Populism and Science in Europe (Palgrave Studies in European Political Sociology) 3030975347, 9783030975340

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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN EUROPEAN POLITICAL SOCIOLOGY

Populism and Science in Europe Edited by  Hande Eslen–Ziya · Alberta Giorgi

Palgrave Studies in European Political Sociology Series Editors Carlo Ruzza School of International Studies University of Trento Trento, Italy Hans-Jörg Trenz Faculty of Political and Social Sciences Scuola Normale Superiore Pisa, Italy

Palgrave Studies in European Political Sociology addresses contemporary themes in the field of Political Sociology. Over recent years, attention has turned increasingly to processes of Europeanization and globalization and the social and political spaces that are opened by them. These processes comprise both institutional-constitutional change and new dynamics of social transnationalism. Europeanization and globalization are also about changing power relations as they affect people’s lives, social networks and forms of mobility. The Palgrave Studies in European Political Sociology series addresses linkages between regulation, institution building and the full range of societal repercussions at local, regional, national, European and global level, and will sharpen understanding of changing patterns of attitudes and behaviours of individuals and groups, the political use of new rights and opportunities by citizens, new conflict lines and coalitions, societal interactions and networking, and shifting loyalties and solidarity within and across the European space. We welcome proposals from across the spectrum of Political Sociology and Political Science, on dimensions of citizenship; political attitudes and values; political communication and public spheres; states, communities, governance structure and political institutions; forms of political participation; populism and the radical right; and democracy and democratization. More information about this series at https://link.springer.com/bookseries/14630

Hande Eslen-Ziya  •  Alberta Giorgi Editors

Populism and Science in Europe

Editors Hande Eslen-Ziya University of Stavanger Stavanger, Norway

Alberta Giorgi University of Bergamo Bergamo, Italy

Palgrave Studies in European Political Sociology ISBN 978-3-030-97534-0    ISBN 978-3-030-97535-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97535-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the ­publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and ­institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Mike Kiev / Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Populism(s) and Science

Although attention to populism is ever-increasing, the concept remains contested: in its heuristic utility, empirical boundaries as well as, consequently, its relation to other social, cultural, and political phenomena. However, reflecting on the relationship between populism and science appears even more relevant. ‘Populist’ actors and movements, very often auto-defining themselves as such, continue not only to flourish all around the globe, but also to take position and influence many issues of current political systems, in Europe and beyond. In fact, populists (leaders or political parties) are increasingly occupying not only stable positions, but also governmental roles in many democracies. For instance, at the beginning of 2021, ten countries in Europe, see (or have seen) populists ‘in power’, either alone or as the main coalition partner: in Hungary, Poland, Greece, Italy, and Czech Republic, Finland, Austria, Netherlands, Norway, Spain, and Denmark (as external support to the government). Transformation toward ‘populism’ is also present in other cases of ruling mainstream parties previously not populist (such as for instance the Slovenian Democratic Party). Moreover, this is not just a European phenomenon; populism in power pertains to Brazil, and, India. This means that populists not only can play an important role in terms of protest and opposition in society but also as decision makers as well as reinforced opinion leaders. No doubts populism has been and will continue to be the fil-rouge of the political information worldwide. And ‘Science’ is the battleground of meanings, policymaking, and power relations (i.e., empowerment/disempowerment of various types of political v

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actors, see for example the emerging topic of the radical right and no-vax protest) in today’s Pandemic times. In Italy, the first European country to have been hit by COVID-19, the pandemic resulted in an increased electoral appeal for certain parties, specifically Populist Radical Right parties; however, the nature of this effect is still ambiguous and in progress. At the beginning of the pandemic, some commentators argued that the coronavirus would represent the end of populism in Italy; as if the biological virus could counteract the “populist virus” However, the reality turned out partly different (Falkenbach & Caiani, 2021). Both the Radical Right (populist) leader, Matteo Salvini, and the representative of the radical right party Fratelli d’Italia, Giorgia Meloni, initially negated the evidence of the pandemic. Salvini’s Facebook posts encouraged followers to continue with their normal lives, while Meloni told her Facebook followers not to believe anything that was being said on TV. After the lockdown, they both adapted their rhetoric to the normalization and consequent awareness of the emergency, wherein Salvini argued that the lockdowns were not going far enough and that everything needed to be shut down. Both PRR leaders started attacking the EU’s response to the crisis, and they released a video stating that the virus was bioengineered in China. Parallel to the evolution of their rhetoric, the consensus for their leadership also changed throughout the course of the pandemic. The PRR flank (represented by the Salvini’s Lega and Meloni’s Brothers of Italy) blamed the government for not being able to make substantive decisions and implementing them. Furthermore, right-­ wing forces capitalized on the crisis, scapegoating on their traditional targets (i.e., immigrants and minorities). The coronavirus pandemic coupled with the increased support for the PRR shed new light on the problems associated with the managing of refugees and migrants in the country. Finally, it should be noted that while the visibility and success of the right-­ wing forces increased during the first wave of the pandemic, the two political parties in government (i.e., the 5SM and the Democratic Party) did not seem to be able to increase their support. In fact, only support for Prime Minister Conte increased. Science was also increasingly politicized, as the protests around vaccines and lockdown/green pass measures are testifying, and due to the thin nature of populism, it is able to shapeshift depending on ‘what it travels with’ (Rovira Kaltwasser et  al., 2017). In Italy, the frames and master frames often used by the radical right leaders (and populist radical right) during the vaccine’s plans, (e.g., related to value libertarianism, economic

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libertarianism as well as the political usage of scientific opinions, see Caiani et al., 2021) have set precise type of opportunities of discursive structure. It has also been observed that the blurring of populism and nativism plays into the hands of populist radical right parties as it enables them to disguise their nativism with populism, and thus supports their claims to be down to earth and close to “the people.” The Cambridge Dictionary declared populism as 2017s Word of the Year, as media outlets drastically intensified their reporting, and occurrences of “populism” and “populist” in the New York Times nearly quadrupled from 2015 to 2017 (Rooduijn, 2019: 362). This trend is mirrored in academia: research on populism is trendy and increasingly employed across various disciplines. In term of definitions, populism has been alternatively conceptualized as a political rhetoric that is marked by the unscrupulous use and instrumentalization of diffuse public sentiments of anxiety and disenchantment and appeals to the power of the common people in order to challenge the legitimacy of the current political establishment (Abts & Rummens, 2007). It has been considered a “thin” or “weak” ideology (Mudde, 2004; Albertazzi & McDonnel, 2008; Urbinati, 2014) that holds “society to be ultimately separated in two homogeneous and antagonistic groups: ‘the pure People’ (generally conceived as monolithic) versus ‘the corrupt elite’, and which argues that politics should be an expression of the volonté general (general will) of the people” (Mudde, 2004: 543). A specific feature of this ideology is its indeterminacy that responds to its need to be adaptable (Fella & Ruzza, 2013). Finally, populism has been defined as a type of organization, characterized by the presence of a charismatic, personalistic and institutionalized (not belonging to the ruling elite) leadership (Kriesi, 2014) and a special style of communication (Tarchi, 2015), namely without intermediaries. There is also a ‘fifth’ definition of populism which partly overlaps with the fourth one: according to a socio-cultural approach (e.g., Ostiguy, Mofitt, De la Torre, Knights), populism is a political style (way of being, way of doing) and mode of relationship. In this sense, aspects such as relations, affinity, bonding, are emphasized as the crucial ones characterizing the phenomenon, which appear as normatively neutral or ambivalent (Ostiguy, 2018). What is important to underline here is that these different definitions can have consequences on how populism is seen, conceptualized, its causes and consequences, and therefore, in one word, on the way to articulate the relationship between populism and science.

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However, research on the relationship between populism and science, the topic of this fruitful and rich book, is almost absent. Although populism has become a global phenomenon, its empirical manifestations in different regions are ideologically diverse, with profound consequences for scholarship. The task of defining ‘populism’ is made even more complex today by the presence of ‘varieties’ of populisms (for a review, Caiani & Graziano, 2019; Zulianello, 2019). Moving from definitions to empirical cases, the variety of populist movements (Tarchi, 2015) is impressive, which sometimes show very few similarities. Since the 1990s, research on populism in Latin America and Europe has grown at an especially fast pace. In Latin America, a succession of new populist leaders of various ideological sub-types emerged in the early 1990s and around the turn of the millennium (De la Torre, 2017, cit. in Hunger & Paxton, 2021: 3). In general, there have been several waves of populist movements in various geographical contexts—such as in North America in the 1870s–1900s, in Russia and Eastern Europe in the 1870s–1920s, in Latin America in the 1930s–1950s and in Western Europe in the 1980s–2000s—assuming different characteristics, following different trajectories, and appealing to different strands of supporters. When a typological criterion is adopted, the literature distinguishes between right-wing and—more recently—left-­ wing populist movements: Whereas the latter identify the ‘people’ in socio-economic terms, such as the working class exploited by the bourgeois elite, the former refer to the ethnic nation (Abts & Rummens, 2007). There are also important differences between left-wing, right-­ wing, and centrist populism. The populism of the new left refers to “an active, self-confident, well educated, progressive people”; populism on the right side appeals to a silent counter-revolution, namely a “slightly conservative, law-abiding citizen, who, in silence but with growing anger, sees his world being perverted by progressives, criminals, and aliens” (Mudde, 2004: 557). In contrast, centrist populists (see the case of ANO in the Czech Republic, Havlík, 2019) appeal to a rather heterogenous plethora of voters, who are generally ideologically closer to their mainstream counterpart but distinguish themselves with their populist discourse, especially with reference to their strong anti-corruption claims (Hanley & Sikk, 2016). Although populism, especially among scholars focusing on Europe, is above all found on the extreme or radical right, it could also be related—as it increasingly is—to the radical left. And left-wing populist parties in power have something to say on the impact of the pandemic and science

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on current societies. They mainly focus on the sphere of welfare and social care expansion provisions in critical times, an issue which is strictly salient in to deal with the emergency situation. Beyond populism on the fringes of the political spectrum, observers further underline the growing importance in Western and Central- Eastern Europe of a type of ‘mainstream populism’, as well as ‘hybrid’ one. The distinction between inclusionary and exclusionary populism (Mudde & Rovira Kaltwasser, 2013) is based on three dimensions (material, political, and symbolic) which concern the distribution of resources among social groups, the appeal to forms of political mobilization going beyond representative democratic channels, and the boundaries of the notion of ‘people’. Not only on all of these aspects inclusionary and exclusionary populist parties differ in the degree of ‘inclusiveness’ envisaged (e.g., favoring mass welfare programs versus defending forms of welfare chauvinism; aiming at giving a voice to disregarded groups versus discriminating among various types of members of the political community) but also all of them overlap with or have consequences on the broader topic of science. This book will deal also with the differentiation among different types of populism(s), with regards to science related issues. Moreover, there are different traditions and political and cultural context within which populism is inserted, which constitute different discursive opportunities for the relationship between populism and science in current times. Considering a geographical distinction in the manifestations of populism, US populism goes back to the agrarian movements of the nineteenth century and the US People’s Party, has today deep roots in mainstream politics, being associated with both Democratic and Republican politicians (Caiani, 2013). Here, populist appeals might rely on the traditional defense of individual liberties vis-à-vis the state, also borrowing from several well-established American traditions, such as producerism (i.e., the idea that the true Americans are hard-working people, “fighting against parasites at the top and bottom of society”), anti-­elitism/ intellectualism, majoritarianism (i.e., “the will of the majority of people has absolute primacy in matters of governance”), moralism, and Americanism. In Latin America, populism has a long history as well, dating back to the first half of the twentieth century. However, Latin American populism is of a more urban nature. Peronism, in the mid-1990s, has been its main manifestation, addressing the economic concerns of the emerging working class. Problems related to the democratic transition and the unstable

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economic situation of the 1980s–1990s, have been mentioned as important factors which favored the emergence of populist parties in this region. Today, in general, populism is considered a common feature in Latin America and, although vested with different programs and styles with respect to the past, still a rewarding strategy. Regarding Central and Eastern Europe, after the Russian experience of the populist intellectuals’ movement of the 1870s, which tried to mobilize a peasant rebellion against the Tsarist regime, more recently populism is seen as a specific post-transition (and post-EU accession) phenomenon, determined by the economic, political, cultural, and social problems that arose after 1989. And Europe has been a crucial agent (but also important negative target, as seen in the Italian case) in managing the Pandemic, also beyond the European scene. Indeed, populist movements mobilize the sizeable strata of Central and Eastern European societies who are dissatisfied with the functioning of democracy and have lost their trust in the political establishment, promising a politics closer to the needs of the people. Finally, like many other political actors, populist parties are currently expanding beyond national borders, creating cross-national links and identities (frames) and establishing international cooperation or common visions of the world (just to mention an idiographic example, the recurring ‘Q’ symbol of the QAnon US movement in various (populist) radical right events or demonstrations). It has been argued that transnational processes of exchange and learning play an important role in the success of populist actors in Europe and beyond. Confronted with global challenges, as the pandemic is the One, this trend is likely to accelerate. To date however, in sociology and political science, there are few empirical analyses on the topic. This book, through its broad overview of various cases of populism and relationship with science will provide informative pages also to contextualize this promising topic of research. It is exactly its complexity—cross-regions, cross-issues related to the big topic of science and cross- various types of populisms—which makes this book Populism and Science in Europe an important reading, very informative and thus stimulating. Pisa, Italy

Manuela Caiani

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References Abts, K., & Rummens, S. (2007). Populism versus democracy. Political Studies, 55, 405–424. Albertazzi, D., & McDonnell, D. (2008). Twenty-first century populism: The spectre of Western European Democracy. Palgrave Macmillan. Caiani, M. (2013). Populism/populist movements. In D. A. Snow, D. della Porta, D. J. McAdam, & B. Klandermans (Eds.), The Wiley Blackwell encyclopedia of social and political movements (2nd ed.). Wiley. Caiani, M., & Graziano, P. (2019). Understanding varieties of populism in times of crises. West European Politics, 42(6), 1141–1158. Caiani, M., Carlotti, B., & Padoan, E. (2021). Online hate speech and the radical right in times of pandemic: The Italian and English cases. Javnost – The Public, 28(2), 202–218. De la Torre, C. (2017). Populism in Latin America. In C. R. Kaltwasser, P. Taggart, P. Ochoa Espejo, & P. Ostiguy (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Populism (pp. 250–274). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Falkenbach, M., & Caiani, M. (2021). Italy’s response to COVID-19. In S. L. Greer, E. J. King, A. Peralta, & E. Massard (Eds.), Coronavirus politics: The comparative politics and policy of COVID-19. University of Michigan Press. Fella, S., & Ruzza, C. (2013). Populism and the fall of the centre-right in Italy: The end of the Berlusconi model or a new beginning? Journal of Contemporary European Studies, 21(1), 38–52. Hanley, S., & Sikk, A. (2016). Economy, corruption or floating voters? Explaining the breakthroughs of anti-establishment reform parties in Eastern Europe. Party Politics, 22(4), 522–533. Havlík, V. (2019). Technocratic populism and political illiberalism in Central Europe. Problems of Post-communism, 66(6), 369–384. Hunger, S., & Paxton, F. (2021). What’s in a buzzword? A systematic review of the state of populism research in political science. Political Science Research and Methods, 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1017/psrm.2021.44 Kriesi, H. (2014). The populist challenge. West European Politics, 37(2), 361–378. Mudde, C. (2004). The populist Zeitgeist. Government and Opposition, 39(3), 542–564. Mudde, C., & Rovira Kaltwasser, C. (2013). Exclusionary vs. inclusionary populism: Comparing contemporary Europe and Latin America. Government and Opposition, 48(2), 147–174. Ostiguy, P. (2018). Populism: A socio-cultural approach. In C. Rovira Kaltwasser, P. Taggart, P. Ochoa Espejo, & P. Ostiguy (Eds.), Oxford handbook of populism (pp. 73–97). Oxford University Press.

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Rooduijn, M. (2019). State of the field: How to study populism and adjacent topics? A plea for both more and less focus. European Journal of Political Research, 58, 362–372. Rovira Kaltwasser, C., Taggart, P.  A., Ochoa Espejo, P., & Ostiguy, P. (2017). Populism: An overview of the concept and state of the art. In C.  Rovira Kaltwasser, P. A. Taggart, P. Ochoa Espejo, & P. Ostiguy (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of populism (pp. 1–24). Oxford University Press. Tarchi, M. (2015). L’Italia populista. Il Mulino. Urbinati, N. (2014). Democracy disfigured: Opinion, truth, and the people. Harvard University Press. Zulianello, M. (2019). Varieties of populist parties and party systems in Europe. Government and Opposition, 55(2), 327–347.

Acknowledgments

Conceptualization of this book started back in December 2019 in Bergamo at the “Populism, religion and Gender: Tensions and Entanglements Workshop”, co-funded by the University of Bergamo and the Italian Society of Political Science, and later turned into a path of collective work in the following years. The network of researchers in both Populism, Anti-Gender and Democracy Research Group at the University of Stavanger and in Sociology & Communication, Department of Letters, Philosophy, Communication at the University of Bergamo provided the academic environment we needed to produce this work. The research and chapters were discussed in multiple environments, including the Fringe Talk Series at University of Stavanger and the conferences of European Sociological Association, European Consortium of Political Research, and Italian Society of Political Science. The book benefitted extensively from discussions and intellectual exchange with our colleagues but especially with the research network Political Sociology of the European Sociological Association, Tommaso Vitale, Lene Myong, and Matt Motta. We thank them all. Our gratitude also goes to our families and friends. They have been sources of strength and support for us. Finally, we would like to express our gratitude to the academic and global intellectual community and our respective professors.

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Contents

 Populism and Science in Europe  1 Alberta Giorgi and Hande Eslen-Ziya  Knowledge, Counter-Knowledge, Pseudo-­Science in Populism 25 Hande Eslen-Ziya  The Role of Experts in Populist Politics: Toward a Post-­ foundational Approach 43 Liv Sunnercrantz and Tevfik Murat Yildirim  The Populist Challenge to the EU’s Sustainability Policy: Is “More Science” a Legitimate and Viable Response? 67 Thomas Sattich  Populism, Science and Covid-19 as a Political Opportunity: The Case of the European Parliament 91 Carlo Berti and Carlo Ruzza  the Emergence of Alt-Science Counterhegemony: On The Case of the Finns Party117 Tuija Saresma and Emilia Palonen

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CONTENTS

 The Problematic Relationship Between Science, Politics and Public Opinion in Late Modernity: The Case of the Anti-Vax Movement in Spain and Italy141 Luca Raffini and Clemente Penalva-Verdú  QAnon and Its Conspiracy Milieu: The Italian Case163 Maria Francesca Murru  Scientizing Gender? An Examination of Anti-­Gender Campaigns on Social Media, Norway185 Elisabeth L. Engebretsen  Between Populism and Popular Citizenship in Science Conflicts207 Mette Marie Roslyng  Inconvenient Truths? Populist Epistemology and the Case of Portugal231 Alberta Giorgi  Right-Wing Populism and the Trade-Off Between Health and the Economy During the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Comparison Between Western Europe and the United States255 Oscar Mazzoleni and Gilles Ivaldi  Academic Freedom, Science, and Right-Wing Politics: Interview with Andrea Pető285 Alberta Giorgi, Hande Eslen-Ziya, and Andrea Pető Index295

Notes on Contributors

Carlo  Berti  is Research Fellow at the School of International Studies, University of Trento, Italy. He holds a PhD in Communication Studies from Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand. His current research focuses on populism and anti-populism in the European Union and in Italy. His work has been published in international journals such as Journalism Studies, New Media & Society, Media, Culture & Society. He is co-editor (with C. Ruzza and P. Cossarini) of “The impact of populism on European institutions and civil society” (Palgrave, 2021). Elisabeth  L.  Engebretsen is Associate Professor in the Centre for Gender Studies, University of Stavanger, Norway. Engebretsen holds a PhD in Anthropology from the London School of Economics (2008) and has written widely on topics relating to gender and sexual diversities transnationally, with particular focus on China, and more recently Nordic Europe. The monograph Queer women in urban China: An Ethnography (2014) won the 2014 Ruth Benedict Book Award Honorable Mention from the Association for Queer Anthropology, the American Anthropological Association. Engebretsen is editor of the Nordic queer studies journal, lambda nordica (with Erika Alm). Hande Eslen-Ziya  is Professor of Sociology at the University of Stavanger and director of the Populism, Anti-Gender and Democracy Research Group at the same institution. She has an established interest in gender and social inequalities, transnational organizations and social activism, and has a substantial portfolio of research in this field. Her research has been published in Gender, Work and Organisation, Emotion, Space and Society, xvii

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Social Movement Studies, European Journal of Women’s Studies, Culture, Health and Sexuality, Leadership, Men and Masculinities, and Social Politics, as well as in other internationally recognized journals. She is working on how right-wing populist ideologies by creating alternative trollscientific discourses oppose the scientific facts and gender theory. She co-edited the book titled The Aesthetics of Global Protest: Visual Culture and Communication. Alberta  Giorgi is senior lecturer in Sociology of Cultural and Communication Processes at the University of Bergamo, associate researcher of the research groups GSRL (Paris) and CRAFT (Turin), and the research centre CES (Coimbra), and chair of the research network Political Sociology (European Sociological Association). Her research focuses on the intersections of religion, gender, and politics. Her research has been published in Identities, European Journal of Women’s Studies, Qualitative Research, Social Compass, European Politics and Society and other internationally recognized journals. Among her books are European Culture Wars. Which Side Are You On? (2016, with L.  Ozzano). She is co-editing the Routledge Handbook of Religion and Politics in Europe with E. Fokas. Gilles Ivaldi  is CNRS researcher in politics at CEVIPOF (Sciences-Po) in Paris. He works on French politics, parties and elections, and he has written extensively on the French Front National and the radical right in Europe. His research interests include the comparative study of populism in Western Europe and the United States. His work has appeared in international journals such as Electoral Studies, Political Research Quarterly, West European Politics, and Comparative Political Studies. His recently published work includes De Le Pen à Trump: le défi populiste (2019) and The 2017 French Presidential Elections. A political Reformation? (2018, with Jocelyn Evans). Oscar  Mazzoleni  is a professor in political science and director of the Research Observatory of Regional Politics at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. He has written in many international peer-reviewed journals, including Comparative European Politics, Political Studies, and Party Politics. He recently co-edited Political Populism Handbook of Concepts, Questions and Strategies of Research (Nomos, 2021) and Sovereignism and Populism Citizens, Voters and Parties in Western European Democracies (2022).

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Maria Francesca Murru, PhD  is a senior lecturer of Sociology of Culture and Communication at the University of Bergamo. Her research interests include digital public spheres, mediated citizenship, and local journalism. Emilia Palonen  is Senior University Lecturer in Political Science at the Faculty of Social Sciences and Programme Director in digitalization at the Helsinki Institute for Social Sciences and Humanities at the University of Helsinki. She has been researching populism in Hungary and Finland and has an MA and PhD from the University of Essex in the Ideology and Discourse Analysis programme. Her recent work on populism has been published in Thesis Eleven and the Journal of Contemporary European Studies. She is active in scholarly societies and in open science, as the Chair of the Finnish Political Science Association, the board of the Finnish Federation of Learned Societies, and Executive Committee Member at the International Political Science Association. She is the author of the Finland chapter for Political Data Yearbook of the European Journal of Political Research. Clemente  Penalva-Verdú is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Alicante, Spain. His main research interests are crisis and social movements, political socialization, e-Government and political participation, minoritized languages and cultural resistance, social discourses of good living. Andrea Pető  is Professor in the Department of Gender Studies at Central European University, Vienna, Austria and a Doctor of Science of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Her works on gender, politics, Holocaust, and war have been translated into 23 languages. In 2018, she was awarded the 2018 All European Academies (ALLEA) Madame de Staël Prize for Cultural Values. She is Doctor Honoris Causa of Södertörn University, Stockholm, Sweden. Luca Raffini  is Assistant Professor of Political Sociology at the University of Genoa. Among his research interests are the relation between social change and political change, social participation, social innovation, youth condition, mobility and migration, and digital communication. Mette Marie Roslyng  is Associate Professor in Media and Communication at Aalborg University, Copenhagen. She holds a PhD in Ideology and Discourse Analysis from Essex University. Her research focuses on how discourses of science, technology, and the environment are represented,

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contested, and politicized in the media and public debates. She is particularly concerned with citizen engagement and the role of digital and alternative media. Her work is published in international journals such as Science as Culture, Critical Discourse Studies, Digital Journalism, International Journal of Cultural Studies and Risk, Health & Society. She is the chair of ECREA’s Science and Environment Communication Section. Carlo  Ruzza is Professor of Political Sociology at the University of Trento, Italy. He has widely written on radical right populist parties and political movements in Southern Europe, particularly in Italy, and on civil society advocacy roles. His research interests focus on civil society organizations specializing in anti-discrimination and human rights policy at the EU level and the impact of populism on EU institutions. Tuija  Saresma  is Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Cultural Studies at the Department of Music, Art, and Culture Studies, University of Jyväskylä. Saresma’s most recent publications include a co-edited anthology Violence, Gender and Affect (Palgrave 2021) and co-written journal articles “The Role of Social Media in the Rise of Right-Wing Populism in Finland” (in Tumber and Waisbord [eds.], The Routledge Companion to Media Misinformation and Populism, 2021); and “Performing ‘Us’ and ‘Other’: Intersectional Analyses of Right-Wing Populist Media” (2021). Currently, she leads two research projects on hate speech, funded by the Academy of Finland and Prime Minister’s Office. She is the co-chair of the Association of Gender Studies in Finland (SUNS) and the treasurer of Association of Cultural Studies (ACS). Thomas Sattich  holds a PhD in Political Science and Economics. With a background in EU Studies, sustainability and energy, his current research work focuses on the international implications of the sustainability transition. This includes EU politics and policy, international energy relations, energy security, green industrial policy, and policy interdependence between countries. His methodological skills include qualitative methods such as text analysis, as well as quantitative ­methods, such as network and cluster analysis. He also has experience with Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA). Liv Sunnercrantz  is a post-doctoral fellow in Sociology at the Department of Media and Social Sciences, University of Stavanger since 2019. Her work falls mainly in the areas of post-foundational discourse theory, the

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sociology of knowledge, and the sociology of intellectuals. She also studies hegemony and populism, and has co-founded the research group on Populism, Anti-Gender & Democracy at the University of Stavanger. Tevfik Murat Yildirim  is an associate professor of political science at the University of Stavanger, Norway and he holds a PhD from the University of Missouri. His research focuses on legislative politics, representation, gender, and politics. His work has been published in such journals as American Political Science Review, British Journal of Political Science, Journal of European Public Policy, Party Politics, Political Behavior, and Political Research Quarterly, among others.

List of Figures

Knowledge, Counter-Knowledge, Pseudo-Science in Populism Fig. 1 Hybrid emotional echo-chamber theory

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Populism, Science and Covid-19 as a Political Opportunity: The Case of the European Parliament Fig. 1 Main topics of debates (February 2020–February 2021) Fig. 2 Populist framings of “public health strategy” debates

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Right-Wing Populism and the Trade-Off Between Health and the Economy During the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Comparison Between Western Europe and the United States Fig. 1 Means of prioritizing health over the economy for radical right-wing populist and other voters. (Source: EPS Survey June 2021) Fig. 2 Means of prioritizing health over the economy for other populist voters. (Source: EPS Survey June 2021)

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List of Tables

The Problematic Relationship Between Science, Politics and Public Opinion in Late Modernity: The Case of the Anti-Vax Movement in Spain and Italy Table 1 Similarities between Italian and Spanish societies Table 2 Percentage of agreement with the statement “If a vaccine for COVID-19 were available to me, I would get it”. (2021) Table 3 Differences between Italian and Spanish societies

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Scientizing Gender? An Examination of Anti-Gender Campaigns on Social Media, Norway Table 1 Top ten number of references by @mentions for all four accounts (number of mentions in brackets)

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Between Populism and Popular Citizenship in Science Conflicts Table 1 Data overview of the Vegan Party case 216 Table 2 Alternative knowledge positions in left-wing environmental populism226

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List of Tables

Inconvenient Truths? Populist Epistemology and the Case of Portugal Table 1 The three phases

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Right-Wing Populism and the Trade-Off Between Health and the Economy During the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Comparison Between Western Europe and the United States Table 1 Health over economy: summary of significant effects of the populist vote across countries

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Populism and Science in Europe Alberta Giorgi and Hande Eslen-Ziya

Introduction: Populism and Europe ‘Coronavirus could kill off populism’ (Financial Times June 20, 2020), ‘Beware a new wave of populism, born out of coronavirus-induced economic inequity’ (The Guardian, April 18, 2020), ‘Where the Virus Is Growing Most: Countries With “Illiberal Populist” Leaders’ (New York Times, June 2, 2020), ‘How European populists are using coronavirus as a political tool’ (Al-Jazeera, March 3, 2020), ‘The populist revolution may become a victim of Covid-19’ (The Economist, April 16, 2020) – the first coronavirus outbreak turned the spotlight on a complex yet underexplored topic: the relationship between populism and science. Especially since the 1980s, populism is an object of scientific interest and political concern in Europe (Kriesi, 2014). By the mid-2000s,

A. Giorgi (*) University of Bergamo, Bergamo, Italy e-mail: [email protected] H. Eslen-Ziya University of Stavanger, Stavanger, Norway e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 H. Eslen-Ziya, A. Giorgi (eds.), Populism and Science in Europe, Palgrave Studies in European Political Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97535-7_1

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populist discourse and policies were ‘normalized’ (Wodak, 2015) and became mainstream in the politics of western (Mudde, 2004) and eastern European democracies (Mudde & Kaltwasser, 2017). Despite the complexities in measuring populism and defining a populist party or a populist rhetoric (Norris, 2020; Rooduijn et  al., 2019), scholars agree that the electoral support of populist parties has been increasing (Rooduijn et al., 2017), that populism has been geographically spreading (Hawkins et al., 2019), and that populist parties in many cases have participated in government coalitions (Albertazzi & McDonnell, 2015). Scholars’ assessments of populism vary. While some regard populism as a completely negative phenomenon (Müller, 2016), others emphasize that populist parties can also be corrective for democracy (Mudde & Kaltwasser, 2017). Yet others welcome the possible positive effects of the populist challenge to European politics (Mouffe, 2018). Without doubt, it is a phenomenon with profound consequences. Populism has been defined in different ways (Blokker  & Anselmi, 2019; Caiani & Graziano, 2019; Caiani & della Porta, 2011; Moffitt, 2016), including: a political style and performance (Moffitt, 2016; Ostiguy et al., 2021); a political strategy and organization, based on the relationships between leaders and followers (Taggart, 2000; Weyland, 2001); political logic (Laclau, 2005; Palonen, 2018; Panizza, 2005; Stavrakakis, 2004); specific configurations of style, ideas and policies (Ruzza & Fella, 2011); a political project with a variable ideological anchoring (Castelli Gattinara & Pirro, 2019); and thin-centred ideology that can be combined with a variety of political ideas (Mudde, 2007). In this book, parts of the chapters consider populism in terms of discourse and performance (see Ostiguy et  al., 2021). Other chapters adopt instead (and adapt) an ideational approach (Hawkins, 2019; Mudde & Kaltwasser, 2017), focusing on how the topic of ‘science’ is articulated with the key tenets of populist thin-centred ideology: the Manichean opposition between the homogeneously conceived ‘people’ against a series of internal and external others defined along a vertical (elite) and a horizontal (e.g. immigrants, sexual minorities…) dimension (Brubaker, 2017a; Marzouki & McDonnell, 2016), and the idea of expressing or restoring popular sovereignty, understood as the ‘general will’ of the people (Mudde & Kaltwasser, 2017). In addition to ‘nationalism’ (e.g. Brubaker, 2017a), recent studies have focused on how populist core ideas have been combined with cultural understandings of religion, constructing both the ‘religious other’ and the religiously identified native (DeHanas & Shterin, 2018; Froio, 2018;

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Giorgi, 2020, 2021; Marzouki et al., 2016; Wagenvoorde, 2019; Zúquete, 2017). Other studies have focused on how populism is combined with neo-liberal economic policies (Raffini, 2019; Ivaldi & Mazzoleni, 2020) and have explored its consequences in European states’ constitutions and, more broadly, in conceptions of democracies (Blokker, 2017a, b; Froio & Ganesh, 2020). Research has also analysed the intersections between populism and feminist politics (e.g. Cullen, 2020; Kantola & Lombardo, 2021) and populism and gender, showing how gender equality, women’s and LGBT+ persons rights can be, alternatively, included in populist actors’ ideology as key tenet of the national culture that should be defended against the others, or identified as a target of populist discourse, which presents itself as the defender of national cultures and traditions, against ‘the other’, understood as the EU elite promoting equality or immigration carrying different cultures (e.g. Dietze & Roth, 2020; Korolczuk & Graff, 2018; Marzouki et al., 2016; Norocel & Pettersson, 2021). Fewer studies, however, have considered the complex relationship between populism and science, until the outbreak of COVID-19. On the one hand, scientific knowledge has been the target of populist criticisms that valorize instead experiential wisdom and common sense (Wodak, 2015), the ‘low’, which is also displayed by political leaders who dress, speak and behave in ways that make voters recognize them as ‘one of ours’ (Ostiguy, 2017). Saurette and Gunster (2011) speak of ‘epistemological populism’ pointing out that populism contests traditional or well-­ established epistemic authorities (Harambam & Aupers, 2014). Populist discourse often frames scientists and, more broadly, experts, as an expression of the elite, with anti-intellectual overtones. Scholars have explored the connections between support for populist parties and mistrust of academics, scholars, and experts (Mede & Schäfer, 2020), also developing a survey instrument (called the SciPop Scale) to measure ‘science-related populist attitudes’ (Mede et al., 2021). Often, scholars also highlight the intersections of populism and fake news, presenting both phenomena as ‘mutually reinforcing pathologies of a perceived political normality backed with a reified epistemic superiority’, as aptly pointed out by Galanopoulos and Stavrakakis (2019: 2). Other studies also explore the relationships between populist attitudes and upholding conspiracy theories (Eberl et al., 2021; Hameleers, 2020; Mancosu et al., 2017). On the other hand, however, research shows how science is put forward in populists’ discourse: traditional epistemic authorities are frequently contested by advocating alternative knowledge authorities, and

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science, facts, and knowledge are praised as the crucial basis for expressing informed and fair opinions. This is the case of the reference to biology or evolutionary psychology to undermine the so-called ‘gender theory’ (Eslen-Ziya, 2020), or the debates over immigration in which the positions of non-mainstream experts are praised (Ylä-Anttila, 2018). Scholars use the expressions ‘pseudo-science’ and ‘troll-science’ (Eslen-Ziya, 2020), or ‘counterscience’ (Ylä-Anttila, 2018) to point out the ambivalent relationships between populism, scientific knowledge and, more generally, expertise, which is the topic that this volume aims to explore.

Anti-Science and Pseudo-Science in Different Fields While anti-science refers to the rejection and devaluation of, and opposition to, the methods of science, pseudo-science denotes the growth of alternative methods for developing knowledge that oppose well-­established science. Both the anti-science discourses and the progress of pseudo-­ science are relevant in the era of populism, as both are used to contest and undermine collective trust in established scientific knowledge and commonly accepted sources of expertise and competence. Right-wing populist discourse, in particular, raised a variety of controversies around science and experts in different fields: an exhaustive review, however, goes beyond the scope of this introduction. One of the most contested issues, in historical terms as well as in recent times, is related to the vaccines: protests and tensions against compulsory vaccines for public health reasons re-exploded recently in Europe, and often allied with similarly ‘contesting science’ initiatives, such as anti-5G, or anti-masks (Berman, 2020). Broadly speaking, research confirmed a high correlation between voting for, or supporting, populist parties and vaccine hesitancy, in Western Europe (Kennedy, 2019). Scholars working on vaccine controversies have introduced the term medical populism to indicate the polarizing oversimplification and politicization of complex public health issues by pitting ‘the people’ against the establishment (Lasco & Curato, 2019). In exploring the reasons for refusing vaccinations, scholars pointed out that hesitancy may be related to distrust towards established medicine (Trujillo & Motta, 2020) as well as to high levels of commitment towards taking responsibility for one’s own health: hence, some studies reveal a positive correlation between vaccine hesitancy and educational level (Peretti-Watel et al., 2019). As a matter of fact, the discourse promoted by people opposing vaccinations adopts a twofold strategy: it draws on

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anecdotal evidence to claim that vaccines endanger children, and it promotes the value of choice and individual freedom. In this sense, the warnings against vaccines are usually coupled with the invitation to engage with non-mainstream medical literature, and the positive appraisal of alternative medicine, homeopathy, organic diets (Moran et al., 2016). Evidence suggests that people opposing vaccinations conceive of themselves as fighting for an inconvenient truth that mainstream science ignores – usually, blame is placed on powerful pharmaceutical interests – hence, rather than ‘against science’, ‘no-vax’ campaigns considered themselves pro-­ science movements (Rozbroj et al., 2020). Also, research pointed out that the label of ‘anti’ or ‘no-vaxers’ exercises a boundary work implicitly discerning ‘good’ and ‘bad’ science, thus advocating more neutral language to discuss these issues (for a discussion, Boullier et al., 2021). The controversies over vaccinations exemplify the rise of pseudoscience and counterscience: alternative sources of scientific knowledge are put forward that focus on the pitfalls of vaccine-related medicines. The alternative facts produced on the dangers of the vaccines, in many cases, have resulted in the rejection of the vaccination schemes introduced by the governments and they are often accompanied by the spread of misinformation about vaccines (Carrieri et al., 2019). Broadly speaking, the controversies over the vaccines exemplify a wide range of controversies in medical science, ranging from the questioning of allegedly invasive or unnecessary medical procedures to the popular appraisal of traditional and alternative healing, to the reclaiming of allegedly innovative cures that mainstream medicine does not recognize (e.g. Morelli & Vitale, 2020). Global warming is another issue that puts traditional knowledge institutions and science under attack, as exemplified by the ‘Climategate’ scandal in the UK, which caused a severe backlash on trust in science. In that occasion, some 500 emails hacked and divulged from East Anglia University (UK) servers showed that climate scientists were committed to make their data on climate change as compelling as possible, to urge for a change. Climate sceptics and deniers understood these emails as proof of data manipulation and scientists’ extra-scientific interests (Cann & Raymond, 2018). Broadly speaking, research shows how populist leaders and voters seem particularly inclined to dismiss climate change (for a discussion, Jylhä & Hellmer, 2020; Huber et al., 2021; Krange et al., 2021) and they often question the reliability of data supporting the climate change theory, contesting that evidence is conclusive and, above all, is biased: global-warming deniers fear in fact that scientists construct or

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adjust data for their own political purposes  – some even warn against a global cabal of ‘deep state’ subversives. In addition, critics warn against the profound policy change that would be necessary to address global warming, prioritizing other socio-political goals – such as economic development (Fischer, 2019). In this case, experts are contested because they are deemed to be ‘biased’, implicitly asserting an ideal of non-political scientific truth. Environmental issues include a wide range of topics, underexplored by the scientific literature on populism and making them the object of increasing scrutiny: recent research, for example, focuses on agricultural issues, trying to understand whether populist policies show transnational similarities (Iocco et  al., 2020; Mamonova & Franquesa, 2020). Another extremely interesting example of populist controversy involving science is the case of the highly contested ‘gender ideology’. Scholars pointed out how biology and evolutionary psychology have been brought forward to undermine the scientific credibility of the concept of ‘gender’, labelled in fact as an ‘ideology’ to put its scientific saliency into question (Krämer & Klingler, 2020). In other words, ‘gender’ is contested based on a specific hierarchy of ‘scientificity’ of different branches of knowledge. In addition, the scientific grounds of theoretical elaborations on gender have been contested, particularly by the Catholic Church, because they threaten the traditional family, implicitly asserting that ‘good science’ should respect culture and traditions (Eslen-Ziya, 2020). The gender case is particularly interesting as it suggests that there may be a preference for certain branches of science (namely, the so-called hard science) over others. In addition, in this case too, science is conceived of as ‘truth’: in this sense, the populist discourse refuses to take into account the role of situated knowledge, striving instead for a single indisputable truth. Recently emerging and particularly relevant for the analysis of the intersections of populism and science are the controversies sparked during the pandemics in relation to various issues. The economic consequences of lockdown measures were a blow to European citizens, and governmental complexities in balancing the necessity for safety measures and people’s freedom and rights exposed the contradictions of contemporary democracies, creating new ground for populist protests (Alteri et  al., 2021). Moreover, some populist leaders linked the spread of COVID-19 with immigration, thus refuelling traditional populist issues. However, scholars suggest that the pandemic crisis also exposed the shortcoming of populist politics, hence undermining their electoral basis. In addition, the delicate

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issue of governmental restrictions on individual and collective freedom to limit the spreading of the virus is particularly relevant. On the one hand, populist leaders invoked fast decision-making, overcoming parliamentary debates and implementing authoritarian controls over citizens. On the other hand, populist actors protested at the same time against coronavirus-­ related restrictions such as lockdown, physical distancing, and use of masks and voiced scepticism of medical expertise. While the demand for expertise rose during the pandemicboth for advisers and for doctors and nurses, attacks against and distrust of expertise also increased, and had risky consequences. As science became politicized (Brubaker, 2020) with experts constantly called upon to explain and rationalize the policy decisions and convince the public, the expert advice became the target of popular anger and frustration. It is this anger against the experts and the authority of science that creates a united mood of opposition among the populists. During the pandemic, as doctors and nurses took the position of authority on the basis of science and informed the public about the virus and about what should be done, the populists became anti-protectionist and disobeyed the recommendations made. According to Brubaker (2020), this is one of the paradoxes of populism that became apparent during the COVID-19 pandemic. He argues that it was populism that took on the characteristic of protectionism whereby people were ostensibly protected from the threats of globalization: In this fundamentally protectionist narrative, the basic imperative is to protect “the people”—economically, demographically, culturally, and physically—against the neoliberal economy, open borders, cosmopolitan culture, and “open society” said to be favoured by the economic, political, and cultural elite at national and European levels. (Brubaker, 2017b: 378)

However, what we see now during the pandemic is the opposite of this, where the populists are choosing not to protect the people against the risks. Instead, they choose to endorse openness and individual liberties, and the COVID-19 measures are perceived as limitations on such freedoms. Then, instead of following expert opinion and scientific advice, supporters of populism choose to rely on mainstream and new media, which also include alternative news media downplaying the pandemics and disseminating fake news and misleading information. The role of social media and media coverage appears to be particularly relevant in these

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circumstances. Vicari and Murru (2020) show how the media logic of Twitter, for example, influenced the early response to COVID-19 on social media through irony; Hotez et  al. (2020) argue that the corona truthers in Germany got together and protested in Berlin against the government’s Coronavirus restrictions as a result of misleading coverage. Hameleers and Van Der Meer (2021) show that public opposition to expert knowledge may be fuelled by blaming scientists and scientific expertise. Studying ideologically charged fake news during hurricane Harvey and Irma, Long et al. (2020) showed in fact that when the conservative media dismissed the dangers, the conservative victims evacuated to a lesser degree than did liberals. Roslyng and Eskjær (2017) showed that media coverage of risks as either manageable or uncontrollable is directly related to the level of polarization of the public and political debate of the topic. Research also suggests that individuals are persuaded more by others who hold values similar to their own (Kahan et al., 2010). In other words, people gather in epistemic communities holding similar views, and this provides an opportunity for political mobilization (Mosca & della Porta, 2009). Once the expert opinion is linked to political identities, individuals start processing the information provided through an ideological lens (Goidel et  al., 1997). In the case of COVID-19, similar views regarding COVID-19 serves as an identity marker that differentiates populists from the elites  – the views of the former emphasizing the threat posed by the virus and the urgency in containing its spread and the latter perceiving the whole thing as a hoax or overreaction to an exaggerated threat. Also, research explored the narrative of stigmatized knowledge through which far right actors presented alternative epistemic authorities and alternative epistemologies (Chapelan, 2021). As with the rise of populism and the politicization of science, we see trust in science as an important indicator for compliance with the safety measures imposed by the governments (Battiston et  al., 2020; Brzezinski et  al., 2020), although recent studies suggest nuancing this correlation (Sulik et al., 2021). Moreover, the COVID-19-related protests appeared to work as an umbrella movement, able to encompass different protesters: in the US, the anti-vaccine groups were able to openly protest against science and the public health measures, joining forces with those campaigning against the restrictions related to the coronavirus (Hotez et al., 2020). This suggests the existence of similar traits in different controversies surrounding science: with different nuances, the core elements remain the same, offering the basis for alliances.

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Yet, research also showed that populist leaders’ criticisms of scientists have no direct effect on people’s trust (or distrust). Scepticism, in other words, is related to other long-terms variables such as values and experience (Evans & Hargittai, 2020). In addition, studies pointed out the decline of science-related populism during the COVID-19 outbreak (Mede & Schäfer, 2021). Broadly speaking, previous research pointed out that protests involving science are often framed by the participants as a call for more expertise and deeper scientific knowledge. This call is motivated by the alleged biases of misleading mainstream experts and institutions, and it relies on the vision that truth exists, that it can be reached, and that it is indisputable. In this sense, ‘hard sciences’ that focus on ‘hard facts’ are privileged over socio-­ constructivist epistemologies. In addition, research showed the critical role of the media and explored the actual consequences of populist understandings of science. Finally, studies have begun to cover the initiatives and practices that governments, opinion leaders and civil society adopt to contrast populist understandings of science (e.g. Stephens et al., 2021).

Science, Populism and the Production of Reliable Knowledge The cases mentioned in the previous section illustrate the populist ‘war of science’ (Thompson & Smulewicz-Zucker, 2018), which combine anti-­ science developments and the nostalgia for a lost golden age (Kuhar, 2017) with the production and circulation of alternative knowledge and epistemic authorities. ‘Pseudo-scientific’ narratives brought about by populist actors to counter mainstream science are produced in conservative academic circles and these narratives are circulated and amplified by mainstream and new media platforms like news, blogs, YouTube videos, Twitter, and Facebook posts. The flow of anti-science information is intensified by the ‘polarization effect of the social media platforms’ (Szabados, 2020: 91). While the content is produced and widely disseminated through such channels, the echo chambers enable homogenous groups to receive the information on social media, which they tend to share, and which in turn helps them confirm and strengthen their beliefs. Such fake news and science-related conspiracy theories spread rapidly and foster anti-science sentiments and dispositions

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in the wider public. Once such sentiments are internalized, they evolve into opinions (Sunstein, 2002) that further reinforce polarization. Broadly speaking, social media (with platform differences, see Allcott et al., 2019) offer the perfect infrastructure for the circulation of fake news and misinformation via different techniques, such as cloaked websites (Daniels, 2009). In addition, social media increases the fragmentation of the public sphere (Sunstein, 2017) and the capacity of the public sphere to act as a forum where the validity of public claims can be tested (Manjoo, 2008). However, some studies find that social media increases exposure to diverse views (Flaxman et al., 2016) and can actually reduce mass polarization (Barbera, 2015). In addition, social media may offer an escape from group culture, as in the case of violent extremism (O’Hara & Stevens, 2015), and give minority voices the opportunity to engage with mainstream media (Galpin & Trentz, 2019). Scholars introduced a variety of concepts to grasp the alternative epistemology emerging in the populist discourse. According to Krämer and Klingler (2020: 256) it is the ‘conception of what constitutes knowledge (and what does not) as well as ideas about legitimate and ‘productive’ activities that contribute to the welfare of the people as right-wing populists define it’. They argue that the populist epistemology is not just anti-­ science and a post-truth ideology but instead a counter-knowledge where ‘truth can be abstract, hidden and even scientific’ (Krämer & Klingler, 2020: 257). In addition, this counter knowledge is based on traditionalism where tradition, conservatism, and nostalgia for the past are significant. Hence, it refutes anything that contradicts these values (e.g. modernization, progress, and science). The populist epistemology,1 or what Van Zoonen (2012: 56) refers as I-pistemology, refers to the ‘cultural process in which people from all walks of life have come to suspect the knowledge coming from official institutions and experts, and have replaced it with the truth coming from their own individual experiences and opinions’. Lay people and their personal experiences are then perceived as more reliable than academic elites and as more skilled for recognizing truth (Krämer & Klingler, 2020: 257). Hence, populism, while promoting the anti-elitist and traditional conservative worldview, also forms an epistemology, that is, a specific theory of 1  The discussion on current epistemological controversies is a relevant topic of discussion for sociology and philosophy of science (e.g. Maslanov, 2021) – however, in this introduction we specifically focus on political and cultural sociological literature.

