Construction of Populism: Meanings Given to Populism in the Nordic Press

The terminology of populism is often taken for granted, even though the very meaning of populism is quite unclear. The article approaches populism by exploring the meanings given to the term in the Nordic press during the first parliamentary elections of the 2010s in Finland, Sweden, Norway and Denmark. A combination of the quantitative content analysis and the qualitative frame analysis of the leading quality and popular papers is favoured. In the study of the use of populism in the British press the conclusion was that the term was used more or less explicitly in a pejorative way, although uses of the term varied and had no consistent logic. In the Nordic press recurring frames were found, but the meanings given to populism were only fully understood in their political and cultural contexts. The different life phases of the domestic populist parties as well as differences in Nordic political cultures especially explain the variation in the usage of the term.