empirical contribution lies in revealing how ‘populism’ as such is diagnosed and prognosed, rather than focusing solely on adversarial responses to specific ‘populist’ actors within a single national context. Accordingly, the research questions addressed herewith are twofold: How does anti-populism diagnose ‘populism’ as a problem? What cures does anti-populism prescribe to remedy this problem?
By combining quantitative and qualitative approaches, I identify four frames which diagnose ‘populism’ and prescribe corresponding cures. First, the political frame constructs ‘populism’ as an authoritarian phenomenon which must be countered via a renewed adherence to liberal-democratic norms and practices. Second, the economic frame presents ‘populism’ as economically hazardous, prescribing the cures of economic growth and redistribution to reduce public support for ‘populist’ movements, provided these measures remain within the bounds of fiscally responsible spending. Third, the cultural frame equates ‘populism’ with nationalism and xenophobia, which are to be addressed through the controlling of migration flows and an anti-populist reclamation of patriotism. Finally, the epistemic frame sees ‘populism’ as manipulating its supporters with simple answers to complex problems. In turn, citizens are portrayed as needing to be educated on the dangers of ‘populism’, and ‘populism’s’ political opponents are instructed to use plain language to win back lost voters. Anti-populism, then, as I claim in the discussion section of this article, functions as a master frame, whereby shared opposition to ‘populism’, as an empty signifier (see below), and a commitment to its defeat bring these more precise frames together.
To address these issues, this article is organised into four sections. First, I conceptualise anti-populism as a discourse and illuminate its key features. Second, I outline my mixed-methods approach to frame analysis, which combines quantitative collocation analysis with inductive qualitative coding, and explain how I assembled the corpus of discursive units. Third, as my principal empirical contribution, I report the four frames, which contain diagnostic and prognostic components, found in the corpus. Finally, in this article’s discussion section, I explain how these findings contribute to a greater theoretical understanding of anti-populism, as a master frame, highlighting both its elite-centric orientation and the role that anti-populists can play in emboldening reactionary, far-right politics.
Conceptualising Anti-Populism
Whilst populism is a people-centric and anti-elitist discourse which pits ‘the people’, as the underdog, against the ruling ‘establishment’ (Stavrakakis, 2024), I define anti-populism, following Antonis Galanopoulos and Giorgos Venizelos (2022: 255), as follows: a discourse that posits itself in radical opposition to populism, creating a discursive antagonistic frontier between (pro-)populist and anti-populist forces. Anti-populists employ the signifier ‘populism’ in their repertoires in order to denounce or discredit their adversaries.
Having defined anti-populism as a discourse, I shall briefly clarify how I understand this latter concept before reviewing the treatment of anti-populism in the extant literature. Here, I take my cues from Discourse Theory (DT) which views discourse as ‘systems of meaning which form the identities of subjects and objects’ (Howarth, 2000: 9). Discourse, therefore, is not reducible to an actor’s rhetoric, but is that which forms the very identity of said actor. Discourse produces subject positions by placing actors ‘within a discursive structure’ (Howarth and Stavrakakis, 2000: 13). As David Howarth and Yannis Stavrakakis (2000: 13) explain, a ‘particular empirical agent at any given point in time might identify herself, or be simultaneously positioned, as “[B]lack”, “middle class”, “Christian”, and a “woman”’. What is of interest here, following Galanopoulos and Venizelos’ (2022: 255) insight that anti-populism erects ‘an antagonistic frontier between (pro-)populist and anti-populist forces’, is how anti-populist discourse produces an anti-populist subject position by unifying individual actors against the ‘populist’ malady. Although anti-populist discourse might vary in terms of style depending on where it is found (politics, media, academia, etc.), I am principally concerned with what is common across these different genres: the construction of an anti-populist ‘us’ against a ‘populist’ ‘them’.
There are several problematic phenomena attributed to ‘populism’ in anti-populist discourse, including demagoguery (Bailly et al., 2025; Casiraghi, 2021; Schwörer, 2021), fiscal irresponsibility (Ronderos and Glynos, 2023; Schwörer, 2021), public disorder (Brooks, 2018; McGiffen, 2019), (xenophobic) nationalism (Degano and Sicurella, 2019; Demata et al., 2020; Herkman, 2016; Nikisianis et al., 2019), political extremism/violence (Hatakka and Herkman, 2022; Schwörer and Fernández-García, 2021), incompetent/frivolous governance (Bale et al., 2011; Hamo et al., 2019; Kranert, 2020), irrationality (Eklundh, 2020; Galanopoulos and Venizelos, 2022; Stavrakakis, 2018), conspiracy theories (Hamdaoui, 2025), post-truth politics (Galanopoulos and Stavrakakis, 2022; Venizelos, 2024) and communism (Kim, 2024; Schinova, 2023). Interestingly, ‘populism’ has been associated with contradictory policy positions, with liberals and social democrats using the term to criticise anti-migrant politics, and right-wing actors referring to their opponents’ apparently ‘soft’ stance on immigration as ‘populist’ (Casiraghi and Bordignon, 2023). ‘Populism’, within anti-populist discourse, then, acts as an empty signifier – a signifier without a fixed signified (Laclau, 2007) – which can represent all these associated dangers, even if some of them are mutually exclusive. ‘Populism’ as a signifier, in anti-populist discourse, then, as Galanopoulos and Venizelos (2022) intimate, constructs chains of equivalence between different political pathologies, all subsumed under the ‘populist’ signifier whilst, at the same time, building a coalition against ‘populism’ through the same equivalential logic. In other words, specific actors may oppose ‘populism’ for different reasons, because it is supposedly economically illiterate, demagogic, nationalistic and so forth, but they are unified in shared opposition to it. Because of this function of the signifier ‘populism’ within anti-populism, Jana Goyvaerts (2025) and Seongcheol Kim (2024) conceptualise it not only as a discourse but also as a political logic: a process of building a coalition to ‘promote or denigrate a particular state of affairs or political programme’ (De Cleen et al., 2018; see also Glynos and Howarth, 2007). As Goyvaerts (2025: 17) explains, an anti-populist political logic involves ‘the construction of a political identity centre[d] around the construction of “good democrats” against “bad populists”’. Anti-populism, then, is that which holds a, potentially ideologically heterogenous, coalition together against ‘populism’ as an empty signifier.