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knowledge. This is also the reason why, in political debates, fact-checking has limited utility: what is at stake are in fact the implications of how scientific knowledge is constructed, and for what purposes (Ylä-Anttila, 2018). Scholars working on conspiracy theories argue that they can be framed in fact as ‘populist theory of power’ (Aupers, 2012; Bale, 2007). Indeed, populist actors can also be conceived of as ‘hegemony challengers’ (Palonen & Sunnercrantz, 2021). Galanopoulos and Stavrakakis (2019) introduce the concept of politicized epistemology to point out the growing interconnections between political positions and specific theories of knowledge that touch upon shared understandings of reality and truth. Along with Foucault, the authors argue that each and every regime of truth is constitutively intersected with power relations within the society. As they affirm: the debate over populism, post-truth politics and fake news on the one hand, and rationality, truth and politics based on facts and knowledge of experts on the other, essentially presupposes the transformation of political confrontation into a supposedly neutral epistemological debate around truth, thereby causing a series of concerns about the very essence of the political. We no longer have a confrontation between different political alternatives, but between what is true and what is false. (Galanopoulos & Stavrakakis, 2019: 7)

Paradoxically, such a criticism of post-truth is particularly resonant with populist rhetoric and style. Some scholars in fact connected populism with the spread of the ‘judicialization’, understood as the rising role of ‘truth’ in the grammar of contemporary politics combined with the refusal of the constitutive ambiguity of political discourse (Rosanvallon, 2008). Hence, the appraisal of a single and indisputable conception of scientific truth is in line with the specific grammars of the contemporary political discourse. In part, populist criticism against science echoes the criticisms against the elite and it exemplifies the distrust in institutional authority (Canovan, 1999). In this sense, it can be framed as part of the broader populist challenge to politics (Kriesi, 2014). However, the intersections between populism and science also touch upon the shared conceptions of truth and oppose different ideas about how reality works and about different regimes of truth. In this sense, it challenges our understanding of authority and, ultimately, society: therefore, inquiring about these intersections is a timely and urgent endeavour. Moreover, recent research has shown the

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troublesome connections between epistemic controversies, far right populism, and the limitation of academic freedom (Engeli, 2020; Väliverronen & Saikkonen, 2021). In other words, the topic of populism and science is directly connected to our understanding and practice of democracy.

Chapters’ Overview The chapters included in this collection provide the first systematic review of the intersections between populism and science, specifically focusing on Europe. The book is divided into three sections: theory, transnational considerations, and national case studies. The sections explore the relationships between populism and science in different fields (including medicine, climate change, environment, gender), with different theoretical approaches and definitions of populism (ranging from the ideational approach to the analysis of populism as political logic), adopting a variety of methods (e.g. content analysis) and analytical perspectives. At the empirical level, the studies included in this volume combine the attention to the transnational dynamics (the European Union apparatus) with nationally rooted analyses covering different European countries. The first section is specifically devoted to the theoretical analysis of the relationships between populism and science. Rather than specific case studies, the chapters included in this section seek to explore theoretically two aspects of these relationships: what are the mechanisms through which alternative knowledge is produced and circulated; who are the experts and how is their role challenged and transformed by populist politics. In the second chapter, Hande Eslen-Ziya discusses the concepts of pseudo-­ science, troll-science, and fake-science, showing how the populist discourse constructs an alternative, ideologically charged science. Eslen-Ziya also explores the political consequences of the ‘crisis of truth’ and the distrust of scientific institutions, which thereby create new grounds for digital populism and public distrust. By adopting the concept of hybrid emotional echo chambers, the author discusses how the spread of political identities and/or ideologies are intensified once they are attached to emotions, thus pointing out the role of emotions in creating trust in alternative epistemologies and epistemic authorities. The third chapter is devoted to discussing the role of experts in populist politics. After offering an overview of the literature covering this issue, Liv Sunnercrantz and T. Murat Yildirim problematize the role, function, and constitution of the expert from a post-foundational perspective, discussing

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how epistemic authority is constructed and how it functions in practice. Sunnercrantz and Yildirim show how experts are co-constituted with the populist project: the populist discursive logic can be used to criticize existing experts, as it is often affirmed, but it is also adopted to instate alternative experts  – either way, they argue, the definition of an expert is not given in advance. The second section focuses specifically on the European Union level: although populism is arguably a global phenomenon, it also presents regional differences. This section, then, seeks to highlight how populism impacted the structure of the European Union, in terms of decision-­ making, policies, and political debate. The fourth chapter by Thomas Sattich deals with climate populism, drawing from the consideration that environmental sustainability and climate mitigation are the main focus of European Union politics and policy. First, from the perspective of policy analysis, the chapter offers an overview of the EU’s actions on climate; second, it points out the range of populist positions around the global warming issue and explores the extent to which populism poses a threat to the EU-level politics on the subject; third, it discusses whether the EU’s science programmes might be an adequate response to the populist challenge. In chapter “Populism, Science and Covid-­ 19 as a Political Opportunity: The Case of the European Parliament”, Carlo Berti and Carlo Ruzza draw on an original database of EU Parliamentary debates to explore how populists and non-populists have discursively constructed COVID-19 as an emergency in the European Parliament. Berti and Ruzza identify the three main dominant frames about the coronavirus pandemic – the health emergency frame; the economic emergency frame; the political/democratic emergency frame  – and examine their role in the populist discourse, showing that populists often maintained an ambiguous position towards COVID-19 and related issues, such as vaccination, emergency measures, and health policies. Adopting the framework of political opportunity theory, the authors analyse this ambiguity as the ability to exploit the pandemic as a political opportunity to pursue Euroscepticism and delegitimize the EU, and in particular the Commission. The third section presents national case studies covering Southern and Northern Europe, as well as Eastern and Western countries. The case studies intersect with different fields of science and scientific knowledge, providing a complex and detailed overview of the relationship between populism and science in contemporary Europe. Adopting a Gramscian approach, Tuija Saresma and Emilia Palonen explore the hegemonic

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struggles over science by analysing the case of the Finns party in Finland. The guidelines of the Finns Party’s cultural policy programme (2020) are scrutinized in particular, along with the municipal election programme (2021) on knowledge and teaching. Saresma and Palonen identify specific strategies of information management as hegemonic practice, namely: denialism, censorship, distortion, co-optation, reclaiming, and the production of alt-science. The chapter “The Problematic Relationship Between Science, Politics and Public Opinion in Late Modernity: The Case of the Anti-­ Vax Movement in Spain and Italy” proposes a comparison between the anti-­ vaccination movement in Spain and Italy. Luca Raffini and Clemente Penalva-Verdù reconstruct the history of vaccine hesitancy and refusal in the two countries and investigate the social, political, and cultural factors that favour its spread, analysing the documents proposed by the campaigners and the social media debate. Raffini and Penalva-Verdù also point out the role of the complex media environment and the current political climate in the contemporary forms that vaccine hesitancy and refusal assume in both countries: a movement in Italy and a less relevant campaign in Spain. However, they argue that in both countries there is a non-­ organic link between the groups protesting against vaccination and far-right populist parties and that the conflict between technocracy and populism exacerbates the problems of trust in science and expert knowledge. In chapter “QAnon and Its Conspiracy Milieu: The Italian Case”, Maria Francesca Murru explores whether and how one of the most relevant conspiracy theories, QAnon, spread in Italy through the analysis of the cluster of cultural practices of specific epistemic communities. The aim of the chapter is to explore whether and in what ways QAnon has succeeded in bolstering local-based conspiracy theories and in articulating pre-existent and widespread feelings of discontent, mistrust, and enmity. The analysis shows that QAnon Italy has taken a blurred and fragmentary shape, widely hybridized with local and pre-existent conspiracy subcultures and exposes alternative science’s popularization as one of the leading discursive strategies through which conspiracy ideation engages its followers, building an inclusive community for those otherwise in the margin. In chapter “Scientizing Gender? An Examination of Anti-­ Gender Campaigns on Social Media, Norway”, Elisabeth Lund Engebretsen examines the role of the media landscape in spreading populist narratives against gender and sexual minorities, discussing how the ‘outrage

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economy’ (Phipps, 2020) is successfully mainstreaming far-right voices in contexts praised for gender equality and attention to sexual citizenship such as Norway. Data collection methods include digital forensics and the analysis of Twitter hashtags related to trans-exclusionary feminism, mapping their transnational connections. In chapter “Between Populism and Popular Citizenship in Science Conflicts”, Mette Marie Roslying investigates the role of leftist populism in food science controversies, focusing on the case of the Danish Vegan Party. Analysing data from both social and legacy media, Roslying conceptualizes populist demands as acts of digital citizenship, exploring three central and interconnected populist antagonistic logics in the vegan discourse: (1) conflicts regarding mainstream versus alternative knowledge, (2) the people versus the citizen, and (3) humans versus non-humans. In chapter “Inconvenient Truths? Populist Epistemology and the Case of Portugal”, Alberta Giorgi analyses the Portuguese Facebook page ‘Verdade Inconveniente’ (Inconvenient Truth), an independent media outlet turning into a protest group, to explore how they conceive of truth, science and politics and to identify the controversial topics that consider to be an inconvenient truth. The analysis shows the mechanisms through which truth-tellers become epistemic authorities, the politicization and polarization of ‘truths’, and the affirmation of an individual form of inductivism in the form of the prominence given to individual experience as a test for validating scientific truths, which also become unfalsifiable. Giorgi’s analysis points the attention to the specific epistemology that the group conveys and retraces its interconnections with the debate on populist epistemology and, more broadly, the diffusion of the grammar of truth in contemporary politics, in a country long considered the European exception to the spreading of populism. In chapter “Right-­Wing Populism and the Trade-­Off Between Health and the Economy During the COVID-­ 19 Pandemic: A Comparison Between Western Europe and the United States”, Oscar Mazzoleni and Gilles Ivaldi present the result of an international survey that investigates the relationship between socio-economic anxieties related to the COVID-19 pandemic and support for right-wing populism. Comparing data from an original dataset investigating national representative samples in Germany, France, Italy, Switzerland and the United States, Mazzoleni and Ivaldi examine how arguments about economic freedom and prosperity have been used by right-wing populists opposing governments’ COVID-19 restrictions that have been imposed in the name of science.

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The results point to the development of a political cleavage opposing health and the economy, with country differences. Finally, in chapter “Academic Freedom, Science, and Right-­ Wing Politics: Interview with Andrea Pető” Alberta Giorgi and Hande Eslen-­ Ziya introduce the topic of academic freedom through an interview with Andrea Pető, in which she explains how her recent publication at Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte led to her resignation from the Hungarian Accreditation Committee. Giorgi and Eslen-Ziya discuss Pető’s experience in light of the complex relationships between populism, extreme-­ right and epistemic controversies. The contributions included in this volume consider different aspects of the relationships between populism and science. The first aspect revolves around the definition of science, pseudo-science, anti-science and focuses on how populist actors define ‘science’ and on identifying their criteria for ‘valid science’. In addition, it explores the differences between the diverse branches of scientific knowledge and fields, such as medicine and environmental research. The second related aspect considers the role of ‘epistemic authority’ and investigates to ascertain the reliable (and the unreliable) knowledge producers according to populist actors. In addition, it analyses the role of the debate infrastructures (such as digital platforms) in polarizing the debates over science. The third aspect concerns the intersections between how populist actors address science-related issues and the support for populist parties – this is the case of the impact of COVID-19 on the support for populism in Europe. The scope of the implications of the tensions related to ‘populism and science’ explored by the chapters in this volume go beyond Europe: similar articulations can be found in Brazil, India, and the USA, for example (see Alteri et al., 2021). Broadly speaking, the chapters included in this volume contribute towards exploring the profound challenge that populism poses to the collective mechanisms through which we build and make sense of the world. Acknowledgments  The authors wish to thank Tommaso Vitale for the valuable comments and criticisms on an earlier version of this manuscript.

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Knowledge, Counter-Knowledge, Pseudo-­Science in Populism Hande Eslen-Ziya

Introduction The right-wing populist movement, with its attacks on left-leaning politicians, mainstream media, academics, scientists, and increasingly authoritarian politics has emerged around the globe. Populism produces a struggle between “an allegedly virtuous people and political elites which are portrayed negatively”, and challenges established structures (Mede & Schäfer, 2020: 473). Though it has been defined as “nationalist, conservative and anti-immigrant” (Salmela & Von Scheve, 2017: 568) and judged for challenging liberal and democratic societies, understanding its motives remains a task for us social scientists. In this chapter, by focusing on the emotional dynamics of the right-wing populist opposition to science, I aim to provide a better understanding for such antagonism. For this, I will rely on the hybrid emotional echo-chamber theory that was first developed as emotional echo-chamber theory by Eslen-Ziya et al. (2019). The theory

H. Eslen-Ziya (*) University of Stavanger, Stavanger, Norway e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 H. Eslen-Ziya, A. Giorgi (eds.), Populism and Science in Europe, Palgrave Studies in European Political Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97535-7_2

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resonates from “the concept of echo-chambers existing within the social media where one is exposed only to opinions that agree with their own” (Eslen-Ziya et al., 2019: 1). According to the theory, the emotions shared by the users and the digital network the users employ plays a role in helping echo emotions back and forth and creates an emotional echo-­chamber, with ever stronger ties. In this chapter, by taking both online and offline spaces into consideration I will discuss how beliefs, motives, and opinions influenced in these echo-chambers help create strong emotional ties. My aim here is to show how the hybrid emotional echo-chambers help us better understand political attitudes and reasons for denying scientific belief. For this, I will first introduce epistemological populism and the development of counter-knowledge and later turn to hybrid emotional echo-­ chambers that contribute to transforming of anger and frustration into a collective identity. Though I am well aware of the debate between emotions and affect, here my goal is not to discuss or differentiate between the two, but only to talk about the role of emotions in believing and spreading populist counter scientific ideologies.

The Production of Populist Affect Though populism is a critical force in today’s political environment, yet it still is a contested term. The challenge in finding a “normative dimension” in understanding what populism is in return provides what Davidson (2020: 307) refers to as a useful starting point for thinking about populism as style over substance. In this chapter I view populism as an anti-­ establishment political style that works to appeal to popular sentiments of the “the people” and take Laclau’s (2005) approach in defining populism as a discourse. It is these discourses that speak to people directly and create what Laclau refers as a hegemonic moment. Hegemonic moments build around the construction of empty signifiers with “void content that enable their generalization and effectivity as sites of identification” (Derbyshire, 2014: 233). According to Laclau, these empty signifiers also carry an affective charge where, what he refers as “radical heterogeneity” is combined into a form of unity: This is the dimension of radical heterogeneity because nothing in those demands, individually considered, announces a ‘manifest destiny’ by which they should tend to coalesce into any kind of unity – nothing in them antici-

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pates that they should constitute a chain. This is what makes the homogenizing moment of the empty signifier necessary. (Laclau, 2005: 144)

According to Laclau, the homogenizing moment of the empty signifier is created through the construction of the “we”. Both the character of “the people” (us) as well as the “elite” (the enemy, “them”) help construct a united “we”. The enemy is defined as an empty signifier as it takes many different meanings depending on the type of the enemy that is needed. The production of the empty signifiers—words and ideas that express a universal idea of what is right and wrong, and symbolically structure the political environment—according to Laclau is a necessary pre-condition for populism. In this case, these new empty signifiers (new words, new foci of interest) become the necessary condition for populism as they create a hegemonic order by being associated with affect and establishing a form of unity, a structural identity. As the people are united via solidarity and a form of identity, they also represent the masses who feel excluded from power due to their position within the society, be it socio-economic status, political power, or nationality. This notion of exclusion in return serves to support populist leaders when they use “markers of inferiority by the dominant culture” (Mudde & Rovira Kaltwasser, 2018: 4) and claim to represent them against a “corrupt elite” (Aslanidis, 2016). They do this by ascribing value to the folk wisdom and lay persons’ judgment over expert opinion and scientific arguments. Populism then becomes anti-elitist and anti-intellectual. Populism’s anti-elitism targets not only politicians but also, as Mede and Schäfer (2020: 473) argue, “other representatives of the alleged establishment—including scientists and scholarly institutions”, following a populist rationality wherein scientists are portrayed as elites who mask the truth from the people. This science-related populism, or anti-science, may be observed in attacks on universities and scientific communities, wherein experts are framed as “less trusted than ordinary people” (Motta, 2018: 483). Such a lack of trust in the opinion of experts and intellectuals and the “trust in the wisdom of ordinary people” (Oliver & Rahn, 2016: 198) leads to anti-intellectualism—a new form of knowledge production and science in the post-truth world (Merkley, 2020; Williamson, 2019).

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Conversing a Link Between Populism and Anti-Science According to Edis (2020: 4), an important commonality among right-­ wing populists is their “opposition to a ‘liberal elite’ that derives its power from its education and professional status”. Right-wing populists while positioning themselves on issues like migration (Berbuir et al., 2015), climate change (Hultman et  al., 2019), and vaccination (Davis, 2019), object to political elites, and criticize institutions that they see as representing the societal establishments (Mede & Schäfer, 2020, Petö, 2021). Mass media, legal elites, corporate business, academics, and the universities – are among the many that they oppose. According to Forchtner et al. (2018), the climate change communication has resulted in the othering of scientists, where they are seen as harming the willpower of the so-called pure people. This is evident in many right-wing populist actors’ speeches. For instance, the former UK Secretary of State for Justice Michael Gove’s famous quote “have had enough of experts […] from organisations with acronyms saying that they know what is best”1 clearly depicts the us versus them divide. Similarly, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, President of Turkey, calls the students and academics who protest against the state-appointed rector at Boğaziçi University as terrorists,2 and Andrés Manuel López Obrador, President of Mexico refers to scientists as a corrupt “mafia” allegedly exploiting government funds.3 Such rhetoric not only projects scientists as the enemy, but also endorses anti-­ science positions at the state level. As populist leaders oppose universities, or the academics within the universities, they also oppose what is produced within these institutions. Hence, their anti-establishment stance becomes anti-science. This puts forward the complex relationship between the product (in this case science) and the place of production (in this case universities/the establishment) and the logic of production (epistemology). Right-wing populist leaders want to “free” science from the establishment and support production of an alternative science (what we also refer as pseudo-science, or troll science) in an environment which they claim to  https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/don-t-ask-the-experts. Accessed on 02.05.2021.  https://www.politico.eu/article/turkey-university-rector-melih-bulu-protests-recep-­ tayyip-­erdogan/. Accessed on 02.05.2021. 3  https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/07/mexico-s-new-president-shocks-­­ scientists-budget-cuts-and-disparaging-remarks. Accessed on 02.05.2021. 1 2

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trust. While doing this they criticize the scientific knowledge created in the established universities and define them as corrupt, politically biased, and inaccessible to the lay person. For instance, protection of minority rights, climate or gender equality is seen as being influenced by left-­leaning ideologies. Hence, the problem for them is not just how science is produced within the universities but the values they see science entailing. Hence, once these institutions start producing the counter scientific views in line with the right-wing populist reasoning everything will be fine. This is evident in Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orban’s and Deputy Prime Minister Zsolt Semjén’s claim4 that gender studies are “an ideology, not a science” or the French Minister of Higher education, Frédérique Vidal’s so-called warning against the “cancer-like” spread of “Islamo-leftism” within French academia.5 While the latter alleged that academics and researchers are spreading Islamo-leftist ideas, for Orban and Vidal, such scientific knowledge instigated division and conflict within society. Similarly, in Denmark, political suspicion and intimidation toward academics specializing in gender and critical migration studies6 led to a wave of right-wing populist attacks on academics researching and teaching gender and postcolonialism, suggesting, “[feminists] want[ing] to unleash the revolution, fight against the white man and do away with objective research.7” This in return led Danish People’s Party MP Morten Messerschmidt and Liberal Alliance MP Henrik Dahl—to lobby further anti-gender and anti-immigration positions and question whether or not post-colonial and gender research is worth Danish taxpayers’ money. In all these instances in Hungary, in France and in Denmark academics were referred to as “pseudo-scientists”, “untrustworthy”, “left-wing leaning” and “militant activists”. Research shows that similar downplaying of the product (science) and the place of production (universities/the establishment) and the logic of production (epistemology) takes place simultaneously at the broader lay person (public) level where both scientists and scientific knowledge are 4  https://www.france24.com/en/20181016-hungar y-gender-studies-ban-drawsuniversity-­anger. Accessed on 2.11.2021. 5  https://www.cnews.fr/videos/france/2021-02-16/frederique-vidal-lance-uneenquete-­sur-lislamo-gauchisme-luniversite. Accessed on 2.11.2021. 6  https://jyllands-posten.dk/debat/blogs/r uneselsing/ECE12777126/luk-­ universiteternes-­galeanstalter/. Accessed on 2.11.2021. 7  https://jyllands-posten.dk/debat/blogs/runeselsing/ECE12793588/naturligvis-er-­ feministisk-aktivisme-ikke-forskning-og-de-indroemmer-det-selv/. Accessed on 2.11.2021.

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criticized for misleading people. While they identify the former as a group of elites deceiving people (Poberezhskaya, 2018) they present the latter as mob research that hides the truth (Sarathchandra & Haltinner, 2020). These all illustrate the importance of studying this complex relationship between knowledge, counter-knowledge, pseudo-science, and populism. In following sections, by reviewing the connection between populism and the production and communication of knowledge, I seek to explore how the development of counter-knowledge serves as a catalyzer of producing and disseminating public sentiments on populist discourses.

Epistemological Populism, Counter-Knowledge, and Pseudo-Science Right-wing populists, while criticizing expert opinion, promote not only anti-intellectualism, but allegedly disseminate counter-knowledge: “alternative knowledge which challenging establishment knowledge, replacing knowledge authorities with new ones, thus providing an opportunity for political mobilisation” (Ylä-Anttila, 2018: 4). Epistemological populism takes the knowledge of the common people and serves it as an alternative knowledge to science. According to Saurette and Gunster (2011) populism challenges the well-established epistemic authorities and scientific knowledge. The existing research emphasizes the connection between the fake news and populism and focuses on the conspiracy theories where the common people are misled by the clandestineness of the elite. Such “paranoid style” according to Hofstadter (1962) brings forth the notion of “righteousness” and “moral indignation”, where the “elite holds not just secret power, but secret knowledge” (Ylä-Anttila, 2018: 6). Such conspiracy theories pave the way for alternative explanations challenging the exiting scientific paradigm. The contestation of scientific authority and framing authorities as the elite while supporting and disseminating information from alternative knowledge authorities then serves as a strategy in populist politics. Hence, while populism challenges political power by criticizing the elite, epistemological populism—via the creation of counter-knowledge—confronts the knowledge elites. Mede and Schäfer (2020: 478) refer to such knowledge as alternative epistemologies and “question the way in which science-­ related decisions and claims about ‘true’ knowledge” are made.

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The first strand of counter-knowledge—or alternative epistemologies— emerged in the second half of the twentieth century around the issues like environmentalism, globalization, where—especially with the use of digital media technologies—societal values changed toward what scholars refer to as “civic narcissism” (Papacharissi, 2009: 230). According to this view, the self-absorbed and self-centered nature of online expression (in blogs and similar spaces) provides a narcissistic element to political deliberation. We observe such civic narcissism in the attacks on climate change, gender ideology and/or evolution theory for being ideologies that seek to challenge traditional ways of living. While questioning the evidence for climate change and global warming, right-wing populists also argue that “gender ideology” can be falsified by biology and evolutionary psychology (Eslen-­ Ziya, 2020; Krämer & Klingler, 2020) or creationism. Global warming is another issue that puts traditional knowledge institutions and science under attack. The Climategate controversy in the UK for instance caused a severe backlash against trust in science. Similarly, the vaccination controversies, the alternative facts produced about the dangers of the vaccines— result in rejection of the vaccination schemes introduced by the governments. The support of alternative epistemologies not only comes within the conservative academic circles producing counter-knowledge, but also through mainstream and new media platforms like news, blogs, YouTube videos, Twitter, and Facebook posts. The flow of anti-science information is intensified by the “polarization effect of the social media platforms” (Szabados, 2020: 91). While the content is produced and widely disseminated through such channels, the echo-chambers enable homogenous groups to receive the information on social media that they tend to share, which in return helps them conform and strengthen their beliefs. Ylä-­ Anttila (2018) has shown how the Finnish right-wing online media and its subscribers promoted the scientific community as a corrupt hegemony. These supporters were found to back a counter-knowledge that complies with the scientific epistemology and produces an alternative knowledge authority. Hence, they have put science forward within the populists’ discourse by praising facts and knowledge as a crucial basis for expressing informed and fair opinions, but at the same time contesting mainstream scientific authorities. For instance, they do this to undermine gender theory by giving references to biology or evolutionary psychology (Eslen-­ Ziya, 2020).

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Scholars use the expressions to point out the ambivalent relationships between populism, scientific knowledge and, more in general, expertise, which this chapter aims to explore further. According to these supporters of “pseudo-science” and “troll-science” (Eslen-Ziya, 2020), or “counter-­ science” (Ylä-Anttila, 2018) what differentiates alternative knowledge authorities from the mainstream scientific community is their distance with corruption of truth. Unlike the mainstream scientific community, the alternative knowledge authorities depict mainstream scientific authorities as polluting the truth. Such fake news and science-related conspiracy theories spread faster and produce anti-science sentiments, dispositions to a wider public. Once such sentiments are internalized, they evolve into radicalized opinions (Sunstein, 2002). Hence, the right-wing populism, while promoting the anti-elitist and traditional conservative world view, forms an epistemology and new knowledge of its own. The second wave of counter-knowledge, be it labeled as “post-truth” (Waisbord, 2018), “emo-truth” (Harsin, 2018) or I-Pistemology (Van Zoonen, 2012), “pseudo-science” and “troll-science” (Eslen-Ziya, 2020), or “counter-­ science” (Ylä-Anttila, 2018) is presented as alternative forms of scientific epistemologies and knowledge. Consequently, these alternative forms are (1) anti-science in terms of scientific knowledge; (2) see universities as corrupt institutions producing “untrustworthy”, “left-wing leaning” knowledge and raising “militant activists”; (3) praise other epistemologies (such as I-pistemology where “me” is at the center, not the scientific logic) and (4) help create and spread troll-scientific, counter-knowledge.

Pseudo-Science, Pseudo-Truth The academic critique of counter-knowledge has been about its empirical, epistemological, and methodological flaws and the ways the epistemic authority is contested through the practice of conspiracy theories. It is defined as bad, pseudo or troll-science as it downplays the “highly complex phenomena to simple cause” (Barkun, 2006: 7) and employs a confirmation bias. Populist development of pseudo-science heavily relies on the confirmation bias as it allows its adherents to seek information that will prove their initial ideas, theories, and any evidence “against the alleged conspiracy [that] is ultimately seen by them as evidence in favor of the conspiracy” (Harambam & Aupers, 2015: 3). This in turn makes them methodologically non-falsifiable, as their attempt to test their theories is

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refuted and such “paradox of evidence renders conspiracy theories at their heart unfalsifiable” (ibid.: 3). The second academic critique of counter-knowledge comes from its relationship with “paranormal and supernatural convictions appearing in the context of conservative religiosity and liberal political philosophy” (Edis, 2020: 6). Conspiracy theories supported through religious epistemologies—creationism, for instance—become a matter of faith rather than proof: […] the obsessive quest for proof masks a deeper problem: the more sweeping a conspiracy theory’s claims, the less relevant evidence becomes, notwithstanding the insistence that the theory is empirically sound. This paradox occurs because conspiracy theories are at their heart nonfalsifiable. No matter how much evidence their adherents accumulate, belief in a conspiracy theory ultimately becomes a matter of faith rather than proof. (Barkun, 2006: 7)

Hence, while serving as a matter of faith, it muddies the waters where the distinction between what is scientific fact and what is conspiracy becomes too vague for the lay person to distinguish. The use of digital media technologies has amplified the spread of pseudo-scientific belief. The online information ecosystems, that is, echo chambers polarized and segregated along political beliefs provide us with selective and even biased exposure to sources. They become a venue for spreading misinformation and manipulating public opinion. The echo-chambers, where beliefs are augmented and reinforced through communication and repetition inside a closed system of filter bubbles, make it easy to tailor misinformation and target those followers who are most likely to believe and further share it. Such amplification of fake news in return makes it difficult for consultation or fact-checking of information for the followers. As I have described elsewhere (Eslen-Ziya, 2020: 8), the counter-­ knowledge or pseudo-scientific arguments once associated with religious arguments and ideologies become “emotionally loaded and get easily accepted in ideologically conservative circles”. I further discuss how the counter-knowledge and the religious beliefs become so intertwined that rejection of such pseudo-science becomes rejection of the religious doctrine, and hence, no one dares to question the former without being accused of questioning the latter. In the following section, I will discuss the role of emotions on constructing and spreading such

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Fig. 1  Hybrid emotional echo-chamber theory

counter-knowledge with reference to the hybrid emotional echo-chamber theory also presented in Fig. 1.

Role of Emotions on Constructing and Spreading Counter-Knowledge Emotions not only shape people’s beliefs and actions toward science and scientists but also help them spread these ideologies wider. Hence, political affiliation fueled with emotions can guide their beliefs about science and those who practice it. Research has shown that emotions serve as predictors for social affiliation, and they help form intergroup identities and notions of belonging: Belief in misinformation […] follow[s] an emotional rather than a cognitive dynamic. That is, those that are emotionally invested might be the most likely to be vulnerable to political misbelief. (Sanchez & Dunning, 2021a)

Attributing positive emotions (belonging, hope, solidarity) into attitudes about one’s political party and negative ones (anger, resentment, distrust) into those of the opposing party not only forms stronger social affiliations, but also creates affective polarization. Such affective polarization (Iyengar et al., 2019) in return reinforces people to like their group (in-group) and

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dislike the others (out-group) but also to believe in what they like (in-­ group and the beliefs they represent) and distrust what they dislike (out-­ group and the beliefs they represent). They also tend to make generalized inferences about the opposing side, regardless of these implications’ accuracy. Hence the populist counter-knowledge, fueled with anti-science ideology, when presented in partisan news outlets, shapes and furthers current mistrust to science. The right-wing populists do this by activating the in-­ group identities (partisan identity) by presenting positive emotions toward their political parties and hostility toward the out-group. The lack of balanced content in such outlets, or the echo-chambers on social media in return result in extreme ideological positions powered by emotional polarization (Levendusky, 2013a, b). In other words, emotions play an important role in shaping counter-knowledge and negative emotions associated with opposing ideologies (and linked with political parties, or groups) are “more strongly associated with endorsing derogatory conspiracy theories about those parties” (Sanchez & Dunning, 2021b: 463). As there is an emotional component to anti-intellectualism or believing in counter-­ knowledge/pseudo-science, spreading such knowledge also bears an emotional component—what I refer to as the hybrid emotional echo-chambers. In studying the role of emotions on protest behavior, we coined the term “emotional echo-chambers” (Eslen-Ziya et  al., 2019) where we explained how such chambers serve as a glue for bringing and keeping different groups of people together in protests. The emotional echo-chamber theory resonates from the concept “echo-chambers” that describes how people get exposed to ideas that are similar to theirs. It is inspired by Garimella’s et  al. (2018: 1) approach to the concept of echo-chambers under two components: “the opinion that is shared by the user, and the ‘chamber’, i.e., the digital network around the user, which allows the opinion to ‘echo’ back to the user as it is also shared by others”. In this case however, the emotional echo-chambers are formed via emotions (linked to the opinions /ideologies/partisan identity) and shared through both digital network and the social environment around the participant. According to the original theory, the emotional echo-chambers are formed through the shared emotions—not opinions—and the chamber is the social environment around the participant—not the digital network. It specifically focused on the emotional echo-chamber built during a protest by the ideologically different groups where their commonality was the

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shared space in the park and their emotions formed in the protest. We argued that the networks created by taking part in the protest allowed emotions to both echo to others, but also to bring them back to their original creator and helped to reinforce them. Though the original emotional echo-chamber theory only discussed the protest behavior and the role of emotions in an actual space resonating with the digital world, in this chapter I employ this theory for both the social environment and digital networks and call it “hybrid emotional echo-chambers” (see Fig. 1). Hybrid here refers to both the digital media platforms on which the emotions can be distributed and echoed continuously but also to the actual space where ideas and emotions are shared and repeated. Hybrid emotional echo-chamber theory adds to Gabriel de Tarde’s work on the public by discussing the role of both digital and non-digital spaces in shaping public behavior and generating social influence. According to Tarde (1901 [cited in Caliandro, 2018: 564]) the public is a “purely spiritual collective, a dispersion of individuals who are physically separated and whose cohesion is entirely mental [with an] awareness of sharing at a same time an idea or a wish with a great number of men”. This is possible via the use of what Caliandro (2018) refers to as means of communication, and I add both old and new media technologies. But what the emotional echo-chamber theory complements here is the role of emotions in the process, enabling the flow of meaning attributed to information (i.e., causing happiness, feelings of belonging, anger, or resentment) that is influencing the crowds. Sunnercrantz’s (2021) analysis of public utterances and rhetorical strategies to influence audiences reveals that both affect and reason are employed regularly. As emotions play a significant role in the building of social and political identities, the hybrid emotional echo-chambers perspective will argue that the spread of political identities and/or ideologies are intensified once they are attached to emotions. Hence as in the Turkish case, calling academics terrorists or in the Mexican one, as corrupt “mafia” exploiting government funds, not only depicts scientists as the enemy, but also attaches certain emotional, negative meanings to them. This also becomes the case when in Hungary gender studies are defined as an ideology and not science, or in France, where post-colonial studies are depicted as being cancer-like, portraying scientific knowledge as instigating division and conflict within society. Henceforward, science and scientific knowledge becomes associated with being unpatriotic and triggers negative emotions. This was also similar in the Danish case, where political

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suspicion and intimidation toward academics specializing in gender and critical migration studies were fueled with speculation of these academics as not responsible citizens. As they were condemned for being “pseudoscientists”, “untrustworthy”, “left-wing leaning” and “militant activists”, the right-wing populists asked whether or not post-colonial and gender research was worth Danish taxpayers’ money. In all these instances it was made clear that the siding with these academics meant being not patriotic or loyal to one’s country. While patriotism was associated with positive emotions like loyalty and solidarity, opposing it was linked with negative ones such as anger, resentment, and not belonging. According to Salmela and Von Scheve (2017: 571) emotions like “(a) fear and insecurity about their identity, work, and entire life; (b) alienation and displacement at the loss of social bonds; or (c) disappointment and distrust in politics and the workings of democracy” shape right-wing populist identity politics. In our case, it is emotions like anger—triggered by rejection—which, when shared with others gets amplified, causing feelings of solidarity and belonging. The possibility of change, in our case banning of gender studies programs or post-colonial research, brings forth hope. Hence, these individual micro-level emotional responses, once linked with macro-level societal changes and challenges (like globalization, economic deregulations), trigger the motivation to support right-wing political parties which reinforce the existing micro-level emotional responses. In other words, they help echo the existing micro-level emotions back and forth by linking them to larger societal problems. Through the hybrid emotional echo-chambers theory I argue that through the echoing of these emotions, the filter bubbles created in these chambers (be they online or not) enable individuals to “prioritize relationships and to consume information content that reinforces their existing values, opinions, and beliefs” (Laybats & Tredinnick, 2016: 204). While the information flows faster and with a higher intensity ‍– due to the emotions linked – so also do untruths. This in return fosters epistemological populism, where while “people from all walks of life have come to suspect the knowledge coming from official institutions” (Van Zoonen, 2012: 56) counter-knowledge is constructed. The counter-knowledge linked with emotions and intergroup identities and notions of belonging replaces the scientific truth.

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To Conclude This chapter by linking the emergence of epistemological populism with emotions discusses how expert opinion is replaced by alternative, counter-­ knowledge, contributes to the classical sociological theory by updating Gabriel de Tarde’s (1969) analysis of collective behavior in crowds. It argues that the truth fueled with emotions and intergroup identities and notions of belonging replaces the scientific truth. Here I showed how the individual micro-level emotional responses, once linked with macro-level societal changes and challenges (like globalization, economic deregulations) activated emotions that help encourage the support toward right-­ wing political ideologies. I further presented how these all echo the existing micro-level emotions back and forth by linking them to larger societal problems. This is further explained with the introduction of hybrid emotional echo-chambers theory where anti-science development is explicated by not only the populist “war of science” (Thompson & Smulewicz-­ Zucker, 2018) but also via the emotional component attached to this war, or what Kuhar (2017) refers as the nostalgia for a lost golden age. The counter-knowledge or pseudo-scientific arguments, once associated with strong emotions and ideologies, also get emotionally loaded. Then the counter-knowledge and ideologies (and political identities, notions of belonging) become so intertwined that rejection of such pseudo-science becomes rejection of that doctrine, and hence becomes very difficult to confront. As the hostility toward science and the development of alternative scientific views develops as an ideology loaded with emotions, attacks on the scientific expertise serve to reduce the impact of scientific research. In other words, the right-wing populist strategies operate by activating emotions that “lead people to react negatively, vehemently, and even violently in such a way as to reduce the impact of scientific research and chill the research itself” (Hsu, 2020: 408).

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Saurette, P., & Gunster, S. (2011). Ears wide shut: Epistemological populism, argutainment and Canadian conservative talk radio. Canadian Journal of Political Science, 44(1), 195–218. Sunnercrantz, L. (2021). ‘Which side are you on–Mr. Westerberg?’ Reason, affect, and division in public debate. Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory, 1–24. Sunstein, C.  R. (2002). The law of group polarization. Journal of Political Philosophy, 10(2), 175–195. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-­9760.00148 Szabados, K. (2020). Combating anti-science: The pathologies of social media and modern journalism. In R. Sajna-Kunowky & A. Garczewska (Eds.), Future of media, changing journalism and new communication (pp. 23–38). Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Kazimierzka Wielkiego. Thompson, M. J., & Smulewicz-Zucker, G. R. (Eds.). (2018). Anti-science and the assault on democracy: Defending reason in a free society. Prometheus Books. Van Zoonen, L. (2012). I-Pistemology: Changing truth claims in popular and political culture. European Journal of Communication, 27(1), 56–67. Waisbord, S. (2018). The elective affinity between post-truth communication and populist politics. Communication Research and Practice, 4(1), 17–34. Williamson, T. (2019). In the post-truth world, we need to remember the philosophy of science. Available at: https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/ 2019/01/in-the-post-truth-world-we-need-to-remember-the-philosophy-ofscience. Accessed 28 Jan 2019. Ylä-Anttila, T. (2018). Populist knowledge: ‘Post-truth’ repertoires of contesting epistemic authorities. European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology, 5(4), 356–388.

The Role of Experts in Populist Politics: Toward a Post-foundational Approach Liv Sunnercrantz and Tevfik Murat Yildirim

Introduction The ‘expert’ often functions as an anti-populist stereotype in analyses of populism (see e.g., Müller, 2020). By virtue of their expertise and privileged access to knowledge invested in the seemingly impartial expert, the expert has the power to ‘debunk’ the masquerade of populist politics and restore faith to liberal democracy, or so we are led to believe. But are experts really the neutral figure that will save liberal democracy from the populist demagogue? To answer this, we must discuss and understand what ‘makes’ an expert. Is the expert, in fact, nothing more than the opposite of the populist? The appeal to ‘the people’ can include claims against the ‘political correctness’ of the political discourse, which are used to demonstrate that the populist ‘really knows’ or ‘dares to say’ what people really are thinking. Populist rhetoric often refutes expert knowledge and champions ‘common sense’, just as it pits a glorified ‘people’ against

L. Sunnercrantz (*) • T. M. Yildirim University of Stavanger, Stavanger, Norway e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 H. Eslen-Ziya, A. Giorgi (eds.), Populism and Science in Europe, Palgrave Studies in European Political Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97535-7_3

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bureaucrats, technocrats, and intellectuals (Moffitt, 2016). The “expertise of the people” can be mobilised against the expertise of the bureaucratic state (Turner, 2015). Similarly, political projects and discourses may create their own, ‘alternative’ experts, to contest established truths and sciences. The contribution of this chapter lies in tying together discursive-­ performative/post-foundational understandings of populism (De Cleen & Stavrakakis, 2017; Laclau, 2005; Mouffe, 2018) with a novel post-­ foundational theory of experts. This emanates in an ontologically coherent understanding of the role of experts in populist politics. First, we define populism. Second, we problematize the role, function, and constitution of the expert. We then discuss the role of ‘experts’ in relation to politics and power through intriguing cases from different local contexts across Europe and the US. The roles of experts in populist politics are neither constant nor definite as exemplified by the interaction of populism and technocracy (as covered later in the chapter); the discrediting of experts and science (see chapter “Knowledge, Counter-­Knowledge, Pseudo-­ Science in Populism”, “The Populist Challenge to the EU’s Sustainability Policy: Is ‘More Science’ a Legitimate and Viable Response?”, “On the Emergence of Alt-­Science Counterhegemony: The Case of the Finns Party”, and “The Problematic Relationship Between Science, Politics and Public Opinion in Late Modernity: The Case of the Anti-­Vax Movement in Spain and Italy” in this book); or assertions that everyone is an expert (Bickerton & Accetti, 2018; Drápalová & Wegrich, 2020). Finally, we are able  to reconnect experts and populism from a post-­ foundational perspective and outline a holistic approach to operationalize the two.

Populism: From Ideology to Discursive Logic Populism is a popular term in both research, media, and politics. Numerous political actors in Europe and the Americas are labelled populist, some of whom take part in national governments; others who perpetuate the role of the radical outsider (Bernhard & Kriesi, 2019; Palonen & Sunnercrantz, 2021). A still-growing body of literature testifies to the many ways of approaching this phenomenon (Betz, 1994; De Cleen & Glynos, 2021; Kaltwasser et al., 2017; Palonen, 2021). Two approaches have dominated the political sciences in the past years: the ideational perspective (e.g., Hawkins et al., 2018; Mudde & Kaltwasser, 2017) and the more empirical party-family approach (e.g., Bernhard & Kriesi, 2019; Jungar & Jupskås,

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2014). Here, we join the growing number of researchers operationalizing populism according to a minimal definition—a type of politics that positions the people against the elite, on a down-up axis—but we do so in a way that departs markedly from the ideational approach. In our view, the minimal definition is better situated within the post-foundational discursive approach. By elaborating Laclau’s (2005) decisive work, researchers like Mouffe (2018), Palonen (2021), De Cleen (2016), and Stavrakakis (De Cleen & Stavrakakis, 2017; Stavrakakis, 2021), treat populism as a way of doing politics: a political and discursive logic. Discourses and utterances which position a universal political subject like “people” against an “elite”, in a hierarchical dichotomy, follow this logic. This minimal definition is easily operationalized. Indeed, as demonstrated in the formalistic conceptualisation by Palonen and Sunnercrantz (2021), populism  =  usaffect1   +  frontieraffect2, which highlights the role of affect in engaging and mobilising the populist ‘us’ (see also Mouffe, 2018) and distinguishing this from the inimical elite. We operationalize populism as an observable discursive logic that recreates the social as hierarchically divided between two opposing camps: the people/underdog versus the elite/overdog (Dyrberg, 2003; Stavrakakis et al., 2017). Following a post-foundational approach, we recognise that the categories “the people” or “the establishment” can be substituted for other identities/categories that can take up the representation of a historical political subject (De Cleen & Stavrakakis, 2017; Laclau, 2005; Palonen & Sunnercrantz, 2021). The important part is that the “people” category can integrate heterogeneous identities and demands under one common signifier. Equally, the “elite” camp can be filled with “experts”, “untrustworthy politicians”, “bureaucrats”, “the establishment” or “the cultural elite”—depending on the social, historical, and geographical context (De Cleen, 2016; De Cleen & Stavrakakis, 2017). As populist projects tend to mobilise against the status quo and challenge existing political consensuses (Palonen & Sunnercrantz, 2021), this may entail a mobilisation against the experts attached to the incumbent regime. This chapter builds on the critique against populism as a thin ideology (Freeden, 2017; Katsambekis, 2020), contending that populism is neither an ideology (cf. Mudde & Kaltwasser, 2017; Stanley, 2008), nor the substance of politics, voter attitudes (c.f. Betz, 1994; Rydgren, 2010; Zaslove et al., 2021) or a mere stylistic feature of communication (c.f. Jagers & Walgrave, 2007). While we recognise some of the same tropes used in populist politics, as these researchers do, we argue that the substantive

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content of those articulations and the ideologies they promote are not the defining feature of populism (Palonen, 2021). By tying ideational aspects to populism, one risks conflating nationalism and populism, or nativism and populism. Equally, in designating nationalists as populists, researchers may cover up the very real threat of such political projects if they are reduced to “mere” populists. This chapter thus contributes to the many efforts to disentangle populism from nationalism (Anastasiou, 2019; De Cleen, 2017; De Cleen & Stavrakakis, 2017; Heiskanen, 2020; Sunnercrantz, 2020).

Experts: Profession or Performance? This chapter repurposes theories on “the expert” and its political function. Reflections on what makes, or constitutes, the expert as such, are surprisingly scarce (see e.g., Andersson et al., 2009; Rich, 2004). The sociological and political literature can be roughly divided between two camps that identify experts either by way of absolute, substantive traits and characteristics—or as a discursive contextual construct or performance (Chi, 2006; Evetts et al., 2006). Both tend to base definitions of experts on skilled or reputed individuals, and neither concerns the role of experts in politics. Here, we reinterpret earlier theories in a post-foundational frame in two ways: on the one hand, we may speak of “the expert” as a performance of knowledge-mediation and specialisation; on the other, the expert functions as a signifier for elites and authorities in populist discourses. We begin with a historical overview of the literature on the expert, starting with the classics and the resurgence of analyses of experts in post-­ industrial society. In the process, we identify two crucial concerns relevant to our discussion: that of identifying the expert; and the links between experts, power, and politics. First, in scrutinising definitions of the expert we find several weaknesses and propose to reconceptualise the expert in relation to the immediate context and conditions. This leads us to consider relational understandings of experts. Second, we delve into precisely those conditions. In our case, since we are interested in possible interconnections between experts and populism, we focus on politics and power. Early Work and Renewed Interest Academic attention to the role of experts in politics grew in proportion to the increased use of experts, scientists, and social engineers in state

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governance from the 1930s (Mannheim, 1952; Mills, 1956; Polanyi, 1962; Sharples, 1994; Weber, 1972). In his analysis of the power elite, Mills (1956) places experts among top decision-makers. Weber (1972), like Sartori (1987), juxtaposes the expert and the politician, seeing the expert as a trained technical specialist in the bureaucratic power of modern democracies. Foucault (1980) recognises the specialised expert in terms of function, as serving specific sectors of the state or capital. Despite the classical literature’s certainty that expertise brings or intermingles with power, Page (2010) highlights the surprisingly limited later research in this field. This may be rooted in a problem of defining “the expert” itself. Later research focuses on the contextual conditions for the development of experts and their functions in modern societies. Two fundamental processes connected to the transition to a post-industrial society in the latter half of the twentieth century affect the role and function of the expert, and ignite renewed scholarly interest. First, the specialisation of modern societies changes the conditions for the emergence of experts, in the north-western world. As the complexities of societies increased, the skills needed for governance grew more specialised. The specialisation and fragmentation of the modern state have arguably ceded much institutional change and control to experts, effectively alienating its citizens (Evetts et al., 2006). Specialisation has often been seen as threatening, either to democracy and political representation or to cultivated intellectual debate (Bourdieu, 2000a; Foucault, 1980; Gramsci, 1977; Mannheim, 1936). Equally, this trend has been apparent in labour markets and divisions of labour in the past fifty years. Increased demand for professionalism, credentialism, and specialists in practical knowledge has led to increased production of certified engineers, technicians, nurses, pre-school teachers, et cetera (Abbott, 1988; Bourdieu, 2000b; Johnson, 1972). Second, developments towards the post-industrial information society with expanded educational systems and technological advancements have made expert knowledge more readily available to the broader public (Bell, 1973; Ericsson, 2006; Webster, 2014). While potentially democratising knowledge production, these resources may also be used to challenge the authority of scientific expertise. As Fischer (2000) points out, such challenges are not a new phenomenon. Public protests against the ‘elitism’ (Fischer, 2000, p. 29) and autocracy of, for instance, medical experts performing tests, experimenting, or forcing treatment on unknowing or unwilling citizens or animals, have a long and widespread history. Nevertheless, increased professionalism in western societies is equalled by

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a steady increase in scepticism towards professionals. We often find antielitism at the core of criticism against experts, as experts are accused of developing solutions attainable only to the very elites of society, serving their private interest, perpetuating social injustices, or of using their social and political status to protect power elites and systems against political challenges (Fischer, 2000; Foucault, 1980; Mills, 1956). Identifying the Expert In general, the literature distinguishes between specialised, technical experts; broader and generally enlightened intellectuals; the lived experience and tacit knowledge of the layman; and inexpert politicians. Early theories lay the groundwork for an expert to be identified by fairly straightforward requirements, as someone ‘with mastery over a body of knowledge and its relevant techniques’ (Fischer, 2000, p.  29), ‘identified by their reputation or their extensive experience’ (Ericsson, 2006, p.  13). Whether operationalized as a professional position (Abbott, 1988; Johnson, 1972), or as a position of enunciation (Sunnercrantz, 2017), experts can be recognised as speaking on particular issues; informing and explaining; and/or presenting claims and perspectives as truth. Equally, anecdotal, personal experience of a service at hand may lend a certain local, domain-limited expertise. In its most elementary sociological form, “the expert” is a relational construct defined dichotomously to nonexperts (Evetts et al., 2006). As an antithesis to politicians (Sartori, 1987), experts are associated with bureaucratic thought and a tendency ‘to turn all problems of politics into problems of administration’ (Mannheim, 1936, p. 105). While experts are generally regarded as persons who excel in a certain domain (Ericsson, 2006); elites have traditionally been defined in very similar terms of capability (Pareto, 1942). Both experts and elites can be conceptualised as small groupings endowed with potential power based on formal positions and selection processes (Evetts et  al., 2006; Mieg & Evetts, 2018). Whereas the power of experts stems from a formal position, merit, or recognition within a field, the elite may gain power by heritage, control of capitals, or personal charisma, as well. Both groups safeguard their borders by processes of inclusion and exclusion, forcing potential members to pass through a selection process (Evetts et al., 2006; Murphy, 1988). As we shall argue, the categories of elites and experts may very well intertwine in populist discourses.

