*CFP* "EUROPE FACING POPULISTS IN POWER: COMMUNICATION STRATEGIES AND PRACTICES", PROTAGORAS SYMPOSIUM

Protagoras symposium:

“Europe facing populists in power: communication strategies and practices”

IHECS Bruxelles/Brussels,

June 4 & 5, 2020

Since the early 2000s, "populist" governments as well as governments with a populist coalition partner, both right wing and left wing, have led to democratic paradigmatic shifts such as the advent of the so-called "illiberal" democracy in Hungary, the "conservative revolution" in Poland, the "entrepreneurial populism" in the Czech Republic and the unprecedented "anti-system" coalitions set up in Italy and Greece (Taguieff, 2015; Dieckhoff, Jaffrelot & Massicard, 2019). 

Once in power, populists seek to control all aspects of the state. By practising a form of mass clientelism in order to win the loyalty of the people (Laclau, 2005) or by distinguishing themselves by means of their undeniable hostility towards organised civil society and the media, populists can be described through their constitutive anti-elitism and assumed anti-pluralism. Research shows that a key element of populist strategies is the discursive construction of the "homogeneous", "good", "honest", and "hard-working" people on the one hand, in opposition to the "lazy" and "corrupt" elites on the other hand (Canovan, 1999; Jamin, 2009; Mudde, 2004; Taggart, 2004; Tarchi, 2015). 

However, the notion of populism – as it is regularly framed in the news – remains blurred. Some scholars conceive populism as a communication phenomenon and describe populism as an expression of political communication content and style (De Vreese et al., 2018). Populism as content refers to communicating and staging elements deriving from its ideological corpus. Populism as a style describes a characteristic set of elements to present these ideas (Charaudeau, 2011). For others, populism can only be fully understood through the decisive role played by (digital) media (Reinemann et al., 2019). As such, the aim of this international symposium is to bring together academic scholars from a wide variety of communication-related disciplines to discuss how “populist" European political parties and European leaders communicate during the exercise of their mandate at local, regional or national territorial level.

We are looking for proposals of 500-word abstracts (*.doc/*.docx). Paper proposals may include case studies, empirical analyses, and theoretical pieces. Practitioner perspectives and cross-disciplinary studies will be particularly welcome.

Proposals must be sent by e-mail before February 7, 2020 to colloque@protagoras.be. All proposals will undergo a double-blind review process. Authors will be notified by 15 March at the latest. Participation fee is 100 Euros.