Although anti-populism, as shown above, can hold together a large variety of complaints about ‘populism’ and be (re-)produced by actors with a range of ideological commitments (Kim, 2024), it, nevertheless, often draws on some common themes which reoccur across national contexts. For instance, anti-populists have a tendency to discredit not only those they signify as ‘populist’ but also ‘the people’, qua the popular classes, who are stereotyped as irrational (Eklundh, 2020), thus showing a demophobic strain which seeks to marginalise non-elite actors politically (Marchart, 2023; Markou, 2021; Yates and Mondon, 2025). This correlates with a general trust in media, academic, political and scientific elites (Hamdaoui, 2022; Voutyras, 2024). Furthermore, anti-populism is most commonly, though not exclusively (see Kim, 2024), found in the ideological centre ground, with anti-populists often drawing false equivalences between the (far) right and left under the ‘populist’ label (Dean, 2022). Consequently, anti-populism can assist in mainstreaming the far right by euphemising such movements or parties as merely ‘populist’ rather than using more accurate terms, such as far/extreme right (Brown and Mondon, 2021). As Cas Mudde (2007) points out, the ‘populist’ character of far-right parties is tertiary to their nativism and authoritarianism, which constitute the far right’s main threat to political equality. A number of scholars have argued that populism is uniquely threatening to minoritised groups (Abts and Rummens, 2007; Müller, 2016; Urbinati, 2019). Nonetheless, anti-populist governments have also excluded minoritised groups, sometimes to a greater extent than their populist competitors, particularly on the left, who themselves often advocate for minority rights (Markou, 2024).
Generally, anti-populists see ‘populism’ as a serious threat to liberal democracy on account of its apparent demagogic ambitions and economic illiteracy. For example, anti-populists castigated the ‘populist’ anti-austerity movements in Southern Europe during the Eurozone crisis as quasi-dictatorial, politically incompetent and economically benighted (Miró, 2019; Stavrakakis et al., 2018), with similar charges levied against ‘populists’ in the Americas (Frank, 2020; Ronderos and Glynos, 2023). By the same token, members of the ‘Vote Leave’ campaign in the 2016 UK referendum on EU membership were construed as economic vandals by their opponents in the ‘remain’ camp due to the predicted fiscal consequences of Brexit (Grainger-Brown, 2022). Further, anti-populists regularly accuse ‘populists’ of demagogically capitalising on voters’ irrationality by offering simple answers to complex problems (Yates and Mondon, 2025). For instance, anti-populist commentators claimed that Jeremy Corbyn’s ‘populist’ leadership of the British Labour Party, which was popular amongst young voters, was supported by self-indulgent children in an infantilisation of politics (Dean, 2022).
Beyond a common faith in elite institutions and a technocratic tendency, however, empirical work has yet to tease out, more precisely, the cures which anti-populist discourse prescribes to defeat ‘populism’ and its associated maladies. In the subsequent section, I lay out the materials analysed and the methodological approach employed to address this research gap.
Materials and Methodology
Constructing a Textual Corpus
As Jonathan Dean (2022) explains, anti-populist discourse is principally (re-)produced by the ‘intensely politically involved’, defined as follows: a group of individuals who hold positions of social power that allow them to shape dominant conceptions of politics and political activity [. . .] They include prominent members of the news, media, notable academics or other leading political professionals, and former or current politicians who are especially influential or highly thought of within the two previous groups (Allen, 2020: 71).
As the intensely politically involved are present in media, politics and academia, there is no a priori method of isolating a representative sample of their anti-populist discourse. I, therefore, used an exploratory approach to data collection by searching for anti-populist discourse across a range of genres. To this end, I assembled a corpus of opinion pieces/editorials (op-eds), along with academic and popular non-fiction books. The op-eds were sampled from the UK and US contexts because of the disproportionate agenda-setting power legacy media from these countries exercise internationally (Guo and Vargo, 2017; Thurman et al., 2020), thus shaping how ‘populism’ is understood in public discourse. Furthermore, both countries experienced the rise of nominally ‘populist’ actors on the right (Donald Trump, Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage) and left (Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders) in this period, thus making the problem of ‘populism’ salient in these contexts. The corpus contained 437 op-eds from the UK and USA, totaling 398,432 words, with the term ‘populis*’ in the title or sub-title from seven broadsheet newspapers, spanning the (centre-)right to the centre-left, and their corresponding Sunday editions: The Guardian, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Financial Times, The Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Telegraph. Op-eds were focused on as ‘a site where social norms and practices are continuously articulated and (de)legitimised’ (Degano and Sicurella, 2019: 45). As these op-eds engaged with ‘populism’ in several countries, this allowed me to observe how ‘populism’ was diagnosed as such, beyond opposition to a single ‘populist’ phenomenon within a given national case. The articles were published between May 2014 and November 2024 during the (so called) ‘populist moment’ (Kim, 2024). I used various databases to search for op-eds with the term ‘populis*’ in the (sub-)title from the seven newspapers listed above (Nexis, EbscoHost and ProQuest). 2
Of the 842 results in the initial search, 437 articles were coded as anti-populist and included in my corpus. In the coding process, I applied Galanopoulos and Venizelos’ (2022) definition of anti-populism by looking for the use of ‘populism/populist’ as a term of disparagement in combination with Kirk Hawkins’ (2010) holistic grading technique for coding entire texts. This involved coding a text as either pro-populist, anti-populist or neutral, with three anchor texts which typify these positions being used as references to guide the coding. My three anchor texts were, respectively, authored by Tony Blair (2017a) (anti-populist), Cas Mudde (2017) (neutral) and Dani Rodrik (2018) (pro-populist). Whereas Blair (2017a) presents all ‘populists’, from the left and right, as threatening, thus epitomising an anti-populist position, Mudde (2017) is neutral in arguing that it is not ‘populism’, but nativism which stands as the main challenge to liberal democracy. Although Mudde uses anti-populist arguments in his academic work (see Mudde, 2004), this article was, nevertheless, a strong candidate for the neutral anchor text because of its de-centring of populism in conversations regarding contemporary challenges to liberal democracy. Put differently, although Mudde often participates in anti-populist discourse, this specific article was an exception in taking a neutral stance. In contrast, Rodrik argues that ‘populism’ is inherently progressive. As such, these three articles capture anti-populist, neutral and pro-populist positions that were used to guide the holistic grading of the remaining op-eds.
