After the epistemological turn: A framework for studying populism as a knowledge phenomenon
| Published date | 01 May 2024 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/13691481231202636 |
| Author | Michał Nawrocki |
| Date | 01 May 2024 |
https://doi.org/10.1177/13691481231202636
The British Journal of Politics and
International Relations
2024, Vol. 26(2) 444 –465
© The Author(s) 2023
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DOI: 10.1177/13691481231202636
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After the epistemological turn:
A framework for studying
populism as a knowledge
phenomenon
Michał Nawrocki
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.
Keywords
community of knowledge, epistemic community, knowledge practices, political epistemology,
populism, post-truth
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 per-
taining 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,
Faculty of Sociology, University of Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland
Corresponding author:
Michał Nawrocki, Faculty of Sociology, University of Warsaw, Ul. Karowa 18, 00-927 Warsaw, Poland.
Email: m.nawrocki@is.uw.edu.pl
1202636BPI0010.1177/13691481231202636The British Journal of Politics and International RelationsNawrocki
research-article2023
Original Article
Nawrocki 445
political, and economic phenomena: in one term it evokes various interlinked socio-polit-
ical 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 authori-
ties, political and ideological polarisation increasingly translates into epistemological rup-
tures. 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 epistemologi-
cal 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 theo-
retical 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 convinc-
ing 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 assump-
tions 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:
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