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Empirical analyses distinguish experts through their knowledge-based activities and occupations. Various sorts of knowledge workers and occupations requiring tertiary education may be included under the expert umbrella (Abbott, 1988; Evetts et al., 2006; Stehr & Grundmann, 2011). Stehr and Grundmann (2011) treat experts as mediators between contexts of knowledge creation and application. In-between these stages, experts transfer knowledge from its place of creation into its application. Although not producing knowledge, experts accordingly exert a certain authority in interpreting, simplifying, and mediating knowledge to a new audience. If experts, like all intellectuals, function as mediators of knowledge and ideology, and provide a language for speaking about a topic to an audience (Sunnercrantz, 2017)—who then are the producers of knowledge? As Evetts et al. (2006) remark, ‘scientists are regarded as experts par excellence, and science is the expert system par excellence’, ‘based on specific practices of knowledge production that have gained social and cultural authority’ (Evetts et al., 2006, p. 106). This system validates the epistemic claims made by scientists. These claims are treated as superior to other forms of knowledge. While arguing for the need for formal—or informal—qualifications, certifications, and accreditation, Stehr and Grundmann (2011) still recognise the existence of self-appointed experts without expanding on the latter. The problem that arises from these more traditional essentialist perspectives is that the role or function of experts is strongly connected to an actor’s occupation. Whereas these approaches treat experts as institutionalised in a semi-autonomous intellectual realm, which occasionally spills over into the public sphere, we need to understand the co-­constitution of experts in contemporary societies. By tying the expert to the immediate context and local conditions instead, we can empirically distinguish the constitution, function, role, and position of the expert. Such efforts can be found in a body of literature employing relational approaches. Relational Interventions Early relational approaches suggested that the expert is constituted as such by acquiring a specialised set of skills. Such skills are often argued to be developed through practice and experience. ‘He must personally know’ (Polanyi, 1962, p. 56), and knows more than ‘he’ can tell, Polanyi argues. Daston’s historical research into conceptualisations of reason, objectivity, and the subsequent rise of rationality, shows how scientific ideals have shifted from that of the most experienced observer to the self-abnegated

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objectivity and selflessness of nineteenth-century scientists (Daston, 1992; Daston & Galison, 2007). Both demarcate experts and expert knowledge validated by the expert/science system vis-à-vis subordinated forms of knowledge and experience gathered by the common man. Processes of institutionalisation secured the authority of the producers of this knowledge, coining for instance the notion of a “scientist”. Hence scientific expertise gained authority in larger social and cultural settings, claiming autonomy over the internal structures, rules, and practices of its system— deciding what is to be regarded as scientific or not. Moreover, it has come to manage the validity of particular explanations and definitions of reality—effectively strengthening or challenging broader cultural hegemonies. In the twentieth century, this expert system has increasingly intertwined with economic and political systems, producing a power hierarchy characterised by formal expertise (Daston & Galison, 2007; Evetts et al., 2006). The past decade has witnessed an unprecedented surge in scepticism towards expert opinion (Nichols, 2017), particularly in policy areas where the public opinion is divided by partisan lines (Blank & Shaw, 2015; Long et al., 2019). A growing body of research suggests that scepticism towards experts is not limited to certain policy areas. Popularised as anti-­ intellectualism, ‘a generalized suspicion and mistrust of intellectuals and experts of whatever kind’ (Merkley, 2020, p.  26) has emerged as a key component of populist rhetoric (Bonikowski & Gidron, 2016; Brewer, 2016; Weyland, 2001). The influence of populist rhetoric on anti-­ intellectualism is so persistent that corrective expert messages that involve “consensus cues”, signalling  significant scientific consensus, often prove ineffective in convincing those with anti-intellectual sentiment and scepticism towards experts (Merkley, 2020). This implies that overcoming anti-­ intellectualism within the public is no easy task. Fischer’s (2009) interpretative approach seeks to understand policy expertise. He emphasises science as a socio-political activity. Like Mannheim, Stehr, and Grundmann, Fischer treats the expert ‘as an interpretive mediator operating between the available analytic frameworks of social science, particular policy findings, and the differing perspectives of the public actors, both those of policy decisionmakers and citizens’ (Fischer, 2009, p. 11). Fischer (2009) points out that the public realm and the techno-scientific realm employ different epistemological rules. When moving between realms, experts must adapt to the new social context, to rightly convey their message. While Fischer (2009) also discusses

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questions of authority and legitimacy to speak about the technical dimensions of policy issues and rhetorical strategies for instilling authority—yet he does not connect the two. Taking up a post-empiricist position and following Polanyi, Fischer recognises that there are, what he calls, hidden dimensions behind our social constructions and that certain ideas, values, logics, and commitments ground professional experts’ practices. This contrast with the perspective presented in the next section, which asserts that it is certain doings which constitute the expert per se. Experts, Politics, Power Experts intermingle with power and politics in several ways, both internally in institutionalised expert systems and externally, in political systems and policies. In relation to politics, the role of experts lies in lending legitimacy to a certain project. Experts and politicians may also construct an advisor-client relationship, where experts are called in to set priorities for action, advise policymakers, define or explain situations to a broader public or political audience (Rietig, 2014; Sunnercrantz, 2017). To Mannheim (1936), the function and role of the expert is to assess the effects of a law, order, or policy—not to question or recognise the conflicting and irrational forces behind every rationalised order. He warns of the authoritative dangers in that bureaucratic experts regard collective energies, irrational forces, and protests as mere momentary disturbances to a natural order. Evetts et al. (2006) identify similar risks with purely expert-driven projects which run the risk of evolving too far away from common sense and losing all connections to public concern and objectives. Equally, cadres of experts have been accused of attempting to secure power in the hands of certain established professional experts—and not others (Larson, 1977). In the following sub-sections, we explore entanglements between experts, politics, and elitism, as the latter are central features in populism as we understand it. As we discuss these power-related aspects, we explore the possibilities of such relations changing over time and in connection to populist mobilisations. First, we show how the anti-elitism associated with populism may be substituted, or filled with, anti-expertise. Second, we show that roles of experts in populist politics are neither constant nor definite as exemplified by populist mobilisation instating technocratic orders.

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Mistrust and Anti-expertise Seeing the weakening relationship between experts and citizens as a danger to democracy, Nichols (2017) argues that growing political alienation of the masses and diminishing civic involvement further exacerbate citizens’ trust in expert opinion. While the argument that citizens often lack the political information and motivation necessary to make informed decisions in political processes is old and empirically well-supported (Bennett, 1988; Campbell et  al., 1960; Carpini & Keeter, 1996), public trust in science and experts seems to have reached a historical low (Gauchat, 2012). In the context of mistrust of experts, Nichols (2017, p. 3) writes, ‘this is more than a natural scepticism toward experts. I fear we are witnessing the death of the ideal of expertise itself, a Google-fuelled, Wikipedia-based, blog-sodden collapse of any division between professionals and laypeople, students and teachers, knowers and wonderers’. An important portion of this can be attributed to elite messages in an era of partisan polarisation (Motta, 2018; Oliver & Rahn, 2016; Routledge, 2020). Past scholarship contends that the implications of such partisan messages are crucial especially in policy areas where misperceptions can cost lives (Kennedy, 2019; Pennycook et al., 2021). Using data from millions of smartphone users in Florida and Texas, Long et al. (2019) show that Trump-voting constituencies were considerably less likely to evacuate for Hurricane Irma than Clinton voters. The authors attribute this finding to science denialism and partisan polarisation. Pennycook and collaborators (2021) examine the differential impact of political polarisation on COVID-19 beliefs and behaviours (e.g., mask-­ wearing, social distancing, vaccination intentions) in the US and the UK. They show that the correlation between political conservatism and misperceptions is over twice as strong in the US as in the UK. According to the authors, increasing polarisation in public discourse plays an important role here. In a study that utilises location data from smartphones, Allcott et al. (2020) find strong empirical evidence to support the aforementioned conclusion: social distancing is much less likely in areas with more Republicans.  xpert Rule and Technocratic Populism E Turner (2015) identifies two general perceptions of experts as problematic. In social theory, experts are often perceived as a threat to democracy as ‘we are faced with the dilemma of capitulation to “rule by experts” or democratic rule which is “populist”—that is to say, that valorizes the

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wisdom of the people even when “the people” are ignorant and operate on the basis of fear and rumor’ (Turner, 2015, p. 17). In normative political theory, expertise is also treated as a problem of equality and power imbalances as states tend to give experts and expert opinion a special status (Rietig, 2014). Rietig’s (2014) empirical analysis concludes that scientific input is at best perceived as a neutral input to better understand technical issues, or at worst, used by politicians to underpin their political objectives and bypass deliberative processes. Turner (2015), like many laymen in modern society, conclude that ideologically motivated experts steer societal developments. The democratic problem is that experts are not democratically accountable yet exercise power and authority in the highest echelons of society. Mannheim identifies, already in 1929, the political problems that ensue when experts are entrusted with power over the political sphere. The ‘functionary’, he says, fails to recognise that behind every law ‘lie the socially fashioned interests’ and worldviews ‘of a specific social group’ (Mannheim, 1936, p.  105). In simpler terms, Turner (2015) identifies this as the problem of expert knowledge: claims or presentations of reality masquerading as neutral fact, above any conflicting parties in a debate, but which in fact are ideologies. In contrast, Albæk (2009) emphasises that experts are used in politics because there is an insatiable need for knowledge in political-administrative systems. Since the state and public sector are expected to solve a range of complex problems, from unemployment to welfare distribution, climate change, and so on, the exercise of politics necessitates expert knowledge. Albæk (2009) also points out that the expert connotes a sense of neutral independence, in contrast with partisan political spokespersons. While populism and technocracy may be theorised as alternative forms of political representation to party government (Caramani, 2017), a growing body of research examines the commonalities between them (Castaldo & Verzichelli, 2020; Culpepper, 2014; Kriesi, 2014). Despite their important differences, the few commonalities between the two are of high importance that they spark considerable scholarly interest in synthesising the two concepts. As Caramani (2017) succinctly summarises, both populist and technocracy emphasise unitary society (usually at the expense of pluralism), build on a trustee model, and have a non-pluralistic view of society and politics. Especially germane to our discussion is the latter element, namely, the non-pluralistic views adopted by populism and technocracy. Commonly associated with semi-authoritarian regimes in developing

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countries, especially in Latin America (O’Donnell, 1973; Collier et  al., 1979; Pastorella, 2016), technocratic governments typically comprise of a group of experts that are fairly autonomous in their policy pursuits, which, in the absence of a strong democratic culture and institutions, undermine democratic processes (Dargent, 2015). Furthermore, Dargent (2015, p. 166) notes, ‘political bodies frequently lack the ability to match technocrats’ expertise’, contributing to an uneasy relationship between representative democracy and the influence of technocrats. Although differing from technocracy in terms of points of departure (“people’s power” in populism as opposed to “experts’ power” in technocracy) similar sets of critique targeting representative democracy are present in both. Most notably, the populist critique argues that dominant party governments in representative democracies suffer from short-termism—stemming from office-oriented goals among political elites (Bickerton & Accetti, 2018; Caramani, 2017). Drawing on the various ways populism interacts with technocracy recent scholarship examines governments that adopt populist rhetoric and elitist technocratic policies simultaneously. Elected officials in populist technocracies seek to rely on technical expertise in the policymaking process, aiming to run ‘the state as an “efficient” political firm’ (Buštíková & Guasti, 2019, p.  303). One such example is Ecuador’s Correa, who, despite his populist appeals, prioritised experts at the expense of citizen input in the policymaking process (de la Torre, 2013). Similarly, Castaldo and Verzichelli (2020) argue that the combination of technocratic policies and populist discourse has been commonplace in Italy since the rise of Berlusconi in the political arena. They see ‘ancestral populist mentality and a recurrent demand for “real skills”’ (Castaldo & Verzichelli, 2020, p. 492) as the driving force behind technocratic populism in Italy. In the Czech Republic, technocratic populism found voice in politics on multiple occasions commonly in times of societal and political transformation (Buštíková & Guasti, 2019, see also Semenova, 2020 for a similar argument). Havlík (2019) argues that the rise of technocratic populism in the Czech Republic coincides with disruptions in political pluralism. While the effect of technocratic populism on democratic processes varies considerably across countries, various political parties from across the world have successfully combined elements of technocracy and populism that Bickerton and Accetti (2018) coined the term ‘techno-populist party family’ to define such parties.

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Experts and Populism: A Post-foundational Approach By now, we have surveyed a series of theories which may be re-appraised and re-interpreted through a post-foundational framework. For instance, the processes of closure surrounding experts and elites (Evetts et al., 2006; Murphy, 1988) mean that these identities are both constituted in opposition to the popular. What constitutes an expert is largely taken for granted in the survived literature on experts and populism. None of these studies examines the constitution of experts in populist discourses. Here, we outline a theoretical approach that can be employed for these purposes. The Expert as Subject Position To operationalize “the expert”, we suggest that the various qualities assigned to the expert and its functions are used to identify this analytical category in each empirical case. Foucault (1972) enables an understanding of the expert as a position taken up by a subject voluntarily or assigned involuntarily, by speaking of assignable positions. Anyone can attempt to co-constitute, articulate, take up, or move between various discursively available positions and momentarily attach him/herself or others, to certain subject positions, such as “expert” (Sunnercrantz, 2017, p. 76). These attempts are not always recognised as legitimate positionings by peers or the surrounding discourse. We must also acknowledge that the research subjects’ definition of an expert does not necessarily correspond to scientific definitions of experts. So far, we can see that “the expert” in populist discourses may signify something very different from the expert and expert performances (of sprinters, musicians, molecular biologists, etc.) defined in social science literature (i.e., Ericsson, 2006). The constitution of an expert has to do with the discursive constructions, performances, and positionings of experts and expertise, providing a language for speaking about the issue at hand, establishing truths and guidelines for veridiction, and (re)iterating certain systems of meaning in new contexts. Indeed, a person can step in and out of the expert role, dependent on context. This constitutive positioning is not necessarily performed by the (alleged) experts themselves. Equally, individuals may be positioned in various subject positions, not just at different moments in their lives, but simultaneously: as an expert in one discourse and a fraud in another. Following Mannheim’s (1952) problematisation of knowledge production and claimed objectivity, we must also admit that “the expert”

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is not always a servant of the ubiquitous greater good of knowledge and society. Rather, every articulation of belief, even supposedly neutral statements of fact and prescriptive expert advice may mediate ideology (Sunnercrantz, 2017). Turning to Rhetoric Following Fischer and Gottweis (Fischer & Gottweis, 2012; Gottweis, 2007), a turn to rhetoric can enable researchers to identify experts by/in argumentative practices and positionings in public debates. Here, the three appeals (ethos, pathos, logos) in rhetoric can aid us in operationalizing the expert-argument. Such an approach also allows us to recognise and identify experts as contextually localised. Starting with ethos, which refers to ‘the speaker’s character or authority, which gives his or her words some degree of persuasive force. We typically understand this when we hear “experts” speak’ (Martin, 2013, p. 63). Hence, “the expert” may be performed in argumentation, as a claim to authority. As Gottweis (2007) explains, ethos is a procedural phenomenon constituted through practices of enunciation. It partly depends on the audiences’ perception and recognition. Hence, it does not refer to an internal quality but is a discursive praxis based on exchange and interaction. As such, ethos helps us to identify an expert in the specific context, rather than by his/her official credentials. While a speaker’s formal position can grant them the right to speak, but often the authoritative character is re-­ asserted if not demonstrated in speech itself (Martin, 2013): Demonstrating or even seeking to enhance one’s ethos need not mean explicitly claiming to be an expert on the topic on which one is speaking. But it does involve giving the listener a sense of the speaker’s entitlement to speak. Witnesses at a traffic accident are not experts in accidents, but their views have force because they saw what happened. (Martin, 2013, p. 63)

Appeals to ethos are common and often implicit in politics. While some politicians assert an ethos by way of eloquence and moderation, others— associated with populist politics—employ a less formal vernacular, manner, and appearance implying a connection with ‘ordinary people’ (Martin, 2013). In contrast, ‘the use of dense language with technical jargon may isolate the hearer behind a veil of apparent expertise that implies distance’

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to the less knowledgeable audience (Martin, 2013, p. 72)—a distinction previously discussed by Daston and Galison (2007). Appeals to reason and demonstrations of logic, which we might associate with the typical expert, are operationalized as logos. One way to assert authority is by a matter-of-fact, logocentric argumentation, presenting a neutral, unbiased ethos, which may then create the ethos of an “expert” in the right cultural context. The speaker establishes authority in a particular domain or issue based on expert knowledge derived from education, a professional attachment, or first-hand experience. This creates a limited sort of locally attached authority which gives the speaker legitimacy only within that domain. It is not transferrable to other situations or questions (Sunnercrantz, 2017). In contrast, appeals toward sympathy and identification with a speaker, to build the charisma of a speaker, or attempts to speak on behalf of relatively universal subjects, like “the people” or “the common man” against bureaucracy or elitist politicians, is a type of ethos we would like to associate with a populist politician. Such an ethos may imply a relatively universal authority over a political standpoint, group, or society—instead of the particular and domain-specific authority that we connect to the expert. Finally, pathos signifies appeals to or with emotion and is crucial in mobilising the audience to act (Finlayson, 2007; Gottweis, 2007; Martin, 2013; Sunnercrantz, 2021). These passions are especially highlighted in previous theories on populist mobilisations (Mouffe, 2018; Palonen & Sunnercrantz, 2021; see also in chapter “Knowledge, Counter-­Knowledge, Pseudo-­Science in Populism” of this volume). To mobilise an audience against an inimical position, a speaker can for instance seek to influence or amplify the audience’s emotions. Now, argumentation functions (best) through a combination of these modes of persuasion (Gottweis, 2007). While the ideal notion of an expert is that of an unattached and rational conveyer of objective facts (i.e., an appeal to logos and ethos, devoid of pathos), Polanyi points out, ‘unless an assertion of fact is accompanied by some heuristic or persuasive feeling, it is a mere form of words saying nothing’ (Polanyi, 1962, p. 267). Experts = (Counter-)Elites That populism valorises “common sense” and the knowledge of the “common people” over expertise is more or less taken for granted. “Folk wisdom”, or the wisdom of the common man, is accordingly seen as superior

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to that of experts, intellectuals, and politicians. At least, this is generally included in theoretical definitions of populism (see e.g., Hawkins, 2010; Wodak, 2015; Mudde & Kaltwasser, 2017). Evetts et  al. (2006) links experts and elites but points out that the commonplace definition of elites emphasises power, not excellence or expertise—as with “the expert”. Yet, recognised formal expertise may lead an individual or group to an elite position. Power plays a prominent role in analyses of institutionalisations of experts and expert systems. Modern societies amplify the functional importance of expertise by supporting their democratic systems on bureaucracy, meritocracy, and public administration, for instance. Rationalisation of governmental and economic functions motivates experts to monopolise access to their fields and disciplines by forming new professions and collaborating with state authorities. Groups of experts install mechanisms of social inclusion and exclusion to safeguard the privileges associated with (their) elite positions against potential challengers (Bourdieu, 1984; Murphy, 1988; Evetts et al., 2006). It is precisely such mingling with power that has the potential to foster and legitimise anti-­ expert sentiments as part of anti-elitism in populist articulations. This brings us back to the populist logic. Mudde and Kaltwasser (2017) underscore the dichotomisation of common-­sense solutions versus the opinion of experts. They see attempts ‘to convince their followers that they do not belong to the (corrupt) elite but are part of the (pure) people’ (Mudde & Kaltwasser, 2017, p. 68) as crucial to populist politicians. Here, we question the ideational approaches tendency to steep populism in fixed foundations of coherent value-­systems. Like Ylä-Anttila (2018), we argue that counter-expertise and counter-­ elites have important roles to play in populist projects. Indeed, we argue that every political project has the potential to mobilise its associated experts and instate these in the place of the former elite. While we have mapped a general distrust of academic expertise, we have not found studies to fully support the alleged valorisation of common sense or personal experience as tied to populism. Bickerton and Accetti (2018) mention the emphasis on alternative experts and notions that “everyone is an expert”, in Grillo’s Five Star movement. This notion might not be specific to populist discourses. Traditional politicians have long used and referenced the experience of “common people” as a way of asserting authority. In the last decades of the twentieth century, affective appeals of pathos-centric persuasion tended to give way to more informative, prosaic, and technical logocentric contributions in mainstream mass

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media. Political spokespersons transcended into technical and expert-ways of argumentation rather than a passionate engagement for the people or party (for instance), possibly for reasons of legitimacy and acceptance (Sunnercrantz, 2017). Politicians increasingly referred to external sources of knowledge for expertise, like reports or statistics provided by experts— or the lived personal experience of voters (Atkins & Finlayson, 2013). As Mudde and Kaltwasser rightly assert (2017, p. 108), ‘media have ditched the (academic) expert for “the man in the street” in their coverage of important political developments’. It just is not necessarily a solely populist feature. Mieg and Evetts (2018) conceptualise the emergence of counter-elites. Individual or small groups of experts who research on marginalised issues may be ignored by mass media and confined to smaller circles of followers for a long time. While they are the first to anticipate and conduct research on the said problem, attempts to initiate public discussion may first be met with ridicule or resistance (as with e.g., environmental issues) (Evetts et al., 2006; Mieg & Evetts, 2018). Polanyi points out that, ‘adherents of one persuasion may refuse to recognize any intellectual merit in those of a rival persuasion, calling them cranks, frauds or fools’ (Polanyi, 1962, p. 235). The clash between different ideologies or political projects determines the accreditive term like “expert”, “reputable” or “distinguished” applied to persons claiming professional descriptions like scientists, doctors, nurses, and so on, implying that ‘a measure of consensus’ (Polanyi, 1962, p. 235) plays into the allocation of intellectual merit. By extension, we might say that intellectual merit and expertise is thus discursively constituted and dependent on relatively consensual affirmation. Ylä-Anttila (2018) similarly discusses alternative knowledge authorities amongst conspiracy theorists, who see themselves as true experts in contrast to the established—but false—experts. During periods of controversy, these marginalised or alternative experts constitute a counter-elite to established elites—who reproduce the status quo and remain reluctant to recognize the issue or recommended solutions. When this issue reaches the public’s concern, is picked up by media or social movements, these alternative experts can supply the demanded expertise. Thus, previously ill-reputed experts can grow respectable or famous when “their” previously marginalised issue gains momentum, becomes indisputable and its solutions standardised. If successful, the counter-elite may replace the established elite (Evetts et al., 2006; Mieg & Evetts, 2018).

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Conclusion This chapter contributes theoretically by providing operationalisable conceptualisations of both populism and experts. Our definition of populism boils down to a type of politics that positions “the people” against “the elite” on a down-up axis. “The expert”, although less thoroughly examined in contemporary research, may be understood as a subject position, and identified through a type of rhetoric that asserts logocentric technical arguments on a relatively specific domain of knowledge. Such features constitute an expert in the eyes of the public and researchers alike. Since earlier sociological and political literature place experts among (scientific) elites, we expect to find experts among the various “elites” opposed in variegate populist projects. Post-foundationalist perspectives lead us to the realisation that the “elite” is an essentially empty category that can be filled with a range of identities depending on the social, cultural, and political historical context—be it experts, intellectuals, politicians, or fiscal elites, for instance. It also leads us to the conclusion that the uses of experts vary between populist projects. As a political-discursive logic, populism may serve to oppose the hegemonic experts of the incumbent regime—or to be employed to instate alternative experts and intellectuals in their place, as with the case of technocratic populism.

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The Populist Challenge to the EU’s Sustainability Policy: Is “More Science” a Legitimate and Viable Response? Thomas Sattich

Introduction This chapter traces two seemingly opposing trends: the increasing importance of sustainability and climate change mitigation for the European Union, and the growing power of populist forces which—despite strong differences and nuances across the different populist platforms—seem to oppose EU policies in the mentioned areas. In view of these contrasting developments, this chapter also asks about the EU’s potential to meet the populist challenge to its sustainability policies by the use of its science programs. The point of departure is the growing importance of environmental sustainability for the EU. Various pieces of EU legislation mean to guide economic and societal development toward higher levels of sustainability,

T. Sattich (*) University of Stavanger, Stavanger, Norway e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 H. Eslen-Ziya, A. Giorgi (eds.), Populism and Science in Europe, Palgrave Studies in European Political Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97535-7_4

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for example in the field of energy. What is more, much of the EU’s strategy for internal and external economic and societal development is based on the concept of environmental sustainability, for example, its strategy for a prosperous, modern, competitive, and climate-neutral economy (European Commission, 2018). Populist forces cover this topic in their discourses (Huber et al., 2021), and tend to criticize—and sometimes reject—the societal, economic, and international effects of EU policy in this area (Schreurs & Wurster, 2019). Populism is therefore assumed to be a political force that is suited to undermine sustainable transitions (Wanvik & Haarstad, 2021, p. 2096). Given the increasing salience of populists in European politics (von Homeyer et al., 2021; Börzel & Risse, 2020; Cossarini et al., 2021), it can, hence, be expected that further advances toward sustainability and climate protection at the EU level will be slowed down considerably—or made impossible. Empirically, however, the impact of populism on individual policies is negligible in some cases (Petri & Biedenkopf, 2021). Strong ideological variety (Huber et al., 2021) is likely to be one of the reasons. Regarding sustainability, the spectrum reaches from strong commitment to strong opposition toward environmental policy and climate protection (Lockwood, 2018, p.  714). The ascendency of populism can therefore seem to both undermine and empower the EU’s sustainability policies (Huber et al., 2021, p. 14). At the same time, overlaps between left and right-wing populists represent a potential threat to climate change mitigation. This concerns anti-elite motives (Bosworth, 2020; Buzogány & Mohamad-Klotzbach, 2021, p. 157) as well as the economic costs of sustainability which are being opposed equally by parties on the far left and the far right (Farstad, 2018, p. 705). The (future) impact of populism on the EU’s policies on environmental sustainability, particularly climate change mitigation, is therefore largely unclear. This makes populism a political force that is difficult to react to from the point of view of EU policymakers. Additionally, EU bodies have few institutional resources and above all, they have limited legitimacy to (re-)act where populist discourses occur. This makes it difficult to implement specific (counter-) measures (Surel, 2011, p. 6). Yet the stakes are high for the EU’s sustainability policy. This chapter aims at capturing the implications of this dilemma. It attempts to capture the significance of populism for European level of politics (section “Populism and the EU’s ‘Polycrisis’: Entry-Points for

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Populism”), and the relationship between populism and environmental sustainability (section “Populism and Sustainability: A Disruptive Minority?”). Moreover, the chapter attempts to capture the impact of populism on EU sustainability policy (section “EU Policy on Sustainability: Challenged by Populist Forces?”). Additionally, the chapter aims to shed light on the EU’s possible reaction to the complex challenge that populism represents to one of her most important policy fields. In that regard, the chapter asks whether the use of EU science programs is a legitimate and valid response to the populist challenge to the EU’s sustainability policies (section “EU Science Policy: A Liable and Viable Answer to the Populist Challenge?”).

Populism and the EU’s ‘Polycrisis’: Entry-Points for Populism Significant efforts have been taken to classify populism as a political phenomenon (Mudde, 2004; Ostiguy et al., 2021). Some authors treat populism as an ideology, others as a political style or strategy, a form of discourse/rhetoric, or a political logic (Markou, 2017). Moreover, authors in the field distinguish between the left and right-wing (March, 2017) as well as a valence form of populism (Zulianello, 2020). In addition, the socio-economic causes of populism are being discussed. Notwithstanding a precise definition, Europe is generally considered one of the global hotspots of populism (Mudde & Rovira Kaltwasser, 2013; IDEA, 2020, p. 2). In this geographical area, populist parties have significantly gained support over the past two decades. As a consequence, populist parties have become important players in the party systems of various European countries (Rooduijn et al., 2014). Right-wing populist movements in particular have seen a strong increase since the 1980s (Abromeit, 2017, p. 177). Due to this upward trend, populist parties were also the main contenders for power in several countries during recent elections (Halikiopoulou, 2018, p. 63), resulting in the inclusion of populist parties in several (coalition) governments (Vittori, 2021, p.  17). As of today, more than half of the EU member states between 1990 and 2018 have seen populist parties in government (Jahn, 2021, p. 2). Currently, more than one third of governments in the EU consist of at least one populist party (Ibd.), including Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Italy, Poland, and Slovenia (Meyer, 2021).

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Given the long experience with this political phenomenon, the impact of populism on politics in Europe is well-researched. Beyond research on national politics, populism also has an important place in the EU-studies literature (Börzel & Risse, 2020; Christiansen, 2020; Schmidt, 2019; Zeitlin et al., 2019). Against the backdrop of this literature and the way it interprets the meaning of populism for the Union, it can be said that the EU-level of politics is under strong pressure by populist forces today— maybe more than at any point following the signing of the Treaty of Rome in 1957. This pressure can be noticed on various dimensions of European politics: public acceptance of EU policies, bilateral politics, and EU-level politics. In short, populism increasingly affects policymaking at the EU level (Fitch-Roy et al., 2018) and policy implementation at the member state level. What is more, populist forces meet a European Union in ‘polycrisis’ (von Homeyer et al., 2021), that is a European Union shaken by several overlapping and reinforcing structural problems. In this near-continuous crisis (Christiansen, 2020, p. 16), the EU is struggling with a multitude of problems—financial, geopolitical, migration, disintegration/Brexit, Covid-19, and so on. Populism adds to this already complicated situation, because for many populists, the European Union represents ‘a popular punch bag, an easy target and prey’ (Buti & Pichelmann, 2017, p.  4). Given the EU’s fragile state, populism ranks relatively at a high position on the hierarchy of threats which the European Union is currently facing (Theodore, 2019, pp. 1–21). Several entry points to EU-level politics are open to populist actors. Various authors suggest that at the most fundamental level, the growing appeal of populist positions has implications for the quality of democracy in Europe (Vittori, 2021, p. 17). Specifically, this concerns the erosion of the ‘permissive consensus’ (Lindberg & Scheingold, 1970). For decades, political forces at the EU level could count on the support of the wider public for European integration in a technocratic fashion (Checkel & Katzenstein, 2009, p. 2). However, rising populism and Euroskepticism have made European politics increasingly politicized (Schmidt, 2019; Zürn, 2019). Due to a significantly more populist and Euroskeptic public, it is no longer feasible to pursue the process of European integration on the basis of the assumption that the general public would eventually appreciate its outcomes (Auer, 2010, p.  1179). Moreover, this concerns the implementation of policies coming from the EU level. With considerable parts of the public being susceptible to populist and/or Euroskeptic

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rhetoric, the legal implementation of EU policies may become increasingly contested. This concerns policies in the field of sustainability (e.g. renewable energy projects). In this field, the implementation of EU policies is often met with opposition from local communities (Batel & Devine-­ Wright, 2015, p. 319). According to the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, energy and climate policy as well as social policy fall into a category of ‘shared competences’ (Best, 2019, p.  236). In this area, member states agree that EU policy and common objectives may be helpful. However, EU measures linked to policies in this category need to be justified in terms of the subsidiarity principle—either because of the nature of the issue or because the objectives can be better achieved at the level of the EU than by individual member states (Ibd.). Due to these conditions, policies in this category are often among the more contested ones. In some cases, member states demand more measures at the supranational level; in others, they voice reservations about EU-level entities. Further, member states point out that it would be better to have more extensive EU policies in some areas and less extensive policies in others (Lopatka, 2019, pp.  26–27). This leaves populists in national governments with many options to interfere with new initiatives. Electoral successes also give populist forces direct access to the legal process of making EU-level policies. In particular, this concerns the European Parliament. Over the decades, a growing number of populist parties have gained seats in the central EU-level institution, particularly at the right-wing of the spectrum (Zulianello & Gahner Larsen, 2021, p. 7). In the 2019 elections to the European Parliament, populist parties could again increase their share of seats, with the result that populism has now reached a position at the center stage of this institution (Stockemer & Amengay, 2020). Different populist and/or Euroskeptic parties are being represented in the European Parliament, mainly on the right-wing of the political spectrum. Moreover, their influence on European politics varies with their position in the European political system. Notwithstanding these differences, it appears possible that populist parties are on their way to becoming the strongest political force in the EP (Ibd.). This strengthening of populist parties, particularly on the right of the spectrum, may have widespread implications for European policies (Theodore, 2019, p.  10). Through the normalization of populist discourses and policies (Mudde, 2019, p.  32), it may, for example, affect mainstream-party agendas. Specifically, populist successes in European

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elections are suited to make it more difficult for mainstream parties to continue the EP’s long-standing policy positions such as ambitious climate policy (Petri & Biedenkopf, 2021). As a consequence of the governments of several member states being (partly) under the control of populist parties, populists also have direct access to the Council and the Council of Ministers. Here, the broad lines of EU policy are being developed and adopted, including policies regarding sustainable development. Hence, populist Heads of State and Ministers from different member states, populist parties are directly involved in high-level decision-making (Mudde, 2019, pp.  30–32), including the Council’s decisions on the EU’s long-term development. Depending on their political leaning and positions toward the EU and its policies, individual governments or groups of countries can significantly complicate and/or prolong negotiations in the Council of the EU (Skjaerseth, 2018). As a consequence, negotiating agreements and policies may become more demanding (Huber et  al., 2021; Żuk & Szulecki, 2020). For example, during the EU summit in 2019, the Polish PiS government prevented (with the support of Viktor Orbán) the EU from moving toward the 2050 zero-carbon goal (Ibd.). Finally, the bilateral level of European politics (Sattich & Jackson Inderberg, 2019) can be affected by populist parties being in power. The refusal of the Polish government to stop lignite extraction at a coal mine near the border to Czechia despite Czech complaints regarding groundwater pollution (Politico, 2021) may serve as an illustration related to climate skepticism (Żuk & Szulecki, 2020). Hence, populism represents a strong risk factor for the European Union, in the area of sustainability and beyond. However, the breaking down of the “permissive consensus” or the inclusion of populists in the EU’s decision-making bodies does not necessarily affect all policy fields to the same extent. Some issues may be more politicized than others are (Zeitlin et al., 2019, p. 964); hence, the impact of populism may differ across policy fields. It is not atypical to assume that the impact is strong, but research results also indicate a mixed impact (see section “EU Policy on Sustainability: Challenged by Populist Forces?”). Given the importance of sustainability for the EU, and its attempts to make the concept of sustainable development the basis of its internal development as well as its relationship with other polities (Oberthür & Dupont, 2021), the implications potentially go beyond Europe (Leonhard et al., 2021; Khrushcheva & Maltby, 2016). However, research on the effect of populism on specific

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policies has started only recently (Falkner & Plattner, 2020, p.  723), including sustainability and climate change mitigation. The next section will present some research results on that matter.

Populism and Sustainability: A Disruptive Minority? Contemporary society is facing multiple challenges such as climate change, shifts in the global economy, the Covid-19 pandemic, and the societal implications of new technologies. Many experts estimate that the response to these challenges will alter our societies dramatically (WEF, 2020). Sustainability and climate protection play key roles in this context, as they have evolved into widely accepted goals (BBC, 2021). With the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals from 2017, sustainability has become a widely accepted goal for governments worldwide. Moreover, the Paris Agreement brings together about 200 countries that have committed themselves to limiting global warming to well below 2°C, preferably to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels (United Nations, 2015, Art. 2, a). The strong role of green policies in the economic stimulus plans worldwide following the COVID-19 pandemic further highlights the fact that climate protection is increasingly being seen as an opportunity for development. According to the United Nations, the package adopted during the COP26 summit at Glasgow will make the regime that governs global efforts against climate change fully operational (United Nations, 2021). Generally, the political discourse on sustainability has greatly changed over the last decades. In contrast to earlier times, the notion that reducing greenhouse gas emissions is technically and economically feasible (IPCC, 2014), is widely accepted today. Moreover, the economic importance of environmental innovation is today ‘undisputed’ (Ghisetti et  al., 2015). Therefore, most policymakers worldwide no longer consider the economic costs of promoting eco-innovation a barrier to economic development, but as a promising investment in future industries and innovation (OECD, 2019). However, despite new confidence regarding the potential of environmental sustainability, obstacles toward decarbonization and climate protection remain. According to a survey among energy leaders from governments, industry, think tanks, and academia, it is primarily a lack of political will which could interfere with reaching the goal of a net-zero society by 2050 (Atlantic Council, 2021, p. 10). Against this background,

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the influence of populist forces on sustainability policies is increasingly seen as one of the main obstacles against sustainable development. To prepare an evaluation of the significance of populism for the EU’s sustainability policies (see section “EU Policy on Sustainability: Challenged by Populist Forces?”), this section presents a general overview of established knowledge on the stance of populist political forces toward environmental and climate policy. Populist parties are currently represented in the governments of around 10–20 countries (IDEA, 2020, p.  2; Timbro, 2019, p.  24). In other words, populist forces are no longer a mere disruptive minority outside of government structures (Henke & Maher, 2021, p. 389), but in a position to directly shape policies. Their actions when in power and their influence on policy are currently under research (see e.g. Pappas, 2019). This concerns all levels of governance, from the municipal level (Lanzone & Morini, 2017) to global politics (Varga & Buzogány, 2020). When it comes to the implications of populism for politics and policy, many scholars in the field agree that it represents a (potential) threat to democratic political ideas (Mudde & Rovira Kaltwasser, 2019, p. 113) and a (potential) threat to democracy (Müller, 2016, p. 103). Moreover, the relevant literature holds that populism represents a (potential) threat to a range of established policy approaches, for example with regard to media and gender (Abromeit, 2017, p. 178). Beyond this broad approach to studying the impact of this political phenomenon, current research efforts pay attention to the impact of populism on specific policies. This new emphasis takes into account the fact that increasingly populists are reaching positions of power (Biard et  al., 2021). The impact of ‘populist statecraft’ (Müller, 2016, p. 48)—that is populist parties exerting governmental power—is not equally well-­ researched across policy fields. However, a several recent publications address the influence of populism on sustainability (Böhmelt, 2021; Buzogány & Mohamad-Klotzbach, 2021; Jahn, 2021; Kroll & Zipperer, 2020), as well as on energy transition (Fraune & Knodt, 2018; Wanvik & Haarstad, 2021). Beyond environmental policies, this literature also includes neighboring areas covered by the sustainability principle, for example, development policy (Bergmann et al., 2021). It is widely assumed that populist forces mobilize against far-reaching environmental policies and the sustainability transition (Buzogány & Mohamad-Klotzbach, 2021, pp. 155–156). Also, findings highlight that public support for far-reaching climate and environmental policies is not

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as unanimous as it is sometimes suggested in pro-climate policy discourses (Ibd., p.  156). However, populist political actors do not seem to be at odds with the concept per se, or every measure1 to achieve it.2 On the contrary, notwithstanding their political orientation, populist groups support environmental policies. Nature conservation, for example, is historically a theme prevalent among parties that lean toward the right (Ibd., p. 157). It was also noted that individual populist parties have their own environmental programs. Here, the local level seems to be central. What is more, some advocates of environmental sustainability and climate mitigation embrace populist approaches to politics to speed up the achievement of environmental goals (Mouffe, 2020). Whether Greta Thunberg’s constant sowing of panic (Caldwell, 2019) qualifies her for being categorized as an example of green populism (Carvalho, 2020), is still under debate. Related to this diverse picture, the literature draws a diverse picture of the actual influence of populism on policy. Wanvik and Haarstad (2021) argue that even while populist movements pose a significant challenge to sustainable transitions, they also provide opportunities for revitalizing democratic politics. Populism therefore appears to represent a two-edged-­ sword when it comes to measures meant to foster progress toward environmental sustainability. This assumption is similar to Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser (2019) who distinguish positive and negative effects of populism on democratic processes (p. 113). In this view, for example, it could, be expected that those groups among the electorate which feel or are indeed underrepresented in the political process, will gain more influence. Hence, the stronger the inclusion of these groups, the stronger will be the possibility of policy shifts. Yet, all considered, criticism and/or denial of individual elements of the sustainability transition seems to be prevalent among populist forces, particularly on the right of the political spectrum. Only a few studies are readily available, yet the results suggest that populist leadership likely undermines environmental quality (Böhmelt, 2021). Moreover, a positive correlation between populist parties being in power and CO2 emissions has been highlighted (Jahn, 2021). This effect appears to be mainly  For example all 17 Sustainable Development Goals (https://sdgs.un.org/goals).  Interestingly, research has shown a negative relationship between politics and sustainability: where policies are successful, and the performance of a given country in terms of sustainable development increases, support for populist forces decreases (Kroll & Zipperer, 2020, p. 5). 1 2

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indirect, namely by the creation of a political climate which juxtaposes some of the political values underlying mainstream policies on the mentioned issues (p.  2).3 However, it has been shown that in various cases populist forces also had the willingness and capability to directly counteract measures to advance environmental protection. Donald Trump’s positions on energy may serve as an example in this regard. Jair Bolsonaro’s criticism of ecological motives, or the can also serve to underline this point. In its majority, populism therefore appears to be a political force that constitutes a drawback for sustainability as a development path, particularly when the influence of populists on the right side of the political spectrum is being considered. In fact, climate skepticism or the denial of climate change has been identified as one of the most common positions of the far right (Buzogány & Mohamad-Klotzbach, 2021, p. 157). This involves strong criticism of policies on environmental issues, particularly in the area of SDG 7 (Affordable and Clean energy) and SDG 13 (Climate action). The withdrawal of the US from the Paris Agreement in 2017 following Donald Trump’s coming to power represents an extreme example that is frequently used to illustrate the potential significance impact of these positions for sustainable development.

EU Policy on Sustainability: Challenged by Populist Forces? In Europe, the European Union is a major promoter of environmental sustainability. According to the Vice-President of the European Commission, the EU is translating the Sustainable Development Goals into concrete actions, and works toward fully integrating them into Europe’s collective economic governance model (European Union, 2019a). Some see sustainability also as an important part of a potentially ‘positive agenda’ that can help to respond to the negative impact of the EU’s polycrisis (von Homeyer et al., 2021, p. 960). Accordingly, the EU has developed a whole array of measures to improve its performance on various indicators covered by the Sustainable Development Goals. The focus is on climate change mitigation. In line with the goals of the Paris Agreement, near to full decarbonization until 2050 has developed into 3  The Gilets Jaunes movement in France is often used to exemplify the potential of populism to mobilize significant parts of the population and to affect the societal climate negatively against climate mitigation policies.

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one of the EU’s central strategies for building a prosperous, modern, and competitive society (European Commission, 2018, p. 5). Simply put, the European Union is a frontrunner of sustainable development (Skjaerseth, 2021, p. 38), and sustainability represents one of the main pillars of the EU’s raison-d’être as a polity. This commitment to sustainable development and climate change mitigation goes far beyond symbolism. In this area, decisions taken at the EU level have over the past decades, become decisive for the actions that are being implemented at the national level. In particular, this concerns the environmental and energy policy. Here, policies such as the European Green Deal (European Commission, 2019) aim at mainstreaming climate and sustainability policies into all sectors (Skjaerseth, 2021, p.  38), and thus to make green development the key concept for building Europe’s economic and social future. Accordingly, support for renewable energy on the national level is guided by European legislation, for example by a (collectively) binding target of at least 32% renewable energy in 2030 (European Union, 2018b, Art. 4, 2). What is more, European mechanisms such as the European Emission Trading System directly structure carbon markets to reduce CO2 emissions (European Union, 2018a). The EU is also a major driving force of energy and green innovation, for example by financing collaborative research and innovation projects that support energy policies (Calvo-­ Gallardo et al., 2021, p. 1). This includes ad-hoc formation of industrial initiatives such as the ‘European Battery Alliance’ (European Union, n.d.) as well long established programs to support technological development such as the Strategic Energy Technology Plan (SET-Plan). Steering the development of low-carbon technologies and the improvement of their competitiveness represents the main objective of this plan (Eikeland & Skjaerseth, 2021). The EU is currently revising its policies to decarbonize the economy, which may provide populists with numerous opportunities to express their discontent with the goals the EU has set itself in terms of sustainability. Whether the recent successes of populist forces at the EU level and in national elections have significant implications for implementing and further developing the EU’s policies in the mentioned areas, is currently under debate. Findings indicate that public support toward taking action on sustainability and climate change remains strong in Europe. For example, several Eurobarometer surveys (European Commission, 2021b; European

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Union, 2019b) found that Europeans identify climate change, the deterioration of nature and health problems due to pollution as significant issues that need to be addressed. Moreover, continuous public support for EU climate policy has been identified (European Parliament, 2019). However, despite EU climate change mitigation and sustainability policies being widely supported, they are also being countered by a surge of populist politics, particularly—but not only—in Europe (Wanvik & Haarstad, 2021, p. 2096), and particularly—but not only—from the right side of the political spectrum. The existing literature on the topic suggests that the rise of right-wing populism in Europe has complicated efforts to advance ambitious EU climate policies (von Homeyer et al., 2021, p. 964). A complete survey of all 28 EU member states has shown that once in power, populist parties have a profound impact on greenhouse gas emissions (Jahn, 2021, p. 12). It can therefore be expected, that the planning and implementation of new infrastructures as foreseen in the EU’s plans to support renewable energy may be delayed, for example the construction of new electricity grids (Wanvik & Haarstad, 2021, p.  2107). Moreover, the political progress toward the EU’s goal of achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 (European Commission, 2018) may be hampered. However, the research results on the actual effect of growing populism on the EU’s sustainability policy agenda are mixed and still under debate. Numerous studies find that rising populism did, as of yet, not significantly affect EU policies in the mentioned areas (Buzogány & Ćetković, 2021; Huber et  al., 2021; Petri & Biedenkopf, 2021). When it comes to the European Parliament, a much-discussed institution regarding populist influence on policy, Petri and Biedenkopf (2021) identify what has been interpreted as a remarkably stable and broad consensus regarding ambitious EU climate policy (von Homeyer et al., 2021, p. 970). This confirms findings of Buzogány and Ćetković (2021) on the Eighth European Parliament (2014–2019), which indicate that increasing fragmentation actually lead to a strengthened position of some progressive groups, leaving populist (Euroskeptic) parties without much actual influence on energy and climate policy. This suggests that the election to the Ninth European Parliament (2019–2024) was indeed more of a wave, and not a populist Tsunami (Stockemer & Amengay, 2020), when it comes to the EU’s sustainability policies. Similarly, a study by Counterpoint (2021) finds that rather than dissent and counter-mobilization on part of populist actors, it is the absence of discussion that characterizes European energy

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and climate policies (specifically the European Green Deal). Challenging sustainable energy transformations by advocating positions on climate change policies from outside of the political mainstream may seem easy (Fraune & Knodt, 2018, p. 1)—but not very effective in a policymaking-­ machinery such as EU politics in Brussels (Ydersbond, 2018). Apparently, exploiting local resistance against renewable energy projects and other infrastructure measures opportunistically is easier than being influential at the EU level of politics (Fraune & Knodt, 2018, p. 4). Findings on the ability of populists to cooperate at the cross-border level may indicate why that is: to date, these efforts have barely (Marschall & Klingebiel, 2019). Some actors may have ideas about a populist international, but before it can effectively challenge EU-level politics and policy a few more steps appear necessary. The fact that relevant populist discourses (Buzogány & Mohamad-Klotzbach, 2021, p. 157) portray international, cross-boundary collaboration—for example to limit the effect of climate change—as a threat, is probably not very helpful in this regard. Finally, the member state level and the influence of member states on EU policies need to be evaluated. According to Jahn (2021), there is substantial proof that populist parties in government (with a right-wing ideology) have a negative impact on Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions. A lax attitude toward implementation of EU policies and generally a lack of engagement with climate policies may be the cause (Ibd., p. 13). Treaty provisions in the field of energy and climate also leave populist governments the option to veto individual policies. Whether obstruction to individual decisions to advances the EU’s sustainability agenda is more attractive than the usual European package deals, is, however, another question (Christiansen, 2020, p. 19). Rather, the normative erosion that populist governments bring into the EU—potentially in a coordinated manner—appears to be problematic, because of the EU’s limitations with regard to imposing norms on obstinate governments (Ibd.). Coordinated actions by governments with similar attitudes is a possibility (Escartin, 2020), and may therefore (together with a populist majority in the European Parliament) represent the biggest (yet not necessarily the most stable) threat to further advances of European sustainability policies.

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EU Science Policy: A Liable and Viable Answer to the Populist Challenge? Several overlapping crises make a successful transition of the EU toward more sustainability4 needed as well as difficult to attain. The influence of populism on policy is currently being evaluated in the respective EU studies and sustainability literature. From the point of view of mainstream policymakers, the most significant question is probably what response to the populist challenge is both legitimate and viable. Finding the answer to this question requires a deep understanding of the phenomenon of populism and the deeper reasons for its success, its difficult relationship with the European Union, and EU sustainability policy. Given the complexities of these issues and their relationship, “more science” might be a piece of the answer to the abovementioned question. This potential answer relates to ongoing discussions. According to Kastrinos and Weber (2020), prior work on the role of science in driving sustainability transitions underestimates social and systemic dimensions of change (p. 1). They are therefore calling for a reflexive EU research policy, that is an approach to science which pays more attention to the systemic dimensions of the sustainability transition. From this perspective, the EU’s research framework should shift the focus away from ‘an oversimplified understanding of technology’ (p. 2) and how it works in society, toward including the concepts, practices, formal and informal institutions by which societal development is governed (Ibd.). This approach appears relevant and close to interpretations of the sustainability transition such as by Wanvik and Haarstad (2021). Additional research about the relationship between societal phenomena such as populism and the sustainability transition may also relate to the Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) principle. RRI aims at embedding ethical and societal values as well as normative targets into research (Novitzky et al., 2020, pp. 39–40). Further, the RRI principle calls for the anticipation and assessment of potential societal implications related to research and innovation. Therefore, RRI implies that societal actors (researchers, citizens, policymakers, business, third sector organizations, etc.) work together during the whole research and innovation process. The European Union accepts this principle (European Commission, n.d.), 4  The EU is currently implementing new initiatives towards the 2030 goals (European Commission, 2021a).