Further, academics have played a central role in the development of ‘populism’ as a derogatory signifier in public discourse (Stavrakakis, 2024), with a number of op-eds in the corpus drawing on academic research to support their anti-populist stance (see Hyde, 2019). Therefore, I supplemented this op-ed corpus with 10 academic books, sampled through a combination of deductive and inductive strategies. Sampling deductively, I searched the Web of Science and Scopus databases for the 10 most highly cited academic books that contained the term ‘populis*’ in the title, published between 2014 and 2024. I holistically graded the abstract/summary of each book following Hawkins’ procedure (see above). This resulted in five academic books being coded as anti-populist. I supplemented the corpus with five further academic books which take an anti-populist position, sampled inductively through the literature review process of the larger research project from which this article is drawn, to capture anti-populist academic contributions that perhaps do not include the term ‘populis*’ in the title or are not as highly cited as other works. In addition, I selected four popular non-fiction works, two from the UK and two from the US, authored by political commentators explicitly critical of ‘populism’. Authors were chosen based on their prominence and oppositional stance towards ‘populists’ on the left and right. In the UK, James O’Brien’s (2023) How They Broke Britain and Alastair Campbell’s (2023) But What Can I Do? both take aim at the ‘populism’ of figures such as Johnson, Farage and Corbyn. In the US, the sample included Hillary Clinton’s (2018) What Happened, which critiques both Trump and Sanders’ ‘populism’ and Francis Fukuyama’s (2022) Liberalism and Its Discontents: a defence of liberalism against ‘populist’ threats.
Together, these discursive units captured the anti-populist discourse of the intensely politically involved (see Table 1 for a summary), forming a corpus for investigation within this study.
Summary of Textual Corpus.
Combining Collocation Analysis and Qualitative Frame Analysis
To discern how anti-populist discourse diagnoses ‘populism’ and the cures it prescribes, I conducted a mixed-methods frame analysis. Framing is understood here as a discursive process whereby ‘definitions of a situation are built up in accordance with the principles of organisation which govern events’ (Goffman, 1975). In simpler terms, to frame is to ‘select some aspects of a perceived reality and make them more salient in a communicating text’ (Entman, 1993: 52). Framing in public discourse, then, raises the salience of some issues at the expense of others to guide what audiences think about (Entman, 2007). It is, in this sense, an operation of power as framing allows the actors who have the ability to shape discourse – in this study, the intensely politically involved – to ‘contain, convey and determine what is seen’ (Butler, 2009: 10). For operational purposes, I define frames as narratives which ‘guide both analysis and action in practical situations. Such narratives are diagnostic/prescriptive stories that tell, within a given issue terrain, what needs fixing and how it might be fixed’ (Rein and Schön, 1996: 89). The two framing tasks of concern, therefore, were diagnostic and prognostic: the diagnostic element of the frame constructs ‘populism’ as a problem, and the prognosis proposes the cure(s) (Snow and Benford, 1988).
To identify these frames, I combined quantitative and qualitative approaches. First, in the quantitative stage, I used collocation analysis, which identifies words that commonly co-occur alongside a chosen word of interest (a node word) (Baker, 2023). 3 As shown by Nikos Nikisianis et al.’s (2019) study of anti-populism in the Greek press, collocates of ‘populism’ can help to identify how it is diagnosed. For example, in the analysis below, the co-occurrence of ‘populism’ and ‘authoritarian’ indicated how the former was diagnosed as a political problem. Using the software AntConc, I identified collocates of the node word ‘populis*’ (five words to the left and right) to capture the diagnostic component of anti-populist framing. To filter out irrelevant collocations, the collocate had to appear at least three times across a minimum of three discursive units. Further, I used two statistical measures: Log-Likelihood (LL) and Mutual Information 2 (MI2), which are, respectively, hypothesis testing and effect size measures (Brezina, 2018). 4 Setting the minimum threshold for LL at 15.13 (p < 0.001) and MI2 at 3 indicated that the collocates returned occurred frequently and predominantly alongside the node word. Second, I undertook an inductive qualitative frame analysis using NVivo. Utilising a purposive sampling strategy which identifies typical cases of anti-populist discourse from the corpus (Emmel, 2013), I downsampled the corpus using the ProAnt software, which selects the most prototypical articles within the corpus by identifying keywords that are over-represented, and sampling articles which contain the greatest number of these keywords (Anthony and Baker, 2015). Whilst I acknowledge the potential limitations of this strategy, in that it may exclude some rarer frames in the corpus, nonetheless, because this study focuses on the dominant frames in anti-populist punditry, a sampling strategy which looks for typical cases was more appropriate (for similar studies which have used this approach, see Bremner, 2023; Gianfreda, 2018). I coded the 200 most prototypical articles openly, along with the academic/popular non-fiction books, to identify emergent themes and, subsequently, in the axial coding stage, combined these codes to reconstruct the core frames of the corpus. 5 Adapting the criteria for frame validity developed by Margaret Linström and Willemien Marais (2012) and Salomé Ietter (2023), the final frames had to be conceptually coherent, commonly occurring within the corpus, distinguishable from the other frames and recognisable by others. This began an iterative process of re-calibrating the identified frames in accordance with these criteria. Finally, I triangulated these qualitative findings with further collocation analysis, where appropriate, to ensure that the frames were representative of the whole corpus. The steps of the analysis are shown in Figure 1.
