Populism, public opinion, and the mainstreaming of the far right: The ‘immigration issue’ and the construction of a reactionary ‘people’
| Published date | 01 February 2025 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/02633957221104726 |
| Author | Aurelien Mondon |
| Date | 01 February 2025 |
https://doi.org/10.1177/02633957221104726
Politics
2025, Vol. 45(1) 19 –36
© The Author(s) 2022
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DOI: 10.1177/02633957221104726
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Populism, public opinion, and
the mainstreaming of the far
right: The ‘immigration issue’
and the construction of a
reactionary ‘people’
Aurelien Mondon
University of Bath, UK
Abstract
While mainstream elite actors with the ability to shape public discourse (politicians, academics,
and the media) generally oppose far-right politics, it is widely argued that such politics represent
democratic populist grievances, whether cultural or economic: ‘this is what the people want’ and
the mainstream should listen. Building on discourse theoretical approaches, this article uses opinion
surveys on immigration to argue that rather than following ‘what the people want’, elite actors play
an active part in shaping and constructing public opinion and legitimising reactionary politics. This
article thus interrogates how public opinion is constructed through a process of mediation, how
certain narratives are hyped and others obstructed. What this highlights is that rather than the
result of a simple bottom-up ‘democratic’ demand, the rise of the far right must also be studied and
understood as a top-down process: public opinion is not only a construction but also an agenda
shaper, rather than a simple agenda tester. This article ultimately finds that ‘the people’ can be
misrepresented in four principal ways: a people to be followed; a people to be blamed; a people to
legitimise reactionary and elitist discourse and politics; and a circumscribed people.
Keywords
discourse, far right, immigration, populism, public opinion
Received: 14th September 2021; Revised version received: 28th April 2022; Accepted: 5th May 2022
In a democracy such as ours, to possess ‘objective’ evidence of the public will is to control a
very valuable asset indeed. (Herbst, 1993: 153)
The shift towards anti-immigration issues in mainstream political discourse, and more
broadly towards topics favourable to the right and the far right is hardly new (see, for
example Hall, 1979). In fact, it is now common to witness centre-left parties pledge to
Corresponding author:
Aurelien Mondon, University of Bath, Bath BA2 7AY, UK.
Email: a.mondon@bath.ac.uk
Twitter: @aurelmondon
1104726POL0010.1177/02633957221104726PoliticsMondon
research-article2022
Article
20 Politics 45(1)
tighten borders as they claim to listen to ‘the people’ and their ‘legitimate grievances’.1
Such shifts are often justified, in part at least, by the use and misuse of public opinion
surveys that claim that immigration is among the top concerns of many if not most
people. This reaction against immigration, multiculturalism, and diversity has been legiti-
mised by a number of academics and think-tanks, who have argued that it is the ‘left
behind’ who tend most to such grievances, and that, therefore, social democratic parties
have most to lose if they do not listen to these cultural demands (see, among others,
Eatwell and Goodwin, 2018; Goodhart, 2017). This has at times gone even further, with
some arguing that ‘racial self-interest’ should be taken more seriously by politicians
(Kaufmann, 2017).
Such normative, ideological points are often made under the pretence of ‘data’, with
accompanying graphs suggesting that the argument is objective, unbiased and/or scien-
tific. Conservative academics involved in the culture wars have made particularly wide
use of rather dubious data and opinion polls to advance their more ideological points
about ‘national populism’, the ‘white working class’, or the ‘Somewheres’. The aim
behind this (mis)use of polls is clearly not accuracy as demonstrated by the rebuttals
they generally receive from colleagues, but impact on the public discourse and agenda
through their access to many mainstream platforms. No matter how clearly and thor-
oughly a claim is debunked, the fact that it simply appears in the first place in legitimate
publications, and from the mouth of apparently legitimate sources, means the damage
is done, particularly to those who are already sympathetic or predisposed to the
position.2
What I would like to explore here goes somewhat further, as correcting the misuse
of opinion polls is not enough to understand their impact: opinion polls, in and of
themselves and whether used appropriately or not, are always political. This does not
mean that they are necessarily inaccurate or have no use, but that ignoring their ideo-
logical purpose, foundation and nature as well as their impact is. The aim therefore is
to interrogate the role ‘public opinion’, as a signifier and elite-driven construction,
plays in the mainstreaming of far-right ideas in particular and on the hegemonic under-
standing and framing of democracy more generally. This article is not interested in
whether polls are accurate or not, but in the role they play in shaping the agenda: how
they frame and prime certain issues while obscuring others, what Herbst calls their
‘symbolic’ value.
As such, the focus here is not sophisticated data analysis, but rather the ‘symbolic’
ways polling data are used in mainstream public discourse to justify certain positions as
democratic demands. Therefore, while the data analysis undertaken is original, the
argument put forward does not require the collection of new data as it is not about the
data per se, but its interpretation. Furthermore, the aim is not to get to the bottom of the
‘immigration question’ or develop a sophisticated quantitative analysis to gauge the prev-
alence of anti- or pro-immigration sentiment among the population. This is interesting but
besides the point as we cannot realistically expect journalists in the current media land-
scape, for example, to have a sophisticated knowledge of quantitative analysis or the time
to ‘crunch the data’. The aim is to engage with data at the level commonly used in our
public discourse to show that even at this level, core issues of accuracy and consistency
are ignored, while certain narratives are preferred over others, which would not necessi-
tate any more expert knowledge to cover or uncover. By doing so, I aim to demonstrate
that the apparently apolitical use of public opinion in our public discourse is based on
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