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and advocates a better alignment research with the values, needs, and expectations of society (European Commission, n.d.). Implementing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is one of the main (normative) objectives of the EU in terms of research (European Union, 2021). It therefore appears legitimate to address societal factors that are (potentially) holding back sustainability solutions. However, skepticism in today’s science systems represents another element of populist criticism (Mede & Schäfer, 2020).5 What is more, the populist critique of the EU’s attempts to follow a new development path built on environmental sustainability appears to be inspired by mistrust in science systems and science skepticism more broadly (Buzogány & Mohamad-Klotzbach, 2021, p.  156).6 At the same time, science has become more politicized lately due to Hungary hosting the European campus of Fudan University. Therefore, it seems likely that a more scientific approach to on the EU’s societal and political development becomes necessary, yet also more political. This puts into question whether “more science” can be a viable answer to populism. There is, however, indication that it can. A good example in this regard is the EU’s main research framework, Horizon Europe. Development, adoption, and implementation of this program are largely dominated by groups of actors that can be described as epistemic communities. A broad coalition emerged spanning DG XII, the Parliament, and interest groups, in support of the framework program as the core of EU research policy (Banchoff, 2002, p. 9). In the past, the European Parliament also consistently backed larger research budgets (Ibd.). During the negotiations of the Horizon Europe research program, however, policymakers were concerned about the potential success of populist parties in the upcoming 2019 elections to the European Parliament, and what impact this could have on the scope and character of the Union’s new R&I framework (Abbott & Schiermeier, 2019, pp.  472–473). In view of the sharp rise in support for populist parties in Poland, Italy, and other EU countries, a significant reduction of the budget foreseen for Horizon Europe were anticipated (Ibd.).7 In the end, Horizon Europe has been implemented successfully, and with a budget of 95.5 billion  This stands in contrast to a more pro-science attitude of the new climate movement.  One could add mistrust in EU-level experts (von Homeyer et al., 2021, p. 965). 7  The European Union devotes more than eight percent of its seven-year budget on science and innovation. This makes this area one of the largest Europeanized policy areas. 5 6

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Euros, it is also considerably bigger than its predecessor Horizon 2020 was. This may signify limited influence of populist political parties on this policy area.

References Abbott, A., & Schiermeier, Q. (2019). EU Science. The next €100 billion. Nature, 569, 472–475. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-­019-­01566-­z Abromeit, J. (2017). A critical review of recent literature on populism. Politics and Governance, 5(4), 177–186. https://doi.org/10.17645/pag.v5i4.1146 Atlantic Council. (2021). The global energy agenda. Report, Washington, DC.  Retrieved from: https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/wp-­content/ uploads/2021/01/The-­Global-­Energy-­Agenda-­2021.pdf. Accessed 06 Dec 2021. Auer, S. (2010). ‘New Europe’: Between cosmopolitan dreams and nationalist nightmares. Journal of Common Market Studies, 48(5), 1163–1184. https:// doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-­5965.2010.02108.x Banchoff, T. (2002). Institutions, inertia and European Union research policy. Journal of Common Market Studies, 40(1), 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1111/ 1468-­5965.00341 Batel, S., & Devine-Wright, P. (2015). Towards a better understanding of people’s responses to renewable energy technologies: Insights from Social Representation Theory. Public Understanding of Science, 24(3), 311–325. https://doi. org/10.1177/0963662513514165 BBC. (2021). Shell: Netherlands court orders oil giant to cut emissions. Retrieved from: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-­europe-­57257982. Accessed 06 Dec 2021. Bergmann, J., Hackenesch, C., & Stockemer, D. (2021). Populist radical right parties in Europe: What impact do they have on development policy. Journal of Common Market Studies, 59, 37–52. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcms.13143 Best, E. (2019). Policy-making in the European Union. In M. Cini & N. Pérez-­ Solórzano Borragán (Eds.), European union politics (6th ed., pp.  235–252). Oxford University Press. Biard, B., Bernhard, L., & Betz, H.-G. (2021). Do they make a difference? The policy influence of radical right populist parties in Western Europe. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers/ECPR Press. Böhmelt, T. (2021). Populism and environmental performance. Global Environmental Politics, 21(3), 1–27. https://doi.org/10.1162/glep_a_00606 Börzel, T. A., & Risse, T. (2020). Identity politics, core state powers and regional integration: Europe and beyond. Journal of Common Market Studies, 58(1), 21–40. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcms.12982

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Populism, Science and Covid-19 as a Political Opportunity: The Case of the European Parliament Carlo Berti and Carlo Ruzza

Introduction From a party-political perspective, the Covid-19 pandemic has engendered a disruptive and challenging set of events. Since its onset, the pandemic has required frequent and important decisions by policymakers in a situation of unremitting uncertainty about the medical, economic, and social outcomes of those decisions. Parties have been forced to state their preferences in the public sphere and political arenas without knowing

The authors have received financial support from the PRIN 2017 project “The transformation of democracy: Actors, strategies and outcomes in opposing populism in political, juridical and social arenas” (CUP E64I19003110005), funded by the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research.

C. Berti (*) • C. Ruzza School of International Studies, University of Trento, Trento, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 H. Eslen-Ziya, A. Giorgi (eds.), Populism and Science in Europe, Palgrave Studies in European Political Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97535-7_5

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whether the policies that they have advocated would be rapidly proven mistaken. Moreover, in multi-level systems like the European one it has been likely that decisions will clash with contrasting choices made elsewhere by allied political forces. Policies of concern have included whether or not to impose lockdowns, or the geographical scale on which to impose them, or where to purchase vaccines, and whom to blame when things have gone wrong. In response to this uncertainty, many political actors have decided to refrain from taking clear and quick decisions, and instead opted for the constant updating of their approach. Others have preferred to err on the side of caution and, for instance, advocate stronger lockdowns. Not so has been the approach of several populist parties, which have changed their positions often surprisingly swiftly and in several cases in open contrast with the recommendations of scientists. This has been the behaviour of populist leaders in power (e.g. Donald Trump in the USA, or Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil) as well as those in the opposition (e.g. Matteo Salvini in Italy). Populist actors have issued a flow of confusing communications, sometimes sponsoring discredited medications or recommending approaches dangerous to the personal safety of their voters. This chapter documents the constant shift in the populist parties’ positions in relation to the approach suggested to tackle the pandemic. We base our analysis on the transcripts of debates held at the European Parliament (EP) plenary sessions during the pandemic. We focus in particular on two main areas of debate: vaccines and the public health emergency generated by the pandemic. Among the main themes discussed in the EP in relation to Covid-19 (see Fig. 1), these two enable us to investigate the discursive relationship of populism with science. We argue that this constant shift is not related to any particular ideology in relation to science: on the contrary, it is a strategic decision taken to exploit the pandemic (and its related challenges) in order to attack the EU elites (and in particular the European Commission) and boost Euroscepticism. Furthermore, we argue that populist parties have an advantage in situations of crisis because they thrive in ambiguity. Our aim is to understand how populist parties tackle scientific uncertainties related to the Covid-19 pandemic and, thus, more generally, how they relate to science. To define populist parties, we adopt the categorisation proposed by Rooduijn et al. (2019) and the definition of populism as a thin-centred ideology that sees society as divided into two homogeneous and antagonistic groups, “the pure people” versus “the corrupt elite”, and which argues that politics

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Topics of debates 1.90% 3.70%

7.40% 11.10%

20.40%

9.30%

24.10% 18.50%

3.70% Vaccines

Public health strategy

Social impact and reactions

Young people

Democracy and fundamental rights

Economic recovery and resilience

Gender equality

Information and disinformation

International relations Fig. 1  Main topics of debates (February 2020–February 2021)

should be an expression of the general will of the people (Mudde & Kaltwasser, 2017). Populism as an ideology propounds a generalised state of crisis which calls for strong and unprecedented responses by political actors opposed to the dominant and corrupt elites (Meny & Surel, 2002; Taggart, 2000). Focussing on the EU level will enable us to identify and analyse distinctive political opportunities deriving from how different populist parties, in different phases of the pandemic emergency, have strategically exploited Covid-19 and its related challenges in the same arena, namely the European Parliament. Populist parties are less bound to policy coherence than other party families are. This is due to the organisational structure of many of their component parties, which rely on charismatic leadership and accept even sudden policy reversals. We will argue that it is also due to distinctive aspects of populism’s ideational constructs which on the basis of a strong

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identitarian adherence and an enemy-politics anti-system stance legitimates, in the eyes of the electorate, a strategic attitude and condones swift changes in party positionings. After the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, all political forces devised markedly complex and interrelated responses to it. All political formations had to reflect and position themselves on several political dimensions and policy areas. The pandemic stimulated reflections on the management of various public policies, from health care to those that play a role in devising effective political communication of scientific information. Also debated were social dynamics affected by the pandemic, such as issues related to social equality, gender, and social discrimination. As an unprecedented event, the pandemic generated an array of conflicting political interpretations. This activity of attribution of meaning to an exceptional and politically unstructured situation closely involved scientists, journalists, commentators, and political actors. In this regard, the role of the representatives of national and European institutions was fundamental. They were required to take the measures necessary to address the crisis and to apprise diverse European publics about its nature. It is undeniable that the crisis has also been an opportunity for political actors to legitimise themselves. This chapter will accordingly document and analyse their political discourses, their communication strategies, and the manner in which they have handled the various phases of the pandemic. It will discuss the relationship of those actors with science and the responses to the conspiracy theories that have emerged and circulated and which have, for example, concerned issues such as the risks and usefulness of vaccines, attitudes to the requirement to wear face masks or comply with rules on social distancing. In the following section, we consider the Eurosceptic radical right parties and groups in the EP, describe their features, and examine their behaviour during the Covid-19 pandemic.

The European Parliament and the Eurosceptic Radical Right Family of Parties There are several radical right populist parties in Europe, and most of them belong to two parliamentary groups: the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR), and the Identity and Democracy group (ID). However, these parties have always been plagued by disputes on key issues,

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such as the attitude to take towards the Russian Federation. For this reason, it is unclear whether they will remain united in the future. However, they clearly belong to the same family of parties, both genealogically and ideologically (Mair & Mudde, 1998). Studying them at the EU level has the advantage of affording a broader European perspective because national specificities are balanced by the need of those parties to collaborate in broader coalitions. Thus provided is a condensed view of their values and programmes. All parties engage in a struggle on which version of their guiding ideology should be dominant and reflect in their programmes. They are faced with the challenge of framing salient social events in terms of their ideology, which was also the case when the Covid-19 crisis hit Europe. However, the question arises as to how this framing process develops and how it is adjusted as events change over time. A study of the framing of responses to the Covid-19 pandemic will provide an answer to this question. As said, responding to the onset of the pandemic was a complex undertaking for parties. They had to square their reactions with state constraints on citizens’ lifestyles, evolving medical requirements, and demands by the various economic sectors that they represented. Often, these factors pulled in separate directions, undermining the modicum of consistency that parties needed for their purposes. Furthermore, in some EU countries, populist parties were minority components of coalition governments, and the strategies of their allies constrained their preferences. However, while other party families found this ideological ambiguity uncomfortable, it was less of a problem for populist alliances, for the following three reasons. First, the institutionalisation pattern of several populist parties typically retains and relies on charismatic leadership, which facilitates sudden shifts of ideology. Second, a theatrical and often socially aggressive political style is still viable despite substantial institutionalisation, because the party tolerates internal fragmentation, and tensions are neutralised by the federative role of the charismatic leader. Third, sudden ideological changes are justified by the parties’ authoritarian values, as well as by the above-­ mentioned charismatic nature of their leadership. That is, because of the distinctive institutionalisation they typically undergo, which retains aspects of their anti-system message event when they become embedded in state institutions, and because of the discursive incoherence made possible by the parties’ authoritarian values, which privileges obedience to their leader to policy coherence, populists are better able to thrive in crisis situations than other parties.

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Several radical right populist parties are relatively new, but they have achieved a string of electoral successes. In the case of some parties, institutionalisation decreases the arbitrary power of their charismatic leaders, who were often their founders. However, several parties of the populist radical right have become stable parts of their national political system while retaining both their out-of-the system ideology and their charismatic character. These latter comprise the features noted by Panebianco (1988): strong loyalty to the leader by all the internal party factions; limited bureaucratisation of the party structures; a highly centralised organisation; and an ideology that advocates subversion of the political and social order. Parties of the populist right have increasingly retained these features while becoming institutionalised as their number increases in several contexts and this normalises these features, so that an out-of-the-­ system ethos is a widespread component of regular politics on both sides of the Atlantic. As noted by Pedahzur and Brichta, these features constitute a new model of institutionalisation (Pedahzur & Brichta, 2002). Their strategy differs from the more usual approach of effecting changes in order to becoming an accepted and stable part of the political system, which was previously considered the defining aspect of party institutionalisation, as emphasised, for instance, by Panebianco (1988). By now, several radical right populist parties are stable parts of the system. But this occurs even while they stress their diversity from and even incompatibility with it—a discursive rhetoric which is often seen as a defining aspect of populism. There are several varieties of populism (Damiani et al., 2018; Caiani & Graziano, 2019; Devinney & Hartwell, 2020), but the assumption of the extraordinary character of a contemporary crisis, and therefore the necessity of relying on strong leadership by an undisputed leader, is to be found in all versions, albeit to different extents. This assumption is particularly apparent in radical right populism, where the emphasis on strong leadership is a historical tenet of the extreme right. In this view, the leader is seen by the party as having a superior understanding of political needs and opportunities, and s/he is therefore allowed to change priorities without providing extensive explanations for doing so. Nonetheless, while contingent explanations of strategies and tactics may change, another defining aspect of this party family is ‘enemy thinking’. Enemies are not easily replaceable because they characterise the boundary-defining nature of these parties and are needed to forge stable alliances within the party family. Nonetheless, the stability of traditional

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enemies may contrast with an array of changing policies, or inconsistent policies (Schmitter, 2019). The literature evidences a general convergence of this party family on nationalism and opposition to liberal values; but in several countries and at EU level there is much less coherence on a broader range of issues, including foreign and defence policy (Falkner & Plattner, 2020). It has been suggested that a frequent emphasis on recurrent enemies is used to mask changing and confusing policies, such as economic ones, that are pursued to the benefit of different and contrasting economic sectors (Saalfeld, 1993). Nonetheless, it should be noted that studies on policy coherence focus on the consistency of positions among different parties rather than on single parties over time, which is also a concern of this study. The typical enemies in the EU political system are first and foremost immigrants. They are conceptualised as a threat to the nation because they undermine the political value of ethnopluralism. They seek to preserve separate and bordered ethnocultural regions and thus oppose multiculturalism and globalisation. From this perspective, the European Union system of governance, with its pursuit of an integrationist political project, its neoliberalism, and globalisation-embracing policies, is the main enemy to confront, particularly for parties operating at the EU level. It is a consolidated enemy that is not likely to wane or lose relevance for this party family (Treib, 2020). There is a close connection between Euroscepticism and nationalism among radical right populists at the EU level. Although conceptually distinct, the Eurosceptic and populist ideologies are firmly embedded in the EU politics of radical right groups, thereby characterising a specific exclusionist type or populism (Berti & Loner, 2020; Massetti, 2021). We can therefore expect Covid-19 to be interpreted in a variety of ways, but that the Eurosceptic topos is central to all the various interpretations. In other words, we posit that as long as the enemy remains viable, the leader’s charisma will suffice to justify the policies adopted. If, as shown in the empirical part of the chapter, the specific policies advocated by the party can vary with little embarrassment and little scrutiny from within the party, this is an opportunity for parties that are less bound to exhibiting coherence over time. It is crucial, however, to clarify what kind of opportunity we are positing. We will specifically refer to a type of ideational opportunity which has been conceptualised as discursive and comprises an acritical and forceful form of party personalisation (Rahat & Kenig, 2018).

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Reliance on a strong charismatic leader even when professing unconstitutional policies is therefore an important opportunity for parties of this family, and it provides a specific type of institutionalisation that combines reiterated anti-system values long present in the electoral arena. The stabilisation of several parties of this kind for long periods in the EU arena testifies to this feature (Pedahzur & Brichta, 2002). Of course, an intransigent charismatic leader may well be inappropriate when a party needs stability and inclusion in mainstream politics (Harmel & Svåsand, 1993). But this is no longer a requirement if there are several like-minded anti-­ system parties that define a shifting balance between unconstitutional and discriminatory policies and acceptable ones as viable and ‘normal’. There may even be parties that strike a balance between, on the one hand, professing or just condoning conspiracy theories in a range of fields, including health care, and on the other, an acceptable presence in the political arena (Bergmann, 2018). This may in part be what is taking place in the EU arena. For this reason, examination of the texts produced by these types of parties is useful. Furthermore, parties of the radical right have existed and prospered for such a long time that one might hypothesise that they have developed radical but nimble leadership styles whereby their authoritarian leadership is utilised to change ideological stances quickly to match evolving political contexts. According to Pedahzur and Brichta (2002), factors such as charismatic leadership are decisive for exploiting a climate conducive to right-­ wing populist mobilisation. However, they are decisive insofar as they are able to grasp and utilise swift changes of discourse that interpret evolving situations, particularly amid the persistent uncertainties that science and its evolution impose on politics. The interaction between charismatic leadership and political discourse is then crucial, and it is best understood as a type of political opportunity or more precisely a discursive opportunity for this family of parties. It is particularly crucial in times of uncertainty not only because, as said, it allows for quick and strategic changes of policy positions in situations of scientific uncertainty, but also and more broadly because the documented ability of populist parties to take advantage of the discontent engendered by economic and social crises is further facilitated by swift changes in policy discourse (Kriesi & Pappas, 2015). Discursive approaches to policy confer a strong influence on the persons and contexts in which policy positions are formulated, publicly stated, and modified (Durnova & Zittoun, 2013; McCammon, 2013). Here we hypothesise a proactive role of leaders who understand that their parties

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are guided by an overarching protest discourse which is similar in nature to the discourse of a political movement guided by resentment and anti-­ elitist moral indignation, and which is directed against the very existence of the European Union. Understanding populism as a political movement helps define the essence of its political discourse. Populism can be understood as a collective action frame (Aslanidis, 2017, 2018). We will argue that it subsumes various forms of anti-elitism, notably the type of Euroscepticism resentful of the distance between European elites and national publics, and more broadly an anti-science discourse which is presented as a contentious politics and which then turns into a political opportunity for the EU-level radical right (Cammaerts, 2012). The Manichean opposition between the good people and the corrupt elite is central to the ideational approach to populism (Mudde & Kaltwasser, 2017), and the centrality of this anti-elitist element is broadly shared by other approaches (such as populism as a discourse or a strategy), making it the “centre of gravity” of populism studies, together with people’s centrality (Massetti, 2021, p.  23). Euroscepticism, on the other hand, is a broad concept that can be fruitfully distinguished into two main forms: soft Euroscepticism, and hard Euroscepticism (Taggart & Szczerbiak, 2002). Soft Euroscepticism entails a positive view of the potential of European integration, coupled with a high degree of EU-pessimism; hard Euroscepticism, on the other hand, rejects the idea of European integration and puts forward strong claims for the full sovereignty of all nations. Thus, European right-wing populist parties, often characterised by strong nationalism, usually adopt forms of hard Euroscepticism: the EU institutions, in their view, are part of the corrupt elite. In this sense, the Euroscepticism of right-wing populist parties can be considered a form of anti-elitism. A similar consideration applies to right-wing populists’ anti-science discourse. If science is seen less as a practice and more as an elite community, it is easy to justify the belief in conspiracy theories, and the idea that even scientific truth-speaking ultimately belongs to the people (Castanho Silva et  al., 2017; Mede & Schäfer, 2020). Anti-elitism, Euroscepticism, and anti-science attitudes therefore constitute an important mix of strategic elements for right-wing populists in the EP. In the following sections, we show that populist actors in the EP have exploited the pandemic to reinforce these elements, and in particular, they have embraced a hard Euroscepticism based on attacks against EU elites and their management of the multiple pandemic-related crises.

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Methodology The dataset for our research consisted of the debates related to the Covid-19 pandemic held during the plenary sessions of the European Parliament between February 2020 and February 2021. We chose to start collecting documents the month before the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the outbreak of a pandemic (on 11 March 2020), since the issue of Covid-19 already had significance for the EU because of its widespread presence in China, but also because of the first verified cases in Europe (clusters of cases were reported in Italy in the second half of February, unrelated to journeys to China; on 30 January, the WHO had declared the new coronavirus variant a “Public Health Emergency of International Concern”1). Full transcriptions of the plenary sessions were retrieved from the Public Register of Documents2 of the European Parliament. These transcriptions have indexes in all the official languages of the EU: using the English indexes, we conducted a search using the keywords “Covid”, “coronavirus”, “Sars-CoV-2”, “pandem*” to identify all the debates focused specifically on issues related to Covid-19. We identified 43 debates, which constituted the dataset for our analysis. As a first step of analysis, we coded each debate according to its main topic (see Fig. 1). Subsequently, we chose to conduct a critical discourse analysis (Fairclough & Wodak, 1997) of the discursive interactions during a subset of the debates (those dealing with issues strongly related to science: the public health emergency caused by Covid-19, and the creation, production and distribution of vaccines), and we focused on the speeches of populist MEPs. To define which parties are populist, and more specifically which ones represent right-wing populism, we used the categorisation proposed by Rooduijn et  al. (2019).3 Critical discourse analysis (CDA) makes it possible to analyse texts in a descriptive manner, as well as to interpret them in relation to their context (Fairclough, 2001). In what follows, we use CDA to investigate populist discursive production in the EP by linking it to its institutional context (in particular, plenary 1  https://www.who.int/news/item/30-01-2020-statement-on-the-second-meeting-ofthe-international-health-regulations-(2005)-emergency-committee-regarding-the-outbreak-of-novel-coronavirus-(2019-ncov). Accessed on 10 May 2021. 2  https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegistreWeb/home/welcome.htm 3  https://populistorg.files.wordpress.com/2020/02/01-thepopulist.pdf. Last accessed 21 August 2021.

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sessions in the EP) and to the broader socio-political context characterised by the disruptive impact of Covid-19 globally and in the EU, and by the widespread presence and strength of right-wing populist parties in most countries of Europe. The aim is to understand how right-wing populist forces interpret and politicise the pandemic, and how this is integrated into their ideologies. In particular, we focus on the strategic functions of texts which characterise political discourse (Chilton & Schäffner, 1997). Translations, where necessary, are by the authors.

Results and Discussion Figure 1 shows the main topics of the debates related to Covid-19 held in the EP during plenary sessions in the period between February 2020 and February 2021. The debates covered a broad range of issues related to the public health, social, political, and economic aspects of the pandemic. However, debates related specifically to public health constituted the majority, with nearly one quarter of them focused on public health strategies to face the pandemic, and another 11.1% dealing specifically with vaccines. Other relevant topics were those related to the economic challenges raised by the pandemic, and the possible ways to boost recovery and increase resilience; and the social impact and social reactions caused by the spread of Covid-19 across the Union. Other debates tackled the risks posed by the pandemic to democracy and fundamental rights (with particular reference to the Hungarian Parliament’s attribution of special powers to Prime Minister Viktor Orbàn - see Orzechowski et al., 2021), issues related to gender equality and youth, and the challenges of disinformation and misinformation about the pandemic. In the context of this chapter (and in the broader context of the book), however, we are particularly interested in the relationship between populism and science, and thus in how populists dealt with the onset of the pandemic and the ensuing public health emergency. Therefore, we concentrated our analysis on those debates that were mainly focused on public health and vaccinations. As seen, most debates were centred on these issues, which have been fundamental in facing the primary challenge posed by the pandemic, namely the health emergency and the horrific numbers of contagions and deaths caused by Covid-19.

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Politicising Vaccines: The Example of the League’s MEPs To show how right-wing populists politicised the issue of Covid-19 vaccines in the EP, we use the example of an Italian party, the League. The League is the most prominent party of the Identity and Democracy Group (ID). It has the highest number of MEPs and chairs the group through the leadership of Marco Zanni. Examination of speeches by League MEPs during the debates related to vaccines identifies three different phases in the politicisation of vaccines. The first of them coincided with the period between the beginning of the Covid-19 emergency (in the case of our dataset, February 2020) and the first reports concerning the imminent approval of vaccines. The second phase started at the end of 2020, roughly in November, when news about the imminent approvals of Pfizer’s, AstraZeneca’s and Moderna’s vaccines started to spread across the world (in particular, the European Medicine Agency approved the first vaccine, Comirnaty, on 21 December 20204), The third phase started in February 2021, when vaccination campaigns had begun in various countries but were developing rather differently according to the speed of vaccination procedures, choice of vaccine, and availability of doses. Consideration of these different phases in the debate on vaccines shows how the League’s populism discursively pursued what we call a “politics of ambiguity”: that is, a chameleonic attitude that adopts different positions on vaccines devised and used as a pretext for the purpose of attacking various elites, and in particular the European institutions. On 14 May 2020, in the first phase of the pandemic, MEP Silvia Sardone spoke as follows during a parliamentary debate on “Vaccines and therapeutics in the context of Covid-19”: Madam President, Europe is making serious mistakes on the coronavirus health emergency. […] But today I want to talk to you about the cure with hyperimmune plasma, a simple cure that has existed in medicine for almost a century, now tested on Covid-19 in Mantua and Pavia, Italy, with excellent results. […] Yet both the Italian government and you in Europe don’t seem particularly interested in it. Why? Well, it does not have the multinationals behind, there are no large investments and the strong powers of the sector, 4  https://www.ema.europa.eu/en/news/ema-recommends-first-covid-19-vaccineauthorisation-eu#:~:text=EMA%20has%20recommended%20granting%20a,from%2016%20 years%20of%20age. Accessed on 27 May 2021.

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there are no large contracts and millionaire earnings]. Perhaps then for some it is better to focus on something else. It is a mistake.

During her speech, Sardone did not talk about vaccines, but instead focused on a therapy based on “hyperimmune plasma”, the utility of which is still debated in the medical field. In her speech, Sardone stated her belief that the EU’s apparent disinterest in this therapy was due to the fact that pharmaceutical multinationals, big investors, and unspecified “strong powers” were not involved in its development. The underlying assumption is a typically populist/eurosceptic one: EU institutions do not act in the interest of European citizens, but rather in the interests of economic and financial elites. Sardone thus spoke on behalf of European citizens to denounce EU elites. To better understand why Sardone chose to focus on this particular therapy, however, it is necessary to refer to what was happening in Italy in that period. Sardone, in fact, was mirroring the communication strategy of the League’s leader Matteo Salvini in Italy. On 5 May 2020, in a Tweet, Salvini demanded explanation of the Italian government’s lack of interest in hyperimmune plasma therapies. She claimed that citizens suspected that, since hyperimmune plasma is cheap and there is no large investment involved, the therapy was being deliberately ignored.5 Rather than on solid medical research, however, Salvini’s battle for this particular therapy largely relied on the claims of a single physician, Dr Giuseppe De Donno, who asserted that all of his patients given that therapy had recovered from Covid-19. Subsequent research showed that the effectiveness of this therapy is far from proven (e.g. Pathak, 2020), so that Salvini’s reliance on it appears to have been purely strategic. He used it as a communication tool to attack Italian and European political institutions and associate them with a conspiracy involving unspecified but powerful economic and financial actors. The same communication strategy has been applied by the League’s MEPs in the EP. In the second phase, when it became clear that vaccines were being developed and would be the most important means with which to combat the pandemic, the League’s attitude towards vaccines became more ambiguous. On 12 November 2020, during the debate entitled “Transparency of the purchase as well as the access to Covid-19 vaccinations”, MEP Simona Baldassarre said: 5  https://twitter.com/matteosalvinimi/status/1257627971541708810. Accessed on 27 May 2021.

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Now we cannot fail again on vaccines. We ask for maximum transparency, in all the phases that will lead to an effective vaccine: transparency on who produces it, on the interests that concern them and on the effects on people’s health. […] The news of the imminent arrival of more vaccines is comforting. In the hope that they are safe and effective, politics must now play its part. We must avoid mistakes and guarantee freedom and security to all European citizens.

This speech underlines a rather positive attitude towards vaccines in general, but raises a series of questions about transparency and the safety of the specific vaccines under production. These questions are legitimate, but they seem intended to raise suspicions about how the EU institutions are dealing with vaccines. Baldassarre, in fact, continued with a disclaimer (“the news of the imminent arrival of more vaccines is comforting”) followed by an ambiguous statement about the safety and effectiveness of these vaccines: unsafe and ineffective vaccines would obviously not be approved by regulatory agencies, so it seems strange to rely on “hope” for issues of this kind. Moreover, Baldassarre demanded that citizens be guaranteed “freedom and security”, but both these words are ambiguous. Did she mean freedom from Covid-19, or freedom of choice regarding vaccination? Did she mean security against the pandemic, or against the possible collateral effects of the vaccine? A similar ambiguity is apparent in the words of another League MEP, Luisa Regimenti, in a debate held on 16 December 2020 titled “Preparation of an EU strategy on Covid-19 vaccination, including its external dimension”. In her speech, Regimenti talked about the imminent approval by the European Medicines Agency (EMA) of the Pfizer vaccine: Madam President, EMA, by rushing the approval process, would be ready to grant authorisation to the Pfizer vaccine as early as 23 December and to start vaccinations immediately after Christmas. The news makes us breathe a sigh of relief, but at the same time it is urgent to reassure citizens about the safety of the vaccine. In the UK, where the vaccine is already in use, allergic reactions have been reported, and the director of the EMA admitted that its effects on and risks for pregnancy, breastfeeding, fertility and children are not known. Despite the manufacturers’ assurances, it is clear that an incomplete trial has been carried out and we would not want to be faced with unexpected events once the vaccine has been injected. We therefore wish – for optimal and voluntary vaccination coverage to be able to express an informed consent based on accurate, transparent and consistent i­ nformation.

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Let us remember that the lives of citizens and the socio-economic future of our society are at stake.

This speech starts with a disclaimer (“the news makes us breathe a sigh of relief”), but continues by raising suspicions concerning some severe collateral effects that might be caused by the vaccine, and ends with a call for “optimal and voluntary vaccination”. While the meaning of the word “optimal” remains ambiguous, the idea that vaccination should be voluntary persists, being justified by suspicions about its potential collateral effects. A similar communication strategy, based on ambiguity, was applied in the same period in Italy by the League’s leader Salvini. An article published by Fanpage.it6 reported his opinion about the idea of compulsory vaccines against Covid-19: “I am in favour of education, of information, […] but against any kind of obligation”; “I have always vaccinated my children, but everyone should be able to choose”. By using disclaimers, Salvini remained ambiguous about his position on vaccines. In the third phase, however, when vaccinations were already being made in Europe, the position of the League’s MEPs abruptly changed. Silvia Sardone, who in May 2020 had claimed that the EU should focus on hyperimmune plasma therapy, now stated: Madam President von der Leyen, I would like to remind you of some data on vaccinations around the world. In England, ten million people have already received the first dose of the vaccine; in Israel, three million people, practically a third of the population. For comparison, the British have administered 12.5 doses per 100 people, the US 8.8 doses per 100 people. And Europe? Europe only 2.5 doses per 100 people. The European disaster is recognised by all.

At this point, the League’s MEP appeared to trust vaccines completely, and claimed that the EU was failing (in comparison with other countries like the UK and Israel) in its vaccination campaign, which she called a “European disaster”. Sardone’s speech was delivered during a particularly important debate titled “The state of play of the EU’s Covid-19 vaccination strategy”, in which Commission’s President Ursula von der Leyen personally participated. During this debate, the positions of populist 6  https://www.fanpage.it/politica/vaccino-covid-salvini-nessun-obbligo-per-i-medicino-vax-no-a-liste-di-proscrizione/. Last accessed 8 June 2021.

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MEPs were remarkably similar and formed a coherent whole. For instance, the ECR’s MEP Carlo Fidanza (from the Italian Brothers of Italy party) said that “[t]he Commission made two crucial mistakes: it signed unclear contracts with pharmaceutical companies and waited too long before signing them, thus allowing itself to be overtaken and demonstrating, once again, its geopolitical weakness”. From the ID parliamentary group, Julie Lechanteux (Rassemblement National) stated that “The European vaccine strategy has turned out to be a real failure”, while Marco Zanni (League) claimed that “the biggest flaw in the European Union is the inability to recognise its mistakes and change course in time”. Guido Reil (Alternative fur Deustschland, ID group) exploited the situation to express his positive judgement on Brexit, and therefore his negative opinion of the EU: Brexit has always been dismissed as a stupid decision by idiotic or xenophobic islanders. The contrast between the disaster with the EU vaccination strategy and the success in the UK makes it clear why Brexit was a good decision.

Jorge Buxadé Villalba (ECR group, from the Spanish far-right party Vox) concluded his speech by calling for the immediate resignation of President von der Leyen: If you, Mrs Von der Leyen, were in any government of a Member State, you would have resigned. This is what I ask you: dignity and resignation.

To summarise, what emerges from populists’ discursive construction of vaccines is a strategic use of science to reinforce their populist ideology. We interpret the ambiguity towards vaccines, and the continuous shifts in opinion by several populist MEPs, not as actual uncertainty about vaccines and their scientific foundations, but rather as a strategic “chameleonism” that aims at exploiting the issue of vaccines to reinforce anti-elitism and Euroscepticism, which are the foundations of European right-wing populism. Populists see a political and discursive opportunity in the debate on vaccines and medications, their production, and the uncertainty that derives from the need for their rapid development and approval in an emergency context. Populists, therefore, de-contextualize and politicize science to support their ideology. Thus, at the beginning of the Covid period, a certain degree of suspicion and conspiratorial thinking was used

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to convey the idea that EU institutions were acting in favour of pharmaceutical multinationals rather than European citizens. During the vaccination campaign, however, a largely positive attitude towards vaccines was expressed in order to highlight the failure of EU elites in organising a successful vaccination campaign: in this instance, populists used the UK as a relevant comparison, not just because of the success of its vaccination campaign, but most importantly because it enabled them to stress that Brexit was a good idea and a great success for populist forces, while staying in the EU leads to failure. Despite their initial flamboyant scepticism towards vaccines, populists ended up using the British vaccination campaign as a “populist success story” that further highlighted the alleged failure of the EU strategy.

Politicising a Public Health Emergency In order to understand how populists politicised the public health emergency caused by Covid-19, we took all the debates coded as “Public health strategy”, and we classified all populist MEPs’ speeches according to their core arguments. The results of this classification are summarised in Fig. 2. What is immediately apparent is that the majority of these speeches are centred on attacks on how the EU responded to the crisis, or on a more Core arguments of populist speeches related to Covid-19 as a public health emergency

2 2 13

6 3 9

Attacks to EU response

Failure of the EU

Attacks to national response

European-level measures

Sovereignism

Problems with tracing apps

Fig. 2  Populist framings of “public health strategy” debates

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general failure of the EU exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic. Some of the speeches attack the national policies of the speaking MEP or, conversely, call for national sovereignty, while others focus on more specific issues such as contact tracing of Covid-infected individuals or on proposals for European measures. But Eurosceptic attacks dominate the populist discourse. Closer inspection of some of these speeches reveals a pattern similar to that found in speeches about vaccines: the public health emergency is instrumentalised to attack the EU elites on a broad range of issues that pertain to the right-wing populist ideologies of the MEPs. For instance, AfD’s MEP Gunnar Deck (ID group), during a debate held on 16 April 2020, said: [I]n January [we had debates] about the Green Deal, climate rescue and the future of Europe and in February about the third gender and human rights in Madagascar. A top official in Madrid remarked calmly - in February, mind you - that he was expecting only a handful of people infected by the coronavirus. Asylum for the world, climate emergency and gender madness are collective symptoms of a neurotic evasion from the toil of self-assertion and the omnipotence fantasies of an unconscious patient: Europe’s flight into disease. The corona crisis makes it clear: Europe is sick and therefore more susceptible to disease

The Covid-19 crisis is, in this speech, a political opportunity to attack the EU on themes which are often targeted by right-wing populism, such as environmentalism, LGBT+ rights, and immigration. What the speaker claims is that the EU was distracted by “neurotic […] omnipotent fantasies” (i.e. the protection of human rights, the fight against climate change, and the governance of migration flows) and did not foresee (and thus prepare for) the oncoming pandemic. Similarly, ECR member Carlo Fidanza (Brothers of Italy), in the same debate, attacked the European Central Bank, the so-called European “Green Deal”, and sea-rescue NGOs (“we ask that borders be defended because while we are enclosing Europeans at home, it is not acceptable that NGOs continue to dominate the Mediterranean”). Rather than focusing on the health emergency itself, these speeches seem to bring the discourse back to populism’s favourite topics, and in particular those topics that, before, the pandemic, were typically discussed by populists in the EP (see Ruzza et al., 2021).

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This strategy is consistently used across parties and over time. On 8 July 2020, during a debate on “The EU’s Public Health Strategy post-­ Covid-­19”, Vox’s MEP Margarita de la Pisa Carriòn (ECR) attacked the EP’s resolution as follows: It talks about new bodies, new institutions … Another attempt by the Parliament to increase the power of Brussels and take more sovereignty from our nations. They repeat in a loop empty words: Green Pact, ecological transition, gender equality, resilience …, mantras that numb consciences, in order to impose a new world order, which Mrs Merkel mentioned in her speech today. A new world order or a new normal (as they now call it), which is only at the service of supranational interests.

Here the issues typical of right-wing populism are linked to nationalism, and are used to argue that the EU’s response to the pandemic is dangerous for national sovereignty because its aim is to create a new world order dominated by supranational interests. A similar claim was made, during the same debate, by the ID’s MEP Silvia Sardone (League), who attacked the resolution for focusing on issues such as LGBTI, contraception, ethnic minorities, and climate change, “which have nothing to do with the coronavirus”. Attacks on single nations, too, were seen as a chance to further assail European institutions. In a debate on the impact of Covid-19 on long-­ term care facilities, Jean-Lin Lacapelle (Rassemblement National, ID group) attacked both the French government and the European Commission, accusing them of being largely responsible for the numerous deaths in elderly care homes in France: In my country, France, the elderly represent 95% of the deaths that we deplore. But in France, what have we done for the elderly? Nothing. We have continued to cut budgets, increase costs, make retirees more precarious. […] I remind you here, moreover, that the European Commission, between 2011 and 2018, asked Member States no less than 63 times to reduce their health spending. You, too, are responsible.

Even in those relatively uncommon instances in which populist MEPs proposed European measures to face the crisis, their interventions entailed a critique of the EU. This was the case, for example, of speeches made during a debate on the EU’s pharmaceutical strategy, held on 26 November 2020. The call by Marco Dreosto (Brothers of Italy, ECR group) for a

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more active role of the Commission in the field of public health sounds more like an accusation: We still have in our eyes and in our memory the tragic moments when, at the outbreak of the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic, the European Union found itself completely unprepared to manage the health crisis. So, dear Commissioner, initiatives by the European Commission are welcome to prevent this situation from happening again in any way.

Similarly, the support expressed by Beata Kempa (Law and Justice, ECR group) for a strong European pharmaceutical strategy pointed to past mistakes, and highlighted the damage caused by the EU’s decisions concerning public health and the pharmaceutical market: This strategy is very much needed because the coronavirus epidemic has once again unfortunately shown the disastrous effects of the current European industrial policy. The restrictions introduced for years, as well as strict environmental and climate standards, caused the industry to escape outside the European Union. […] Between 2000 and 2018, drug shortages in the European Union increased twentyfold. For years, the EU has not made any breakthrough in the treatment of cancer patients, and more than 95% of patients with rare diseases seek help outside the European Union. We cannot find an answer to drug-resistant strains of bacteria or the unspoken epidemic of Lyme disease. Therefore, today we need to quickly remove many years of neglect and, above all, restore drug production to Europe and shorten supply chains.

To sum up, what appears to lie behind the majority of populist discourses about the public health strategy is not a set of considerations and proposals on how to face the challenge of the pandemic, but quite aggressive criticisms of the EU and its policies. These criticisms are not limited to matters of public health but extend to other topics more commonly targeted by populists, such as environmental policies, LGBTI+ rights, gender equality, and migrations. As with vaccines, populist exploit the EU’s public health strategy in the context of Covid-19 as a discursive and political opportunity to attack EU institutions and, more broadly, to pursue their agenda on topics with little to no relevance to public health. This suggests that populist actors are pursuing a political communication, rather than policy, agenda. While their speeches are formally directed at other MEPs, and are delivered in a strictly institutional context, their

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target public appears to be the “people”. In line with the idea of populists as “vox populi” (Mudde & Kaltwasser, 2017, p. 68), they voice the worries of their electorate: the dialogic space of the Parliament is exploited as a stage for the populist performance, a chance to put forward a broad narrative of anti-elitism and Euroscepticism, where the pandemic becomes just another element with which to demonstrate the failure of EU institutions and elites.

Conclusions In this chapter, we have highlighted how right-wing populists in the European Parliament politicise science in order to use it instrumentally to exacerbate the people/elites dichotomy, and to boost Euroscepticism. In particular, we have shown a tendency to adopt ambiguous positions on scientific matters such as vaccines, therapies, and public health policies: this “politics of ambiguity”, prescribed by the intent to use the pandemic as a political/discursive opportunity to reinforce populist instances, is a strategic tool that de-contextualizes and politicizes science. Populist discourses are built through the wide use of disclaimers, and a general hesitancy to adopt clearly stated and unchanging positions, until it becomes clear which one best serves populist purposes in a particular moment. Scientific uncertainty, which is normal and inevitable when dealing with an emergency provoked by the spread of a novel virus, is exploited by populists to claim that elites are failing; science is described as a political and social lever in the hands of colluding political elites and pharmaceutical multinationals whose interest conflicts with that of the people. The example of populist discourses on Covid-19 vaccines, for instance, showed how the initial position of suspicion towards those vaccines (aimed at attacking the EU elites for serving the interests of pharmaceutical companies and financial investors) turned, in the first months of 2021, into a strongly favourable position adopted on the vaccines in order to attack the reputation of the EU by highlighting the failure of the vaccination campaign. In a slightly different fashion, but with similar results, the populists’ discourse on the EU’s public health strategy is rather empty of proposals and instead filled with often aggressive criticisms of EU institutions; criticisms which range from holding the Commission responsible for the deaths of many people during the pandemic (due to a request to cut public health budgets in countries such as France) to accusing the EU of focusing on the wrong issues and dismissing the pandemic for too long.

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These accusations confirm the long-term definition of the EU, and more generally, the European Project as the defining enemy of the radical right—as an enemy even more primary than the traditional split between left and right (Proksch & Slapin, 2010). Euroscepticism is an overarching framework within which a number of shifting positions find a role and a justification. Just like left/right issues, those pertaining to the role of science become utilised in the endeavour to blame the EU. We can conclude that one of the reasons for this ambiguity is purely strategic, due to the chameleonic nature of populism (Mazzoleni & Ruzza, 2019; Taggart, 2000) and its ability to rapidly change position on specific issues without necessarily losing reputation or popularity. However, this is probably not sufficient to explain the marked ambiguity of most populist attitudes towards vaccines, and especially the tendency to focus on potential collateral effects, issues of safety, and the need to keep vaccinations voluntary. Some recent research, however, may provide important insights into why populists hesitate to take a stance on this specific scientific issue. Kennedy (2019), for instance, shows that the same dynamic drives vaccine hesitancy and political populism, namely a profound distrust in elites and experts. Populists must therefore balance the need to support mass vaccinations (which they probably realise are the only realistic measure to control the pandemic) and the knowledge that their electorates are often reluctant to be vaccinated. Moreover, as shown by Stecula and Pickup (2021), there is a correlation between populism and belief in conspiracy theories about Covid-19, so that populist parties and politicians may feel pressured to send their voters the message that they do not fully trust the “science” behind the suggested solutions to the pandemic (see also: Eberl et  al., 2021). It should be noted, however, that nevertheless populists do not seem to fully embrace conspiratorial thinking or openly question scientific findings. When they discuss pandemic-­related issues, they avoid extreme polarisation, and instead prefer a measured ambiguity that lets them attack political-economic actors such as the EU or the pharmaceutical companies, rather than scientists and science itself. The discussion of vaccines also evidences a specific trait of science-­ related populism: the claim that truth-speaking and decision-making sovereignty belongs to the people, and not to science (Mede & Schäfer, 2020). Thus, the constant emphasis by populist MEPs, that science and the world that surrounds it (i.e. pharmaceutical companies, universities and research centres, but also the European institutions themselves) must always be accountable to the people, who are the ultimate decision-makers about vaccinations.

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On the Emergence of Alt-Science Counterhegemony: The Case of the Finns Party Tuija Saresma and Emilia Palonen

Introduction The relationship between knowledge and power is vital. Ignorance or indifference are not just lack of knowledge but can be related to cultural and political struggles (Proctor, 2008). The attempt to define correct or permissible information can be seen as a “cultural war” that seeks to shape power and values (Hervik, 2014). Current cultural wars are waged on social media and are associated with misogyny and white supremacy (Nagle, 2017). Anti-intellectualism, linked to anti-elitism, also thrives (Aktas et  al., 2019). Complicating the position of researchers and academic institutions is linked to authoritarianism—even in Finland, a Nordic country in the European Union with high education and literacy rates, T. Saresma (*) University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland e-mail: [email protected] E. Palonen University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 H. Eslen-Ziya, A. Giorgi (eds.), Populism and Science in Europe, Palgrave Studies in European Political Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97535-7_6

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attempts to silence and ignore scholars in decision-making are recognized as major threats (Väliverronen & Ekholm, 2020, 8). According to the Finnish Science Barometer survey, there is no fear of an anti-scientific atmosphere and spread of misinformation in Finland, on the contrary: people believe in scientific knowledge. However, Finns Party supporters differ from others: While almost nine out of ten Green party supporters trust science, only every other Finns Party supporter does so by the same token, half of the Finns still trust science according to this survey (Varpula, 2019). The difference in attitudes towards climate change is particularly clear, as the Yle news (Sandell, 2019) highlights: the Finns Party supporters side with the claim that too much “zero research”—that is, study on what we allegedly already know—, is done in Finland, and they have less confidence in research data than supporters of any other political party. The struggle over science-based knowledge not only deals with the academia but also addresses schools and the education system, as we demonstrate below. In several cases of political change attention has been put on school curricula and even books, from minor reforms of conceptualisations to wholesale renewal that addresses typically the way in which nationhood is dealt with or how to think about the past (e.g., Kazlauskaitė, 2018). Typically, counter knowledge is produced through blogs, discussion boards and think thanks. Alt-science as the scientific knowledge is also on the rise. Introducing new voices, non-traditional knowledges, and new supporters through engagement in the knowledge field is part of the wider overall alt-right movement, where the Finns Party spearheads with institutionalized support in Finland. Indeed, the Finns Party is one of the most popular parties in Finland. Since 2011, they have reached considerable electoral success as one of the large parties in the proportional electoral system that supports coalition governments. In 2015, they took part in the government, until the leadership change in 2017. After the leadership change they managed to retain their position, and became the third largest party in the 2019 elections (see e.g., Palonen, 2020). Before the pandemic they lead the polls in a sovereign manner, while in the end of 2021 with circa 18 per cent support rates they compete between the Social Democrats and the more moderate right-wing National Coalition over as the three largest parties in the YLE polls, as the Centre Party’s support has been on long-term decline (Tikkala, 2021). Defining and controlling the production of knowledge has always been at the heart of the Finns Party, although it is one of the basic principles of

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science that it is not constrained by interests outside science itself (Väliverronen & Ekholm, 2020, 7). The results of science are commonly rejected when they conflict with your own worldview (confirmation bias), and this is clear with the Finns Party. Most often, it gets reflected in environmental and health issues, including views and moral perceptions towards climate change or vaccination. The same attitude is reflected in takes on social sciences and cultural studies. Sometimes they rely on knowledge and science (as in the “studies” on immigration and other controversial issues published by their own think tank Suomen Perusta), and sometimes they abandon the academic elite and emphasize popularity. In what we have uncovered, the discourse is not anti-science, although for a scientist it may appear anti-scientific. As Tuukka Ylä-Anttila (2018) has pointed out the Finns Party engages in an epistemological critique of contemporary science. In this thinking, the problem of ideological leftist intellectuals is that they do not see the reality for what it is. Science or scientists are perceived as a threat when they question traditional values and moral perceptions. Gender is a particular field that has been seen in the need of rewriting (Graff & Korolczuk, 2022). Considering that what we explore is a process of providing an alternative science and institutionalised forms of knowledge rather than conspiracy theories (see chapters “Knowledge, Counter-­Knowledge, Pseudo-­Science in Populism”, “The Role of Experts in Populist Politics: Towards a Post-­foundational Approach”, and “QAnon and Its Conspiracy Milieu: The Italian Case” in this volume) in online discussions, we operationalize here the term of alt-science that Casarões and Magalhães (2021) developed in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, although Ylä-­ Anttila’s term counter knowledge captures the wider field of contestation. Irrespective of the exact vocabulary, we see this as a transnational hegemonic battle over knowledge and power, where the Finns Party offers just a case. In the wider alt-right field, ideological othering does not mean abandoning education or science but studying the “right things” in the “right way”. This echoes the Althusserian understanding that the role of schools, media, church, and so on are vital for maintaining the consciousness that the political subjects are hailed by and without realizing that they are practising ideology. We suggest discussing the phenomenon the through the Gramscian concept of organic intellectuals and Althussers’ theorizing of ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses. We combine this with Laclau and Mouffe’s (1985) insights into discursive contestation, which also

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offers a broad methodological base for our research exploring a range of documented narratives from policy papers to social media and biographies. Our chapter discusses the ways in which Finns Party engages in criticism of information and seeks to define appropriate information. We analyse the guidelines of the Finns Party cultural policy programme (2020) and the municipal election programme (2021) on knowledge and teaching. In addition, we present examples of Finns Party’s science relations published in the media (online magazines, social media platforms and discussion forums but increasingly traditional media) and their key themes: gender, climate change denialism, criticism of the main public funding body Academy of Finland and the quality of information produced by Suomen Perusta, the Finns Party think tank, as well as the party leadership’s personal connection to science. Exploring the phenomenon, particular strategies of information management—denialism, censorship, distortion, co-optation, reclaiming, and the production of alt-science as a hegemonic praxis were recognised. Saresma (forthcoming) has done closer analysis on the strategies, reducing these to three means: denial, censorship and production of alt-science. The chapter is divided into four parts. The first one outlines our analytical framework of hegemony theory. The second explores the role of the leadership and elite recruitment introducing the party’s current leaders and fellow travellers, including co-optation. The third explores the policies and praxis of engagement culture and education through censorship and distortion. The fourth explores the key nodal points that provide elements to the party’s discourse beyond its primary focus, migration. Here denialism and alt-science production have an important role.