Process of Analysis.
Analysis
Collocation Analysis
The collocates of the node word ‘populis*’ provide initial insights into how ‘populism’ is framed via a holistic analysis of the corpus. I have grouped the collocates of ‘populis*’ into five thematic clusters, displayed in Table 2. First, ‘populism’ is seen as a growing movement. Second, ‘populism’ is constructed as ‘extreme’, advancing ‘authoritarian’ and ‘nationalist’ policies. Third, ‘populism’ is presented as a disruptive force. Fourth, ‘populist leaders’ are accused of manipulating their supporters, relying on ‘rhetoric’ and a ‘playbook’. Finally, ‘populism’ is understood as an emotional form of politics, driven by ‘anger’ and constituting a ‘backlash’ against the political status quo. Using these quantitative results as a starting point, in my qualitative analysis, I identified four frames which contain diagnostic and prognostic components: a political frame, an economic frame, a cultural frame and an epistemic frame, which I now consider in turn (see Table 3 for a summary).
‘Populis*’ Collocates. 1
This lemma returns results for ‘populism’, ‘populist’ and ‘populists’
This lemma refers to, amongst others, ‘anti-establishment’, ‘anti-immigrant’, ‘anti-EU/European’, ‘anti-democratic’, etc. I coded this term into the disruptive cluster because of its articulation of ‘populism’ as an oppositional force.
Anti-Populist Frames.
The Political Frame
The first frame diagnoses ‘populism’ as a political problem which engenders authoritarian rule, as supported by the ‘extreme’ cluster in the above collocation analysis. In terms of the cures, some hold that measured and responsible politicians must be returned to office to defeat the ‘populist’ threat. Others argue for greater democratic renewal. What unites these cures is the assumption that addressing ‘populism’ requires the preservation of liberal-democratic norms and practices, rather than a rupture from them.
‘Populism’ is chiefly accused of harbouring authoritarian ambitions, with ‘populist’ leaders using their electoral mandate to centralise power: Populism’s distinctive feature is not the redistribution of wealth. It is the concentration of power outside liberal democratic institutions and the rule of law. The populist leader uses antielitist [sic] rhetoric to enhance his messianic appeal with the people and undermines checks and balances by concentrating power (Vargas Llosa, 2020).
6
This line of thinking is also evident in academic anti-populist discourse, which claims that ‘populist’ leaders insist that they, and only they, are entitled to rule (Galston, 2018; Mounk, 2018; Müller, 2016; Urbinati, 2019). ‘Populism’, then, apparently marginalises any force which would prevent ‘the people’s’ will from being realised. It is accused of targeting, amongst others, ‘the media, courts and legislatures’ (The Washington Post Editorial Board, 2024).
Commentators put forward several remedies in response to the authoritarian threat of ‘populist’ rule. For some, the cure lies in returning responsible, measured and principled politicians, who respect liberal-democratic norms, to office: [O]rthodox politicians such as Biden and Keir Starmer seem less flustered by populism than their predecessors were. They have not been drawn into its culture wars. By sounding measured instead, they’ve made the movement seem shrill (Beckett, 2020). Populists have been able to dismiss anti-Trump Republicans as malcontents or ‘RINOs’ – Republicans in name only – when conservatives in fact represent the best of the Republican tradition. We can’t risk losing that heritage. America has long benefited from a principled conservative party that, when balanced against a responsible progressive party, has created the stability that has held our country together (Danforth, 2023).
For others, democratic renewal is required to stem the rising ‘populist’ tide. In The Washington Post, for example, Arjen Nijeboer and Thijs Vo (2018) admonish the Dutch parliament for abolishing citizen-initiated referenda: Modern politics requires more democracy, not less. In fact, a strong case can be made that a ‘closed’ political system like in the Netherlands has contributed to the rise of populism in the traditionally moderate country.
This being said, proponents of democratic renewal continue to work within the framework of liberal representative democracy. Nijeboer and Vo (2018), for example, see referenda as an opportunity for ‘dissatisfied citizens blow off steam and make gradual changes to policies’ as a supplement to parliamentary politics. The use of the ‘blow off steam’ idiom and reference to ‘gradual changes’ implies a discharging of pent-up emotions in a restrained manner, rather than a comprehensive proposal for participatory governance. Similarly, in the UK, The Times, (2019) proposal for renewal lies in founding a new political party to oppose Brexit-fuelled ‘populism’. The cures for ‘populism’s’ authoritarian rule, then, stand in continuity with liberal-democratic practices, rather than rupturing from them. Anti-populist commentators centre the activity of responsible and measured politicians at the expense of participatory alternatives. This reflects the elite-centrism of anti-populist discourse, which I explore further in this article’s discussion section.
