“I am not populist”

Situated within studies on discourses about populism (De Cleen et al., 2018De Cleen, Benjamin, Jason Glynos, and Aurelien Mondon. 2018. “Critical Research on Populism: Nine Rules of Engagement.” Organization 25 (5): 649–61. ), this paper zooms in on the use, meanings, and role of the word populist in contemporary socio-political debates and, more specifically, on social media. This paper examines populist as stigma term (Kranert, 2020Kranert, Michael. 2020. “When Populists Call Populists Populists: ‘Populism’ and ‘Populist’ as Political Keywords in German and British Political Discourse.” In Michael Kranert (ed.) Discursive Approaches to Populism Across Disciplines: The Return of Populists and the People. Springer. 31–60. ) and seeks to determine how people negotiate their categorisation as (non-)populist — and hence the meaning of this category — on Twitter. Based on the analysis of 139 tweets including the phrase “I am not populist” in four different languages (Dutch, French, English, Spanish), we propose that two patterns can be identified for the renegotiation of users’ identities as populist: denial and self-categorisation. This analysis confirms that populist as a category can refer to a variety of (political) attitudes and orientations and shows the consequences of the polysemous nature of populist while proving that, in certain contexts, populist refers to some specific and stable categories.