Organic Intellectuals and Hegemony (Challengers) Attention to the use of media and politics—and the need to produce vision from the movement’s own perspective—was realized early on and in the modern politics by the Italian political theorist Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci argued that movements needed organic intellectuals to communicate the knowledge of the class within the class and to the others. Gramsci’s point was that intellect was a capacity of anyone, but not everyone would be an intellectual. Rather, these people would come either from within the group itself or through assimilation of traditional intellectuals in it: “One of the most important characteristics of any group that is developing towards dominance is its struggle to assimilate and to conquer

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“ideologically” the traditional intellectuals, but this assimilation and conquest is made quicker and more efficacious the more the group in question succeeds in simultaneously elaborating its own organic intellectuals.” (Gramsci, 1971, 116.) Developing on Gramsci’s work, the French philosopher Louis Althusser (2008[1971]) pointed at Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs) that are relevant to societal knowledge production. In fact, he makes a difference between repressive and ideological state apparatuses. “Ideology never says ‘I am ideological’,” Althusser (ibid., 49) notes. The political subject becomes “hailed” or “interpellated” by the ideology and does not realize they are in ideology (ibid., 47). In this way, ideology for Althusser “acts” in a particular way of “recruiting subjects.” To contest the ISAs, progressive forces would need to establish their own state apparatuses or take control of the established ISAs. These range from party organs and related think thanks to policies and social media communities. It is important to see that the Finns Party in the same way as other movements, and particularly the wider field of the alt-right, have generated these starting from websites and discussion boards now moving into more labour intensive and tech-heavy state apparatuses. At the same time, they contest the established ISAs such as education, media, and schools. Thinking further on theory of hegemony, building on both Althusser and Gramsci, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (1985), working in the UK under Thatcherism, discussed about the role of hegemony in mobilizing strategy. Counterhegemonic movements would need generate their own nodal points, myths, and political frontiers—to challenge the status quo with an alternative imaginary. Drawing on their theorizing we will investigate the process of generation of a counterhegemony through approach to knowledge as alt-science. The key to contemporary mobilization of the radical right mobilization, or the alt-right, is that they do not merely want to establish a political “us” just as the populists do to get to power through making clear an antagonism that they see as constitutive to their existence centring around an unfulfilled demand in a cause or confrontation that unites them (Laclau, 2005; Mouffe, 2018). More precisely, they want to carry out transformation at the level of mindsets and what is not just the status quo but the (new) normal. This transformation links several forms of information (true or false) and negates conventional sources of knowledge so that through this new confrontation they constitute their own position and define the pertinent questions and answers to them.

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Understanding online mobilization and claiming of institutions of knowledge can benefit from theorizing politics and communication in Deleuze and Guattari’s footsteps (Guattari & Deleuze, 1987; Hardt & Negri, 2000). We refer to alt-right beyond the Finns Party precisely because of this rhizomatic political practice. Organized political forces such as the radical right parties do not merely seek to feed into the uncontrollable field of production of meaning. Rather, they want to be in control of the mechanisms that give it structure and direction. Though it may sound odd to study the radical right through the (post-) Marxist tradition, we argue that these theories shed light on the workings of counterhegemonic mobilization and its knowledge production. These insights could be applied in several other contexts, but the theorizing seems particularly apt for the Finns Party as a case of radical right party promoting wider alt-right and alt-science perspectives.

The Finns Party Leadership and Fellow Travellers: The Party of the Intellectuals One piece of evidence on the relevance of alt-science is provided in the Finns Party General Election video from 2019. V niin kuin Ketutus was a 6:40 long short film on a monster that emerged from the anger of people and sought to conquest the ruling corrupted elites (Finns Party, 2019). While the video spread within Finland and beyond its borders and it has been analysed for international audiences (Horsmanheimo et  al., forthcoming; Sakki & Martikainen, 2020, 2021), what was interesting about it was that it really started at the symbolic home of knowledge. As many populist radical right imageries it includes a relatable, recognizable historical setting in the heart of the capital city—the main cathedral. But where the video starts is the Finnish National Library where a figure reads a comic book in the dark. After the film returns from the comic to the reader for the final scene in the starting location, the figure is revealed as the party chair Jussi Halla-aho who issues a reassuring message: “there is no pissed-off monster” but instead that it is you who have a say in the general elections. In fact, it was the same library as where Jussi Halla-aho had spent his formative years at the university—even receiving his PhD at the University of Helsinki. His postdoc did not come to fruition despite funding he received for compiling a dictionary, which he never did (Nurmi, 2020).

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Instead, he launched a blog Scripta  – Kirjoituksia uppoavasta Lännestä (Scripta  – Writings from the sinking West) with which he reached wide audiences—much more excited audiences than his colleagues at the university who were worried about the tone of his argumentation of Western civilizationism. This knowledge that was framed as something that cannot be spoken in the public about is secret knowledge about the dangers of immigration that was politically incorrect and thus forbidden—generated the affective appeal of his followers (and a bunch of trolls) who were calling him “Master” (Mestari) from the mid-2000s. He managed to make his way to the party list although Timo Soini, the party chair at the time, was not fond of him and on the one hand, did not estimate the appeal and on the other, needed a boost in Helsinki. Following the argument of journalist Lauri Nurmi, Halla-aho, in contrast, appeared as much in control and needed a job, as his university career did not take-off after the PhD (Nurmi, 2020). The current party chair Riikka Purra studied international relations at the University of Turku. She discovered that IR was not diplomacy that she hoped to have studied and has openly discussed about the disjoint between her colleagues and her own beliefs (Suonpää, 2021). She never finished her funded PhD, and it is a bit unclear what she did in the years between studying and moving to politics to become the vice-chair of Jussi Halla-aho in 2017. In the traditional media, her urban healthy lifestyle has been portrayed. She is depicted as an eager reader—there are photos of her home with large bookshelves and books also piled on the floor (Myllymäki, 2021), and on the social media her Instagram features green smoothies. This gives some contrast to the very fact-driven presence in the print media and Twitter. Purra would be the first one to deny the label populism on her party. It is patriotism that she advocates. She found her way to the party also through the blogs and engagement with Jussi Halla-­ aho’s circle. In a recent book (2021), Markku Jokisipilä, director of the Centre for the Study of Parliament and a leading commentator of politics in Finland, discusses the Halla-aho and Purra’s party. The book projects the picture of highly educated party elites. The leadership is trusted, but the actives have a different educational background. For example, in the Uutissuomalainen poll, both Jokisipilä and one of the authors commented in November 2021 the persons rating Riikka Purra as the most successful party leader in the recent poll after two years of her stay in power are dominantly from the two least educated demographic groups in the study. In contrast, the

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poll’s lead PM Sanna Marin of the SDP received support evenly from all demographic groups. Purra’s ratings are strong, constituting two-thirds of the party supporters although not three fourths like Halla-aho did before his sudden decision to step down in the summer of 2021, two years prior to the next scheduled general elections, after leading the party for four years. One of the speculations is that Purra is seen as less extreme in views. Jokisipilä purports to have repeatedly interviewed and met Halla-aho and he is widely expected to become the person in possession of a famed letter that outlines reasons for Halla-aho’s decision to step down. Jokisipilä’s 2021 book is not a scientific study in the strict sense but was widely discussed as an attack against his colleagues suggesting that they (just like the mainstream media) mock the party and present it in a bad light, because they themselves support values other than nationalist ones. The study made claims that 1.5 million Finns (voters in the previous elections) cannot be labelled far right or that historically it is not possible to see that fascism would exist in Finland given the lack of ideological tradition in the past. The style would indicate one of the forms of becoming a Gramscian organic intellectual: adaptation from the other social groups. The key argument in the book is to deny prior knowledge on the Finns Party as ideological and offer a neutral observer’s account of the facts. With also the party’s secretary Arto Luukkanen having a post as lecturer in Russian and East European Studies at the University of Helsinki, the outlook tells a story of an educated elite led party whose supporters are still the same socio-economic groups as they were in the early days, or the landslide victory of the party led by Timo Soini in the “Jytky” elections in 2011 (Arter, 2012). We discussed the road to Jytky in the framing of the party in the largest Finnish national daily Helsingin Sanomat and the party’s own discourse, where it had received sympathy among the “elite” newspapers, and the persona of Timo Soini, who at the same time highlights his degree master’s in political science and appears streetwise among the masses (Palonen & Saresma, 2017). A Gramscian question is whether the demands, themes, and values among the intellectuals come organically from the social group—or class— they represent. And how fast is the generation and recruitment of organic intellectuals. The Althusserian point here would be to expand the organic intellectuals so that the hitherto hostile ISAs could be occupied from within, this including the party leadership passing through the institution of the Finnish parliament and on the way to the government, as educated elites.

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Reclaiming Traditional ISAs: The Finns Party Cultural Policy And Municipal Election Programmes In this section, we study cultural policy programme and the municipal election programme of the party. The programme The Finns Party media and cultural policy, published on 13 January 2020, immediately brings out a message on the cover that summarizes the message of the declaration—the effort to teach “Finnish” culture: The Finns Party do not accept censorship of opinion or the fact that accusations of hate speech or painting silence the debate. We strongly defend the inviolable right to freedom of expression. We also want our nationalist and Finnish-proud way of thinking and culture from our historical background to be strengthened. Finnish culture must also be present in the daily life of schools and in curricula. We want the teaching of culture, civilization, and the arts – not multicultural propaganda or political ideology as a headache for children. (Finns Party, 2020, 1.)

The eight-page statement consists of the sections “Freedom of speech, hate speech and social media,” “The role of the Finnish Broadcasting Corporation,” “For Finnish culture and the Finnish language,” “Something limits even art,” “Art and culture as factors of well-being” and “Physical culture and movement for life.” Freedom of speech is at the centre, but the cornerstone of freedom of speech, public communication, is being slandered. The activities of the non-affiliated Finnish Broadcasting Corporation, Yle, which engages in independent information transmission, are criticized. On the one hand, Yle’s importance in recognizing “high-quality documents as a provider of program content and music and other art programs co-produced by the European Broadcasting Corporation” and as a “guardian of Finnish culture and language.” On the other hand, concerns are expressed that “in immigration and EU news, for example, Yle has not cared that its task is not to proclaim its own “truth” to the people, but to present facts and leave it to the reader to draw conclusions” (Finns Party, 2020, 4). The party attacks Yle for disseminating information coloured by its own, false perspective. The state-owned broadcaster’s independent, fact-based communication, committed to the ethical conditions of journalism, is criticized: “The activities and journalistic level of the Finnish media are in many places at a worrying level.” The programme recalls that the activities of the

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Broadcasting Corporation are financed by tax funds and that its “activities can be influenced by political decisions if we wish.” (Finns Party, 2020, 4.) The cultural policy programme thus suggests that Yle’s programme activities should be politically controllable. In particular, the party criticizes the current “promotion of cultural diversity added to Yle’s mission” and the obligation to produce a “programme that seeks to present a multicultural social project supported by other parties in a positive light” (ibid., 4). The attempt to take over the broadcaster, determine its programming policy, and thereby control media publicity is familiar from other countries. This form of anti-elitism where journalists and experts of Yle are depicted as the antipode of what the real people know, trust, and believe, matches with the Althusserian idea of seeing media as an ideological state apparatus that would need to be into the control of the counterhegemonic movement. The programme emphasizes Finnish, distinctive culture, without defining it. Such a (fictional) “common culture strengthens the identity and community of a nation” (Finns Party, 2020, 4). Therefore, “Finnish culture must also be present in the everyday life and curricula of schools” (ibid., 5). At its best, art and culture “evoke emotions, increase active citizenship, and encourage discussion and critical thinking.” However, critical thinking is defined as preservative rather than reformative: “We want the teaching of culture, civilization and the arts – not multicultural propaganda or political ideology as a headache for children.” (Ibid., 5.) In their municipal election programme, published on 25 January 2021, Finns Party emphasizes Finnish traditions and tackling bullying in connection with schools. The Ministry of Education and Culture had simultaneously prepared an extensive programme of measures to prevent bullying, violence and harassment in schools and educational institutions. The Board of Education in addition to developing education, early childhood education and lifelong learning, promotes internationality (OPH, 2021a), and produces materials to address cultural diversity in education (OPH, 2021b). Finns Party line is strictly the opposite declaring, how “The Summer hymn (Suvivirsi) and Christmas parties belong to Finnish culture and schools. (…) Finnish culture must be visible and heard.” (Ibid., see also Ruotsalainen & Saresma, 2017.) The strong emphasis on Finnish culture is contrary to the Basic Education Curriculum (OPH, 2016), in which global education plays a key role. For example, in the UNICEF Learning Materials, learners are committed to global responsibility while learning the skills they need to make the world fairer and more sustainable (UNICEF). These goals are linked to the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, which aim

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to eradicate extreme poverty, promote equality and justice, and protect the planet by 2030. Such goals do not fit into the Finns Party municipal election programme. Schools and libraries are key institutions for producing information in Finland. The Finns Party municipal election programme emphasizes that schools and libraries should be “safe places to focus on learning new things” and points to the “growing problems” of both with the “exclusion of young people and the increasing side effects of immigration” without elaborating on this. In addition to these side effects, school attendance is hampered by the placement of special needs students in regular classes and dangerous school trips overshadowed by “unsafe traffic solutions” and “wolves and other large carnivores.” (Finns Party, 2021, 10–11.) The municipal election programme does not talk directly about the content of school or university education but warns against “unnecessary and harmful expenditures” such as “ideological upheavals related to immigration, climate, and gender policies” (Finns Party, 2021, 4). When the programme clearly takes a stand against “gender-neutral traffic signs,” “ongoing anti-discrimination and anti-racism slogans,” “artificial gender awareness” and “anti-hate speech campaigns” (ibid., 6), tolerance and gender sensitivity are obviously not, in the party’s view, contents that should be taught in schools. The Finns Party’s municipal election programme echoes the familiar nationalist welfare chauvinism (Keskinen et  al., 2016), well-being and security, and depicting migrants as a threat. It also calls for “some limit to ideological upheaval,” as defined by anti-racism, discrimination, and hate speech campaigns and “artificial gender awareness,” as well as “a sense of proportionality to climate action” (ibid., 2–6). Intrusion of making sure the curriculum follows the party line is followed through active engagement at schools. Schoolteachers find topics related to politics and history or cultural diversity difficult to teach at schools, as local party activists’ campaign against potential bullying of supporters of the Finns Party (Niemonen & Pilke, 2021; Pohjanen, 2021). In 2018, a school was attacked by angry Finns Party supporters after the then MP, currently MEP Laura Huhtasaari posted in Twitter a photo about a poster made by the students of that school as a part of their media course that suggested the Finns Party turns their back to refugees and leaves them drowning in the Mediterranean instead of accepting them in Finland (Ranta, 2018). Another attack implying the efforts to censor knowledge production took place in 2021 as the youth organization of the Finns

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Party (STT, 2021) had asked school children to report their experiences of bias in school education. Jani Mäkelä, Finns Party MP, called on Twitter to talk about the bias of teaching (ibid.). The teachers’ trade union OAJ and the National Board of Education knocked out the actions, by stating that no external part has a saying about the content of teaching and that there has not been a bias in the curriculum (Ekholm, 2018). The model for the campaign was taken from an online application launched in 2018 by the right-wing populist Alternativ für Deutschland (AfD, Alternative to Germany) used to report teachers who express critical opinions of the party. In both Germany and Finland, the reports were linked to the content of the information to be taught. Teachers’ organizations in both countries opposed the parties’ interference in the school curriculum and emphasized the importance of critical thinking. The right-­ wing populists of both countries, on the other hand, argued that it was the reporting system that would guarantee the impartiality of information (Ekholm, 2018.) Even the Halla-aho rebuked the teachers for the uproar in his Facebook post on 17 January 2021: “Virtually every Finns Party parent with school-­ age children knows that schools are forced to enter political and partisan views, i.e., mainly to incite immigration, incite climate panic and bark at Finns Party. It is remarkably interesting that when Finns Party want to map this phenomenon, the party is accused of trying to take party politics to schools.” (Halla-aho, 2021.) Halla-aho’s writing describes the party’s message, the two tops of which are anti-immigration and climate denialism. Speaking on behalf of the reporting campaign, he himself is taking party politics to schools. Also, the higher education is targeted: on the 22 October 2021, the MP of the party Sebastian Tynkkynen, an influencer  and a YouTuber, tweeted and asked the students at the Helsinki University of Arts to enrol on a course on structural whiteness and provide him the materials, adding in a threatening tone: “They will be needed” for mocking or even censoring the course syllabus (Tynkkynen, 2021). From the Finns Party’s perspective, Althusserian ISAs, in the Finnish society the key ISAs are conquered by alien ideology—one of inclusion and diversity. The party recommends not to generate alternative apparatuses, apart from using social media as such, but move on to schools as an ISA in control of their others. In the next section, we also see new thematic points of contestation and the establishment of new more progressive institutions and practices.

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Distortion and Ridicule: Engaging with the “Zero” Research Awarded in Competitive Science The broader theme of science scepticism clearly emerges in the Finns Party criticisms against the funding decisions of the Academy of Finland. This has been taking place for the past years, and particularly in 2021, when a counter campaign started (Thornton, 2021). In her empirical analysis, Tuija Saresma (forthcoming) demonstrates that there are three ways of approaching science that are typical of Finns Party, namely (1) the denial of research results, manifested as climate change denialism or “climate change criticality”, (2) the attempt to censor information, especially criticism of the Academy of Finland, and (3) the production of one’s own “alternative” information by Finns Party incubators. We first go through the logic of the attack on the Academy of Finland funding decisions, and in the next section, the themes of contestation in particular. Going through these attitudes briefly here shows that there is a clear desire of Finns Party to dictate what research is along the line of the party and how it aims to defining what constitutes as science. In the recent years, social media and party related media have directed attention to the types of Academy of Finland funding decisions. The Academy of Finland, the main academic funding body offers is highly competitive funding, but public criticism is used to serve the Finns Party’s aims of highlighting the distinction between the ordinary people with their beliefs and the academic elites with their ideological convictions and the abuse of public funds. The Finns Party online magazine Suomen Uutiset (2020a) has participated in the smearing of the Academy funding decisions. Suomen Uutiset published a news article with the title “Trans-future, racism, African healers, the importance of racism and meme images” and was dealt with in an amused tone in the body text (Turkkila, 2016). Studies on gender minorities, gender equality, and sexual equality were especially criticized. From 2016, particularly funding for humanities, gender studies, issues related to immigration, research in development studies are sourced and ridiculed on the Finns Party forums and online and presented in a ridiculous light. In the latest stir, individual researchers were identified and mocked in not only right-wing but also more mainstream media. The case centring on a tweet in August 2021 is interesting, as it unveils inner paradoxes in the Finns Party science discourse and raised a huge counterblow on Twitter.

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In the tweet chain, first journalist of Ivan Puopolo, known for his maverick style, shared a link to the reputable mainstream daily newspaper which in its editorial discusses how a leading civil servant at the ministry of education argues that scientists need to legitimate them. The cynical comment stated, “Perhaps in the ‘science community’ they soon understand that calling one’s work science is not enough.” (Puopolo, 2021) The denigration of science community does not devalue science as such, but it does contest whether current scientists are doing science or not. The journalist Susanne Päivärinta responded to this with a phone screenshot (presumably) of research at the University of Eastern Finland on “The Poetics of Afroeuropean Mobilities in Francophone African Literatures”. The journalist claimed she did not understand it. This aroused a huge discussion where, on the one hand, the research is dismissed and on the other, the study of “student mobilities, tourism and exploration, professional mobilities, criminal mobilities, return travel, and clandestine travel” may indeed be relevant for migrant-focused parties. It sparked on Twitter a new hashtag #minätutkin (#Iresearch) where academic people all over Finland tweeted in an easily understandable manner what they study and why (see Thornton, 2021). The Twitter active communicators of this impromptu campaign and hashtag public (Rambukkana, 2015) received the Interaction of the Year Prize by the scholarly society on communication Prologos. Some say the campaign backfires on science as it reinforces the discourse of usefulness since what makes science relevant is that it would not be immediately relevant (Jalonen, 2021). Others such as the prize-givers claim that it generated more attention to sciences, particular projects and their diversity as scholars were supposed to argue in a space of a tweet what they research. Responding to contestation always confirms that there is contestation but one of the key issues was that it generated a hashtag public, and a supportive community of scholars online whose main worry was not the alt-right, but funding cuts that the hitherto pro-science government was presenting to them in early autumn 2021. Contestation worked in a reverse logic: it made the science community stronger and more visible, but it kept the doubts present. As we can read here from the vocal journalists and alt-scientist, the movement is in the need of organic intellectuals. It is worth noting that the term intellectual in Gramscian thought does not merely refer to academics. Organic intellectuals both derive from the social strata of the

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group, or through assimilating others as their intellectuals, whether journalists or academics.

Denial and Production of Alt-Science: The Climate and the Gender Debates as Alternative Nodal Points in the Single-Issue Party’s Discourse There are some key themes that the Finns Party have sought to pursue in their criticism of scientific knowledge. While a certain value-conservative, traditionalist line has continued throughout the party’s existence, the party led by Soini until 2017 was on the side of the underprivileged, while led by Halla-aho (2017–2021) and Purra (2021–) there have been a clearer agenda of right-wing xenophobia and outright racism (Norocel et  al., 2021.) However, support growth cannot be built on single issue alone, especially when immigration has declined further during the Covid-19 period. Other themes such as climate and gender can move on to provide more space for identification. Research on climate change is constantly belittled elsewhere too. The former president Halla-aho has repeatedly spoken in public about “climate hysteria” and the current president Riikka Purra talks about “climate fanaticism” (Purra, 2021). In January 2020, Halla-aho posted on Facebook a long text that has been liked by more than 6000 people and shared by more than 700 people. In it, he contests the Green Minister of Interior Maria Ohisalo and claims: “Of course, forest fires are not really caused by climate change. (…) Climate flutter is not only stupid, but also dangerous for the economy as well as for people and nature. If we pretend the forest fires elsewhere are caused by climate change, and therefore will stop using and taking care of our forests, the forests will be burning also at home.” (Halla-aho, 2020.) The inaccuracy of the message was contested by many experts and politicians. For example, Minister of the Interior Ohisalo herself suggests that the political right in particular “questions research and the credibility of individual researchers” and even seeks to “subject science to its own purposes” thus crumbling trust to scientists, although “freedom and independence of science are key building blocks of democracy” (Koskinen, 2020). The uproar over Australian forest fires was not the only one of its kind. Sara Rigatelli (2020) states that the downplaying of climate change and the refusal to reduce emissions, which have been diligently practised

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among Finns Party, are related to the line that is holding back the climate actions of many right-wing populists in Europe. With the shift in focus from immigration, it is precisely climate change that has “become a favourite destination of populist parties” (ibid.). Halla-aho has embraced scepticism about climate change and the glorification of motoring in pursuit of popularity (see chapter “Populism, Science and Covid-­19 as a Political Opportunity: The Case of the European Parliament” in this volume). Gender was another issue that caused discussion in 2020. The pamphlet Totuus kiihottaa – Filosofinen tutkimus vasemmistopopulistisen valtamedian tieto- ja totuuskriisistä (The Truth Excites: A Philosophical Study of the Information and Truth Crisis in the Left Populist Mainstream Media, Hankamäki, 2020) by Jukka Hankamäki, Doctor in Philosophy and in Political Science. The title of the book suggests that the book deals with media, knowledge, and truth as philosophical concepts and their social context. In reality, the book is a mixed compilation that criticizes media, feminism, immigration policy and academia, and concern for freedom of speech. Hankamäki writes, among other things, that rape in marriage is not rape, that women mate with foreigners to take revenge on Finnish society and that the mixing of biological races is dangerous. Hankamäki’s perception of women can be considered misogynistic. Such female hatred and antifeminism are familiar from the Internet sphere (Saresma, 2020; Nagle, 2017, 93–94) and is practised by right-wing populists around the world (Palonen & Saresma, 2019). Hankamäki uses language typical of anti-immigrant movements (Saresma, 2017) referring, for example, to the “demographic power” used by women. He refers to “cross-border mating,” in which women “modify the genetic heritage of our people” and “violate the equivalence and correlative and confidential relationship between the biological race, the ethnically identifiable people, the politically valid nation, legal citizenship, and the philosophically existing nation-state” (Hankamäki, 2020, 205–211; 260–265). The book expresses hatred of women and ethnonationalism, flooded with words of civilization. Totuus kiihottaa was spectacularly published in an event where in addition to Hankamäki himself, Marko Hamilo, the director of the think tank, and Jussi Halla-aho, the party’s chair, were present. The publication ceremony for Hankamäki’s book was advertised in Suomen Uutiset (2020b), and it was promised that Hamilo and Hankamäki would provide “fresh research information on the values, attitudes and influence of journalists”. The party clearly wanted the publication to get as much publicity as

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possible. At the unveiling ceremony, Hamilo praised the book as “fine research” (Mäntymaa et  al., 2020). When its hostile and racist content erupted, Matias Turkkila rushed to announce that Hamilo was the only representative of the Foundation or party to read the book. The party leadership withdrew from the book. Halla-aho and then Purra issued a press release emphasizing that they were unfamiliar with the content of the book and that “the party does not usually check the outputs of its think tank in advance.” (Parkkonen, 2020.) Thus, the production of information in the party’s own machinery is hardly evaluated at all, even though the quality of other researched information is critically criticized. Halla-­ aho, Turkkila and Grönroos, who knew Hankamäki’s style, knew how to expect a stir in the party’s media publicity. They focused on contesting authorities of knowledge and generating their own ones. Features of counterscience and alt-science include calling itself science without being science. Books that copy the format of scientific publications published by the Foundation, such as the Epäneutraali sukupuolikirja  – Puheenvuoroja sukupuolikysymyksistä (The Unneutral Gender Book: Speeches on Gender Issues, Grönroos, 2016), on closer inspection turn out to be unsubstantiated opinions that do not meet the criteria of science (see e.g., Keisalo, 2016; Saresma, 2018). But this is the game of devaluing scientific knowledge and producing not scientific knowledge but knowledge that would pass as such. Knowledge is not disregarded by the Finns Party. It is quite the contrary. It provides key elements and signifiers which are spreading as the counterhegemonic discourses among the masses, where they gain ground and may become a new discursive horizon, and imaginary, to follow the theory of hegemony of Laclau and Mouffe. During the covid-19 period, vaccinations alt-science talk is moving strong in the party. This last section that showed how the Finns Party seek to determine appropriate or acceptable information actively in cases of immigration or gender—by providing knowledge. The think tank Suomen Perusta close to the party publishes reports and pamphlets in line with the party’s agenda, for example on the costs and gender of immigration. For a populist, any publicity can be useful. The party, which promotes conservative values, cannot be harmed by the fact that a publication criticizing immigration for restricting women’s sexuality rises in the headlines.

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Conclusions Above, we presented the ways the Finns Party aims at controlling and utilizing knowledge production. We chose to focus on the party’s activity for two reasons: Firstly, they already are a very powerful party with a clear aim to become even the prime minister party, and in that position, they could affect the country’s science policy in many ways. And secondly, because the Finns Party is a schoolbook example of an authoritarian alt-­ right party manual of how to gain and execute power. We have analysed the party’s cultural policy programme, the municipal election party programme, and the social media attacks on the Academy of Finland’s funding decisions and Suomen Perusta as a producer of information, we have discussed strategies that describe the Finns Party’s own media debates in 2020. These strategies are not mere attitudes to science but rather active tactics in the party’s aim at controlling knowledge production. The party’s participation in the discussion of information is condensed into different means: the denial of the researched information, the effort to censor the research, and the production of alternative information. Of these strategies, climate change denialism is intentional ignorance, agnotology. A further desire to define research to be funded and thus to censor research topics that do not fit into one’s own agenda, is a chatter on social media and in the party’s own voice supporters, who are not committed to the journalist’s instructions. Where these means of managing information go unhelpful only in response to existing knowledge, the generation of knowledge itself is proactive. The denigration of scientific knowledge and the production of alternative knowledge are in the strategic use of the party, and the aim here is to weaken the public trust to academic knowledge production and to academic freedom. It is a form of censorship and it also weathers the belief on the school system and to the whole democratic system more broadly. Finally the strategies of producing alternative knowledge are yet another but a more forceful attempt to set the agenda of science and knowledge. They emphasize that in the alt-right knowledge production the aim is not only to censor or to question “wrong” kind of knowledge but also to promote one’s political agenda by producing alt-science that is fabricated to answer the needs of this agenda. Because of the various responses to existing knowledge—denying it, questioning it and censoring it—and also because of the active effort to

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producing counter-science, we suggest that what we are witnessing is not only anti-science or even only counter-science, but a new mixture of tactics, alt-science. This strategy includes co-optation of existing knowledge, generating or occupying organs of knowledge (ISAs) and working through organic intellectuals either from the movement’s own ranks or through integrating intellectuals from other groups. In this article, we sought to read the discursive practices on science of the Finns Party from the perspective of the theory of hegemony, with reference to Gramsci and Althusser. From the Laclau and Mouffean perspective, the Finns Party are bringing for both nodal points of their discourse and through confrontation. Just as Althusser suggested, they also generate and make use of ISAs in the hybrid media but also traditional fields such as schools and universities. The Finns Party further seeks to recruit youth and others to join as “intellectuals” able to contest the existing knowledge. Organic intellectuals have done this through social media channels—their own blogs and discussion board but increasingly in general and hybrid media where they also recruit from other groups. Their  work as ISAs, besides writing the electoral programme and going to schools to propagate, takes place open in the field. Assimilating persons engaged in the exiting ISAs to counter the “ideology” is part of the strategy. While empirically speaking the Finns Party itself is not a homogeneous social group, it has a well-educated leadership that has the support of the masses as persons who know better and confirm their beliefs to them. Noteworthy is that the well-educated leaders are not those who have been particularly successful in scientific careers, but engagement with the party has offered them another way to contribute to the Finnish society with their knowledge. The story of science is “a constant struggle against ignorance and religious or political restraint attempts,” Väliverronen and Ekholm (2020, 15) write. In the case of the Finns Party, it is not only challenging production of knowledge with censorship, but they produce alternative knowledge for their own purposes. When immigration has stalled and anti-immigration is no longer enough, the agenda also includes denying climate change, questioning gender equality and the rights of sexual minorities, and mumbling research into them. The Finnish Academia has not remained silenced. They have also found new ways to self-legitimate and network, responding with engaged “hashtag public” to the challenge posed by the alt-science actives contesting the status quo. Academics are however not a unified field but there are organic intellectuals also within the

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Finns Party who seek to generate scepticism of the status quo and propose their own perspective, which is not always as distinct as it claims to be. The idea, however, is to generate a confrontation where “ideology” is contested as ideology, and the alternative provided would be science, or at least “common sense.” As Ylä-Anttila (2018) argues, at stake is an attempt to provide a true(er) depiction of the world with better methods and premises, not the rejection of information or science, in name at least.

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The Problematic Relationship Between Science, Politics and Public Opinion in Late Modernity: The Case of the Anti-Vax Movement in Spain and Italy Luca Raffini and Clemente Penalva-Verdú

Introduction This chapter aims to explain the way in which negative attitudes toward vaccines relate to certain political predispositions and actions. The issue of vaccines, which is especially relevant in the current context of the COVID-19 pandemic, offers an opportunity to study the communicative processes concerning the complex relationship among science, politics, and everyday life, as well as possible new conflicts surrounding this issue.

L. Raffini (*) University of Genoa, Genoa, Italy e-mail: [email protected] C. Penalva-Verdú University of Alicante, Alicante, Spain © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 H. Eslen-Ziya, A. Giorgi (eds.), Populism and Science in Europe, Palgrave Studies in European Political Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97535-7_7

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Vaccine hesitancy is defined as a delay in accepting or refusing available and safe vaccines (WHO, 2020), while the anti-vax movements are collective movements active in denouncing the alleged uselessness and harmfulness of vaccines and opposing compulsory vaccination. The anti-­ vax movements then are the politicization of vaccine hesitancy. Vaccine hesitancy has existed as long as vaccines have existed, that is, since Jenner experimented with the smallpox vaccine in 1786. Since then, waves of mobilization developed as a reaction to compulsory vaccination. Mandatory vaccination was introduced by countries from time to time with the aim of eradicating diseases such as polio, meningitis, and smallpox. The origin of the current anti-vax movements usually coincides with the debate sparked by the publication in 1998 of an article in The Lancet by a group of doctors, coordinated by Wakefield. This article indicated the existence of a correlation between administering the MMR vaccine and the development of autism.1 Due to the current pandemic emergency, the issue of vaccine hesitancy and anti-vax movements has risen further, as the COVID-19 health policies have a direct connection with everyday decisions in a context of high-risk perception. The conflict regarding science tends to overlap with the conflicts on political and economic issues. Italy and Spain are characterized by very similar characteristics about the (relatively low) spread of vaccine hesitancy. Nevertheless, it is evident that, in terms of political behavior, the Italian case presents greater mobilization (i.e., protests) than Spain. The anti-vax movement in Italy, unlike Spain, is highly structured and formalized. This points directly to the substantial and political difference between vaccine hesitancy and anti-vax mobilizations. Therefore, this chapter aims to grasp the link between science, media, and politics, and to explain which contextual, social, cultural, and political factors favor the shift from individual attitudes and behaviors (vaccine hesitancy) to a contentious, collective movement (anti-vax). More specifically, the goal is to inquire what influence populist parties, and specifically extreme right-wing populism, have on creating and disseminating ideas and mobilizations that maintain skeptical positions with science. 1  The correlation was debunked in subsequent articles and the article was later retreated. Wakefield was accused of manipulating the data and of being in an obvious conflict of interest, as he was funded by a law firm engaged in lawsuits against the state by alleged victims of vaccine damage. Nevertheless, the argument will continue to find wide support, and Wakefield will be seen by anti-vaxxers as a victim of a system that obstructs and censors those who tell the truth “against the system”.

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In section “Introduction”, we set the stage. The key concepts used (vaccine hesitancy, anti-vaccinism, and populism) are defined, and the theoretical perspective is framed. In section “Anti-Vaccinism and Populism”, we carry out a critical reconstruction of the spread of vaccine hesitancy and anti-vaxx movements in Spain and Italy, in order to identity similarities and differences in both countries. Section “Vaccine Hesitancy and Anti-Vaccinism in Italy and in Spain: Similarities and Differences” is devoted to the analysis of the changing relation between science, media, and politics, and the new conflicts revolving around truth and freedom. Section “Science, Media and Politics. A Question of Truth, Trust and Freedom” analyzes the relation between anti-vax movements and populism in-depth. We conclude that vaccine hesitancy is triggered by a crisis of trust and legitimacy of institutions, and that anti-vaccinism takes on many of the hallmarks of populism. Our research has been based on different sources of information. On the one hand, statistical data from institutions specialized in public opinion surveys (CIS, IPSOS) and data on health systems and anti-COVID-19 health measures from the EU and the OECD. On the other hand, from a qualitative perspective, textual data extracted from two sources have been analyzed: (1) mass media, from the monitoring (between March 2020 and July 2021) of various information and opinion programs from the main conventional TV channels in both countries (TV1, La Sexta, Tele5, Antena3, Cuatro, -Spain- and Tg1 – Tg2 – Tg3 – Tg5 – Tg la7 – Italy) and digital newspapers (El País, El Mundo, ABC, Público, Eldiario. es -Spain- and La Repubblica, Il Corriere della Sera, Il Giornale, Il Fatto quotidiano, Fanpage, Open, Il Post -Italy). For all media, a non-­probability sampling has been carried out that has managed to cover a sufficient diversity of editorial policies; (2) non-systematic observation was made on digital social media (Facebook and Twitter) based on search patterns (i.e, “vaccines”, “COVID-19” “coronavirus”).

Anti-Vaccinism and Populism According to Dubé et  al. (2015), the themes that characterize today’s anti-vax movements are seemingly the same as those raised by their counterparts two centuries ago: the ineffectiveness, uselessness and harmfulness of vaccines, the violation of the right to self-determination on choices that have a direct impact on the body, aversion to chemical products and preference for natural products and alternative medicine, the refusal to be used

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as guinea pigs and a general distrust of science and technology. Most previous research interpreted vaccine hesitancy as an “atavistic” distrust of science and technology by uneducated and marginalized people; a sort of conflict between modernity and the residuals of premodernity (Berman, 2000). This is an interpretation of the phenomenon that is still widespread in the public debate today. Many institutional campaigns aimed at combating vaccine hesitancy assume that the phenomenon is based on ignorance and superstition, which can be overcome by means of “educational” communication based on scientific evidence. Indeed, anti-vaccination movements are generated by variables far more complex than ignorance and are often rooted in typically late-modern sensitivities and concerns (Hausman, 2019). Recent studies agree in identifying the protagonists not in the most disadvantaged social groups, but in well-educated middle- and upper-­ income parents claiming the right to make an informed decision with respect to choices that directly impact their body (Lello, 2020). Other research evidenced that the new anti-vax generations are particularly widespread in the most advanced societies, much more than in less developed countries (De Figuiredo et al., 2020) and the refusal to be vaccinated is higher in the most dynamic urban areas, much more than in the most marginal territories. In agreement with Goldenberg (2021), we consider vaccine hesitancy as an expression of the crisis of trusting scientific and medical knowledge and the institutions that represent them. Therefore, this is part of the broader delegitimization of institutions. When dealing with pandemics, political institutions, as well as citizens in their everyday lives, have relied on expert advice. This occurs now more than ever. Experts acquire a central role, and this has tended to exacerbate the process of depoliticizing political decisions, while at the same time encouraging a corresponding process of politicization of science (Hellstrom & Jacob, 2000). The vaccination issue and the health management of the pandemic in general immediately became the subject of conflict leading populists to be against the mainstream parties. This contextualization leads us to explore the connections between vaccine hesitancy and populism. We accept populism as a political practice that uses discourse as a way of expressing and articulating political content, as well as the main tool to obtain support and achieve political goals. Based on this perspective, within the current debate on the character and definition of populism, our position is closer to that of Brubaker and

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Laclau (populism as discourse). The first defines populism as “a set of discursive and stylistic repertoire, a set of tropes, gestures, and stances” (Brubaker, 2021, p. 74), the second argues that populism makes use of empty signifiers to describe a container with no substantial contents, to be used as a point of identification for otherwise fragmented groups (Laclau, 2000). The main line of division, people versus the elite, is accompanied by a few other essential traits. One is a Manichean opposition between the people, conceived as a homogeneous group, and those who are not part of the people. The second is a simplistic proposal based on political mobilization practices aimed at breaking what is established and at bringing the power back to the people. This definition of populism allows us to observe it in all its heterogeneity and its extraordinary adaptability to the historical circumstances and the cultural substrate of each of the countries where it operates, extracting the common elements of this discourse. Another way of grasping the extraordinary capacity of populism to adapt to the changing social and political context is to define it as a thin ideology (Mudde, 2004; Stanley, 2008; Kriesi & Pappas, 2015) which needs the support of other thicker ideologies, such as socialism, nationalism, or fascism, to complete the legitimacy of their political practices. Populists, as discussed in chapters “On the Emergence of Alt-­Science Counterhegemony: The Case of the Finns Party”, “Right-­Wing Populism and the Trade-­ Off Between Health and the Economy During the COVID-­19 Pandemic: A Comparison Between Western Europe and the United States”, and “Academic Freedom, Science, and Right-­ Wing Politics: Interview with Andrea Pető”, accused governments of using the pandemic as a pre-test to control and manipulate society. They even contested the existence of a pandemic, depicting it as an invention used to create a “health dictatorship”. They adopted a skeptical attitude toward the measures recommended by health institutions and adopted by the majority of national governments, and claiming the efficacy of alternative treatments, such as chlorhexidine.

Vaccine Hesitancy and Anti-Vaccinism in Italy and in Spain: Similarities and Differences As can be seen in Table 1 Italian and Spanish have a set of cultural, economic and public health systems similarities that invite comparative studies to investigate the social, political and cultural factors that influence the

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Table 1  Similarities between Italian and Spanish societies

Development (HDI position ranking) Social protection (% healthcare total population) (OECD, 2019) Healthcare expenditure relative to GDP (OECD/EU, 2020) COVID-19 (OECD/EU, 2020)

Italy

Spain

EU country; 29 (2019) 100%

EU country; 25 (2019) 100%

8.67% (2018)

8.99% (2018)

Similar chronology and incidence. Similarity in disease mitigation strategies and measures High (80%). Similar increase since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic

Predisposition to vaccination (Level of agreement with the statement “If a vaccine for COVID-19 were available to me, I would get it”) (IPSOS, 2021) Trust toward professionals Scientists 1st (positions) (IPSOS, 2019) position; Doctors 2nd position

European Union (9.57%)

Dissimilar with France (57%) and Germany (68%)

Doctors 1st position: Scientists 2nd position

perceptions on vaccines and the spread of anti-vaccine ideas and discourses. In the midst of the spread of the COVID-19 disease in Italy and Spain, which had a great impact in both countries and a very similar chronology in terms of incidence, a significant increase in predisposition to vaccination was observed in relation to other countries. Table 2 reflected the largest increases in vaccine readiness in an international study conducted through two surveys (2020 and 2021) carried out in 15 countries. What is most striking is that both societies obtain accurate results in all response categories and in the year-on-year increase. The climate of public opinion at the beginning of 2021 was altered by the large media coverage and social impact of the evolution figures of COVID-19. At the time, Italy and Spain were hit hardest by the pandemic. This high degree of coincidence is in line with the similarity in disease mitigation strategies and measures, mobility restrictions, as well as in previous health indicators (capacity in terms of hospital beds and average share occupied before the COVID-19 crisis and intensive care capacity, ICU beds before the COVID-19 crisis) (OECD/EU, 2020). The same report notes the huge overlap in 2019 in terms of health expenditure per capita and health expenditure as a share of GDP.

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Table 2  Percentage of agreement with the statement “If a vaccine for COVID-19 were available to me, I would get it”. (2021) Country

Total

Agree

(strong+ somewhat)

Strongly

Somewhat

Strongly

Somewhat

Increase 2020-21%

agree

agree

disagree

disagree

Strongly agree

France

57%

31%

26%

22%

21%

+19

Germany

68%

43%

25%

17%

15%

+3

Italy

80%

54%

26%

12%

8%

+28

Spain

80%

54%

26%

12%

8%

+28

UK

89%

67%

22%

6%

5%

+9

Source: Own elaboration based on IPSOS (2021)

Thus, in more structural terms, both health systems (like those of other Southern European countries) were seriously affected by the impact of 2008 crisis. The increase in health inequalities is an effect of the structural adjustment programs (Serapioni & Hespanha, 2019). Only small differences are found between the two societies in terms of the perceived quality of primary care and hospital and specialist care. Both societies also had a similar degree of trust toward scientists and doctors in 2019, with both professions being the most highly valued in both countries (IPSOS, 2019). This contrast to the great discrediting of other professions of public relevance (bankers, ministers, journalists, and politicians in general) is quite high. However, skepticism and negative feelings regarding the benefits and efficacy of vaccines in Italy was, in 2016, one of the highest in Europe (alongside France) (Larson et al., 2016). Other differences between these societies can be observed in Table 3, where it is possible to see the divergence around some health aspects (pre-COVID compulsory vaccination for children and existence of anti-vaccine health professionals in Italy), and socio-political differences, especially those referring to the institutional political situation and protest mobilizations.

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Table 3  Differences between Italian and Spanish societies

Level of anti-vax mobilizations

Italy

Spain

Low hesitancy, but high activism High

Low hesitancy and activism Low

Anti-vax movement structure and activity Pre-COVID-19 skepticism and “Vaccines are important for children to have” negative feelings regarding the benefits (Larson et al., 2016) and efficacy of vaccines for children High level of High level of strong disagreement agreement Pre-COVID compulsory vaccination Yes No (children) Anti-vax health professionals Yes No Vote on main populist far-right parties Lega (17.35%, 2018) Vox (15.08%, 2019) Status in legislature (Government) (Opposition) Fratelli d’Italia (4.4%, 2018) (opposition) Far-right anti-vaccines protests Yes, organizer No. But disseminates mobilizations anti-vax proposals and mobilizations Government formation Rainbow coalition Left coalition (minority (majority government) government) Source: Own elaboration

The Italian Case On 8 July 2017, around 10,000 people took part in a large protest in Pesaro against the government’s decision to broaden the number of compulsory vaccines for children, from 4 to 10 (Lello, 2020). The government’s decision came in the wake of a worrying increase in measles and was aimed at stemming the return of certain diseases that seemed to have been eradicated (in that year more than 5000 cases of measles were reported, compared to less than 100 in the previous year). The event was organized by Comilva, the Italian movement for freedom of vaccination, active in the promotion of freedom of choice in the field of vaccination and the protection of the rights of vaccine victims. Comilva’s mission is to support families who decide to practice conscientious objection, to provide medical and legal assistance to the victims of vaccines, to campaign for a change in the laws in force and to raise awareness of the issue (http:// www.comilva.org). The association rejects the “NoVax” label, which they

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consider to be associated with social disapproval, and supports the correlation between vaccination and the development of the autistic spectrum, stating that vaccines are useless. The two main opposition parties at the time, MoVimento5Stelle (M5S) and Lega, both considered populist parties (Biorcio, 2015), stand in favor of the campaign, stating that the principle of freedom of choice should be reconciled with the protection of collective health. During the mobilizations against compulsory vaccination in 2017, some members of M5S were leading actors in the campaign against vaccines, embracing and promoting the harmfulness of vaccines and the corruption of scientists and doctors. This is not surprising as since the late 1990s, Beppe Grillo’s shoes (Beppe Grillo is the actor who later became the founder of the movement) have combined attacks on politicians with denunciations of global finance, food multinationals, and Big Pharma, often taking openly conspiratorial positions, including on vaccines. When, in the aftermath of the 2018 political elections, M5S and Lega formed a yellow-right government, they promised to reduce the number of compulsory vaccines from ten to four and to substitute mandatory vaccines with “recommended” vaccines. The promise will not be respected. In the summer of 2019, the M5S-Lega majority was replaced by a center-­left alliance composed of M5S, PD, and LeU.  The new majority managed the pandemic emergency by taking very restrictive health measures, attracting accusations from the most critical sectors of the opposition of taking advantage of the pandemic to exercise a “health tyranny”. Finally, while the vaccination campaign is currently in full swing, there is a new change in majority. A wide-ranging government led by the former President of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi, was born, involving the outgoing majority, along with the right-wing parties Forza Italia and Lega, and with the two forces on the extreme right and left in opposition, Fratelli d’Italia and Sinistra Italiana. The new majority, although including the two parties previously committed to freedom of choice, made the decision to make vaccination compulsory for health and social workers as an “essential” requirement to exercise their profession (DL 44 of 9, April 2021). The goal was to protect the most vulnerable citizens, in the face of a high percentage of doctors, nurses and other care workers, who refuse to get vaccinated, arguing that they are not against vaccine, but opposed to COVID-19 vaccines as they have been approved without the due experimentation. A long series of public meetings and manifestations

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were arranged by Movimento 3V (We want the truth about vaccines, http://www.movimento3v.it) and other organizations. On 17 May 2021, the manifestation in Rome was introduced with these words: “We call all citizens who wish to demonstrate against the awful obligation to be vaccinated, against the absurd Green Pass, against the harmful postponement of the electoral vote. What 3V has been repeating for years is about to come true: the obligation imposed on children was only the first stage of a health drift aimed at forcing the entire population to be vaccinated. Today health workers are affected, tomorrow the whole population will follow”. They were quite right about this. The provisions approved by the Italian Parliament regarding the use of the Green Pass were introduced from 6 August 2021 (DL 23, July 2021 n. 105) and made vaccination compulsory to visit public spaces, from restaurants and cinemas to universities and museums, as well as for traveling long distances on buses and trains, and the obligation was extended to other professionals, such as teachers. Finally, the DL 127, approved 21 September, transformed the Green Pass into a mandatory aspect for all public and private workers from 15 October 2021, and the Prime Minister, Mario Draghi, declared that the vaccine would be mandatory for all citizens soon. It was the beginning of a new wave of manifestations that were more crowded and heterogeneous. Behind the shared slogan “we want freedom”, many people protested in several cities: from the pre-existing anti-vax movements to grassroots unions linked to the radical left, to the extreme right-wing populist movements and parties. As a matter of fact, the demonstrators are characterized by a profound heterogeneity, and also include women and men active in the promotion of sustainable lifestyles, engaged in political consumerism and practicing alternative medicine. The glue of protest is distrust of institutions. During the street protest in Rome on 9 October 2021, extreme-right activists were responsible for acts of violence against the police and for the assault and devastation of the CGIL (Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro - Italian General Confederation of Labour) national headquarters, the main Italian trade union. Mass manifestations followed over the next few days, organized by workers who denounced the making of the Green Pass compulsory in order to work as discriminatory because it violated their right to work. They demanded the immediate repeal of the rule and, as an alternative, that the state and companies pay for the cost of carrying out the test, every two days; a solution supported by M5S and Lega, and not shared by other governing parties.