The Economic Frame
Second, I identified an economic frame which interprets the lavish spending of ‘populist’ governments as economically hazardous. In turn, this frame proposes a return to economic growth and a reduction in economic inequality to curb ‘populism’s’ appeal as cures. Nevertheless, I demonstrate how, for anti-populists, redistribution must be constrained by fiscal prudence. Anne Applebaum (2016) shows this clearly by arguing that the ultimate ‘populist’ promise is ‘free money’: Nationalization, spending promises, empty slogans: Politicians who cynically promise the impossible wind up with hyper-inflation if they deliver – or political catastrophe if they don’t.
It is important to say that, for Applebaum (2016), this fiscal imprudence applies to ‘populism’ of the right and left as the former supposedly favours unfunded tax cuts and the latter engages in unsustainable welfare spending. Populism is ‘the politics of children in the sweet shop being told that “yes you can have everything and don’t have to pay”’ (O’Mahoney, 2018).
‘Populism’, therefore, presents an economic risk through its profligate spending. Accordingly, my findings suggest that the economic cures to ‘populism’ are twofold: economic growth and a moderate degree of redistribution. Beginning with the former, securing growth will purportedly prevent voters from being tempted by ‘populist’ radicalism and the fiscal irresponsibility that comes along with it in the future. This is evident in the coverage of the defeat of the Greek populist radical left party, SYRIZA, in the 2019 general elections: A growing economy would in turn attract many of the hundreds of thousands of young, educated Greeks who emigrated during the crisis and have thrived abroad. If enough of them return home, they might constitute a powerful voting bloc in favor of further reform. If all that happens – and it is a big if – then populism in Greece will be left without a leg to stand on (Palaiologos, 2019).
Furthermore, there is a recognition in the corpus that growing economic inequality has precipitated ‘populism’s’ rise on the left and right and must be reduced to thwart its appeal: Long-discarded notions of progressive taxation, active competition policy, and social equity should be disinterred. Those who have come to worship unfettered markets doubtless will cry foul. They should have learnt by now that the hyperliberalism of the Washington consensus is a certain route to political populism (Stephens, 2017).
Nonetheless, beyond a small degree of redistribution through progressive taxation, for example, more comprehensive economic reforms are discounted: Progressives have not found an effective response. A lot of what they are doing is only making the situation worse. In the United States, they are pushing for socialism, the Green New Deal, Medicare-for-all, a 70 percent marginal tax rate, reparations for slavery, the abolition of the electoral college and other initiatives that, rightly or wrongly, scare a lot of people, especially older white people [. . .] Progressives know that society can’t go in reverse. What they don’t seem to realize is that driving into the future at 120 mph is going to scare a lot of people. It’s much safer to drive at 20 mph to get everyone used to the ride (Boot, 2019).
The cure to ‘populism’s’ economic mismanagement, then, is found in a return to economic growth and redistribution, yet more radical economic policies, such as those which offer ‘free money’, risk further reproducing the very instability upon which ‘populism’ thrives. In the political sphere, anti-populist politicians, such as Joe Biden in the USA, Keir Starmer in the UK and Anthony Albanese in Australia have differentiated between ‘public investments in the competitive infrastructure of the supply side in the economy (“good spending”)’ and ‘consumption-driven expenditures associated with Keynesian welfare policy (“bad spending”)’ (Toye and Wamsley, 2025: 1470). Simply put, anti-populists afford a central place to fiscal prudence, in contrast to ‘populism’s’ economic irresponsibility, even when a moderate amount of redistribution is considered necessary.
The Cultural Frame
Along with political and economic disruption, in the cultural frame, divisive ‘populists’ are accused of tearing apart their countries’ communal bonds. ‘Populists’ who ‘dream of sowing division’ (Schetyna, 2019) ‘wage culture wars and stoke grievance’ (Danforth, 2023). Primarily, as supported by the above collocation analysis, ‘populism’ is equated with nationalism and xenophobia. In response, rather than firmly defending migration, commentators advocate for controlling immigration and reclaiming patriotism to unify societies which ‘populists’ have divided.
Starting with the diagnosis, ‘populism’ is accused of being nationalist and xenophobic. Although this likely reflects the ‘reified association’ often drawn between ‘populism’ and the far right in anti-populist discourse, which largely ignores progressive left-wing populism (Stavrakakis et al., 2017: 421), this accusation is also extended to left ‘populists’: Insurgent parties of both left and right draw their conflicting passions from a well of nationalism, and this appears in the way that they apportion blame for the economic catastrophe. Both Spain and Greece have certainly been badly hit by the crisis and its aftermath. But it would be intellectually dishonest to lay all the blame for current hardships on Angela Merkel, as Syriza and Podemos often do, or on the patent dishonesty of Greek statistics, as northern European rightwingers do. Many of Spain’s difficulties find their origin in the home-grown speculative construction bubble of the early 2000s (The Guardian Editorial Board, 2015).
Indeed, the covert ‘nationalism’ of SYRIZA was apparently revealed, some commentators suggest, by their choice of coalition partner in the anti-memorandum government (the ‘right-wing populist’ party, ANEL) and their supposed anti-EU/German orientation (Applebaum, 2018; Konstandaras, 2016; The Times Editorial Board, 2014).
Nevertheless, this frame mainly focuses on the far right, euphemised as merely ‘populist’ and their anti-migrant rhetoric: Populists assume that immigrants leave less of the (presumably fixed) national wealth for native-born citizens (Ganesh, 2019).
Yet rather than responding with a full-throated defence of migration, commentators argue that the ‘left behind’, understood as a collective subject, racialised as white, who vote for the far right (Mondon, 2025a), must have their ‘cultural grievances’ regarding migration addressed to curb ‘populism’s’ appeal: As long as mainstream political parties turn a blind eye to immigration, they are in danger of being outflanked by the populist right (Zakaria, 2024).
