Anti-establishment

This research paper endeavors to trace the anarcho-centric nature of Alex Pina's Money Heist by the application of Naom Chomsky's notion of ‘Anarchy’ with a prime focus on the intentions and actions of the protagonist and primary characters. Through a comprehensive analysis of the narrative, the paper will attempt to research the anarchic beliefs of the characters. It will also examine Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of ‘Carnivalesque’ while centering on his concept of the carnival, group structure, and laughter. It will attempt additionally to study the anarchist history of Spain, including the Catalonian rebellion of 1936; therefore, attempting to understand the origin of the anti-capitalist, carnivalesque, and anarchist ideology in Spain. In light of the work of Miguel Igualada, the study will attempt to link the effect of the 2008 Spanish housing crisis with the content creation in the country. It will draw parallels between the actions of the Professor and Spanish anarchist activist, Enrik Duran. Further, the paper will attempt to trace practices of State domination in the series concerning the role of the mass media with regard to Chomsky's ‘Manufacturing Consent’.  Finally, the paper will attempt to explore the effect of power structures on groups while scrutinizing state practices like surveillance through the application of Michael Foucault's theory of ‘Power/Knowledge’.

Fashion suX is an artistic research project of imaginative utopia creation in the tradition of Thomas More. But instead of an imaginary society on an island, the project explores how a radically different fashion culture could emerge in the footsteps of hardcore and Straight Edge metal. The project specifically examines the underground fashion and craft movement that called themselves suXers (sometimes referred to as " sustainable fashion Straight Edge"). Radically opposing the "do-good " ethics of consumerist sustainability, the suXers embody an ethic that imbues not only clothes and lifestyle but also an infuriated ryection of the fashion system's sartorial betrayal. Opposition needs other motivations than pure virtue, and anger can be one such motivation, as exemplified by the suXers.

The more populism enters public debates, the more it needs close scrutiny. Central and Eastern Europe offers a useful context for exploring the diversity of parties identified as populist; anti-establishment rhetoric provides a suitable conceptual starting point because of its pervasive role in the region's political discourse. Using a new expert survey, this article details the relationship between anti-establishment salience and political positions, showing that anti-establishment parties occupy a full range across both economic and cultural dimensions and many occupy more centrist positions. Narrowing the focus to content analysis of anti-establishment parties' thin ideology in the Czech Republic, Poland, and Slovakia, we concurrently find that for many actors (including those usually labelled as populist) anti-establishment rhetoric is indeed predominant, yet not always extensively combined with other elements of populism: people-centrism and invocation of general will. The findings are important for understanding multiple varieties of anti-establishment politics also beyond the region.

Few studies have systematically examined the rising political and social unrest in the Balkans. This paper investigates the local dynamics and consequences of widespread discontent in Kosovo through the analytical framework of populism as an essentially anti-establishment political style. By focusing on the case of Lëvizja Vetëvendosje (LVV), the paper sets out to consider two related questions: the unique populist style of LVV and the complex reasons behind its electoral breakthrough and continuing support among various groups. Based on a qualitative documentary analysis of the party programme, manifesto, party publications, speeches of the leadership and interviews, the paper finds that LVV successfully melds a populist political style, leftist/social democratic agenda and contentious politics as a means to disperse its message. The second part of the article offers three arguments to explain its appeal: structural factors (electoral availability and party system), societal dynamics (political and economic dissatisfaction) and the agency of LVV (internal organisation, cohesion and leadership). The article contributes to the thriving literature on populism through a novel empirical scope, and to the literature on Southeast Europe through a focus on local agency, voter preferences and the party system.

The Thin Anti-Establishment Supply Dataset (TAESD) assesses 142 social media campaigns by anti-establishment parties from the radical right, left and ‘centre’, as well as their conventional competitors during 23 elections in 8 countries across Europe (Austria, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Slovakia, Spain) 2010-2019.

TAESD maps the diversity of ‘thin-ideological’ messages beyond just populism. The dataset includes continuous measures which capture the salience of: anti-establishment rhetoric, people-centrism, as well as appeals to populist general will, technocratic expertise and extraordinary political vocation.

Please cite as:

Pytlas, B (forthc.) Beyond Populism: The Diversity of Thin Anti-Establishment Contestation in Turbulent Times. Party Politics.

Pytlas, B (2022). Thin Anti-Establishment Supply Dataset (TAESD). https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/F23HM

In this study, I look at two types of political actors commonly described as 'populist' in literature-namely, rightwing populists and technocratic leaders like France's Emmanuel Macron and the Czech Republic's Andrej Babiš. While both types of political actors tend to emerge as a response to a decline in trust in established parties and adopt platforms with anti-establishment and monist elements, they also possess noticeably different qualities. Unlike rightwing populists, technocrats lack a distinctive ideological profile and tend to adopt more inclusive rhetoric by appealing to a broadly-defined community of people. When contrasted with supporters of rightwing populists, empirical analysis of supporters of Macron's and Babiš' parties shows that the two have few commonalities. Relatively few examples of such political leadership , the lack of a distinct ideological profile and the variation of their support bases suggest that one should use caution when conceptualizing technocratic populists as a distinct theoretical type.

In audience-driven contexts, believing passionately in a set of values or a cause is an asset. In borderline cases, this emotional context can facilitate, deliberately or not, the adoption of single-minded visions for solving problems and changing society, leveraging on uncertainty instead of focusing on objective criteria, promoting the categorization of social groups through the paradigm of “us and them”.
This highly emotional narrative has proven to be a versatile vector for extremist discourse, able to overlap the ideological aspect and connect divergent views.
The adaptive features of this rhetoric allowed its pervasiveness from violent extremist circles to opaque communication contexts, becoming a transversal boundary-spanning tool for different social segments. Thus, the propagation of a communication phenomenon, rooted in social structural changes as globalization, educational and cultural divisions, increased polarization between prosperous and less developed regions, tech giants self-regulation, political or reli- gious dissatisfaction.
With these premises, this paper is aimed at analyzing how polarized rhetorics, adapting to an ever-evolving social set of values, can insinuate in some non-extremist contexts and understand how their exploitation by various actors can incentivize the spread of anti-establishment views or beliefs.

In questo paper si è voluto indagare sulla figura politicia di Emmanuel Macron, sui principali motivi di successo della sua candidatura, sul rapporto con gli altri attori politici francesi e sulla portata della sua proposta politica. Ci si sofferma, in particolare, sulla centralità del tema europeista, sui temi post-globalizzazione, e si riflette su quanto la "terza via" possa essere considerata attuale al giorno d'oggi.

In recent years, several countries have noted the strengthening of anti-establishment parties, which, despite not belonging to a homogeneous group, share a confrontational position in relation to the political establishment. The existing literature presents an undeniable richness of potential causes for this trend, but few studies seek to establish configurations of factors to analyze the emergence of such parties. Therefore, the present work develops a crisp-set qualitative-comparative analysis (csQCA) with sixteen parliamentary democracies from Western Europe to find out the possible paths leading to the expected result. The study raises five variables: perception of corruption, unemployment, trust in national parliament, perception on immigration and electoral system. In the end, regardless of the differences between the cases, it is concluded that a negative perception on immigration is a necessary condition for the electoral success of anti-establishment parties. In relation to the other causal conditions, it was not found any patterns of configurations sufficiently capable of explaining the outcome.