Populist Counterpublics: Exploring Populist Mobilization, Crises of Representation, and Popular Subjectivities in Canadian Politics
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The concept of "populism" presents a unique conundrum in academia and popular discourse.Despite the universal acknowledgement that it has an increasing presence in global politics, there is little to no agreement on what populism is, how it should be defined, or what concepts should be used to make sense of how it works.In the face of this conundrum, theorizing of populism amongst sociologists and political scientists has been become formulaic and repetitive.First, the most common approach is to formulate a conceptual map of what populism is.Second, that map is then applied to various jurisdictions with elected populist politicians.The result is that field of populism studies is loaded with essentialized, context-independent theories that impose on the unique features of each case and are not flexible enough to capture how populism may manifest as different "species" of a wider political "genus".This dissertation resolves these core issues by introducing the interpretive concept of "populist counterpublics," which identifies populism as a fundamentally context-dependent phenomenon.Populist counterpublics capture how a specific kind of populism operates in-situ, from the perspective of social actors, by analyzing (1) the political logic identifying some representational crisis in a given democracy, and (2) the popular subject-position forged to create a shared, viscerally-felt lack among diverse individuals.Illustrating its utility through five empirical case studies, I argue that the concept of populist counterpublics is a way through the conceptual battle-zone currently plaguing the field.It does so by shifting focus to the subjective aspects of subordination that populists claim to fix, encouraging the suspension of moral judgement before analyzing cases, and attunes us to the unique features of diverse contexts in which populisms operate.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.024 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".