Former UK Prime Minister, Tony Blair (2017b), echoes this argument: Immigration is vital for the future of our economies and societies. But it needs to be controlled and managed so the system is fair and can command public support [. . .] This is needed to reduce the space for populists to use immigration as a tool to exploit people’s legitimate fears, sow division and delegitimize liberal democratic institutions.
Although there are those who argue for an anti-populist championing of migration (see Malik, 2018), such voices are in the minority. This is verified by both the collocates of ‘*migra*’ (immigration, migration, migrant(s)) in the corpus, such as ‘illegal’, ‘mass’, ‘crisis’ and ‘issue’ which indicate, overall, a negative articulation (see Table 4) and recent research by the Camila Montiel-McCann and Maka Julios-Costa (2025) which identifies, in the UK context, the widespread construction of migration as a threat in House of Commons debates and news articles.
Top 10 *Migra* Collocates (Ranked by Log-Likelihood).
In fact, anti-populist contributors, in this corpus, advocate for a reclamation of patriotism as a softer alternative to ‘populist’ nationalism. Patriotism is positioned as a unifying cure for ‘populism’s’ divisiveness: But therein lies the problem. The reason why Trump triumphed. Because liberals had grown progressively more uncomfortable with assertions of national pride, love of country and patriotic feeling, leaving these deep, powerful and natural human sentiments there for a populist showman to exploit (Gove, 2016). The EU must become a union for sober patriots if it is to defeat the intoxications of nationalism (The Guardian Editorial Board, 2015).
In sum, the cure for xenophobic ‘populism’ is to sublimate these impulses into a softer patriotism which still addresses the concerns of the (white) ‘left behind’ regarding migration. As a result, these anti-immigration demands are hyped and legitimised, even though the evidence of their popularity is rather thin (see Mondon, 2025a), thus further evidencing the role which anti-populism can play in mainstreaming the far right, as discussed in this article’s fifth section.
The Epistemic Frame
Finally, the epistemic frame holds that ‘populist’ leaders manipulate their voters by appealing to emotions over rationality, as verified in the ‘manipulative’ and ‘emotional’ clusters of the collocation analysis (Table 2). In an expression of ‘epistemic snobbery’, contributors hold that ‘one needs to have the “correct” kinds of experiences or expertise to be worth listening to in the course of political discussion’ (Allen, 2018: 128), which ‘populism’-prone voters supposedly lack. In response, commentators argue that citizens must be educated to see through the simple answers to complex problems which ‘populists’ offer. Simultaneously, anti-populist politicians must use plain language to garner the support of ‘populism’-prone voters.
In the diagnosis, ‘populism’ is supposed to appeal to voters’ emotions rather than their rational interest, a trope often found in anti-populist discourse (see Eklundh, 2020): Populism is not about being popular. It is the relegation of fact and reason to lies and emotion (Campbell, 2019).
‘Populism’, then, apparently dupes voters by providing simple answers to complex problems (Campbell, 2023; Collins, 2016; O’Brien, 2023). The cure offered for these ‘populist’ emotional appeals is twofold. First, voters must be educated to see through ‘populism’s’ lies, and rationality defended: [O]ne may expect that a young generation, which is well prepared and has had ample opportunity to discuss all arguments of different sides in the classroom (including the arguments of populists), will be more able to make a reasoned choice and become active voters (Van Herpen, 2021: 218). We need to restore liberalism’s normative framework, including its approach to rationality and cognition. A critical norm is belief not in ‘science’, which never speaks with a single, authoritative voice, but in a scientific method that is open-ended and dependent on empirical verification and falsification (Fukuyama, 2022: 113–114).
Second, political candidates who oppose ‘populists’ must use plain language to sell themselves to the electorate and avoid ‘faculty lounge’ language (Carville, quoted in Zakaria, 2021): Mainstream politicians might also adapt populist tactics that have proved successful. Perhaps most important, they have to try speaking in ways that ordinary people understand, without talking down to them, without oversimplification, without harsh or divisive rhetoric (The Washington Post Editorial Board, 2024).
Taken together, the epistemic frame holds that ‘populism’ manipulates voters by appealing to their base emotions over rationality, offering simple answers to complex problems. In response, the electorate should be educated to see through ‘populism’s’ mistruths, rationality must be defended and political candidates who oppose ‘populists’ must use language that ‘ordinary people’ understand to win them back to the anti-populist cause. There is something of a paradox here between the anti-populist accusation of oversimplification levied at ‘populists’, whilst simultaneously holding that ‘mainstream politicians’ must use plain language to win back ‘populism’-prone voters, which I now explore further.
Discussion: Anti-Populism as a Master Frame
As explained in the ‘Conceptualising Anti-Populism’ section, Goyvaerts (2025) and Kim (2024) view anti-populism as a political logic, whereby ‘populism’ as an empty signifier is associated with a wide variety of political dangers, which creates a ‘bad’ ‘populist’ ‘them’ in contrast to a ‘good’ anti-populist ‘us’. Because of the emptiness of ‘populism’ as a signifier, it can be used to denigrate a range of ideologically heterogenous actors, all subsumed under the ‘populist’ threat. Reflecting on the findings of this article and translating this conceptualisation into the vocabulary of frame analysis, I claim that, here, anti-populism functions as a master frame. Master frames are more general than the frames identified in this analysis as they are ‘elastic, flexible and inclusive’ such that they ‘enable different groups to be allied on common political struggles’, holding a variety of more precise frames together (Coticchia and Catanzaro, 2022: 437). It is, therefore, anti-populism’s insistence that ‘populism’ – as an empty signifier which is used to signify several threats – must be defeated, which coheres the political, economic, cultural and epistemic frames, along with the actors that sponsor these frames. In this discussion section, I put forward three theoretical reflections regarding anti-populism as a master frame, derived from these empirical findings. I argue, first, that the framing in this corpus demonstrates the elite-centrism of anti-populism and its scepticism towards the role of the popular classes in political life. Second, I highlight the role anti-populism plays in mainstreaming the far right via its uncritical acceptance of reactionary positions, particularly regarding migration. Third, I explain how anti-populists reconcile these two, seemingly conflictual commitments to, on the one hand, elite-centrism and, on the other, listening to reactionary demands which anti-populists attribute to ‘the people’, by contending that these demands must be satisfied by measured anti-populist elites rather than ‘populist’ firebrands.