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The economic, social, and political repercussions of the rule split the public opinion on the appropriateness and the effectiveness of the measure. According to a survey carried out by the EngageMinds Hub– Università Cattolica in Milan, only a slight majority of Italians considers the green pass requirement for work to be an effective measure and a proof of social responsibility. Almost one in two Italians is against the measure. The rate is higher among young and middle-aged people, low-­ income workers and in the northern regions. The disagreement on the Green Pass requirement to work—mostly seen as an infringement of the right to work—is far greater than the share of the adult population that is not vaccinated. In October 2021, the percentage of citizens who have received two doses of vaccine exceeds 80%, and a further 3% are waiting for the second dose. The Spanish Case In Spain, there are a low number of people who reject vaccines that do not turn this rejection into strong protest mobilizations. The Spanish case has antecedents and specificities that contrast the Italian case. Firstly, they have not had the degree of organizational structure or mobilization capacity that they have had in Italy. The highest level of anti-vaccine organization in Spain is only a loosely coordinated series of professionals, mainly Médicos por la Verdad (Doctors for the truth). This group of doctors has been followed by other groups, such as biologists (Biólogos por la Verdad) and psychologists (Psicólogos por la Verdad). All these groups have connections and share the same ideology as Abogados por la Libertad (Lawyers for freedom) and Policías por la Libertad (Police for freedom).2 Despite having a minimal organizational structure and affiliation, they are widely disseminated on social media, WhatsApp and Telegram. They also use less diffused online channels on the Internet, linked, in some cases, to far-right groups. It cannot be said that there is a direct connection between these denialist groups and the far-right groups in Spain, but it does affirm that the far-right wing disseminates their proposals and mobilizations. Secondly, and closely related to vaccination campaigns and concerns about hesitancy, it is noteworthy that in Spain, unlike other neighboring countries such as Italy or France, there is no type of obligation for users or for health 2  Doctors and lawyers also play an important role in Portugal; see chapter “Knowledge, Counter-Knowledge, Pseudo-Science in Populism”.

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personnel to be vaccinated. The compulsory vaccination is an exception (as in 1921 and 1944) in the history of vaccination in Spain (Pachón, 2004). To date, no incidents related to opposition to vaccines have been recorded in studies of historical archives. Recently, the possibility of compulsory vaccination has led experts and those responsible for public health (such as the former Minister of Health, Salvador Illa) to its dismissal due to its difficult legal framework and the suspicion that this imposition could be counterproductive and increase the hesitancy of vaccines (Redacción Nius, 2020). Thirdly and finally, in pre-COVID-19 times, no direct connection has been detected between attitudes of rejection to vaccines with certain movements or political parties. The campaigns against the hypothetical compulsory nature of vaccination by some groups were transversal in terms of ideology or political partisanship, as the first association emerged in 1989: the Liga para la libertad de vacunación (League for vaccination freedom). However, as regards the political climate, COVID-19 and its chronology has intensified pre-existing political polarization. This polarization has been reflected in a set of attitudes, ideological positions (among them anti-scientific ones) and behaviors (searching for information, participation on social networks and some protests against confinement and other measures) of rejection of vaccines. However, the media and institutional framing must be considered because they help to understand the debate between pro and anti-vaxxers and political effects. The first effect is based on distrust, which is a basic element (also pre-­ pandemic) that culturally crosses the entire socio-political space. Distrusting experts and institutions (represented, in a metonymic way, by what politicians do) structure an opposition discourse where anti-politics merges with unscientificism (see chapter “The Role of Experts in Populist Politics: Towards a Post-­foundational Approach”). It is an anti-elite discourse that links international conspiratorial and denialist currents that in Spain are integrated by the traditional right and the new (and far) right within the denialist discourses (of gender violence, of plurinational diversity) and a historical revisionism of the reasons that led Spain to the Civil War (Franco saved Spain from the communist dictatorship). A very contradictory discourse is formed where freedom (of information, mobility, business, opinion, education) and law (against the acts of disobedience of the pro-independence processes or against those that protect groups, women, LGTBI, dying patients) are the signifiers employed by the political formation heirs of the Franco regime. Franco interrupted the

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modernization process of the Second Republic and nowadays the Spanish right “hesitates” to change customs and mentalities. They are not conclusive to make a clear and univocal correlation, but the statistics show an association between far-right voting and vaccine hesitancy (Requena en Conde, 2021, p.  70). This discourse is structured in the opposition between the “truth” and “deceit” (political/expert/media) of conspiratorial connotation. This alternative “truth” about the pandemic is paradoxical (the existence of the virus is denied or that hospitals are empty at the same time that its artificial origin is affirmed and that there are ways to cure the disease that are hidden or prohibited) but is consistent with the “true” history of Spain and with the “true” definitions of law, freedom and democracy. The second effect, which is more subtle, is based on the silencing of critical voices that relate the health crisis to the crisis of the current models of society and the imminent civilizational collapse. Pandemic polarization in Spain has placed the government in a moderate position in the face of the radical deniers using fake news on social media. In general, media coverage represents the central government aligned with expert knowledge as TV news and digital press are warning on a daily basis on the danger of “false” remedies, “false” experts, simulators of “false” side effects of vaccines, and irresponsible individuals who do not follow protective measures. In this way, another existing discourse is hidden, much less affected by the sensational and simplistic tendency that television usually uses and that has also emerged during the pandemic. A scientifically based discourse that warns of the loss of biological diversity as a prevention of pandemic crises, of the significant social inequalities in the effects of the disease (overcrowded workplaces and homes, lack of health coverage) and of not investing in public health, primary care services and preventive medicine. This critical perspective also highlights other issues, such as those that reduce geographical and cultural distances (a pandemic can only be overcome with global actions, incompatible with exclusive access to vaccines by the richest countries), those that demand a dialogue among knowledge, those who become aware of the innumerable interests that surround the pharmaceutical industry, and even the non-neutrality of science with respect to these interests. These invisible discourses also speak of the public absence of self-criticism in science and expert knowledge to recognize the limitations of their results (knowledge is never definitive), and of the non-inclusion of populations in the processes of decision, deliberation and implementation of measures against the pandemic.

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These two exposed effects are associated. In some way, the government can (despite the dramatic and emotional excesses of populist and media discourses) move in a comfortable and simplistic debate that avoids structural causes (which will continue in time, also with the threat of other viruses or the mutations of COVID-19) and that is based on a project of “domestication” of the pandemic based on vaccines and health measures (Conde, 2021). The idea that scientific-technical solutions will be able to face other new challenges caused by zoonoses (EcoHealth Alliance, 2019; UNEP, 2016) and the Anthropocene (Crutzen & Stoermer, 2000) is still “colonizing the future” (Beck, 1992) to justify present actions. From this perspective, as recognized by the Spanish Vaccination Association, the battle between pro-vax and anti-vax is closed and won thanks to COVID-19. It is evident that the “reality shock” of nearby victims and even the incidence of the disease on the body itself has significantly increased the predisposition to be vaccinated, generating a turning point in hesitancy. The pandemic is a reminder of the success of vaccines (Megget, 2020). The data on the percentage of individuals predisposed to vaccination confirm this (CIS, 2021), as well as the limited degree of rejection of vaccines which is insignificant among those aged 60 years and older, and around 10% among those between 50 and 59 years of age.

Science, Media and Politics. A Question of Truth, Trust and Freedom In both countries, vaccine hesitancy has been framed by politicians as a problem of poor or misleading information. As a result, most of the communicative strategies introduced to counteract vaccine hesitancy and preventing it from turning into refusal focuses on disseminating “real” information in contrast to fake news. Little attention has been paid to understanding the cultural basis and, thus, the deep sub-political implications of the phenomenon. Within a context of emergency, framed in the political debate mostly in health and economic terms, there has been little effort, using the expression used by Wu Ming 1 (2021), to search for the “nuclei of truth”, that is, the motivations and reasons behind the hesitant citizens. We have indeed identified that vaccine hesitancy is rooted in a crisis of trust toward science and knowledge, which is part of a wider crisis of trust and legitimacy of institutions.

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The polarization of the issue is accompanied, in public opinion, by a growing reciprocal stigmatization. The pro-vax and anti-vax stances result in a conflict between two opposite dogmas. On the one hand, it seems that taking a position in favor of vaccines automatically means uncritical support for the government and expressing a full trust toward scientific institutions and pharmaceutical companies, leaving no room for criticism or doubt. On the other hand, all expressions of vaccine hesitancy, including those due to ethical reasons, fears, and apprehensions about the consequences of vaccines, or linked to the expression of alternative lifestyles, are labeled as anti-vax, and are therefore assimilated to conspiracy. Observing the set of arguments that are developed both in mass media and on social networks between pro-vax and anti-vax, we can observe a set of identical statements which acquire the meaning according to the context (who and when it is stated) because they function as deictics: “Open your eyes”, “they are deceiving you”, “they manipulate you”, “the truth experts say”, “you are ignorant”, “you are uninformed”. On the other hand, investing oneself as a connoisseur of great remedies and solutions through “expert voices” (official/marginal) is a fairly frequent attitude and personal disqualifications are structured in pairs: “conspiracy theorist”/“lamb”, “magufo” (a popular and derogatory word formed by magic—mago in Spanish—and UFO, a person who believes in pseudoscience)/“guinea pig” are just some examples. In any case, only a part of those who support vaccine hesitancy are ready to change their position if they are reassured. The most radical component, including activists, tends to be immune to the influence of communication strategies, since information is adapted to their truths through a series of cognitive biases. Notwithstanding these dynamics, which help to crystallize the opposition, in both countries the prevalence of vaccine hesitancy is relatively low, as indicated by the surveys, and evidenced by the high vaccination rates (partly or fully vaccinated) which are among the highest in Europe (82% in Spain and 78% in Italy in november 2021).

From Vaccine Hesitancy to Anti-Vaccinism Both the Italian and the Spanish cases confirm the existence of a connection between anti-vaccinism and far-right populism (see also Kennedy, 2019, who, nevertheless, includes also left-wing populist parties). Anti-­ vaccinism takes on many of the hallmarks of populism: opposition between the people and the elite, who are corrupt and geared to their own

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interests, to the detriment of the citizens; an aversion to expert knowledge; and a general distrust of institutions. Furthermore, populist movements revealed to be able to strategically redirect and adapt their claim. A new emphasis is now placed on health and scientific elites. In Italy, unlike in Spain, the conflict takes on a high level of politicization, favoring the formation of a more structured and visible anti-vax movement. We identified two causes for it: Firstly, the compulsory nature of vaccines. Following the 2017 law, Italy is among the countries that make it most compulsory in terms of vaccination at a European and global level, together with France, which is a country with a high incidence of vaccine hesitancy. Hesitancy to vaccines in Italy got an important boost and diffusion by the political mobilization in the form of protests that resulted in compulsory vaccination. Every social movement that aspires to solidify clear and direct objectives and demands to guide collective actions produces proposals and endures over time as an organization. This is a key point with respect to Spain that explains the different character of the mobilizations and political forms in Italy. While in Spain it was difficult to go beyond “preventive” manifestos in view of the possibility of implementing compulsory vaccination and resistance guidelines to vaccination campaigns, the Italian anti-vax movements achieved to reduce the number of compulsory vaccinations for children and to weaken the implementation of the law. The structure of political opportunities also has an impact. In 2018, Italy was governed by two parties close to anti-vaccine positions. Three years later, both M5S and Lega approved the first national law making the COVID-19 vaccine compulsory for a segment of the population, while however maintaining an ambiguous position in the public opinion. Paradoxically, if the abandonment of anti-vaccinism by some political organizations may have the effect of attenuating its spread among the general public, the other consequence is the radicalization of the active minority that acts as its advocates. This is the case of the Italian anti-vax movement which, having lost its references in the governing parties, constitutes itself as an autonomous subject which can assert its otherness with respect to all the other political forces which have betrayed and defended the system. Every new step forward in making the COVID-19 vaccine mandatory contributes to strengthening the anti-vax movement. Furthermore, imposing the Green Pass as a condition to be able to work attracts accusations of violating the right to work and discrimination. In a climate already

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marked by a growing social unease, as the effects of the crisis have hit the working classes hard, and a polarization of the debate, it is the spark that helps to channel accumulated social anger which extreme right-wing movements seek to exploit into anti-vax movements. The Italian government argues that the decision is necessary in order to convince hesitant people to get vaccinated and, thus, increase vaccination rates. This objective is only partly achieved, and is paid at the price of a further politicization and radicalization of the conflict over vaccines. Epistemological populism of the anti-vax movements is mirrored in a kind of scientist populism, as well as the rejection of pluralism, the traditional forms of political mediation, representations, and legitimation (Esmark, 2021, p. 4). The paradoxical effect is strengthening of anti-vaccinism positions and distancing the possibilities of dialogue. Furthermore, the clear-cut juxtaposition of expert knowledge (the episteme) against the fallacious opinions of anti-vaxxers (the doxa), full of prejudice, emotionalism, and misinformation, reproduces a dogmatic, anachronistic, and misleading view of science. Therefore, the relationship between anti-vaccinism and right-wing populism is strengthened, because instead of affirming an alternative narrative, it fits into the populist discourse. It reproduces the idea of an opposition between the elite and citizens, in favor of the former, and nurtures the opposition between “us”, the good citizens, and “them”, the ignorant and selfish anti-vaxxers.

Conclusion Vaccine hesitancy is a widespread phenomenon in advanced societies, involving different social groups. Attitudes and behaviors toward the vaccine represent a strategic point of view to analyze the intersection between science and technology, the relationship between science and values, between individuals and society and between choice and responsibility. In other words, the analysis of vaccine conflicts allows us to explore, from a strategic point of view, the challenge of reframing democracy and communication in a complex society, where the borders between nature and culture are blurred, as well as the boundaries between science and politics, on the one hand, and between politics and everyday life, on the other. Anti-vaccinism is the outcome of a crisis of trust toward liberal-­ democratic institutions (Alteri et al., 2021) that finds answers in populism,

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but with much deeper roots. In this context, populism presents itself as a democratic alternative to liberalism and technocratic crisis management. As the crisis increases the propensity for a technocratic depoliticization, it also increases and radicalizes the populist politicization. As observed by Esmark (2021, p.  13), the conflict between technocracy and populism may also lead to the spread of “technopopulism”, defined as an organizing logic of electoral competition based on the combination of populist and technocratic discursive tropes and modes of political organization (Bickerton & Accetti, 2021). In line with a pattern observed in the context of economic crisis, immigration, and climate change, COVID-19 led to populist denial, displacement, and rejection of technocratic crisis management. Indeed, COVID- 19 provides us with the basic contours of a form of governmental technopopulism based on the core attributes of emergency politics and crisis management: discursive securitization, aggressive intervention under the license of a precautionary principle, and concentration of power. Taken together, these lessons caution against simplified notions of a zero-sum game between technocracy and populism, let alone the immanent ‘victory’ of the former due to populist mismanagement of COVID-19. Populism promises to bring back the power to the people so they can make decisions on their lives, and it counter poses common sense, and the personal, experience-based knowledge—Doxa—to Episteme, that is, the abstract knowledge brought by experts (cfr. Saurette & Gunster, 2011). It appeals to a “true” and “pure” counter-science (Tipaldo, 2019) that is free from the interests and distortions that characterize the mainstream scientific community. In this respect, anti-vaccinism is framed within a broader opposition between technocracy and epistemocracy as the government of experts, and democracy as the government of the people. In this kind of conflict, we can easily find paradoxes, as stressed by Brubaker (2021). The first one regards the relation between populism and crisis. Populism usually makes a strategic use of crises and often produces a sense of crisis, placing itself as the cure for it (i.e., the migrant crisis). Amid the pandemic crisis, one of the main arguments of populists is that mainstream politicians invented the crisis and/or used it to gain consensus and control over society. Indeed, populists minimize the health crisis and capitalize the economic crisis to generate a political crisis. The second paradox is that while populism is usually protectionist, during the pandemic it became anti-protectionist and accused the government of over-­protecting and controlling the State. Brubaker argues, and we agree with him, that

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this paradox is explained as the lack, in populism, of a substantive political ideology. “Populism is relational and oppositional, defined by what it opposes. What it opposes is formally always the same, and is always antielite, always anti-establishment, but substantively variable, depending on how the opposition between the people and the elite or the establishment is constructed” (Brubaker, 2021, p. 81). This phenomenon has been exacerbated by the spectacularization and politicization of science that has followed the constant presence of epidemiologists and virologists and the loss of credibility of science, due to the mistakes made in health communication, for example in the management of the AstraZeneca vaccine. In conclusion, the comparison of the Italian and the Spanish cases contributes to highlighting how political populism may turn in science-related populism, related to the production and the communication of knowledge (Mede & Schäfer, 2020) and active in contesting epistemic authorities (Ylä-Anttila, 2018). Populism does not create the anti-vaccine movement, but it has been able to get absorbed in its discourse and to adapt to the post-pandemic society, its founding dichotomy: elite versus people; science versus common sense; natural versus artificial; and ordinary-everyday versus extraordinary. In order to avoid populism taking advantage of all these loopholes of mistrust to advance and lead discontent, it is necessary to recognize the reconfiguration of the public sphere. This is the realm of discursive construction of legitimacy, of confrontation between alternative claims to truth (Habermas, 1992) or the opposition between dominant discourses and counter-discourses (Dryzek, 2000). Thus, the community sphere could be explored as the daily place where opinions are formed (also scientific ones) and where dialogical practices can be developed between the public and experts with the mediation of primary care professionals. The main reason for this is because the public sphere, even before being a field of political conflict, is a place of conflict concerning the social construction of reality. Although the advent of the public sphere 2.0 profoundly alters these dynamics (social media represents the ideal environment to disseminate a populist sentiment against experts), a reasoned debate must go beyond a partisan discussion between pro-vax and anti-vax, recognizing its sub-political character. Further research is needed to explore if there is a social and ideological heterogeneity in attitudes of resistance to vaccines, and if this heterogeneity reflects the late modernity sub-political processes (Beck, 1992) of search for information and political links from bottom to top, outside and beyond the representative institutions of the political system.

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QAnon and Its Conspiracy Milieu: The Italian Case Maria Francesca Murru

Introduction QAnon is a conspiracy theory alleging that a cabal of Satan-worshipping Democrats, Hollywood celebrities and billionaires is running the world while engaging in global sex-trafficking of children.1 It gets its name from ‘Q’, an anonymous social media user self-identified as ‘Q Clearance Patriot’, claiming to be a government insider. In 2017, the Q account started publishing ‘drops’ on the imageboard 4Chan with content that alluded to a detailed plan to unmask the cabal and mass arrest its members. 1  The thesis is that national Democrats, aided by Hollywood and a group of global elites, are running a massive ring devoted to the abduction, trafficking, torture, sexual abuse and cannibalization of children (see Donegan, 2020).

M. F. Murru (*) University of Bergamo, Bergamo, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 H. Eslen-Ziya, A. Giorgi (eds.), Populism and Science in Europe, Palgrave Studies in European Political Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97535-7_8

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It claimed that each seemingly incomprehensible Trump statement could only be correctly understood and explained in light of Q’s revelations. QAnon followers consider former USA President Donal Trump as their paladin, the only antagonist of the cabal and its ‘deep state’ collaborators. They believe that Trump is secretly struggling to expose the malefactors and send them all to Guantánamo Bay. While conspiracy theories usually revolve around divisions between the élites in power and the underdogs, the popularity that QAnon gained during Trump’s Presidency suggests that we are in front of a different and fleeing schema of power based on ‘moving the goalposts’ (Miller, 2021) strategy, which means that a great part of the discursive vitality nurtured by QAnon narratives has to do with the continuous search for secret, powerful actors to blame for social and political troubles. This and other eccentricities have led many to think that QAnon is a sui generis conspiracy theory, the intrinsically controversial nature of which can open a vast array of explanations and readings. According to Moorhouse and Malone (2020) from BuzzFeed News, the term ‘collective or mass delusion’ illustrates the reality of QAnon better than ‘conspiracy theories’. It would be better framed as a media literacy problem that originates from our broken information system. Seeing QAnon followers as Nazi-hippies, other interpreters of QAnon consider it to be the result of the convergence of far-right ideologies and New Age spirituality (Evans, 2020). Others see QAnon as a financially profitable, alternate reality game (ARG) started on 4chan as a prank and then amplified by profiteer trolls as a further-reaching ARG. This widespread ARG is based on a participatory narrative that mixes fiction and reality with which people collectively engage to search for clues and solutions to enigma (Hon, 2020). Against this background, the present chapter will offer a complementary perspective that is more focused on what QAnon has become than on its roots and beginnings. It starts with an outline of the studies conducted to date on QAnon, its discourses, its textual forms, the presumed reasons for its appeal and the dynamics of its global diffusion. The chapter continues by developing a theoretical frame that points to the overlap of conspiracy theories and populism. As a ‘populist theory of knowledge’ (Ylä-Anttila, 2018), conspiracy ideation demands a special focus on the epistemic horizon that it implies. The analytical purpose of the empirical research discussed in the subsequent section on QAnon Italy is to examine the authoritative claims that QAnon followers use to validate conspiracist knowledge and make it seem plausible. As observed in other

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countries, QAnon Italy has taken a blurred and fragmentary shape that is hybridized with local and pre-existent conspiracy sub-cultures. When focusing on the Italian conspiracy milieu where QAnon theories were spread and accepted, empirical research suggests that alternative science’s popularization is one of the leading discursive strategies through which conspiracy ideation has engaged its followers.

What We Know About QAnon In the US, QAnon has become a ‘conspiracy singularity: the place where many conspiracy communities are suddenly meeting and merging, a melting pot of unimaginable density’ (Merlan, 2020). Different claims and characters firmly rooted in the conspiracy imaginary (e.g. Satanism, children trafficking, paedophilia, Jews, Soros) are now held together for the first time within an over-arching frame that places each of them within a clear plot of destruction and redemption. However, the QAnon conspiracy theory has been revealed to be more than just an appealing narrative. It became so mainstream that more than twenty US election candidates in 2020 were vocal followers of the movement (Steck, et al., 2020) and violent acts, such as the attack on the US capitol in 2021, were organized by supporters of the theory. This ability to move from theory to action is enhanced by a millennialist paradigm. QAnon does not stop at theorizing the existence of a global conspiracy. It also reads current political affairs as an ongoing struggle between forces of Good and Evil. According to the theory, the struggle will end definitively with the redemption of the righteous and the demise of corrupted elites. A so-called storm will arrive, taking the shape of relentless, political turmoil that inevitably leads to the triumph of the Good, which includes the arrest of all paedophile Satanists and the return of America to its founding values. When the time is right, Q will give the signal, and the people will rise and join Trump in the showdown against the forces of darkness. This QAnon script depicting an imminent, apocalyptic confrontation between Trump and the cabal not only reveals the unmistakable populist tinge of the QAnon movement (Bracewell, 2021). It also underscores the appropriateness of Barkun’s category of ‘improvisional millennialism’ (2013; Urbano, 2021) to point to an apocalyptic narrative frame rooted in an idiosyncratic combination of the most disparate religious, secular, scientific and political elements united under the power of a controversial leader. QAnon advocates have taken advantage of

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the COVID-19 pandemic. Given the distress caused by the pandemic, an all-encompassing explanation for the seemingly non-sensical chaos presented a comforting shelter from the uninterrupted bombardment of facts and the uncertain global system upon which citizens discovered their lives depend (Miller, 2021). Moreover, the pandemic provided the QAnon narrative with a new, mysterious cue that added new challenges of decryption to its already ‘visible but opaque’ (Urbano, 2021, p. 102) picture of the world. According to Zuckerman (2019), what distinguishes QAnon from other conspiracy theories is the participatory nature of its dissemination dynamics. QAnon storytelling relies less on compact and exhaustive ideological frames and more on anonymous, ephemeral, cryptic drops that are written in a way that spurs readers to fill in the blanks left in the narrative. ‘Members of the QAnon aren’t just readers of Q’s “drops” – they are the “bakers,” assembling crumbs into coherent narratives and predictions. And while assembling and re-baking crumbs is unlikely to yield anything culinarily appealing, participation in constructing the Q narrative is clearly a fascinating pursuit for thousands of co-creators’ (Zuckerman, 2019). While the pandemic was initially read as the foretold ‘storm’ that would inevitably reverse the world’s order, QAnon narratives later converged to interpret the pandemic as a new obstacle to Trump’s re-election. QAnon followers believed that in the context of an emergency, votes by mail were encouraged so that ballots could be manipulated and Trump’s electoral victory could be concealed. Given the conspiracy theories’ resilience to any counterfactual evidence, Trump’s defeat did not change the narrative core of QAnon. Instead, followers believed that the historical appointment leading to human redemption was simply postponed. Scholars note that the dissemination power of QAnon conspiracy theories cannot be understood without considering the relevance of the form in enhancing the symbolic strength of the content. More specifically, the network form, open to crowd-sourced contributions, is seen as increasing its viral speediness, bolstering conspirational hermeneutics and neutralizing any strategy to debunk the theories (Hannah, 2021). This protean form is further confirmed by the study developed by Aliapoulios et  al. (2021) based on a dataset of 4949 canonical Q drops. They collected these drops from six aggregation sites that curated and archived them from their original postings to imageboards. The research shows that QAnon drops, despite being disseminated by only a handful of users, were exceptionally resilient to mitigations because of the aggregation sites. This is seen as the main reason why the ‘gospel of Q persists on the Web’,

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despite de-platforming and heavy-handed moderation decisions (Aliapoulios et al., 2021). Strikingly, this ‘gospel’ was gradually diffused globally. Through large-­ scale data analysis of 4.5 million messages posted in 161 QAnon Telegram groups/channels over almost four years, Hoseini et al. (2021) discovered that the popularity of QAnon content has increased, surpassing many other politically oriented groups. Meanwhile, its toxicity (the degree of rudeness and impoliteness assessed according to the model provided by the Perspective API2) doubled between September 2019 and March 2021. However, the global dissemination of QAnon related messages does not appear to be following homogenous patterns. Not only were German messages more popular than English messages during 2020 and 2021, but toxicity was also higher in German and Portuguese messages. Messages about vaccines and their side-effects prevailed globally while local groups specialized in different topics, such as Nazis and Hitler in Germany and local politics in Italy. A reportage by Mark Scott on Politico (2020) shows that the globalization of QAnon happened through its hybridization with the conspiratorial themes and anti-government rhetoric already rooted in the extremist fringes of the countries where it arrived. From gilet jaunes in France to Brexiteers in the UK to no-vax activists in Italy, QAnon found fertile ground among those who opposed European governments’ efforts to tackle the pandemic. In an interview with Scott (2020), Anna-Sophie Harling, managing director for Europe at NewsGuard, a social media analytics firm tracking misinformation, emphasized that ‘QAnon messaging is often far-fetched for the average person to understand, but it’s not difficult for someone who’s lost his job and hasn’t been affected by the coronavirus to come across these ideas online and jump to the conclusion that something is going on’. Extemporaneous references to the deep state are then mixed up with anti-vaccine memes, spread alongside anti-Semitic invectives and attacks on Merkel who is seen as a puppet of the global elite. They are also used to reinforce conspiracy theories alleging that Microsoft founder Bill Gates created the global pandemic for economic gain. The American-style characterizing QAnon language has then become a 2  Perspective is an API that uses machine learning models to score the perceived impact a comment might have on a conversation, by evaluating that comment across a range of emotional concepts, called attributes. Perspective’s main attribute is TOXICITY, defined as ‘a rude, disrespectful, or unreasonable comment that is likely to make you leave a discussion’. See https://developers.perspectiveapi.com/s/about-the-api

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rhetoric expedient which reinforces and reunites under the same umbrella all the discontent and deep distrust nuzzling in European societies. More than the reach of a new, global conspiracy singularity (Merlan, 2020), globalized QAnon rhetoric fastens conspiracy themes together, building with the blocks of a wide-ranging culture of suspicion.

Populism and Conspiracist Ideation Reading conspiracism as ‘populist theory of power’, Fenster defines it as ‘the conviction that a secret, omnipotent individual or group covertly controls the political and social order or some part thereof’ (Fenster, 2008, p. 1). Conspiracy theorists tend to assume that multi-faceted, social phenomena are intentionally, secretly and nastily orchestrated by a powerful, coordinated social group at the expense of defenceless people. Hofstadter (1965) defines it as a ‘paranoid style’ in which the feeling of persecution is central and reality is always analysed from the point of view of righteousness and moral indignation. Against a broad spectrum of variations, there are three central elements that comprise conspiracy theories (Barkun, 2013; Hameleers, 2021). The first is the alleged presence of hidden and evil forces that are seen as the primary reason for any deviant or novel phenomena in the socio-political reality. The motives behind these forces are hidden but their destructive and deceptive intentions are clear. Second, any historic event is understood as part of a predictable and repetitive plot that consists of a Manichean struggle between evil and good forces. Third, conspiracy theories always imply a specific epistemology. Reality as shown by the media and as described by the establishment is a sham, aimed at covering up power discrepancies. Despite appearances, a hidden truth lies waiting to be unveiled by the bravest. According to Barkun (2013), conspiracy theorists ‘inhabit a different epistemic universe where the usual rules for determining truth and falsity do not apply’ (Barkun, 2013, p. 236). Critical scholars especially underscore conspiracy theorists’ tendency to locate a ‘causal relationship where none exist’ (Pipes, 1997, p.  3). By tracing unsubstantiated connections between unrelated facts and events, conspiracism subsumes the most distinct aspects of reality into explanatory meta-narratives that are both all-­ inclusive and all-accounting (Harambam & Aupers, 2021). Many scholars have shown that populism is often imbued with conspiracist reasoning. The family  resemblance is visible in Manichean

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cosmology  they share and that opposed the pure will of good people against the forces of a knowing, diabolical force (Hawkins & Rovira Kaltwasser, 2017). For Castanho Silva et  al. (2017), the connection between populism and conspiracist thinking is that they both draw on a general animosity toward anything official. In line with Wood et al. (2012), they call it ‘deceptive officialdom’, intended as the belief that authorities’ officiality is a misleading mise-en-scène aimed at concealing the  malfeasance they perpetrate to the detriment of common people (Castanho Silva et  al., 2017, p.  426). Scepticism of officiality resonates with distrust of established knowledge, which is shared by both populist and conspiracist thinkers. Just as populist discourse frequently blames the media for being dishonest and biased, conspiracy theorists consider mainstream knowledge and interpretations as a goal-directed way of distracting people from a hidden source of power (Hameleers, 2021). Notwithstanding these discursive similarities, populist discourses do not always co-occur with conspiracy theories. As shown by Castanho Silva et al. (2017), populists believe in conspiracies that portray elites as greedy and selfish, and the common people as vulnerable because they lack power, money and knowledge. However, they do not usually support the idea that some organizations are intrinsically evil and uniquely seek to secretly harm the health and personal well-being of individuals on a massive scale. According to Balta et  al. (2021), populism’s connection with conspirational thinking becomes stronger when populist forces are leading the government. While populist attitudes seem to fade away once populist forces are in power, conspiracy theories gain ground insofar as they offer an external, undefined scapegoat to blame for the problems that incumbent populist parties are not able to rectify. Conspiracy theories successfully realize a relocation of anti-elite attitudes by reframing the identity of corrupt elites as outside, malign, hidden actors who boycott the legitimately elected government and subvert the will of pure people (Balta et al., 2021, p. 10). This relocation is often realized by referencing a ‘nebulous globalist agenda’ pursued by local elites who are committed to foreign interests and ready to betray the national community (Tsatsanis et al., 2018). Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser (2017) point to similar dynamics among Syriza politicians in Greece who refer to domestic opponents as ‘the fifth column’ of Germany and among US right-wing populists who are convinced that both Democrat and Republican elites are working to establish a ‘new world government’, which would put the United States under UN control.

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The combination of populism and conspiracy theories can increase populists’ communicative efficacy. As shown by Hameleers (2021), when the thin ideology of populism is supplemented by references to conspiracies or truths that are deliberately hidden from ordinary people, populist communication becomes even more persuasive. Taggart (2018) identifies conspiracy theory as one of the tropes that are often, but not always, associated with populism. Along with war and religion, conspiracy theory is considered a secondary feature that is not universally associated with populism but is nevertheless symptomatic of its unpolitical core. For Taggart (2018), ‘unpolitics’ is the repudiation of politics as the process for resolving conflict. Refusal of politics is therefore symptomatically expressed in the tendency to simplify complexity by resorting to over-arching conspiracies that frame both elites and non-elites as unitary monads devoid of internal heterogeneity, ambiguity and pluralism. What Taggart has identified as the simplification of complexity, for Ylä-Anttila (2018) is an absolutist orientation concerning both the conceptualisation of power and the representation of truth: as  ‘all limitations by liberal-democratic institutions and mainstream media (…) should be lifted to uphold true freedom and democracy’, in the same way, the absolutism of truth follows ‘an empiricist-­positivist philosophy of science’ (p. 14) by assuming that truth about society is out there, withheld by the establishment but fully accessible for anyone with enough fortitude and intelligence (Fenster, 2008, p. 8).

Conspiracist Epistemology As a ‘populist theory of knowledge’ (Ylä-Anttila, 2018), conspiracism is primarily recognizable by its specific epistemic horizon. Conspiracist epistemology presumes the existence of two levels of reality: the most visible one, which is a forgery purposefully constructed by the establishment to conceal their evil misconducts, and the deepest one, which coincides with the real truth that is attainable only through counter and alternative knowledge. We also know that conspiracist narratives are all-encompassing in their explanations of disparate facts and events according to the same rationale. In so doing, they ‘restore a sense of agency, causality and responsibility’ (Knight, 2000, p. 21) that ultimately provides ontological security (Ylä-Anttila, 2018) in a period when established authorities of knowledge are deteriorating.

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But how are these theories made plausible? What are the discursive strategies of legitimation that are employed to validate this kind of knowledge? With the erosion of the epistemic authority of science, scholars have pointed to the proliferation of alternative epistemologies with which unconventional knowledge is valorised and oppositional realities are enhanced and legitimated (see chapters “Knowledge, Counter-­Knowledge, Pseudo-­Science in Populism” and “The Populist Challenge to the EU’s Sustainability Policy: Is ‘More Science’ a Legitimate and Viable Response?”). Harambam and Aupers (2021) show how the leap from the unbelievable to the (alleged) undeniable is made via epistemological eclecticism—a combination of different epistemological strategies that simultaneously draw on ‘personal experience, perennial narratives in ancient cultures, technological imageries, science and critical social theory’ (p. 1005). More than merely discursive rhetoric, this hodgepodge of heterogeneous knowledge claims works because it engages those ‘epistemological omnivores’ who are motivated by a generalized distrust and who ‘pick and mix from both established and generalised knowledge’ (Harambam & Aupers, 2021, p.  1005). Examining the relationship between populism and knowledge, Mede and Schäfer (2020) describe ‘science-related populism’ as a distinct variant of anti-scientific positions that points to ‘an antagonism between an (allegedly) virtuous ordinary people and an (allegedly) unvirtuous academic elite’ (p. 848). While most studies focus on populists’ tendency to valorise experiential folk wisdom and common sense as opposed to institutional expertise, Ylä-Anttila’s study (2020) on an anti-immigration Finnish counter-medium reveals the predominance of ‘radical scientism’ (p. 23)—a form of ‘objectivist counter-­ knowledge’ that professes strictly positivist views, employs scientistic language and opposes relativist truth orientations. Supporters of this view advocate a kind of knowledge in line with an epistemology of science but produced by experts who are not affected by the alleged corruption of mainstream science. This is in line with both the ‘peculiar empiricism’ that Barkun (2013) observed among those who endorse conspiracy beliefs and the ‘intensely rationalistic discourse’ underscored by Hofstadter (1965) in his examination of paranoid political style. Important for understanding how conspiracist believers produce and claim knowledge is the notion of ‘suppressed knowledge’, introduced by Barkun (2013, p. 27). ‘Suppressed knowledge’ describes knowledge that claimants believe is verified despite it being marginalized by institutions, such as universities and scientific communities, that conventionally

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distinguish between knowledge and error. ‘Suppressed knowledge’ includes ‘claims that are allegedly known to be valid by authoritative institutions but are suppressed because the institutions fear the consequences of public knowledge or have some evil or selfish motive for hiding the truth’ (Barkun, 2013, p. 27). On one hand, conspiracy theories are an example of suppressed knowledge because those who believe in them are convinced that they know the truth that has been hidden by the powerful elites. On the other hand, conspiracy theories work as an explanatory mechanism for stigmatization. The alleged presence of malign forces aiming at deceiving people explains in itself the stigmatization as a strategy implemented by the establishment to prevent truth becoming known. Stigmatized claims are then supported by an automatic presumption of validity predisposing believers to accept unverified and previously unfamiliar ideas just because they ‘possess the cachet of the suppressed and forbidden’ (Barkun, 2013, p. 27). At the same time, Barkun (2013) notes how this positive bias towards stigmatized knowledge co-exists with empiricism, which conspiracy theorists draw on when challenging others to test their facts against evidence. This leads to a peculiar mimicry of mainstream scholarship with elaborate citations and a multiplication of sources that produce ‘a kind of pseudo-confirmation’ that where the impression of validation is produced ‘without actually putting any propositions to the test of evidence’ (Barkun, 2013, p. 28). The result is a paradoxical epistemology in which leaps of faith cohabit with an accumulation of proofs claiming to be judged by the same criteria used in official science. Barkun’s (2013) notion of ‘stigmatized knowledge’ has Campbell’s (1972) concept of ‘cultic milieu’ at its core. Campbell describes cults as loosely structured religious groups and notes how their existence depends on a supportive social and ideological environment, which he calls the ‘cultic milieu’. This cultural background includes all deviant belief systems drawn together by a common hostility toward authority and dominant cultural orthodoxies. The milieu is constituted not only by thoughts and interpretations, it also consists of a web of practices, organizations and channels of communication that allow the quick, fluid combination of ideas regarding politics, religion, news and body healing that are equally positioned at the antipodes of orthodoxy. While the notion of the cultic milieu was originally conceived to describe the dynamics of contemporary religious experimentation, Barkun (2013) contends that, given the current overlap of religion and political ideologies, the concept can be

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extended to encompass a broader range of phenomena. Harambam (2020) has applied the concept to the study of the Dutch ‘conspiracy milieu’, intended as a ‘relatively stable, yet always fluid, network of people, places, and positions involved with the oppositional forms of knowledge commonly known as conspiracy theories (…) and characterized by a heterogeneity of people, beliefs, practices, and ideological orientations, yet united by an opposition to the cultural mainstream’ (p. 33). As shown in the next section, this concept can be a useful compass for exploring the diffusion of QAnon in Italy.

QAnon in Italy QAnon has developed in Italy as a double-faced phenomenon. On one hand, QAnon in Italy looks like the conspiracy theory from the US—just translated without adaptations to the local context or issues. In this form, it has spread through dedicated channels, first on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube3 and then, after the global deplatforming4 in the summer of 2020, mainly through Telegram. On the other hand, QAnon has also developed locally, hybridizing with the conspiracy themes and anti-government rhetoric already established in pre-existing conspiracy sub-cultures. QAnon has therefore become a ‘blurred conspiracy theory’, diluted and fragmented into isolated pieces. Without its original cohesiveness, the QAnon theory has become a generic symbolic referent for bigger and obscure plots in which some people are secretly pulling the strings in what the mainstream thinks is reality. In this second form, concepts and narrative frames originating from QAnon have been mixed up with pre-existing conspiracy theories (such as those related to vaccines, 5G, Soros, Bill Gates, etc.) and fully adapted to the local conspiracy milieu. The analysis discussed in this chapter considers QAnon Italy in this blurred form. It focuses on one of the many counter-­ information sites—‘Conoscenze al confine’5—that have occasionally circulated QAnon content without systematically disseminating all updates from US sources. Considering the analysed website as a significant part of 3  @QanonItalia on Twitter, the pages “Qanon Italia” and “The Q Italian Patriot” on Facebook, and the channel “Qlobal-Change” on YouTube. 4  https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/11/technology/twitter-removes-70000-qanonaccounts.html; https://edition.cnn.com/2020/10/06/tech/facebook-qanon/index.html 5  https://www.conoscenzealconfine.it/

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the wider conspiracy milieu hosting QAnon theories, this research aims to examine the epistemic horizon that has acted as fertile ground for QAnon, the content of which was spread and accepted as plausible. This analytical purpose has been concretized by the identification and examination of the strategies of epistemological validation that the website used to legitimate knowledge claims made in pandemic-related articles. Multiple sessions of online ethnography (Hine, 2017) conducted between May and September 2021 have allowed to explore both the ideas and the practices of communication, sharing, networking and commercialization that characterize the cultic milieu as it is hosted and shaped by this specific website. Furthermore, conventional content analysis (Hsieh & Shannon, 2005) on a sub-sample of articles dealing with pandemic-related alternative knowledge has resulted in the identification of one leading interpretive hypothesis (‘popularization’ as discursive strategy, explained in the next section), which has been further scrutinized with the lens of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA)’s approach to the relations between discourse and knowledge (van Dijk, 2003). Popularizing the Unbelievable Conoscenze al confine (‘Knowledge at the Border’) is a website that collects a variety of content spanning alternative medicine, yoga, esoterism, psychology and politics. It also promotes books on those topics. Some articles are original content written for the website by multiple authors. Others are collected and translated from other online media outlets. The two editors of the website described it as ‘a website free from the chains of the system. The name “Knowledge at the Border” indicates the inner wall that we are called to break down, allowing us to see a friend in the other, even when the thoughts expressed appear very different. The mind, with its habits, can chain us for a whole life in a sweet invisible servitude, made up of distractions, false truths and superficial pleasures, artfully created by those who control us, thus burning our existence. Let’s tear down the wall, and cross our inner boundary!’. It can therefore be considered an example of ‘conspirituality’ (Ward & Voas, 2011), which is the convergence between conspiracy ideation and New Age holistic thought. Eight articles published between May and June 2020 quote QAnon. The first is an explanatory article offering a rich and updated description of QAnon theories and of how they have been interpreted by journalists and pundits. It does not advocate for QAnon nor does it take any explicit position, but

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it does underscore that many in Italy have started to take the theory seriously. The article goes on to suggest that everyone should form a personal opinion and possibly wait for Q’s plans to be confirmed. In another post, QAnon is included only in the tags (along with FBI, Globalization, Hillary Clinton, Media Manipulation, New World Order, Obamagate, Arab Spring, Russiagate, Global System, Trump versus Deep State), but the discussed topics (coinciding with the other tags) are completely aligned with the QAnon paradigm. The main issue of the post is the so-called Obamagate, described in the following way: ‘The case has exploded, and the media cannot cover it up, because the Director of the National Desecretion has declassified the names of the Obama administration officials who, during the transition phase, have committed crimes (against) (…) Trump administration’. The article states that the story is long and entangled, but anyone could understand it if available to put the effort into  reading it  for ten to fifteen minutes. Then the explanation starts, showing most of the topoi that scholars have analysed in their work on conspiracy theories. For example, the article includes the Manichean struggle between evil and good forces as well as an explanatory narrative that links heterogeneous facts and events, insinuating that any aspect, even the most trivial, of social and political life, is not as obvious as it appears to naive gazes and conceals a deeper truth.6 Furthermore, a religious, millennialist stance frames the ‘destruction of the New World Order’ as the manifestation of Divine Providence bursting from above and overcoming the darkness. Another article titled, ‘“Obamagate”, the Global System is about to be destroyed’, clearly endorses QAnon theories as it claims that there are connections between the so-called deep state and a clan of alleged paedophiles and Satanists led by Hillary and Bill Clinton, without forgetting the involvement of Italian establishment. The support of QAnon theories becomes manifest in another post published in June 2020 where again various conspiracy theories involving George Soros, Jeffrey Epstein and Bill Gates were connected to Covid-19 negationism, to the political acts of Italian politicians—both centre-left and right-wing—and to a call 6  ‘To understand why the Global System is about to be destroyed, it is necessary to chew some plots of US politics and its projection in the world. The Renzi or Conte government, the WHO and Covid 19, the way to produce a mobile phone and the GDP of China, oil and the apocalyptic conferences of Greta Thunberg, Islamic terrorists and coups d’état, migrants and homeless shelter, in short, everything depends on the plots of US politics, because in the capitalist Empire created essentially by Freemasons, all roads lead to “Rome” (Washington)’ (my translation).

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for rebellion against mandates to wear masks in order to prevent the spread of Covid-19. The anti-vaccine position of the post was made clear at the end when the author stated, ‘Fortunately, in Italy there is a wonderful girl who is doctor and lawyer at the same time (…) she among those who, as a fine expert of viral mechanisms, do not get vaccinated “even under torture”…[and] has the courage to say that “I’m ashamed to be a doctor in this fucking country”. It is thanks to people like her and to the many friends who surround me, to the readers who follow me, that I have not yet burned my Italian passport’. This statement shows that conspiracy ideation connects disparate elements as well as an enraged rejection of established expert systems and the related, simultaneous celebration of individual experts, scientists or doctors who dissociated themselves from the official science and became sources of inspiration and knowledge for the conspiracy communities. The content analysis has focused on a sample of twenty articles concerned with alternative medical knowledge and tagged with the keywords vaccini/vaccino (‘vaccines/vaccine’), ‘Covid’ and pandemia (‘pandemic’). The authors of the considered posts are various. Some of them are Italian who usually write on personal weblogs dedicated to the dissemination of counter-information on politics, alternative science and medicine. Other posts are translations of articles published abroad and originally written by self-declared scientists who research topics that are overlooked, concealed or refused by official science. Each article is worthy of a detailed description. However, the limited space here means that only a partial list of the discussed topics is possible: the Covid-19 test implant ‘Darpa hydrogel’ (an ‘artificial substance acting as a converter between the electromagnetic signal and the living cell, tissue and organ’); the presence of graphene in Covid vaccines, which connects to 5G networks; the presence of self-­replicating parasites in Covid vaccines, which are seen as the first step of the introduction of a new species of human android; deaths of airplane pilots hidden by official sources and mainstream media; sideeffects of vaccines in the circulatory system; magnetism in vaccines; the Marburg virus and next pandemic; cyber-pandemic and the so-called Big Reset. In each of the considered articles, there is a recursive scheme: a revelation of facts and numbers that are hidden by the entire establishment (including media, politicians and mainstream scientists) and that prove that all medical and restrictive measures taken by the government to control the pandemic will be used to secretly destroy humankind or transform

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part of it into a mass of enslaved androids. Data are always expressed in percentages and arguments cumulate a crescendo of details, resulting in a seemingly unquestionable attribution of effects to causes. Even within a framework of conspiracy ideation in which the truth (at least at its general level) is known in advance, statements are supported by referring to criteria of alleged scientistic objectivism. The sources of reported knowledge are expressions of a counter-expertise that is variously legitimated. In some cases, what counts for legitimation is the experiential closeness to the reported facts (e.g. anonymous doctors sharing their personal experiences nursing sick people), which allows light to be shed on the backstage of official events. In other cases, authority comes from past or current belonging to scientific expert systems (e.g. holding one or more PhDs or working for research centres with international standing) with various, and not always clarified, paths of dissociation. This kind of conspiracy ideation that relies on assumed scientific facts confirms that the epistemological eclecticism underscored by Harambam and Aupers (2021) and the radical objectivism identified by Ylä-Anttila (2018) are not case-specific but are on the contrary able to catch transversal and cross-cultural trends. In addition to confirming a substantial convergence with the conspiracist epistemology explored mostly by international scholarship, the analysed case also suggests a complementary interpretive hypothesis. This can be grasped by first following a pragmatic approach to knowledge that applies the analytical stratagem of aprioristically excluding any value hierarchy between different knowledge systems and that also defines knowledge as the whole of the beliefs that are shared by epistemic communities and certified by historically and culturally variable criteria (van Dijk, 2003). This means that ‘what is knowledge for one community can be mere opinion, superstition or ideology for others’ (Calsamiglia & Van Dijk, 2004). Second, the inquiry should be oriented to identify which of the strategies of epistemological legitimation are more engaging, appealing and convincing for people confronted with this kind of discourse. While a full inquiry of this aspect should go beyond the text to explore the creative and multi-faceted process of audience reception, the working hypothesis based on the analysed case is that the established relationship between conspiracy theories and scientific knowledge can be understood as an instance of knowledge popularization. Popularization (Calsamiglia & Van Dijk, 2004) is the transformation of specialized knowledge so that non-specialized readers are able to construct lay versions of it and integrate these with their existing knowledge. Popularization involves

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not only the translation of scientific content from science to society, two realms differentiated by practices and languages, it also involves a recontextualization and a creative re-elaboration that goes beyond mere terminological problems  (Williams Camus, 2009) and that  adapts to the properties of the communicative context, such as participants’ purposes, beliefs and knowledge. Popularization discourses usually present some specific textual instances, such as denomination, definition, reformulation or paraphrase, exemplification, generalization or analogies, aimed at filling a knowledge gap (Calsamiglia & Van Dijk, 2004). Some of these strategies are exemplified in posts denouncing the presence of graphene oxide and self-replicating parasites in vaccines. First, the necessity of checking the contents of vaccines is explained with an analogy of an ordinary consumption practice: ‘When someone goes for a burger, they ask what ingredients are in it. Well, the same people should at least know what’s in the vaccine vial, since they’ll inject it into their veins, right?’. The explanation proceeds with a strategy of exemplification supported by visualizing and denomination. The thesis that the Covid-19 vaccine is made of graphene is explained by comparing the microscopic images of graphene and the vaccine’s contents. No other explanation is provided. There is only a metaphorical denomination of what is made visible by the images, described as a ‘blackish thing that appears down there as a kind of net, because what is behind it are probably the holes (…) The characteristic, as I said, is that it is like a piece of handkerchief’. The underlining premise is that truth can easily be deduced and verified by anyone who has access to the right images. These explanatory strategies are often supported by metacommunicative instances (Ruesch & Bateson, 1951) in which the writer makes explicit the purpose of (and the moral commitment to) the explanation. In these metacommunicative instances, the emphasis is put on the so-called objectivity of the information, which could be understood by anyone with the right attitude: ‘In this video, I report only objective information that allows even the most reluctant to understand the real reason for this maniacal obsession of vaccinating everyone.’ Just as the website promises a kind of knowledge ‘at the borders’ that can be understood only by overthrowing the inner walls entrapping consciousness, the self-declared commitment to popularization similarly implies the assumption that the real obstacles to full knowledge do not depend on education, training or specialized degrees but only on a process of inner persuasion and ethical emancipation from political propaganda. The ‘truth is out there’

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(Ylä-­Anttila, 2018, p. 7), and people only need the right attitude to receive and understand it. However, the promised comprehension is framed as a two-­stage process. While any shared content is claimed to be an irrefutable fact, it often happens that the author specifies that these facts are a preview of a wider scenario that will become clear to anyone in few weeks, months, or years. This kind of claim is exemplified by a passage in one of the articles on QAnon: ‘What I am going to tell you are not fake news nor “conspiracy” indiscretions, but concrete facts proven and confirmed in the past days and verifiable in those to come, within a few days or at most a few weeks. Not random events but precise and unambiguous concatenations’. Such claims are also found in pandemic-related posts: ‘But all this …it will be told by the doctors from an official public institution in our country. When the time will come, those people will also be interviewed…But we, as we’ve said and promised, have published these photographs for you to see’. In a post denouncing high false-positive rates of Covid-19 PCR tests, it is suggested that the final disclosure of truth will be anything but encouraging: ‘the measures and the vaccines will continue indefinitely (…) until about 2025 when humans will be successfully “re-designed” to fear each other and avoid any close physical contact (…). So this is our bleak future if we continue to believe in the lies provided by criminal governments and their propaganda tools’. This is consistent with millennialist temporality of conspiracy theories, according to which the present is a time loaded with clues about an imminent and threatening future. Readers are therefore requested both to rationally validate the highlighted facts currently available and make a leap of faith about what is still to come but can be already forecasted. Moreover, the focus on counter-science regularly culminates in final comments that summon the audience to consider the cultural and social issues at stake. This is not a typical or exclusive trait of conspiracist epistemology. Scholars of scientific popularization have observed the emergence of a ‘new discourse’ in mass media that is connected to scientific or technological events that also have political implications, whether environmental issues, public health or food safety (Moirand, 2003). Within this new discourse, which co-exists with the more traditional discourse on science, new discursive objects (such as risk and precaution) that are no longer merely scientific and that point to legal and political issues are occurring more frequently. It, therefore, appears that the strict task of popularization, consisting of didactic strategies aimed at explaining science, has been

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dropped in favour of a discourse that is primarily focused on the social and political stakes of the issues in question. Interestingly, this produces an interdiscursive linking of events that are, from a strictly scientific point of view, completely unrelated but that elicit similar reaction (e.g. the Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy crisis or the potential dangers of GMOs are aligned with the blood contamination scandal, the dioxins in chickens affair, the contaminated Coca-Cola scare) (Moirand, 2003, p.  191). Aligning with established discursive trends in mass media popularization strategies, the conspiracist discourse about science ends with a dramatic call for action that primarily involves spreading the acquired knowledge before it is too late. People’s sovereignty and lives are at stake: ‘So, we all have a huge responsibility to inform the people around us, sharing all our knowledge with the family, the neighbourhood, the village. There is no need to go further. Also because of course we cannot count on people occupying higher positions, because they have already shown that they are only interested in eliminating us as soon as possible.’