An Elite-Centric Response to ‘Populism’
Adversarial responses to ‘populism’ need not be elitist rejections of popular involvement in politics. ‘Populism’ can, instead, be understood as symptomatic of a democratic deficit and a sign that democracy must be deepened (Goyvaerts, 2025). However, in contrast to populism’s people-centrism (Stavrakakis, 2024), the cures offered to tackle the rise of ‘populism’ in this corpus are elite-centric. ‘Populism’ as a signifier within the anti-populist master frame, therefore, signifies a distrust of the political activity of the popular classes and a generalised commitment to elite rule.
In the epistemic frame, voters are portrayed as needing to be educated against the dangers of ‘populism’ and are caricatured as irrational: duped by ‘populism’s’ simple answers to complex problems. In turn, they become passive recipients of sound, anti-populist, civic education (see Mounk, 2018; Van Herpen, 2021). Dispersions are further cast upon the intelligence of ‘populist’ voters through the claim that politicians must use simple messaging and avoid using ‘faculty lounge’ language. Somewhat paradoxically, this latter argument betrays a degree of anti-intellectualism, an orientation more commonly associated with populism than anti-populism (Merkley, 2020). Even so, it is, crucially, underpinned by a patronising view of voters’ ability to understand complex political ideas, which are positioned as the domain of elites who must simplify them for popular audiences. In addition, in the political frame, even when more participatory democratic practices are proposed, these are posited as supplementary to elite-led parliamentary politics and the need to elect responsible and measured candidates. Finally, the economic frame advocates for a reduction in economic inequality to tackle ‘populism’. Nonetheless, emphasis is placed upon elites delivering economic goods in the form of redistribution or growth to dissuade voters from endorsing ‘populists’, rather than proposing strategies to build collective power for the economically disadvantaged or devolve policy-making capacities to communities. For anti-populists, redistribution must be constrained by fiscal responsibility vis-à-vis the economically irresponsible ‘populists’ who falsely promise ‘free money’ (see Applebaum, 2016). Dovetailing with the epistemic frame, voters who are duped by ‘populist’ spending promises should have their expectations managed by political and economic elites who, supposedly, have a far better grasp of how to run a healthy economy.
Emboldening Reactionary Politics
Moreover, the findings demonstrate how anti-populism can embolden reactionary politics – a type of politics ‘which seeks to consolidate systemic hierarchies or restore them’ (Newth et al., 2025: 851) – even when standing in nominal opposition to the ‘populist’ far right (see Brown and Mondon, 2021). Starting with the cultural frame, the nationalist and xenophobic tendencies of ‘populism’ are portrayed as emerging from grassroots opposition to immigration on the part of the ‘left behind’, betraying a lack of reflexivity by anti-populist commentators regarding the agenda setting role of the intensely politically involved in media, politics and academia in hyping the ‘immigration issue’ (Mondon, 2025a). Reactionary, nationalist and xenophobic demands are uncritically accepted as being what voters want, such that mimicking these policies is viewed as a precondition for defeating ‘populism’. These contributors advocate for a softer patriotism to counter ‘populist’ nationalism. Yet, as Meghan Tinsley (2022: 808) demonstrates, the boundaries between ‘patriotic’ and ‘nationalist’ discourses are often fuzzy as the former constructs ‘an in-group of citizens who embody an authentic national tradition, and an out-group of co-citizens who threaten to hijack the national spirit’. The examples of Starmer and Biden are pertinent here as both have pursued highly restrictive migration policies in the hopes of dampening the appeal of their ‘populist’ far-right competitors (Capicchiano Young, 2024; Newth et al., 2025), whilst also trying to articulate a progressive patriotism. At the time of writing, this strategy has strengthened the far right by moving the political debate onto their favoured terrain, with Donald Trump being re-elected to the presidency in November 2024 and Reform UK currently leading in the opinion polls. Further, the other frames play a role in emboldening reactionary politics, albeit indirectly. In the political frame, commentators endorse responsible and measured politicians of the liberal centre, such as Starmer and Biden. In so doing, anti-populist discourse produces a myopic view of reactionary politics which sees such actors as standing as a bulwark against reactionary figures of the ‘populist’ far right, even when they produce similar policies and discourses (Mondon, 2025b). As Emmy Eklundh (2026) has made clear, exceptionalising ‘populism’ as a unique threat to nominally inclusive liberal democracy only conceals that exclusions are latent within liberalism in terms of race and gender, particularly in a European context which continues to be marked by coloniality. By clinging on to liberal-democratic norms as a bulwark against ‘populism’, and specifically the ‘populist’ far right, these commentators retain a faith in a hegemony which has been demonstrably unable to stymie the recent rise of reactionary politics. Although the economic frame advocates for some limited redistribution to defeat ‘populism’, its commitment to fiscal prudence contains within a scepticism of a more radically redistributive programme, thus further seeking to shore up the atrophied liberal hegemony.
Who are ‘The People’?
At first glance, there seems to be a tension between these two features of the anti-populist master frame in this corpus. On the one hand, anti-populism dismisses the demands of ‘the people’ through its elite-centric response to ‘populism’, yet on the other, it mainstreams and emboldens reactionary politics precisely because it views such policies as being what ‘the people’ want. Nevertheless, this articulation of ‘the people’ remains an elitist one. Contributors in this corpus accept the contention of the ‘populist’ far right that its demands are of popular, even if this is empirically dubious (Begum et al., 2021; Dobbernack, 2024; Mondon and Winter, 2020). Yet the elite-centrism of anti-populism is sustained through the claim that these demands must be implemented by responsible anti-populist elites. The anti-populist master frame is, therefore, underpinned by a demophobic vision of politics that is ‘for “the people”, rather than of or by them’ (Yates and Mondon, 2025: 691). This echoes the infamous statement of former French Prime Minister, Laurent Fabius, that far-right figurehead, Jean-Marie Le Pen, asked the right questions, but came up with the wrong answers. In other words, for anti-populists, the demands of the ‘populist’ far right, particularly regarding immigration, are fundamentally legitimate yet they must be responded to by measured anti-populist elites, rather than ‘populist’ firebrands who risk taking things ‘too far’. As a result, supporters of the ‘populist’ far right become ‘a people to be blamed’ for the ‘reactionary turns enacted by media and political elite[s] who not only appear to have no choice in their coverage, campaigning, or policy-making, but also no control on what is discussed at the national level’ (Mondon, 2025a: 30–31). The role of this ‘people’ is, moreover, highly circumscribed (Mondon, 2025a). Their function is to passively vote for responsible anti-populist elites who will deliver upon reactionary demands whilst avoiding incompetent and chaotic ‘populist’ governance.
This further speaks to which demands anti-populists tend to be sympathetic towards, or, put differently, who really counts as being part of ‘the people’, and therefore, worthy of democratic attention. As I have argued in previous work (Yates and Mondon, 2025), anti-populists are more often sympathetic to ‘populist’ demands emerging from the far right, regarding migration and nationhood, than to the social-democratic economic demands found on the left (see also Ronderos and Glynos, 2023). This, perhaps, should not be surprising as really existing liberal regimes (Finlayson, 2015), particularly in the neoliberal era, have long accommodated policies of which the ‘populist’ far right merely demands an intensification, such as border militarisation or restrictions on the right to protest (Katsambekis, 2023; Mondon, 2025b; Zorko et al., 2023). In contrast, social-democratic demands from the ‘populist’ left carry a commitment to redistribution which threatens the hegemonic neoliberal tenet of fiscal prudence (Yates and Mondon, 2025), from which even contemporary centre-left governments have been reluctant to break (Toye and Wamsley, 2025). Anti-populism, then, not only emboldens the reactionary politics of the far right but also further consolidates the systemic hierarchies already present within liberalism and seeks to discredit ‘populist’ left alternatives. In this sense, as Sebastián Ronderos and Jason Glynos (2023) point out, the hypothesis that anti-populism is a form of horseshoe theory that sees the ‘populist’ (far) right and left as equally threatening may need some revision.
Concluding Remarks
In conclusion, this article has highlighted the cures which anti-populist discourse prescribes to tackle the diagnosed problem of ‘populism’. Through a mixed-methods frame analysis, I have identified four central frames: political, economic, cultural and epistemic. The political frame holds that ‘populist’ authoritarianism is to be countered through a renewed adherence to liberal-democratic norms and practices. The economic frame contends that ‘populism’ is economically hazardous and that economic growth and redistribution are required to dissuade voters from supporting ‘populists’ in future elections. The cultural frame casts ‘populism’ as nationalist and xenophobic. In response, the concerns of the so-called ‘left behind’ who support ‘populism’ must be addressed through the control of migration flows and a reclamation of patriotism. Finally, the epistemic frame portrays ‘populism’ as duping its supporters by offering simple answers to complex problems, which requires citizens to be educated regarding ‘populism’s’ dangers, and for anti-populist politicians to use plain language to win over ‘populism’-prone voters. The central contributions of this article are, therefore, twofold. First, I have demonstrated, empirically, how anti-populism prescribes cures to the diagnosed ‘populist’ threat. Second, these empirical findings have helped to develop a greater theoretical understanding of anti-populism by illuminating its elite-centrism and role in emboldening reactionary politics, which partially unsettles the claim that anti-populism sees the ‘populist’ left and right as equally threatening. More broadly, this article demonstrates how shared opposition to a negatively articulated empty signifier can hold together a heterogenous ‘anti-’ discourse coalition (Hajer, 2005), which may have implications for the study of, for example, anti-communist, anti-fascist and anti-liberal politics (see Kim, 2024). With many far-right actors positioning themselves against ‘liberalism’, most prominently Viktor Orbán in Hungary (Laruelle, 2022), further research may wish to investigate how shared opposition to ‘liberalism’, as an empty signifier, can unify a set of otherwise disparate grievances. Overall, because anti-populism remains the dominant orientation for the intensely politically involved in academia, media and politics, it often goes uninterrogated. It is precisely because of anti-populism’s quasi-hegemonic status that its framing must be critically scrutinised, or else the biases, exclusions and deficiencies that it perpetuates will remain unchallenged.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The author wishes to thank the editors and reviewers for their constructive feedback. The author would also like to thank Aurelien Mondon, George Newth, Sophia Hatzisavvidou, Benoit Dillet, Rob Walker and Eli Ramsvik Melby for their comments. Special thanks are also owed to the organisers and attendees of the DESIRE seminar at Vrije Universiteit Brussel (May 2025) for their engagement with the paper.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article: This research was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council (ES/P000630/1).
Ethical approval and informed consent statement
Ethical approval was not required for this study.
Data availability
This study does not contain any primary data.