Conclusion While the origin of QAnon remains unclear, the cultural and ideational ground where it has caught on has clearly distinguishable aspects. The conspiracy context examined here features some of the traits that scholars have identified as typical of conspiracy discourses, such as eclecticism in explanatory plots and knowledge claims, the co-existence of alternative spirituality and millennialist stances, radical scientism combined with hostile distrust of official science. The focus on the milieu where QAnon has spread and been accepted as plausible was required by the blurred form the conspiracy theory has assumed in the Italian context. As observed in other countries, the diffusion of QAnon in Italy has not resulted in a cross-­cultural convergence creating a singular conspiracist frame. Quite the opposite, its fragmented textuality combined with the cryptic nature of its content fostered a reciprocal hybridization with local and pre-existing conspiracy sub-cultures. At the same time, the examination of this background has allowed an understanding of the epistemological, communicative, and cultural preconditions favouring the reception (and possibly endorsement) of a discursive construct that, from an outsider’s perspective, sounds like a far-fetched, unthinkable, and paranoid blunder. QAnon has integrated itself harmoniously in this context, actively contributing to the cumulative multiplication of sources and proofs through which conspiracy ideation

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heroically strives ‘to prove that the unbelievable is the only thing that can be believed’ (Hofstadter, 1965, p.  38). Within an empiricist horizon where truth validation draws on the insistent concatenation of facts that are at their heart unfalsifiable (Barkun, 2013), the introduction of a super-­ theory like QAnon has worked not only as a narrative bridge between the micro and the macro dimensions of reality but also as an additional layer that ultimately confirms and enhances the unattainable nature of truth. In a reality that is supposed to be a diabolical mise-en-scène and in which conspiracy is supposed to actively control all sites of knowledge production and dissemination, not only stigmatization, but also crypticity and unintelligibility can ultimately work as a presumption of knowledge’s validity. The plots set up by powerful elites are so intricate, and people’s consciousness is so obnubilated by propaganda, that knowledge cannot be but a tricky and puzzling endeavour. In this context, discursive popularization could potentially act as a compensatory countermeasure. The empirical research discussed in this chapter has developed the working hypothesis that empiricism and radical scientism, which have been so often observed in different conspiracy milieus, can be partially explained as a specific instance of knowledge popularization. Just as Barkun (2013) explains how conspiracist literature mimics scientific scholarship’s discursive conventions, the conspiracy background examined here features a mimicry of discursive styles usually exhibited by mass media scientific popularization. In a world that is increasingly complex and tangled, popularization can be an inclusive, community-making act that promises participatory involvement to people who otherwise stay at the margins. This is aligned with the ‘participatory turn’ that Mede and Schäfer (2020, p. 477) place at the origin of science-related populism and that expresses a growing demand for participation in different realms of society as distrust of political institutions and confidence in citizens’ capabilities grow. The connection between empiricism, popularization and participation established here is a working hypothesis since only a complementary analysis of reception processes could shed light on how and why these discourses sound appealing and plausible to their audiences. While studying pagan communities in Italy during the Covid-19 lockdown, Parmigiani (2021) speaks of ‘participatory epistemology’ to explain how conspiracy believing (different from conspiracy belief, as it is contextual and positional) relies on an affective, sensory and aesthetic engagement that goes beyond mere cognitive assessment. With a view to future research development, it could be interesting to start assessing the intrinsic

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polysemy of participation and the multifarious manifestations of cognitive engagement that it activates.

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Scientizing Gender? An Examination of Anti-­Gender Campaigns on Social Media, Norway Elisabeth L. Engebretsen

Introduction The year 2016 was a watershed moment for transgender rights in Norway. As the fourth country in Europe, Norway passed a law on gender self-­ declaration that allowed for changing one’s legal sex/gender marker in official documentation without the previously required procedure of sterilization (hartline, 2019; ILGA World, 2020).1 This reform marked a significant departure from previous processes that required medical intervention, psychiatric diagnosis, and surgical sterilization to formally 1

 Legislation: LOV-2016-06-17-46, Law Amending the Legal Status.

E. L. Engebretsen (*) University of Stavanger, Stavanger, Norway e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 H. Eslen-Ziya, A. Giorgi (eds.), Populism and Science in Europe, Palgrave Studies in European Political Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97535-7_9

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alter birth sex to preferred sex/gender marker. Joining other European countries Malta, Denmark, and Ireland at the time, this was an important step in transgender rights that honed the principle of gender self-­ determination and choice of sex/gender markers and set a precedent for other countries to follow in the years to come. Despite receiving critique from activists that the reform limited gender self-declaration to binary gender and excluded the possibility for nonbinary gender self-­identification, the bill has generally been hailed as a victory for transgender equality, in Norway and internationally (Monro & van der Ros, 2017). Five years later, on 1 January 2021, an amendment to the criminal law on hate speech (Straffeloven Section 185) came into effect. By adding “gender identity or gender expression” to the list of speech acts deemed discriminatory or hateful (diskriminerende eller hatefulle ytringer), trans and gender-nonconforming people would now be protected by law, in the same way that speech acts deemed racist, ableist, sexist/misogynistic, and homophobic had already been covered by this law for some time (Hellum & Sørlie, 2021). It is regarded a significant victory for transgender rights and activists’ long struggle against discrimination and violence in Norway (Espseth, 2017; Sørlie, 2017; Anderssen et al., 2021). In the same five-­ year period, transgender issues and people have become visible in popular culture and social media on an unprecedented level (Faye, 2021). Put together, these two legal amendments and the overall increased visibility are proofs that trans and gender-nonconforming people are increasingly being heard and receiving popular support, and even shape policy, legal, and social practice at national levels. Crucially, the changes in Norway have come about due to two interlinked developments internationally; firstly, in response to developments in medical sciences and legal fields, including human rights law at EU levels, as well as the implementation of the Yogakarta Principles that emphasize the human rights of gender and sexual minorities and recommend legal standards for countries worldwide. These developments have contributed toward putting pressure on national legal practice and policy priorities. Secondly, international advocacy and research have engendered vital research knowledge from the point of view of LGBTQI+, trans and gender-nonconforming communities themselves. Furthermore, Norwegian survey results and research literature, albeit very limited thus far, document high levels of discrimination and worse life conditions for trans and nonbinary people in Norway (hartline, 2019; van der Ros, 2013, 2017; Norwegian Directorate of Health, 2015; Espseth, 2017; Sørlie,

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2017), and especially for those of racialized minority backgrounds (Anderssen et al., 2021; Klatran, 2021). The mentioned legal reforms are indicative of wider transformations as well as growing disagreements over the meanings of sex and gender, their connected identities and collectivities, and the role of fundamental common values in contemporary social-democratic society. This five-year period has seen significant and growing popular support, visibility, and formal recognition of gender and sexual minorities including transgender, nonbinary, and intersex people, in Norway. Indeed, it has long been argued that homo-tolerance and gender equality are essential parts of contemporary Norwegian national identity (Jacobsen, 2018). Alongside its Nordic neighbors Denmark, Sweden, Finland, and Iceland, Norway routinely tops global rankings of equality and welfare, including living conditions and rights for LGBTQI+ people and communities (Teigen & Skjeie, 2017).2 Norway’s image as part of an exceptional ‘Nordic model’ has even become a global catchphrase in politics and governance as the yardstick for the levels of gender equality, LGBTQI+ rights, democracy, and egalitarianism, for other countries to aspire to. And yet, the picture is more complex than single-story narratives at state levels. Whereas public opinion is largely in favor of gay marriage and the inclusion of gays and lesbians on a more mainstream level and Nordic model rhetoric dominates, there is no denial that there remains persistent homophobia, for example in schools, and low support for gender diverse and transgender people’s rights and equality (Statistics Norway, 2020; Anderssen et al., 2021). This chapter examines rising anti-gender campaigns in Norway and their discursive tactics on social media, and establishes them as part of a broad-based, transnational landscape of critics that oppose legal reforms and expansive, social constructionist understandings of gender identity. I put the specificity of the Norwegian case, a context which has received little scholarly attention in transnational anti-gender research thus far, in dialogue with what is now a solid body of research literature and reports 2  For pertinent critiques of the Nordic model in gender equality, minority rights, democracy and societal welfare terms, see Alm, E., L. Berg, M. Lundahl, A. Johansson, P. Laskar, L.  Martinsson, D.  Mulinari, C.  Wasshede (eds.) 2021. Pluralistic Struggles in Gender, Sexuality and Coloniality: Challenging Swedish Exceptionalism. London, New York: Palgrave; Keskinen, S., U.  D. Skaptadottir, M.  Toivanen (eds.) 2019. Undoing Homogeneity in the Nordic Region: Migration, Difference and the Politics of Solidarity. London and New York: Routledge; Engebretsen, E.  L. and M.  Liinason (eds). Transforming Identities in Contemporary Europe. New York and London: Routledge. Forthcoming.

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that show a backlash and series of reactionary opposition and anti-gender campaigns on a transnational scale (Dietze & Roth, 2020; Graff et  al., 2019; Kuhar & Paternotte, 2017; Corrêa et al., 2018; Pearce et al., 2020; Hemmings, 2021; Siddiqui, 2021).3 As is well-documented in this scholarship, what is oftentimes termed ‘the anti-gender movement’ attacks feminism, Gender/Feminist/Queer Studies, critical theory, Black and migration studies, transgender activists and LGBTQI+ support organizations (Martinsson, 2020). A key premise of this backlash is to do with the ways in which the concepts sex and gender are being operationalized, for example, in phrases such as ‘women’s sex-based rights’ and ‘gender ideology’ (Pearce et al., 2020: 679; and see Phipps, 2020). Drawing on a mapping exercise and content analysis of anti-gender discourse on the microblogging site Twitter, the principal aim of this chapter is to examine anti-gender campaigning with a particular emphasis on trans-exclusionary rhetoric that relies on deployments of ‘science’ and ‘biology’ (Pearce et al., 2020: 678). I will show, firstly, that anti-gender politics despite not propagated by a numerically speaking large crowd, still has been very much established as part of an increasingly mainstream critique of minority rights and voiced in the Norwegian public. For this reason, anti-gender and transphobic rhetoric should not be written off or ridiculed as isolated, uncoordinated tantrums from marginal individuals on the extreme end of the political spectrum. This is a long-overdue correction to what I would call an ‘exceptionalism’ approach that I have encountered from parts of academia, activism, and the media, namely that the anti-gender movement is ‘not yet here’ but is, rather, something established ‘elsewhere’ and that ‘we’ should be vigilant about so that it is kept outside the Norwegian borders. This leads me to my second main argument, namely that anti-gender discourse and its proponents—however politically marginal and numerically few—is no laughing matter but must, placed in its transnational context, be considered a significant political threat to democracy, in Norway as elsewhere. In other words, whereas the anti-gender discourse in Norway is decidedly local and particular to the country in many ways, I will show that anti-gender discourse is closely linked to and collaborate with transnational movements, from which the Norwegian divisions draw significant inspiration and resources. It has been argued in many other sources on Europe’s anti-gender backlash that despite local specificities and differences between locales, these 3  For relevant publications on Norway, see Alm & Engebretsen, 2020; Fangen, 2020; Nadim et al., 2021.

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movements, discourses and campaigns have a transnational character (Darakchi, 2019; and see Korolczuk & Graff, 2018; Kováts, 2018; Kuhar & Paternotte, 2017). Thus, I will map and trace the transnational connections of Norway’s anti-gender and transphobic discourse in the media, with the social media platform Twitter as a particular case in point. The chapter is organized into three sections. First, I will outline the centrality of claims to biological reality and science in anti-gender discourse, set in a broader context of an increasingly populist discursive climate. I then offer a brief overview and contextualization of anti-gender politics in Norway. The second section concerns the data material and research design. I first introduce the method and methodology including a brief note on researcher positionality and ethical concerns. The third section focuses on presenting and analyzing the data material, where I focus on four selected account profiles. For this chapter, I limit the focus to discourses that center biological essentialism and claims to ‘science’, to complement the volume’s principal topic on science and populism as per editors Hande Eslen Ziya and Alberta Giorgi’s introductory chapter. Based on the data material presented, I demonstrate why and how Norwegian anti-gender campaigns are not isolated or irrelevant local initiatives but are in fact deeply connected to well-established and well-­ resourced movements. On this basis, I argue that Norway’s anti-gender campaigns and organized movements must be taken very seriously as they—seen in this broader geopolitical context—represent a reactionary populist backlash to basic human rights principles, and even democracy itself.

Categorizing (Anti-)Gender and the Ideology of ‘Science’ The current mobilizations of reactionary populism across Europe target gender and sexual rights, especially transgender and queer populations that defy a biologically essentialist understanding of sex and gender. A striking part of the populist anti-trans discourse is the frequent reference to the superior quality of the ‘common sense’ of the majority population of ‘ordinary people’ (in Norwegian: folk flest or vanlige folk) to ensure societal stability and index a desired national value system. Another central ingredient of anti-gender discourse is the mobilization of ‘science’ or ‘scientific facts’ to justify their views as ‘correct’ and factual. Both tactics—the majority population’s common sense and the seeming reliance on

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scientific facts—center an essentialist ideology of biological sex, an approach to sexed difference and gender that refuses to acknowledge the legitimacy of social constructionist research literature on actually existing gender diversity. To anti-gender activists, a social constructive understanding of ‘gender’ that recognizes diversities and fluidities such as nonbinary, transgender, and gender-queer identification, amounts to “gender ideology” and undermines the natural character of the heterosexual reproductive society, and even the order of society itself (Butler, 2021; Ferber, 2020; Tudor, 2021). And as Lola Olufemi argues, ‘Gender fluidity presents a threat to the stable ideas of gender and sexuality. This seems so threatening because compliance to a system of categorization within stable sexual categories also means compliance to the unjust system of governance that dictates it’ (Olufemi, 2020: 55). These mobilizations and their violent effects are currently intensifying. This is both concerning and frightening in large part due to their vast range of targets and because these mobilizations involve the active support of governments, law makers, evangelical and faith organizations, and powerful, well-funded organizations from across the political spectrum transnationally—from Norway, to Hungary, Poland, the USA, and Brazil for example. In the words of Judith Butler, a preeminent gender studies and philosophy professor who themselves have been viciously targeted by anti-­ gender campaigners: [I]n attacking ‘gender’ they oppose reproductive freedom for women and the rights of single parents; they oppose protections for women against rape and domestic violence; and they deny the legal and social rights of trans people along with a full array of legal and institutional safeguards against gender discrimination, forced psychiatric internment, brutal physical harassment and killing. All this fervor ramped up during a pandemic time in which domestic abuse has soared and queer and trans kids have been deprived of their spaces for gathering in life-supporting communities. (Butler, 2021)

Thus far, scholarship on anti-gender mobilizations has typically focused on Eastern or Southern Europe, but political campaigns utilizing pseudo-­ scientific arguments about sex, gender, knowledge and ‘facts’, are growing in prominence also in the Nordic region (Fangen, 2020; Pedersen, 2021). Through tracking and analyzing Twitter activity focusing on a selection of central hashtags and activists that define themselves as trans-exclusionary feminists, I show the ways in which anti-gender campaigns are active and

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prominently positioned in governmental politics and societal discourse in Norway. I argue that the current anti-gender rhetoric dominate Norwegian media platforms, utilizes pseudo-scientific arguments about sex and gender, selectively borrows from conservative, right-wing discourses, and presents them as common-sensical ‘facts’ and ‘science’. Conversely, I show that this is a well-organized, transnationally circulating discursive tactics that due to its resourceful organization succeeds in depicting its proponents as an embattled minority that struggles against elitist gender radicals and transgender mafia that seek to eliminate the ‘truth’ of biological sex altogether (see Paternotte & Kuhar, 2017). I follow Elizabeth Corredor’s application of the concept transnational counter-movements to account for this cross-border connection, and the ways these movements make use of gender ideology as counterstrategies vis-à-vis feminist and LGBTQ+ social movements. Argues Corredor, anti-­ gender campaigns can be examined as ‘palpable transnational counter-­ movements and their use of gender ideology as salient counterstrategies to feminist and LGBTQ+ social movements’ (Corredor, 2019: 614). What is crucial in Corredor’s approach, and which is also emphasized by David Paternotte and Roman Kuhar  (2017), is that ‘it shows that recent anti-­ gender activity transcends isolated and uncoordinated instances of resistance and in-stead operates within distinct and coordinated countermovements to defeat feminist and LGBTQ+ policy’ (Corredor, ibid.). It has been shown that there are strong ideological connections between biological essentialism and scientific racism. Strategic and context specific alliances between anti-gender, alt-right and conservative, reactionary, and religious organizations emerge in particular cases to do with vulnerable children, the alleged threat to children and ciswomen of transwomen’s mere presence in sport and public restrooms and changing rooms (see Olufemi, 2020: 58–59). These purported concerns about the vulnerability of women do not usually include intersectional gender analyses. Instead, essentialist truth-claims about gender, race and oppression anchored in biology, proliferate. This is because they offer simple solutions to complex and paradoxical culturally and historically changing ideas and practices in the existing world. Anti-gender discourse’s tendency to pathologize trans people has proven an effective strategy to put blame trans people for whatever social issue with the added effect to categorize cis and trans women in mutually exclusionary, moral-biological categories. In recent years, ‘gender-critical’ feminists have increasingly mobilized with political, religious and other groups, around the Gender Recognition

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Act (Norway 2016) in Norway and other countries with similar legal rights afforded trans people. It has been suggested that this is now being amplified in ever more countries—such as the UK (Faye, 2021) and across Europe (Haynes, 2020; Paternotte & Kuhar, 2017), and thereby constitutes a ‘larger trend of official anti-LGBTQI+ hate speech documented in other European countries … as populist leaders seek to shore up support from voters by trying to appeal to “family values”’ (Haynes, 2020). There are overlapping interests between a wide array of reactionary and conservative forces previously located at the far-right margins which are now mainstreamed and considered ‘common sense’ as ‘woke culture’ takes hold of societal morals in general and gender and sexual norms more specifically. In Norway, more than ten years after the 22/7 terrorist attacks, social-political developments have largely normalized intolerance of ‘others’ in mainstream politics, government, and societal debate, where especially racialized Muslims, nonconforming queers, and trans people are at the receiving end of hate (Engebretsen, 2021). By systematically tracing social media activities of Norwegian anti-­ gender movements, I attempt to expose the transnational networking of these movements and the way they are seeking to influence policy and government, thereby shifting popular opinion. I would suggest that the public debate on (trans)gender and the broader political climate shows exactly how far-right ideology can work its way into mainstream and change what is understood as mainstream knowledge on gender. As I will go on to show, using social media platforms such as Twitter to announce and spread their messages, represents a relentless intervention on the part of anti-gender movements and actors.

Research Design and Data Material Data collected for this study is derived from non-participatory online observation of a selection of four accounts on the micro-blogging site Twitter, with a focus on extracting data from a recent twelve-month period. The choice of the micro-blogging platform of Twitter instead of Facebook for example, was because it was found to be particularly useful for capturing a wide variety of social media data and for analyzing rapid dissemination of information (Julliard, 2018; Lu, 2020; Steensen, 2018; Stewart, 2016). Secondary background material was gathered by way of targeted searches in a national news media database, Retriever. On 27 January 2021, I conducted a series of searches in Retriever, to identify

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themes and get a sense of the trends in recent years’ media representation of transgender issues. For this search, I used the following key words (in Norwegian): anti-trans, juridisk kjønn (legal gender), kjønnsidentitet (gender identity), and transrettigheter Norge (trans rights Norway). The Twitter datasets that this chapter presents and analyzes were collected in April through early June 2021, through the Web browser extension NCapture allowing researchers to easily capture and download content such as web pages, social media, and online PDFs for analysis with NVivo 12. NCapture is useful as it collects a wide variety of social media data including the content, type, timing of posts, hashtags, number of comments, mentions, and retweets. Analyzing the use and relevance of mentions and hashtags allows for sampling tweets related to specific topics of interest, especially as Twitter activity tends to rise during crises (Steensen, 2018). Regarding selection of the specific Twitter accounts and related datasets, I began by identifying groups and individuals who have been regularly active on social media since 2016. The gender self-identification law of 2016 was, as I mentioned in the Introduction, an important milestone in transgender activism and formal recognition in Norway. However, it also initiated a renewed public and political attention to questions of gender, especially transgender identities, and rights activism. In the years since, numerous individuals, groups and initiatives have sought to criticize transgender rights and activist agendas for rights and care in the Norwegian public sphere at the same time as far-right populism has moved to the political mainstream. This has meant a smaller space for queer and trans politics beyond the homonormative mainstream to be heard and recognized, as I have discussed elsewhere (Engebretsen, 2021). As I am myself a longtime participant in media debates and activism with regards to queer and transgender rights in Norway (and transnationally), I have observed and actively taken part in relevant social media spaces since 2016, which was the year I moved back to Norway after having lived abroad since the late nineties. This long-term participant observation practice helped me greatly to identify the Twitter platform and the selected accounts as appropriate and suitable for this (limited) study. In addition to identifying hashtags and connecting shared themes across different accounts and networks, I also searched for content—mainly tweets, retweets, mentions and quote-tweets—related to gender, (biological) sex, women/men, queer/LGBT and transgender. Based on these searches and my experience, I identified four Norway-based accounts that would be

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representative for the anti-gender campaigning that this chapter addresses. These Twitter accounts, with their handles in brackets, are Mot Strømmen (@Sappfo_), LLH2019 (@llh2019), WRHR_NO (@WhrcN), and Matriarken (@MatriarkenN). I introduce and discuss them in detail in the next section. Based on the selected four accounts, I developed three units of analysis in this study. This selection was inspired by the methods and analytical frameworks detailed in four relevant research publications: Tamara A. Small’s content analysis of Canadian politics on Twitter (2011), Ariadna Matamoros-Fernandez and Johan Farkas’ critical review of racism, hate speech and social media (2021), Chao Guo and Gregory Saxton’s study of tweeting and social change advocacy (Guo & Saxton, 2014), and Bonnie Stabile and others’ recent study of social media use by anti-gender-­violence based organizations and how they seek to mobilize support and influence policy and politics through Twitter (2021). Interestingly, the latter research considers “the level of attention an organization receives by measuring the number and types of tweets (retweets, favorites, public replies, mentions, and the inclusion of hashtags) that constitute its communication on Twitter”, which I have attempted to incorporate in my own project’s thematic priority and method (Stabile et al., 2021: 41; and see Froio & Ganesh, 2019; Onanuga, 2020). Having selected the four accounts, I used NCapture to collect content from a twelve-month period, between June 2020 and 1 June 2021. I then coded the material in NVivo. To determine connections and links between the data, I looked at two major trends in the material, namely the frequency of retweeting of certain posts and the total number of references of mentions. This allowed me to get a sense of reach and broadcasting potential, as well as identifying domestic and transnational networks and connections. Based on this selection, I then conducted a content analysis of tweet messages, including articles or texts retweeted. In line with recent social media research identifying the overreliance on textual discourse at the expense of the visual, I have also paid attention to account and tweet content visuality as part of a multimediated communication tactics (Matamoros-Fernández & Farkas, 2021: 218). The results presented in this chapter are indicative of broader trends and themes which support my principal arguments regarding the anti-gender movement’s existence and discursive strategies in Norway.

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Finally, a note on the ethics of working with this material: In presenting and analyzing social media content, there is a risk of furthering and reproducing material that many consider hateful and discriminatory and may also experience as triggering. To minimize the risk of amplification, I made conscious decisions to include limited textual and visual material to not overshare such content. I also decided against publicizing content and accounts connected to individual persons connected with these groups, as the object of the project is not about specific persons and individual narratives. It is my hope that this balancing attempt has allowed for the focus to remain on the principal objectives of this chapter, namely, to identify the existence of and map the established patterns and transnational connections of a particular political ideology (and see, Massanari, 2018).

Anti-Gender Account Profiles and Their Contents: Mapping and Analysis In this section, I present and analyze the four Twitter accounts’ own tweets and their contents (tweets/posts). The aim is to assess, first, thematic priorities (content analysis, tags) and second, interactivity with special emphasis on identifying users and levels of attention (retweets and mentions). All the four selected accounts joined Twitter between June 2020 and March 2021. The units of analysis I have focused on are (a) presentation of profile (text and visuals), (b) an overview and critical assessment of top-10 mentions, and (c) content analysis of selected tweets and retweets, including web links to related material. This will make possible to indicate priorities in themes, networking, and connections, both nationally and internationally. Given the overall focus of this anthology on populism and science, I pay particular attention to this issue in the selected material that I discuss in this chapter. Account Profiles The account with the most followers, at 1190 as per 1 June 2021, is Mot Strømmen (‘against the stream’) with the hashtag ‘Sappfo_’ The profile reads ‘Not “cis”. I don’t identify with patriarchy. Tør der andre tier. Pronomen: selv-anden’ (Dares where others don’t. Pronouns: self-other; see illustration no. 1). The total number of tweets for the selected time period was 3188, including retweets.

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The LLH2019 account describes itself in the profile, in both English and Norwegian languages, as ‘An organization for lesbians, gays and bisexuals.’ It was established in July 2020 and had per June 2021 ca 650 followers. LLH2019’s Twitter profile includes a drawn image of a bus with writings on it in Norwegian and English, such as ‘Stand with J.K.  Rowling’, ‘Sister organization of LGB Alliance’, ‘Bisexual’, ‘Homosexual’, and ‘Lesbian’. The profile also lists a corresponding web site, which by now is defunct. When it was operated, only for a few months, it listed similar content to what is shared and produced on the Twitter account. The account name is a deliberate play on the former name of the Norwegian national LGBTQI+ organization, LLH—landsforeningen for lesbisk og homofil frigjøring (LLH—the national organization for lesbian and gay liberation),4 which changed its name to FRI—Foreningen for kjønns- og seksualitetsmangfold (FREE—the organization for gender and sexual diversity) in 2016 to better reflect developments in understanding and accepting diversity (Skeivt Arkiv, 2015).5 In a press release, LLH2019 announced themselves as a sibling organization to the British equivalent LGB Alliance. LLH2019 emphasized a shared view with LGB Alliance that gay and lesbian rights are being threatened by the major organizations—Stonewall and FRI in the UK and Norway respectively—opening up their mandates to include trans and queer rights (Engesbak, 2020). LLH2019 is registered in the national registry Brønnøysundregistret under the description ‘LLH2019 aims to actively promote lesbian, gay and bisexual peoples’ rights and interests in the Norwegian society, to contribute toward spreading knowledge that gender is binary and does not exist on a spectrum. Gender identity is a social construction. We do not see any conflict between heteronormativity and homosexual orientation’ (Engesbak, 2020).

4  Between 2008 and 2016, the amended full name of LLH was “the national organization for lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transpersons” (Landsforeningen for lesbiske, homofile, bifile og transpersoner). 5  The LLH organization was established in November 1992 when the former DNF-48 (Den norske foreningen av 1948), Norway’s first gay and lesbian organization, established in 1953 as a nationally independent organization, but in the years 1948–1953 it was a filial of the Danish lesbian and gay organization DNF) joined ranks with the Fellesrådet for lesbiske og homofile organisasjoner i Norge (FHO), made up of a series of local gay and lesbian groups in Norway (Skeivt Arkiv, 2015).

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In a series of launch tweets on 28 July 2020, LLH2019 introduced their politics thus (excerpts, my translation from Norwegian): Gender and gender roles By gender (kjønn) we mean male and female (hankjønn og hunkjønn). Biological sex (biologisk kjønn) is a reality. Biological sex is binary and does not exist on a spectrum. Gender roles on the other hand, are social constructions that change over time, and is understood differently in different cultures. Women and men who do not conform to stereotypical gender roles are women and men who are women and men in their own ways.

Another tweet from the same date, where the organization tagged several Norwegian national newspapers, news sites and media personalities, reads: Lesbians and gays are not a homogenous group. Political conviction, religion, and world view are as diverse among lesbians/gays/bisexuals as among heterosexuals. LLH is the organization for those who support our views.

The three named board members of the LLH2019 are long known to be particularly active participants in media debates and activist initiatives against trans-rights, queer rights and theory, and against the national organization FRI. WHRC Norway is an official chapter of the international organization the Women’s Human Rights Campaign, which has national chapters in several countries around the world. The Norwegian chapter was established in September 2020, and the total number of tweets including retweets between then and 1 June 2021, number 2002. For clarification, I note that in January 2022, the WHRC International announced change of name to Women’s Declaration International (WDI), which the Norwegian chapter adapted immediately. Its social media profiles are now named WDI Norway. I use ‘WHRC Norway’ here to reflect the name used at the time of my research and reflect accurately on the data material. Whereas WHRC Norway more frequently mentions individuals, the broader search result (see Table 1 below) shows a similar tendency to the LLH2019, in its frequent mentions of other nation’s WHRC chapters, Norwegian government politicians, in addition to a more targeted focus on Norwegian LGBTQI+ organizations, trans and queer activists.

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Table 1  Top ten number of references by @mentions for all four accounts (number of mentions in brackets) Mot Strømmen (N = 3188)

LLH2019 (N = 559) WHRC Norge (N = 2002)

Matriarken (N = 306)

  1. fri_het (218)   2. benthhoyre (200)   3. whrcn (162)   4. tonjegjevjon (123)   5. frodesaugestad (94)   6. trettebergstuen (88)   7. trondgam (87)   8. erna_solberg (83)   9. aakremoberg (80) 10. motekstreme (80)

  1. Benthhoyre (54)   2. Alliancelgb (37)   3. redlgb_ (32)   4. llh2019 (31)   5. frentelgb (28)   6. alianzalgb (27)   7. arbeiderpartiet (26)   8. erna_solberg (25)   9. lgballiance_usa (25) 10. trettebergstuen (25)

  1. arbeiderpartiet (28)   2. trettebergstuen (24)   3. jonasgahrstore (19)   4. Sappfo_ (19)   5. mitt_ombud (17)   6. benthhoyre (14)   7. abidraja (12)   8. fri_het (12)   9. whrcn (12) 10. sekulf (11)

  1. fri_het (159)   2. kamillaaslaksen (109)   3. tonjegjevjon (106)   4. trondgam (102)   5. mathiasfischer (99)   6. wcrcn (92)   7. motekstreme (88)   8. bestmedbart (78)   9. erlendfri (65) 10. aageb (62)

Finally, Matriarken is a the most recent Twitter account of the four, having been established as late as March 2021. It is an extension of a blog that is linked in the Twitter profile, where the owner often posts own texts as well as those of collaborators, some of whom are mentioned in the Table 1 above, who are also active in LLH2019 and WHRC Norge. The account profile presents itself in ways that explicitly demonstrates its commitment to anti-gender politics: ‘Adult. Human. Female. Stand with J.K Rowling and Maya Forstater. Lack of integrity is a world wide problem. Truth, facts and peer reviewed science.’

Top-Ten Number of References by @mentions What emerges from this overview can be summarized in five points. First, there are frequent mentions of government politicians and even ministers, especially the then health minister Bent Høye (benthhoyre), who is responsible for transgender health care policy. Second, there are frequent mentions of international collaborators and supporters, especially the LGB Alliance in the UK (Alliancelgb). Third, cross-­mentions of each other and individual members who are also part of these initiatives, as well as

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supporters appear frequently (motekstreme, sekulf). Fourth, there are frequent mentions of individual politicians they are especially critical of, particularly the Labour Party, the then Minister of Culture and Sports, Abid Raja (abidraja), and the Labour Party politician Anette Trettebergstuden, who at this time was the head of the parliamentary gender equality and diversity committee (trettebergstuen). Fifth and a final point, is the repeat targeting of individual trans and queer activists (bestmedbart) and the national LGBTQI+ organization FRI (fri_het). When looking at LLH2019, the two-fold division between mentions of international LGB Alliance sibling organizations on the one side and mentions of Norwegian government politicians and parliamentarians is dominant here. It suggests that LLH2019 has a particular agenda of networking with their international partner organizations and linking the Norwegian situation and their campaigns locally with the transnational movement and its priorities. A second major agenda is targeting government politicians and ministers with their tweets and influencing—or at least be seen to try to influence—policy making at the highest levels in the country. Summary of Data Analysis with Content Examples This section discusses common themes across the ten most retweeted stories on the four accounts within the twelve-months period considered. I focus the discussion to the use of (explicit and implicit) references to science, biology, facts, knowledge, and information. I look for patterns in phrases, common topics and news stories, and cross-reference with the references/mentions presented in Table 1 in the previous section. In the following I share are a few examples from three of the most retweeted posts at Mot Strømmen. I suggest that they exemplify common themes and phrases used by all four accounts. The first is a retweet from a parody account going by the name Titania McGrath (run by Australian comedian Andrew Doyle), calling herself “queen of woke”. The account has over 600,000 followers worldwide6: • So far today I’ve got a woman fired for claiming that sex is binary, shouted abuse at an old man collecting money for the British Legion, dog-piled people on Twitter for disagreeing with me and burned some books by Dr Seuss. 6   For more information about Andrew Doyle: https://www.theaustralian.com.au/ inquirer/queen-of-woke-titania-mcgrath-is-a-titan-of-social-satire/news-story/9897ac592 e69f9a348bbd20b8267807e

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It’s SO exhausting being on the right side of history. (Tweet 921. 4.3.2021. Retweets: 2371)

All four accounts frequently retweet posts concerning policy and events in the UK. The detransitioning case of Keira Bell and the ensuing court case, has gained particular attention of anti-gender campaigners. This much-shared tweet from March 2021 updates on the campaign to collect donations for Bell’s legal campaign: “Protect gender dysphoric children from experimental treatment”: • The Tavi have applied to the CoA. More info in link. We plan to file against this next week. It’s an extremely expensive case and of course I can’t afford this on my own. Once again I am so grateful for any donations. Every lil bit will add up. (Tweet 2255. number of retweets: 963. 3/1/2021. Username KLBfax.) The story includes a hyperlink to a crowdfunding website where Bell introduces themselves as an ex-patient of gender identity clinics and pledges to stop procedures of gender confirming medical procedures on minors. A third post concerns the oft-mentioned threat of transwomen’s access to ‘women’s spaces’; in this case, the story is about women’s prisons. • *NEW AND EXCLUSIVE*: Today we are publishing the internal documents that reveal why prison bosses decided to put the unit for dangerous trans prisoners in a women’s prison instead of the men’s. /1 https://t.co/fl3LgqiZji—Prison bosses put transgender sex offenders into female prisons because they need “association with other women.” Fair play for women’s objectives: https://fairplayforwomen.com/about­us/our-­beliefs/ “Trans rights are human rights, but they are not female rights.” (Tweet 281. 17/5/21. Fairplaywomen. Retweets: 946.)

What emerges from the most shared posts when specifically coding for mentions related to science, facts, biology, truth, knowledge, and information is a familiar framework and web of connected themes and actors, nationally and transnationally. Firstly, a common strategy is to emphasize that sex is binary and to use ‘female’ and ‘male’ to underline the claim to

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having science on one’s side, by way of citing biological essentialist ideology. The term ‘women’ is commonly applied to articulate a clear opposition to ‘transwomen’ belonging in this category. By doing this, ‘transwomen’ are sought relegated to the category of ‘male’ or at least as not belonging to the core—read: biologically essentialist—category of women (or ‘females’) that they themselves ascribe to. This discursively ideological move happens a lot in posts about sports, shared space (prison, bathrooms, changing rooms), and in the broader context of threats to women’s safety, and sometimes children’s vulnerability too. In short, certain stories and claims to truth-telling through citing biological essentialist ideology and ‘scientific facts’, support these transnationally circulating stories of misinformation. Secondly, when comparing with top mentions as well (Table  1), the intent of sharing certain stories is also about connecting with already-­ supportive collaborators nationally and internationally, as well as targeting politicians and activists they consider to be posing threats to their agenda by way of their public profile, position, and media engagement. The frequent mentions of government ministers, parliamentary politicians, the national LGBTQI+ organization, the national ombudsman for equality and so on, support this impression. This strategy is a well-documented one internationally. Third, and related to the two previous points, a key aim of the Twitter strategy is to influence public discourse and help exacerbate political polarization by ceaselessly targeting minority populations they consider threats to moral, order, the family, women and so forth. In this endeavor, the concepts of sex and gender are operationalized so as to emphasize a natural and fundamental distinction between sex—read as a biological, material reality—and gender, read as a social role, norm and/or ideology (see Pearce et al., 2020). These actors deny information and arguments that negate their own views, by frequently sharing and commenting on stories that spread misinformation, distrust scientific experts and peer reviewed expert publications and make counterarguments that they go against public opinion’s ‘common sense’ and allege experts’ ideological propaganda. Fourth and finally, the strategic alliances and frequency of tweeting, sharing, retweeting, and targeting specific individuals and group at specific times, and by using very similar phrases and arguments across different engagements, show that these campaigns are well-organized, resourced, and cannot be reduced to the whimsical one-off, lone engagements of single actors or insignificant local groups.

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Conclusion Norwegian and transnational anti-gender movements and their social media campaigns, show the ways in which anti-gender rhetoric can be read on one level as conceptual responses to many years of basic human rights advancements from gender and sexual minority groups, and especially transgender rights, as they have progressed markedly in recent years (see Corredor, 2019). In this chapter, I have put forward two main arguments. Firstly, I have suggested that whereas the 2016–2021 time period has seen great advancements in transgender rights and social visibility in Norway, with growing popular support and societal visibility of trans, nonbinary and queer identities and knowledge, this has at least in part led to a backlash against gender and sexual minorities, in Norway as in many other locations. The second major argument concerns the anti-gender rhetorical strategy employed—especially in social media—to influence politics, government, and popular opinion. The ambition is to detract from a focus on trans-issues from a position of rights, justice, and equity, to curtail support, rights, and policy developments, and demonize the very basics of trans existence by positing anti-gender ideology as scientific facts and biology. A central tactics for the four accounts I discussed in this chapter, is to target government politicians and ministers, as well as LGBTQI+ activists, with criticism and claims to scientific ‘facts’. I have demonstrated that an important strategy in this respect is to retweet, mention and ‘at’ (@) their supporters–domestic and international–as a way to amplify their reach and encourage more retweets and public visibility for their position. Using English language instead of Norwegian or Scandinavian language is likely also a strategic choice to reach more of their international supporters who are prone to actively retweet and share their posts. Corredor’s concept of transnational countermovements is useful in that it calls attention to the well-organized, resourceful and sophisticated countermovements to debase and defeat feminist rights and LGBTQI+ policy (Corredor, 2019). In a similar vein, Swedish ethnologist and scholar of antigender politics, Jenny Gunnarsson Payne recently argued that  the ‘on-going threats to European democracies are inextricably bound to conflicts of gender, sexuality and reproduction’ (Payne, 2019). From the case study presented here, considered in this context, it is clear that anti-gender movements in Norway and their transnational reach are part of this complex threat to democracy and must be taken extremely seriously in the time to come,

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when growing reactionary populism and disengagement from knowledge, facts, and research are seriously undermining international human rights protocols and even democracy itself.

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Kuhar, R., & Paternotte, D. (Eds.). (2017). Anti-gender campaigns in Europe: Mobilizing against equality. London: Rowman & Littlefield. Lu, C.  T. (2020). A computational approach to analyzing and detecting trans-­ exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs) on Twitter. Dartmouth College Undergraduate Theses. 165. https://digitalcommons.dartmouth.edu/senior_ theses/165 Martinsson, L. (2020). When gender studies becomes a threatening religion. The European Journal of Women’s Studies, 27(3), 293–300. Massanari, A. L. (2018). Rethinking research ethics, power, and the risk of visibility in the era of the ‘Alt-Right’ gaze. Social Media + Society, 4(2), 1–9. https:// doi.org/10.1177/2056305118768302 Matamoros-Fernández, A., & Farkas, J. (2021). Racism, hate speech, and social media: A systematic review and critique. Television & New Media, 22(2), 205–224. https://doi.org/10.1177/1527476420982230 Monro, S., & van der Ros, J. (2017). Trans* and gender variant citizenship and the state in Norway. Critical Social Policy, 38(1), 57–78. https://doi. org/10.1177/0261018317733084 Nadim, M., Thorbjørnsrud, K., & Fladmoe, A. (2021). A study of participants in heated and aggressive online debates (Gråsoner og grenseoverskridelser på nettet: En studie av deltagere i opphetede og aggressive nettdebatter). Report. Institute for Social Research (Institutt for samfunnsforskning). 2021:1. https://hdl. handle.net/11250/2724997. Accessed 15 Nov 2021. Norwegian Directorate of Health (2015, April). Rett til rett kjønn – helse til alle kjønn. Utredning av vilkår for endring av juridisk kjønn organisering av helsetjenester for personer som opplever kjønnsinkongruens og kjønnsdysfori. Report. https://www.helsedirektoratet.no/rapporter/rett-til-rett-kjonn/ Rett%20til%20rett%20kj%C3%B8nn.pdf/ Olufemi, L. (2020). Feminism, interrupted: Disrupting power. Pluto Press. Onanuga, P. (2020). Coming out and reaching out: Linguistic advocacy on queer Nigerian twitter. Journal of African Cultural Studies. https://doi.org/10.108 0/13696815.2020.1806799 Ottar.: https://www.ottar.se/artiklar/antitrans-­allians Paternotte, D., & Kuhar, R. (Eds.). (2017). Anti-gender campaigns in Europe: Mobilizing against equality. Rowman and Littlefield. Payne, J.  G. (2019). Challenging “gender ideology”: (Anti-)gender politics in Europe’s populist moment. The New Pretender. http://new-­pretender. com/2019/02/10/challenging-­g ender-­i deology-­a nti-­g ender-­p olitics-­i n-­ europes-­populist-­moment-­jenny-­gunnarsson-­payne/. Accessed 20 Feb 2020. Pearce, R., Erikainen, S., & Vincent, B. (2020). TERF wars: An introduction. The Sociological Review Monographs, 68(4), 677–698. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 0038026120934713

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Between Populism and Popular Citizenship in Science Conflicts Mette Marie Roslyng

Introduction A changing media landscape has altered the way that citizens and other political actors make use of digital media to raise issues and conflicts in relation to science. The politics of food has become one of the battlefields within which alternative, more sustainable, political visions have challenged hegemonic conceptions of human’s relationship with nature and the status of science in environmental discourse. New online public spheres provide democratic opportunities for citizens and groups to voice their concerns in public debate. However, as authorities are increasingly met with mistrust in science controversies, we see examples of science being challenged from a populist perspective (Mede & Schäfer, 2020; Saresma & Palonen, 2022). In this media environment, it can be difficult to distinguish between points of concern raised democratically by citizens and problematic pseudo- or anti-scientific positions in the debate. Academic

M. M. Roslyng (*) Aalborg University, Copenhagen, Denmark e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 H. Eslen-Ziya, A. Giorgi (eds.), Populism and Science in Europe, Palgrave Studies in European Political Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97535-7_10

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and political calls for scientific mainstreaming and scientific authority therefore run the risk of closing down necessary democratic scrutiny and critique of science. Much literature on populism and science tend to replicate this tension between democratic concern and pseudo-science, particularly when maintaining a division between the rational and knowing scientist and an irrational, less knowledgeable public (Lockwood, 2018). The chapter adopts a constructivist approach to science populism by emphasising the role of media and political actors in negotiating the meaning of scientific authority and mistrust in science. This chapter argues that science populism needs rethinking through the concept of popular, digital citizenship by examining how political movements draw on citizenship to articulate alternative knowledge positions online that contribute to populist discourses on food, science, and the environment. Alternative knowledge positions are counter-establishment as they challenge hegemonic scientific discourses (Mouffe, 2018). Following Ernesto Laclau, populism is viewed discursively as a ‘mode of articulation’ of political frontiers that are made up of political demands (Laclau, 2005a: 153). This means that science populism as a political logic can be left-wing as well as right-wing. Populist demands, furthermore, are conceptualised as acts of digital citizenship (Isin & Ruppert, 2015) where popular citizenship is performed through digital acts of citizenship when subjects articulate rights-claims online (Isin & Nielsen, 2008). These two perspectives in combination allow us to analyse how and if environmental movements rearticulate science by drawing on radically alternative notions of ‘the people’ against an elite in the struggle to redefine the meaning of healthy and ethical food and new ways for humans to interact with nature. The chapter draws on the Danish Vegan Party as an illustrative case of Chantal Mouffe’s (2018) call for a new left populism. The party uses digital and social media avidly to articulate political positions based on alternative rights-claims on facts, knowledge, and truths about food, its impact on the environment, and the naturalness with which animal products are consumed and produced. It is argued that the Vegan Party plays an important role in challenging hegemonic perceptions of food and agriculture from a populist perspective by articulating digital rights-claims regarding ecocentrism and radical environmentalism. The rights-claims show how three central and interconnected populist antagonistic logics are present in the vegan discourse: (1) conflicts regarding mainstream versus alternative knowledge, (2) the people versus the citizen, and (3) humans versus non-humans.

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Theoretical Framework This chapter analyses the Danish Vegan Party’s use of citizen media as an example of left-wing populist discourse viewed through the lenses of digital citizenship. The literature on popular engagements with science work with a problematic tension between democratic citizen engagement and popular mistrust in science (Irwin & Wynne, 1996). While the notion of citizenship draws on empowerment and different forms of political participation in relation to science conflicts, studies on populism, in contrast, often rely on a more passive population, articulated as ‘the people’. The population, in this view, reacts in a primarily emotional, sometimes irrational, way to social trends and problems arising from globalisation or modern risks (van Zoonen, 2012), and it is often represented by authoritarian, right-wing nationalist parties or leaders. Challenging the passive-active dichotomy in science populism may help the understanding of how radical environmentalist movements engage in articulating alternative, populist/ popular positions that challenge mainstream notions of science in relation to health and the environment. Likewise, other prominent dichotomies in the field such as rational-irrational, facts-emotions and indeed truth-falsity also come under scrutiny as they may in fact divert attention away from other central, but less visible, antagonisms at play in science conflicts. Science Between Populism and Popular Citizenship Science populism is often seen as an antidemocratic and obstructive force underlying modern politics. Several studies emphasise the role played by anti-intellectualism and the promotion of common-sense over expert knowledge as a predominant stylistic feature in populist parties and movements (Wodak, 2013). Scholars are increasingly concerned about emergent social phenomena connected to science scepticism, misinformation, and ‘fake news’ on social media (Farkas & Schou, 2018). Some specifically examine citizens’ role in spreading false information through social media during the ‘infodemic’ in the COVID-19 crisis (Fernandez-Torres et al., 2021). Others argue that science scepticism may lead to articulations of alternative science positions of limited legitimacy that become ideologically loaded with emotions (Eslen-Ziya, 2022) and can be seen as counter-­ hegemonic responses to different crises of trust in science and democratic institutions (Raffini & Penalva-Verdú, 2022; Saresma & Palonen, 2022). In relation to digital media logics and science populism Eslen-Ziya

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identifies a: ‘troll-science … based on (distorted) scientific arguments … moulded into populist discourse, creating an alternative narrative on the conception of gender equality’ (Eslen-Ziya, 2020: 1). These operate in ‘emotional echo-chambers where common emotions are ‘echoed’ back and forth and shared by others’ (Eslen-Ziya, 2020: 3). Echo-chambers can be seen as networks formed by social media in which information is ascribed meaning according to a communal bias within a closed room (Bessi, 2016: 460). Van Zoonen’s concept of ‘I-pistemology’ conveys that a ‘personal truth’ based on subjective, personal experiences and feelings can explain the move away from factuality and the declining trust in official knowledge in current political debates (van Zoonen, 2012: 57). ‘Where epistemology is concerned with the nature, sources, and methods of knowledge, then I-pistemology answers these questions on the basis of I (as in me, myself) and Identity, with the Internet as the great facilitator’ (van Zoonen, 2012: 60). Others have used the concept of pseudo-science to delimit the confines of legitimate science and to understand how alternative knowledge positions can serve the purpose of ‘rationalising’ or legitimising right-wing populist political projects or to formulate alternative positions in the face of mistrust in science in relation to controversial topics such as vaccination (Tomasi, 2020; Zuk & Zuk, 2020). Drawing on Cas Mudde’s (2017) ideational conceptualisation of populism, Mede and Schäfer develop a model for the study of science-related populism. ‘We understand science-related populism as a set of ideas suggesting an antagonism between an (allegedly) virtuous ordinary people and an (allegedly) unvirtuous academic elite – an antagonism that is due to the elite illegitimately claiming and the people legitimately demanding science-related decision-making sovereignty and truth-speaking sovereignty’ (Mede & Schäfer, 2020: 484). Ylä-Anttila (2018: 357) proposes the concept of counter-knowledge to understand how right-wing populist groups adopt, promote, and produce alternative inquiry to challenge mainstream politics. Counter-knowledge is defined as ‘alternative knowledge which challenges established knowledge with new ones, thus providing an opportunity for political mobilisation’ (Ylä-Anttila, 2018: 559). This concept dovetails somewhat with Mede and Schäfer’s conceptualisation of a central populist antagonism based on populist actors demanding truth-speaking sovereignty on behalf of ‘the people’. However, Ylä-Anttila emphasises specifically that counter-knowledge should not be defined as misinformation as it is not necessarily wrong per se (Ylä-Anttila, 2018: 361). The concept therefore may prove useful to understand how

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environmental movements seek to articulate and promote alternative knowledge from a left-wing perspective. The vegan movement’s ideological foundation, relying on cosmopolitanism, solidarity, and equality, diverges fundamentally from the right-­ wing populist agenda’s notions of authoritarianism and nationalism. Viewing environmentalism and veganism as populist will therefore necessitate a theoretical move away from populism as a particular ideology and towards a conceptualisation of populism as a logic that draws on political practice as developed by Laclau (2005a, b). Laclau suggests that populist logics should be studied through the analytical unit of (unfulfilled) social demands that dichotomise the social space and create a political frontier that construct ‘the “people” and “power” as antagonistic poles’ but in a way that does not a priori assign a particular ideological or political content to this logic (Laclau, 2005: 156–157). For Laclau there are ‘two clear preconditions of populism: (1) the formation of an internal antagonistic frontier separating “the people” from power; and (2) the equivalential articulation of demands making the emergence of “the people” possible’ (Laclau, 2005b: 74). Following this line, scholars have examined populism from a left-wing perspective (Stavrakakis & Katsambekis, 2014). A few studies have also analysed the phenomenon of green populism as a progressive and antagonistic struggle against mainstream politics and culture (Beeson, 2019; Davies, 2020). This chapter seeks to expand on this endeavour by applying Laclau’s populist logic along with Chantal Mouffe’s normative call for a new left populism (2018) to understand radical green positions that rearticulate modern society’s central antagonisms with new demands pertaining to human’s relation to nature, animals, and the climate. The central antagonisms regarding science populism and citizenship are rethought in three ways: (1) conflicts regarding mainstream versus alternative knowledge, (2) the people versus the citizen, and, most importantly, (3) humans versus non-humans. Alternative Knowledge and Left-Wing Populism Populist science conceptualised as pseudo-science or misinformation contrasts with the academic literature on the sociology of science and science and technology studies which investigate the social and political conditions within which science is co-produced, debated, and communicated in social and public spheres (Jasanoff, 2004). The link between knowledge, science, and truth is therefore problematized and declining trust in

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scientific authority is, according to Irwin and Wynne (1996), more fruitfully countered by deliberation and public participation rather than fact-­ checking or expert authority. Right-wing populism as antagonistic anti-science positions, however, remains a challenge for inclusive, deliberative approaches to alternative knowledge positions. To understand radical environmentalism as left populism (Mouffe, 2018), Laclau’s (2005a, b) emphasis on populist logics as antagonistic politics may prove useful. Conflicts over science, in this light, make visible antagonisms regarding humans’ interaction with nature as well the contested meanings of facts, discursive negotiations over the meaning of health, humanism, rights, and the environment. Science can be seen as a pervading social imaginary that political actors draw upon to give meaning to these different, divergent constructions of meaning played out as political expressions in digital media (Roslyng & Larsen, 2021). In conflicts over science, debates about truth versus falsity are replaced by political struggles over who gets to define hegemonic science and knowledge. Alternative knowledge positions become counter-­ knowledge because they challenge a hegemonic scientific social imaginary (Roslyng & Larsen, 2021: 6) defined as ‘an unlimited horizon of inscription of any social demand’ (Laclau, 1990: 64). As this unlimited horizon of inscription can always only be partial due to the discursive nature of scientific discourse, alternative knowledge can be seen as knowledge that challenges a hegemonic reading of science through the articulation of (populist) logics of antagonism. The People as Citizens In this light, citizens and political groups articulate demands as alternative knowledge positions that contest science-claims on digital media. Isin and Nielsen rethink citizenship as they diverge the focus away from legal, state-­ bound forms of citizenship ‘to acts of citizenships – that is, collective or individual deeds that rupture social-historical patterns’ (Isin & Nielsen, 2008: 2). A subject becomes a digital citizen by articulating his or her rights-claims on the internet (Isin & Ruppert, 2015) often through citizen media in which unaffiliated citizens actively intervene in public space through diverse forms of media practices (Baker & Blaagaard, 2016: 16). In the context of radical food claims, these practices take the form of alternative and counter-hegemonic knowledge positions that challenge a hegemonic food discourse (Roslyng, 2011). The alternative positions can draw

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on populist logics if they instigate a frontier that separates ‘the people’ from power (Laclau, 2005b). The chapter’s analytical focus is therefore directed towards examining how and if a radical environmental movement draws on populist logics to articulate alternative discursive positions on food, science, and the environment. Internet content that performs rights-­ claims becomes acts of citizenship voicing the will of ‘the people’. Post-Humanism as Radical Populism Finally, the radicality of environmental groups stems from re-formulating the central antagonisms in society to emphasise the problematic relation between humans and the environment. These positions contain critiques of anthropocentrism and rejections of less radical notions of environmentalism that are seen as post-political or compartmentalised from other spheres (Neimanis & Hedrén, 2015). For Rosi Braidotti post-humanism stems from many sources that share a commitment to move beyond the anthropocentric as ‘environmental, evolutionary, cognitive, bio-genetic and digital trans-disciplinary fronts (…) rest on post-anthropocentric premises and technologically mediated emphasis on Life as a zoe-centred system of species egalitarianism (Braidotti, 2013: 146). Veganism can therefore be viewed through the lenses of her ecological post-human subjectivity calling for self-reflexivity for the subject who no longer occupy the humanist centre. Rather, ‘posthuman subjectivity expresses an embodied and embedded and hence partial form of accountability, based on a strong sense of collectivity, relationality and hence community building’ (Braidotti, 2013: 49). The vegan subjectivity is embodied as it is lived and experienced as well as embedded in social, cultural, and political practices. Moreover, it draws on a post-human, sustainable ethics as it conveys ‘an enlarged sense of inter-connection between self and others, including the non-human or ‘earth’ others’ (Braidotti, 2013: 190). The analysis will focus on how digital citizenship, articulated by the vegan community online, draws on a notion of post-human subjectivity and ethics which reformulate the central societal and cultural antagonisms to include a frontier between humans and non-humans, thus dramatically responding to Mouffe’s call for a left populist project that radicalises the ‘ethico-political principles of liberal-democratic regime, “liberty and equality for all”’ (Mouffe, 2018: 39).

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Methods: The Case of the Danish Vegan Party To analyse how political movements articulate rights-claims as alternative knowledge positions that contribute to a populist discourse on food, science, and the environment, the chapter conducts a qualitative case study using netnographic methods of data collection and drawing on the Danish Vegan Party as a critical case to illuminate how radical left-wing movements articulate populist positions according to an antagonistic logic. Contextualisation The case study is focused on the Danish Vegan Party which was formed in 2018; it received some attention during the 2019 National election. It did, however, only reach the required number of signatures to run for the Danish parliament in August 2020. The party is part of a wider trend of no less than three new green parties appearing in Danish politics arguably responding to a gap in the green agenda in the existing Danish parties (Hørkilde, 2021). While Denmark may have enjoyed a certain level of front-runner status in green politics in the last part of the 20th century, particularly agriculture has been an area of tribulation in relation to both pollution and carbon emissions (Sørensen, 2020) and radical environmental critiques have traditionally emerged from social movements rather than from within the political system. The Vegan Party stands out with its focus on ecocentrism, animal rights, and a stated goal of completely phasing out conventional agriculture.1 For Flyvbjerg (1991: 149) a case can be critical when it has strategic importance in relation to the phenomena studied. The Vegan Party can be seen as a particularly information-rich and strategic case regarding three aspects. First, the party uses digital media in a radical and highly antagonistic way by sharing digital content directed against conventional agriculture and the consumption of animal products. This is indicative of a new form of progressive left populism that actively challenges mainstream knowledge and science according to populist logics. Second, the case of veganism has strategic importance in challenging hegemonic scientific discourses of health and technological risks in farming and food production. The Vegan Party can be seen as populist in its attempt to rearticulate notions of rights towards a new post-humanist discourse, thus challenging the  The Vegan Party website: https://vgpt.dk/politisk-fundament/ (accessed 20/5 2021).

1

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food hegemony. Third, the Danish context is relatively typical of green politics in comparable Western countries. With a political environment characterised by a high degree of cultural and social homogeneity and public trust (Lundqvist & Petersen, 2010), there is a strong hegemonic potential for the dominant discourse on food and agriculture. This makes the task of articulating (populist) alternative positions particularly challenging. It also means that there is an unexplored democratic potential in left-wing science populism in Danish society that could be interesting for comparable countries also. Netnographic Data Collection The study uses netnographic methods (Boellstorff et al., 2012; Kozinets, 2010) to observe and document how a particular online community is established around a movement, the Danish Vegan Party, within which demands and rights-claims are presented, debated, and contested. The analysis will focus on two events that are chosen strategically to exemplify the most central rights-claims articulated by the party. The events, moreover, originate in comments that led to an extensive online debate in the form of comments, likes, and shares which allows us to examine how demands circulate and evolve on social, connective media with a particular focus on Facebook and Twitter. While the events primarily take place on social media, thus exemplifying an online community directly related to an online culture, veganism is also part of a wider community extending beyond the narrow context of the social media texts (Kozinets, 2010: 64). The first event, a Facebook post regarding kindergarten lunch, was chosen because it stirred an extensive debate over health implications of eating either a plant-based or a meat-based diet, not only on Facebook but also across the mediascape. The debate shows how demands circulate on social media both in favour of and in opposition to the hegemonic food system. The second event consists of several posts, tweets, videos, and website articles across the media scape documenting and debating animal cruelty and is central for understanding how the left populist movement rearticulates rights-claims in favour of a post-human subjectivity. Table 1 provides an overview of the collected data including the comments, shares, and likes of the original posts and tweets.

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Table 1  Data overview of the Vegan Party case Event 1: Kindergarten lunch Event 2: Animal cruelty Post author(s)

Daniel Buus

Affiliation

Vegan Party member and local candidate 30/4/2021 Facebook

Date posted Content and platform Links Reactionsa

Newspaper articles 4,200 comments; 1,400 reactions; 169 shares

Henrik Vindfelt; Daniel Buus, Lisel Vad Olsson Vegan Party chair, members and candidates 25–26/4/2021; 1/6/2021 two Tweets, two Facebook posts, Vegan Party webpage, YouTube video post YouTube, Facebook, memes, videnskab. dk, newspaper articles In total: 115 comments; 724 reactions; 68 shares; 25 retweets; 91 views

a All data retrieved on 20/5, 14/6 and 15/6 2021. This provides the snapshot of the number of comments, reactions, and shares on the posts

Event 1: Vegan Health Protest as Populist Digital Citizenship The first event is a post written on 30/4 2021 by Vegan Party member and local candidate Daniel Buus on his own Facebook wall. It shows in image of the lunch served in his three-year-old son’s kindergarten consisting mainly of open ryebread sandwiches with processed meat toppings supplemented by cheese and cucumber slices. In the accompanying text, Buus expresses his outrage over the health-implications of this diet for young children. He quotes cancer research and links to an external webpage to support his point. The post had on 14/6 2021 more than 4,200 comments, 1,400 reactions (likes and emojis) and 169 shares on Facebook.2 According to the Vegan Party’s own calculation, the post reached 500,000 Danes in just one week.3 This shows how social media content can go viral and spread widely across platforms and feeds. Some of the shares had an equally large number of comments, likes and shares, for instance on the Facebook page of the tabloid newspaper BT.4 The post, the comments, and the reactions show how Buus makes digital rights-claims that are antagonistic: 2  https://www.facebook.com/109622273936015/posts/302362511328656/?d=n (accessed 14/6 2021). 3  https://www.facebook.com/veganerpartiet (accessed 14/6 2021). 4  https://www.facebook.com/ditbt/posts/4879828348711011 (accessed 14/6 2021).

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Here is a photo from my three-year-old son’s kindergarten. The children can choose between five different open sandwiches: two with heavily processed meat toppings, one with breaded and oil saturated fish filet, one with solidified udder secretion and finally one with margarine and cucumber. Minimum two of the mentioned toppings are on the list of food stuffs that we should not eat because they cause cancer and contain large amounts of nitrite. It is food that the Cancer Society warn us directly against (see source). How can we defend that we as a society serve our children food that is verifiably harmful!?5

The two most prominent antagonisms in this event, expressing a populist logic, are the articulation of ‘the people’ as citizens through digital rights-claims and the expressions of alternative knowledge positions as counter-hegemonic. The post can be seen as a digital act of citizenship (Isin & Nielsen, 2008) with a demand for the kindergarten (and the local municipality) to provide healthy food that does not put his young son at risk. That in itself is not an unusual citizen demand; what is striking in the post is that the image shows a selection of open ryebread sandwiches with various toppings that are typical of a traditional Danish lunch, seen by most people as perfectly fine. In fact, ryebread is in Denmark commonly considered essential to a healthy diet due to its high level of fibre and other nutrients compared to white wheat bread. The demand therefore becomes an alternative knowledge position where food previously considered healthy is articulated as risky. This contains a digital citizen rights-claim (Isin & Ruppert, 2015) presented from a vegan perspective and expressed through the phrases: ‘heavily processed meat’ and ‘solidified udder secretion’ to describe the meat and cheese toppings. Moreover, Buus is identified as @ veganwithdaniel and as a political candidate on both Facebook and Twitter; he describes himself on Twitter as ‘Fulltime Animal Rights Activist’, ‘Retired mover’, and ‘fighting for animals and a more compassionate world’.6 This sets him up as an activist presenting a counter-­ position in relation to hegemonic notions of food (Roslyng, 2011). While there is no direct reference to ‘the people’ in the post, the vegan counter-­ position still draws on a populist logic because Buus’ act of citizenship is directed against a hegemonic food discourse based on conventional farming. 5 6

 https://www.facebook.com/109622273936015/posts/302362511328656/?d=n  https://twitter.com/VeganWithDaniel (accessed 20/5 2021).

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This vegan citizen rights-claim for a new understanding of healthy food is met by a large number of opposing and supporting comments. This shows the formation of oppositional rights-claims that defend the hegemonic food discourse by suggesting that the food offered in the kindergarten is good, healthy, and traditional. The argumentations used are at the same time factual and emotional, attacking vegan discourse for being radical, extreme, naïve, dangerous, and ridiculous. One typical comment states: ‘I grew up on that and damned if I am not still alive’. The short comment sparks 243 likes and 90 responses. The thread and sub-threads display a heavy use of sarcasm and heated attacks that are typical of the social media genre. A direct counter-response from Buus himself is, ‘Call Cancer Research immediately and tell them that you know best and that you are still alive!’, ridiculing the lack of factual and evidence-based support. This is, then, met with ‘there have actually never been so many old people as now, isn’t it amazing?’, also, a sarcastic tone but now pertaining to the increased life expectancy in modern society which, in turn, meets the response: ‘People die more slowly today, it starts earlier with lifestyle diseases. Over 50% suffer from overweight’ and another person claims that this is due to ‘technologies such as soap and hospitals’. In these comments, facts and knowledge are bounced back and forth, contested, and defended and several comments on both sides contain calls for proof and documentation. Sarcasm is prevalent in political social media content and is here used to confront and expose the opposing part; not necessarily to cultivate humanity and group ties (Korkut et  al., 2021) but to win an argument in relation to the two diverging conceptions of health thus contributing to a polarisation of the online food debate. Sarcasm therefore supports and amplifies the populist logic that establishes both competing discourses against each other in controversies over who can make claims on behalf of the people articulated as citizens (Laclau, 2005a, b). The antagonistic frontier between mainstream and alternative knowledge is expressed through the two opposing discursive readings of risk and health identified as rights-claims: meat as a serious health risk versus meat as traditional, healthy food. One citizen writes about the possible health risks of veganism, turning the health argument against the vegans. Vegans risk doing even very big damage on themselves and their children due to vitamin deficiency. It is apparently bad being a dog or a cat in a vegan home. Vegans are like religious fantasts. They have lost their minds. They

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should not speak publicly about their condition. God created us for a varied diet; otherwise, we probably would have had four stomachs like the cows.

The author attaches a link to an article about vitamin deficiency amongst vegans on a respectable science dissemination website entitled ‘Vegans are in vitamin and mineral deficit’.7 The initial emphasis on factual evidence, however, contrasts with the argumentative link presented in the post that is based on a number of assumptions: vitamin deficit → neglect of pets and children → religious fanatism → mental condition → no right to speak publicly → vegetarianism is unnatural and morally/religiously wrong. Another citizen, who calls himself ‘Michael … Veganos’, retaliates and tags his opponent in a reply to each of the critical points made against veganism: It is right that if you do not get enough B12 it is a problem but research says that supplements are a more stable resource than animal products. We saw therefore that 39% of the American population has low B12  in the Framinham study. This is why many nutrition experts recommend EVERYONE to get their B12 from pills, particularly those over 50. So your argument is actually a better argument against meat-eaters. Because all vegans have definitely learned what B12 is but many meat-eaters naively think they get all they need from their meat and potatoes. Research also shows that cats and dogs are equally healthy today on vegan food compared to meat-food. The biggest study on cats, out recently, shows far fewer diseases for cats on a vegan diet. Which makes pretty good sense when you learn a little about the garbage they put into that food. And the only micro-­ nutrients one is missing on a vegan diet is B12, there is nothing more to talk about. Get your information from research rather than clickbait “journalism” without serious sources. And what you believe “god” created us to be is obviously not much use in a serious debate.

In both comments for and against veganism the antagonists use links and sources to back up their argument and draw on science as a social imaginary (Roslyng & Larsen, 2021) which provides the primary legitimate support for each of the opposing arguments. The pro-vegan reply makes sure to counter each argument with scientific evidence to show that 7  https://videnskab.dk/krop-sundhed/veganere-mangler-vitaminer-og-mineraler?fbclid= IwAR2FUcrlS5OqPLVHUf_dyOwuWDriPLtSH1S8_YDGkv6ZZx7Pe3qMrk0upXk (accessed 20/5 2021).

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although a B12 vitamin deficit is a serious health risk it is not confined to be a consequence of a vegan diet. He strongly rejects references to religion as a valid form of argumentation as well as the source, videnskab.dk. Instead, he refers to a specific study and positions vegans as more knowledgeable than meat-eaters on the issue of nutrition. Yet another citizen critically argues against him on the question of cat’s diets quoting an (unknown) veterinary source directly to say that ‘cats are strictly meat-­ eating animals and need ingredients from animals/meat for the up-take of important nutrients, such as vitamin A and arachidon-acid, (…) protein, arginine, sulfuric amino-acids and taurine’. According to her, a lack of taurine can cause heart failure and blindness; this is countered by Michael Veganos with a link to a study in a scientific journal supporting that taurine is produced synthetically, and that her vet, sadly, needs to keep up with current research. The frontier established here between different sciences cannot be clearly defined as mainstream versus alternative; rather each position has varying degrees of legitimacy supporting the notion of science as a (contested) social imaginary. The vegan rights-claims are supported with alternative knowledge from a vegan perspective considered by opponents to be unconventional and counter-hegemonic, but at the same time, the activists are successful in establishing a legitimising social imaginary based on supporting evidence. The Cancer Society’s call to avoid processed meat, mentioned by Buus, reflects a development in nutritional knowledge and advice that may not yet have trickled into society and the Vegan Party presents itself as being ahead of mainstream knowledge as they persistently draw on research with links to external scientific sources to support all their claims. In the political struggle of drawing on the ‘right’, legitimate science, the vegans often come out on top in terms of quality and authority of their sources while the defenders of meat use other types of argumentations to show how radical and extreme, they find the Vegan Party’s rights-claims. Interestingly, populist logics are prominent in the way that the anti-vegan discourse is articulated through an antagonistic frontier between ‘the people’ opposed to ‘power’ (Laclau, 2005a); as when a citizen reacts to another commenter’s demand for a (vegan) food policy (presumably in public institutions) alongside smoking and alcohol policies. He then replies, ‘They might as well just send us all to concentration camps. Maybe you also vote for the communist parties? The vegan party is not likely to be voted in’. The vegan movement is here linked to disconnected evils, all

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representing power, to illustrate that veganism allegedly take away all free choices. The comment emphasises the extremism of the vegan movement as it (paradoxically) aligns with the power of parliament. The antagonistic frontier on processed meat as either risky or healthy is, moreover, supported by several stylistic features typical of social media debates that draw on confrontational articulations such as swearing, attacks, sarcasm, and so on. The comments on the tabloid media BT’s Facebook page are particularly critical calling vegans: ‘curling parents’, ‘spoiled’, ‘ridiculous’, ‘crazy’ and ‘extreme’ who ‘take their children hostage’ and ought to ‘shut up’ and ‘relax’8 thus constituting vegans as a power threatening the choices of ‘people’. The comments illustrate how the social media format can be seen to further polarise a highly politicised populist debate on health and science characterised by emotional argumentation where people draw on their own experiences and feelings, as in ‘damned if I’m not still alive’ (van Zoonen, 2012). Emotions can create echo-champers but can also support and motivate protest and mobilisation (Eslen-Ziya et al., 2019). In this event, the logic of an echo-chamber is overshadowed by an antagonistic logic of polarisation and confrontation, as all statements are scrutinised, defended, and sometimes ridiculed with emotional and factual means. Indeed, there seems to be almost a circular movement in which the same arguments are repeated endlessly by many different people while they are also constantly contested in several threads and sub-threads. The vegan position draws heavily on a scientific imaginary that is based on alternative knowledge; however, alternative does not mean anti- or pseudo-scientific but rather counter-hegemonic in relation to established perceptions of  meat as healthy and wholesome food. The citizens that oppose the vegan discourse defend traditional, hegemonic notions of food and health but, interestingly, end up arguing with less scientific support and often refer to common-sense, personal experiences, emotions, and sarcasm. The first event regarding competing notions of healthy versus risky food primarily adopts two of the populist logics examined in this chapter: first, the making of vegan digital rights-claims through which ‘the people’ becomes citizens online and, second, the polarised articulation of alternative knowledge positions directed against mainstream science. This, however, does not happen in any simple way but through processes of confrontation over who gets to legitimately define science as a social 8

 https://www.facebook.com/ditbt/posts/4879828348711011 (accessed 14/6 2021).

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horizon that can aspire to become a hegemonic social imaginary (Laclau, 1990).

Event 2: Ecocentrism as Populist Antagonism The second event regarding animal cruelty is spread over different posts, comments, and videos from the Vegan Party’s feed on Twitter, their  Facebook page, and official webpage and on  YouTube. The two Facebook posts and two tweets document cruelty committed against pigs in Danish farms and articulate a rights-claim to end animal mistreatment that is supported with video evidence posted on YouTube. All the content is posted by Vegan Party members and contains images, emotional argumentation, and chock effect in relation to the suffering of farm animals in the meat industry. Two of the left-wing populist antagonisms are predominant in the Vegan Party’s rights-claims: first, citizens’ digital rights-­ claims as ‘the people’, and second, the human versus the non-human. In the posts the Vegan Party makes a number of digital rights-claims (Isin & Ruppert, 2015) on behalf of animals based on their cruel treatment in conventional farming, as in this text posted by the party leader, Henrik Vindfeldt, on Facebook on 25–26/4 2021 regarding the conditions of most sows in Denmark: Sows are strapped down as breeding machines everywhere in the pig industry. 98% of the sows are strapped down in small stalls in Denmark. Pigs in nature are social and playful animals which build a safe nest for their young. Pigs are very clean and even when they are very small, piglets sometimes leave the nest when they defecate. Every time the sow is fixated, she can watch a large part of her litter die primarily of hunger and cold. Every day 25,000 suckling pigs die in the danger-boxes. Danish pigs never leave the stable. On this farm pigs are sent to slaughter when they are 5–6 months old and the sows typically when they are 3 years old.9

The post goes on to cite farmworkers on how the sows refuse to enter the stalls and have to be kicked and forced in. The claims are documented with two video clips. This shows how Vindfeldt engages in citizen media practice (Baker & Blaagaard, 2016) as he both witnesses and documents animal cruelty while simultaneously making rights-claims on behalf 9

 https://www.facebook.com/veganerpartiet (accessed 15/6 2021).

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of all animals suffering in conventional Danish farms. These rights-claims are clearly made from a counter-hegemonic position as the vegan discourse presents itself as marginalised in opposition to a politically and economically strong food production system and a hegemonic food culture (Roslyng, 2011). With the animal rights-claim, Vindfeldt politicises this hegemonic food system as he rearticulates the rights of the people to include the rights of animals, as well as his own citizen right to make rightsclaims on this issue from a left-wing populist perspective (Mouffe, 2018). The rights-claims are strongly supported in most of the comments with expressions that are highly emotional and creative in a way that reinforce  Eslen-Ziya et  al.’s (2019) notion of emotional echo-chambers in which emotions are bounced back and forth amongst social media users, thus echoing sentiments of protest and solidarity. The two posts each have 58 and 50 comments; 298 and 179 likes (including crying and angry smileys); and 45 and 23 shares. All comments except three are very supportive of the posts’ and video’s rights-claim against what they see as atrocious conditions for farming animals and expresses this in a language of outrage: ‘torture-methods’, ‘sick abuse’, ‘hell’, ‘a disgusting sight’, ‘SICK’, ‘HUMANS are GROTESQUELY CRUEL’, ‘poor innocent animals’, ‘I dare not watch these horror films’, ‘it is fucking not ok’, and so on. One citizen includes a meme of a repulsive looking human face/head in Styrofoam supermarket packaging and another meme depicts the feet of a dead body labelled as ‘Animal Abuser’. The memes challenge the hierarchy between humans and animals which is one of the foundations of the hegemonic food discourse (Roslyng & Larsen, 2021) by placing humans morbidly and mockingly in farming animals’ position. Unlike the health claim in the first event, emotions do not primarily work to underscore or oppose authoritative scientific evidence but to make an ethical rights-claim on behalf of the suffering animals within an emotional echo-chamber. The antagonisms regarding animal cruelty appear to find a much less polarised form of expression in the comments compared to the discussions on health, mostly because of the relative absence of engagement from the anti-vegan camp. Only three comments are directly confrontational and/ or sarcastic about the video and text: First, ‘notice all of them have a curly tail. Perhaps the vegan party feels worse about it than the pigs themselves’. Second, another citizen claims: ‘The vegan party is a cantankerous party, they say nothing when sheep are tormented to death by wolf attacks, they say nothing when cattle is starved to death in Mols hills, but they can lie and if you are ignorant you are an easy target’. And finally, one user writes

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about the videos/posts: ‘I knew that and that is why I buy cheap bacon’, linking to another Twitter comment: ‘Great swine, which will provide lots of good bacon in the future’.10 Despite, or perhaps because of, the provocative content in the posts, the last two comments are ignored by other users, while the first is met with indignant corrections. The question of animal cruelty, it seems, is harder to oppose in public debate probably due to its ethical stance and radicality and the pro-vegan camp comes out as dominant in this online debate within an emotional/ethical echo-­chamber. The populist logic that rearticulates the human versus non-human antagonism thus supports an echo-chamber rather than a polarised and confrontational logic. The human versus non-human antagonism expressed by the Vegan Party is an explicit rights-claim to end animal cruelty on their official website. Here they seek to shift the political frontiers to include non-humans and thus move away from an exclusively anthropocentric worldview with their two ideologies of veganism and ecocentrism: The first is veganism understood so that no decisions must directly or indirectly harm others … It is self-evident for the Vegan Party that this concerns both humans and animals. The other is ecocentrism. It concerns that we no longer will place humans at the centre for all our decisions … The eco-systems are the foundation of all life. They are not just determents of life and death in them-selves but also for the quality of life that we have.11

The Vegan Party draws on an antagonistic frontier expressed through post-human subjectivity when speaking on behalf of suffering animals, bio-systems, and nature (Braidotti, 2013). With this, they radicalise Mouffe’s (2018) demand for liberty and equality in her normative call for a new left populism. The party creates a left-wing populist frontier in which the elite is identified as: ‘Factory farming and capital funds are owners… (angry smiley)’; ‘the agricultural lobby’ as ‘unethical and deranged

10  https://twitter.com/AnimalRightsDK/status/1399793685605330951 (accessed 15/6 2021). 11  Original emphasis. The Vegan Party website: https://vgpt.dk/politisk-fundament/ (accessed 20/5 2021).

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regarding animal welfare’.12 Moreover, the government is criticised in many of the comment threads for not acting on animal welfare. The Vegan Party retweets party member Lisel Vad Olssons tweet linking to her vlog entitled ‘What about the feelings of plants?’. In this she replies to typical anti-vegan comments she receives when she argues that animals have feelings: ‘Hell, you know that cutting into a pumpkin on your kitchen table is not the same as killing another being with blood and all that belongs to it’.13 From a post-humanist perspective (Braidotti, 2013), she uses arguments that are both embodied, as she draws in her gut-feeling, and embedded in the social and political structures of the food discourse. Drawing on Laclau’s populist logics (2005a, b), we can argue that the attempts to include animals in a notion of rights, might indicate that the Vegan Party seeks to reformulate of the signifier of ‘the people’ to include non-humans. According to the party, animals and nature are separated from power as they lack representation in parliament and their rights are excluded from economic and cultural structures that support the hegemonic food system. In this event, the party construct a notion of the people, again understood as citizens, that makes rights-claims online but the articulation of the people is more explicitly juxtaposed in relation to its exclusion from power as it identifies specific economic and political actors as the elite. The rearticulation of the people to include non-humans is controversial; however, the rearticulation mostly occurs on social media in emotional and ideological echo-chambers.

Science Populism as Popular Citizenship? The chapter suggests a shift away from a focus on the rational-irrational dichotomy as an approach to science populism and argues for the citizen as an active part-taker in constructing alternative knowledge in public spheres. While there is no doubt that misinformation and pseudo-­scientific argumentation are problematic practices for the democratic debate on scientific and environmental issues, the emphasis on left-wing populism has shown that alternative knowledge can play a more complex role in relation to hegemonic policies. Table 2 summarises the analytical findings of how 12  https://twitter.com/AnimalRightsDK/status/1399793685605330951 (accessed 15/6 2021). 13  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=335wCOgkGVY (accessed 15/6 2021).

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Table 2  Alternative knowledge positions in left-wing environmental populism

Rights-claims Frontier: Alternative knowledge positions

The construction of ‘the people’ Frontier: people separated from power Frontier: Humans/ non-humans

Event 1: Food and health

Event 2: Animal cruelty

Healthy, non-risky food Veganism Meat as risky versus meat as nutritious Challenging the hegemonic food discourse The people as citizens

Rights for non-humans

Citizens separated from a hegemonic, traditional food system Human consumption of meat questioned

Challenging and politicising the anthropocentrism present in food practices The people as citizens and non-humans Animals and citizens excluded by a political and economic hegemonic power elite Post-human subjectivity as radical inclusivity and rethinking of rights and antagonisms

the Vegan Party draws on popular/populist, digital citizenship to articulate alternative knowledge positions online regarding the vegan discourse on food, health, and ecocentrism. The chapter has, first, analysed the antagonistic populist logic of how citizens make rights-claims on behalf of themselves and others by actively constructing citizen media (Baker & Blaagaard, 2016). They formulate these claims as counter-hegemonic positions and thereby confirm their digital citizenship through the very act of making claims (Isin & Nielsen, 2008; Isin & Ruppert, 2015). These rights-claims are made both in relation to the vegan reformulation of health, risk, and food, which is highly contested in the social media debate, and animal rights as a more radical reformulation of rights to be inclusive of the rights of non-humans such as animals and nature. This shows how the Vegan Party constructs ‘the people’ as citizens insisting on citizenship as the right to act by speaking out on behalf of humans, nature, and animals. Second, the chapter has examined how alternative knowledge positions are articulated on social media in both a highly polarised manner as well as within ideological and emotional echo-chambers (Eslen-Ziya, 2020) depending on the topic. The vegan discursive articulation of an alternative vision for an ecocentric food system is clearly a counter-position that seeks to politicise the current hegemonic food system and identify problematic

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power structures that form antagonistic frontiers (Laclau, 1990) between veganism and the hegemonic food discourse. However, the vegan movement also draws on science as a social imaginary which can imbue their arguments with scientific legitimacy and rigour (Roslyng & Larsen, 2021). Paradoxically, the anti-vegan commenters also use populist logics when they set themselves up as the right-thinking citizens who can see through the hypocrisy of vegan discourse. Finally, the Vegan Party’s rights-claim for the inclusion of animal rights follows a post-human subjectivity (Braidotti, 2013) that radicalises the left populist project (Mouffe, 2018) in terms of solidarity that goes beyond the anthropocentrism in the hegemonic food discourse based on traditional food production. The question of animal cruelty, supported by its highly emotional expressions of outrage and anger, radicalises the left populist discourse on food thus making the antagonism in the politics of food visible in the quest to politicise the hegemonic food discourse. In this light, science populism can be rethought in a way that allows ‘the people’ to hold an active form of popular citizenship that is facilitated by citizens’ creative and political use of digital and social media. The articulation of alternative knowledge positions that challenge hegemonic understandings of science are not necessarily anti- or pseudo-scientific but can be expressions of citizens’ rights-claims that show scientific controversy as a battleground for the instigation of new antagonisms, be they from a left- or right-wing ideological perspective.

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Inconvenient Truths? Populist Epistemology and the Case of Portugal Alberta Giorgi

Introduction: Populism, Science, and the Post-Truth Scenario This chapter examines the case study of the Facebook page Verdade Inconveniente (Inconvenient Truth), an independent media outlet then civic movement that focuses on exposing the “truth” in order to illustrate the interweaving of science, truth, and populism in a post-truth landscape. In particular, populism has been connected to the spreading of misinformation and fake news. Researchers have focused, for example, on the role of fake news and disinformation during the electoral campaigns of populist leaders (for a recent discussion, see Corbu & Negrea-Busuioc, 2020). In relation to science, scholars working on vaccine controversies have introduced the term medical populism to indicate the polarizing oversimplification and politicization of complex public health issues that pit “the people” against “the establishment” (Lasco & Curato, 2019). Other researchers

A. Giorgi (*) University of Bergamo, Bergamo, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 H. Eslen-Ziya, A. Giorgi (eds.), Populism and Science in Europe, Palgrave Studies in European Political Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97535-7_11

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have focused instead on food and alimentary conspiracies (Morelli & Vitale, 2020). More broadly, some have explored the connections between supporting populist parties and mistrusting academics, scholars, and experts (Mede & Schafer, 2020). Additional studies have centered on populism and “conspiracy theories,” showing that the latter are likely to be more appealing to populist rather than non-populist voters (Mancosu et al., 2017). The spreading of fake news would be facilitated by the emergence of a “post-truth society,” in which emotions and identity are more relevant than “objective facts,” as reported in the Oxford Dictionary (2016). Retracing the history of the “post-truth” concept, Krasni (2020) shows how it started to be used in the 1990s as a leftist, and then liberal, intellectual critique of the mainstream media manipulation of the audience, noting media outlets’ powerful role in maintaining a regime of truth by means of misinformation and selective news coverage. Since the 2010s: a focus shift takes place, in which both terms [post-truth and fake news] are used by the mainstream media against ‘others’ (e.g., alt-right movement, postmodern intellectuals and/or science deniers), but also by the ‘others’ against mainstream media […] depending on the perspective of one’s hegemonic ideology, the other side(s) is delegitimized by the use of fake news as a floating signifier. (Krasni, 2020, 3)

In this common use, post-truth has a pejorative meaning, and its connection with populism reflects a “politicized” epistemology, according to which one specific understanding of knowledge production is naturalized as “the truth” (Galanopoulos & Stavrakakis, 2019), and those who challenge it are labeled as ignorant—and, in the case of disputes related to science, as “anti-science.” However, this is misleading: as Eslen-Ziya and I discuss in the Introduction, for example, and as Raffini and Penalva also note in this volume, vaccine hesitancy often is embraced by highly educated and scientifically competent individuals (Peretti-Watel et al., 2019), and those protesting against compulsory vaccination claim they are, in fact, pro-science (Rozbroj et al., 2020). Broadly speaking, the challenges to “science” and traditional modes of knowledge production can be categorized as questioning epistemic authorities and scientific epistemology (Mede & Schafer, 2020). Challenges to epistemic authorities are meant to expose the corruption and partisanship of the establishment—which includes mainstream experts, academicians, and scholars—while reaffirming the relevance of scientific knowledge

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and institutionalized scientific epistemology. Expressions such as counterknowledge (Ylä-Anttila, 2018) and “pseudo-science” or “troll science” (Eslen-Ziya, 2020) have been introduced to point out when scientific knowledge is challenged and replaced with other scientific knowledge, produced by alternative epistemic authorities who are supposedly independent of external constraints and therefore free to tell the truth. Mede and Schafer (2020) speak of “science-related populism,” which includes an antagonistic relationship between ordinary people and the academic elite and the reclaiming of ordinary people’s epistemic authority in terms of decision-making sovereignty and truth-speaking sovereignty. Challenges to scientific epistemology propose alternative modes of knowledge production instead, which Saurette and Gunster (2011) define as “populist epistemologies,” including the primacy of individual and first-­ hand experience (e.g., I-pistemology; Van Zoonen, 2012) and the valorization of common sense and folk wisdom (Wodak, 2015). From this perspective, not only would we need alternative epistemic authorities, but the mode of knowledge production also should be re-thought, as the criteria to define reliable knowledge are not those usually applied by scientific epistemology. Harsin (2018), for example, proposes the concept of “emo-­ truth,” in which the authenticity of what is conveyed is guaranteed by emotional intensity, working in three ways: truthtellers have the courage to tackle controversial topics and an aggressive style of communication, veined by outrage, disgust, and humiliation. Further, they are able to establish an empathic connection with the audience, who feel the same (amplified by the hybrid emotional echo-chambers conceptualized in chapter “Knowledge, Counter-­Knowledge, Pseudo-­Science in Populism”). Overall, these studies highlight the importance of analytically unpacking the alternative epistemologies and epistemic authorities that actors put forward and taking their claims seriously. Addressing such concepts should not be interpreted as endorsing the argument that factual truths do not exist or that everything is a matter of opinion—to quote Hanna Arendt (2003, 554): Even if we admit that every generation has the right to write its own history, we admit no more than that it has the right to rearrange the facts in accordance to its own perspective; we don’t admit the right to touch the fact themselves.

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What is a stake, then, is which facts are relevant, how claims are argued, the appropriate grammar of argumentation, and how credible and legitimate knowledge is constructed (see chapter “Knowledge, Counter-­ Knowledge, Pseudo-­Science in Populism”). Current literature on “science wars” and populism often neglects to articulate how the criticisms of science are part of a broader re-articulation of truth and its shifting role in relation to science—which is the object of this chapter. Post-truth societies are in fact characterized by the proliferation of regimes of truth: Post does not equal after. Yet, we are after a historical period where more people relied on and trusted the same truthtellers and when popular truth was more stable, a set of institutional and popular relationships Foucault called a ‘regime of truth’. (Harsin, 2018, 36)

By the expression “regime of truth,” Foucault indicates the type of discourse that a society accepts as true, the rules and mechanisms separating truth from falsehood, the legitimate ways of producing (or discovering) and telling the truth, and the status of the truthtellers. In post-truth societies, we can no longer speak of one hegemonic regime of truth: multiple regimes of truth co-exist in the same field of knowledge (e.g., science, governance) and compete for hegemony in multiple arenas, in which active audiences undertake their own truth games in segmented epistemic communities. Hence, Harsin (2015) suggests speaking instead of “regimes of post-truth.” The proliferation of post-truth regimes has a serious impact on politics and democracy, as well as different implications. In the case of science-­ related disputes, for example, if people disagree on the definition of reliable knowledge, they will also differ on the best policies to deal with science-related issues and may decide not to comply. For example, disputes over science are conceptualized by protesters as disagreements over truth. Reframing the “science wars” as competitions between different post-truth regimes, rather than struggles between scientific truth and fake news, we will be able to produce a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the current re-conceptualizations of science and truth and the impact of these re-conceptualizations on public policies. In the following sections, I present the rationale for the case study selection and the methodology. Section “Verdade Inconveniente: What Is True and Who Tells the

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Truth” focuses on the results, while the last section discusses the outcomes and their implications.

Case Study Selection: Inconvenient Truths Following the performative and discursive approach, I intend populism as “relational and performative appeal effective in certain social contexts” (Ostiguy et al., 2021, 8). In other words, “populist actors constitute popular political identities through performative practices ranging from political speeches to transgressive ‘low culture’ performances which resonate locally” (ibidem, 4). From this perspective, the “supply and demand sides of populism do not exist in separation from each other” (ibidem, 8). Therefore, in order to understand the role of truth in populist politics, it is crucial to understand the shared culture of the populist milieu. To this end, I focus on the public Facebook page Verdade Inconveniente (Inconvenient Truth): even though it describes itself as completely independent from political parties, the page consistently praises populist political actors, and it is part of the Portuguese populist media ecosystem. The case has been selected following a purposeful and theoretically informed sampling approach (Emmel, 2014). Verdade Inconveniente aims to share “content that is normally omitted by mainstream media” according to its description; it is “liked” by 7694 and followed by 8270 individuals, Pages, or groups (in July 2021). The page was launched in 2016, and in 2020, it became the primary information and dissemination channel for the Groupos Pela Libertade! Pela Verdade! (Groups For Freedom! For Truth!) according to the self-description of the page. The Groupos are a network of locally -based groups present on Facebook, with a private group including 8441 members (as of July 2021). The group self-description reads: The group’s objective is to organize ourselves to defend freedom of expression and the free press and denounce manipulation, propaganda, and support for the banks, knowing the austerity that lies ahead! For the end of the state of calamity. For optional vaccination, to prevent the implantation of a possible chip (if it happens, like in some countries), and to question the impact of the 5G network on public health through an environmental impact study. (Emphasis in original)

By mainstream media, the page is described as “close to the radical-right” and “conspiracy theorists,” although the administrator rejects both labels

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(this defense is in line with existing research, such as Harambam & Aupers, 2014). The page is in Portuguese and focuses on Portugal. Moreover, the case study is particularly relevant as Portugal has long been considered the European exception to the spread of populism and the radical right (Lisi et  al., 2019), relating to the cultural resistance to the radical right that derives from the country’s dictatorial past. Until recently, the main parties considered to show at least some populist features were the Democratic and Social Center—People’s Party (CDS-PP), with some electoral success, and the National Renewal Party (PNR), with little electoral success. Another important populist actor is Marinho e Pinto, the former president of the Portuguese Bar Association, who has adopted an “anti-elite” style of communication and portrays himself as a victim of media hostility, an outsider, and a challenge to the status quo. He founded the Earth party (in 2014), for which he successfully ran for the European elections, and then the Democratic Republican Party (2015), which had minimal electoral success in the national elections (for a recent review on research on populism in Portugal, see Salgado & Zúquete, 2017). Recently, the brand new right-wing populist party Chega has gained much attention as the first properly radical-right populist party in Portugal that also managed to obtain a seat via national elections (Santana, 2021). The mainstream media sphere, traditionally resistant to populism, paid significant attention to the party, increasing its visibility (Mendes & Dennison, 2021). However, researchers have also shown the high salience of populist discourse among Portuguese citizens (Fernández-García & Salgado, 2020), in particular on social media (Salgado, 2019), which has risen significantly in the aftermath of austerity (Salgado & Zúquete, 2017). Moreover, survey data point out that: In the post-bailout period, populist attitudes were considerably widespread in Portugal, confirming the assumption that the absence of relevant populist parties in the country has not been due to lack of demand, but is instead due to lack of supply—namely sophisticated and charismatic political actors able to choose the right substantive issues in order to thrive in a remarkably stable and closed party system such as that of Portugal. (Santana-Pereira & Cancela, 2020, 222)

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In fact, recent analyses show the relevance of social media for the populist party Chega in terms of voice and as an instrument to recruit and organize its supporters (Marchi, 2020).

Methodology: Science and the Games of (Post) Truth The qualitative thematic analysis of the public webpage included the manual coding of its contents, following the logic of the grounded theory (Charmaz, 2006). Combining the attention to epistemic authorities and epistemology (Mede & Schafer, 2020) and the analytical perspective of “truth formulae” a development of Foucault’s truth games that includes the relationship among representation and presentation (words and things),1 truth and non-truth, and the truthteller (Weir, 2008), I focused on three main analytical elements. The first element concerns the nature of truth. Guiding questions for the analysis were: What are the “inconvenient truths” that the page points out? What fields do they cover—for example, science, politics? Why are they inconvenient? The second element focuses on truthtellers and epistemic authorities: Who are the truthtellers? What characteristics do they share? What are the alternative epistemic authorities proposed? What characteristics do they share? The third element concerns epistemology: How is reliable knowledge constructed? What criteria should “truth” meet? What is the evidence? How can we discern truth from falsehoods? In addition, a specific focus on attention was related to the dynamics of interactions and engagement, and the style of communication—the analysis included verbal and non-verbal elements (such as images and videos). In relation to the analytical elements, it is possible to identify three phases, marked by distinct areas of attention (relevant inconvenient truths), epistemic authorities, relevant epistemologies, dynamics of interactions, and communication styles.

1  In different “truth formulae” the relationship between presentation (reality) and representation (how it is told and represented) maybe be different (for a discussion, see Weir, 2008).

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Verdade Inconveniente: What Is True and Who Tells the Truth Denouncing Mass Media Manipulation (2016–2017) When the page was created in December 2016, the first posts covered a 2009 TV interview with Marinho e Pinto, then president of the Portuguese Bar Association, during which he accused the journalist hosting the interview of being a “bad journalist” because she was criticizing him (Gomes Melro et  al., 2010). The interview was widely debated in Portugal and epitomizes one of the populist narratives according to which mass media are politicized actors that manipulate the truth. Marinho e Pinto remains a focus of attention for the Facebook page, together with Portugal. The supposedly inconvenient truths covered by the Facebook page are mostly in the field of politics. Verdade Inconveniente (VI) conveys the idea that mass media allegedly conceal the truth by remaining silent about some topics or by actively stating the opposite of what is true. Hence, the page shares videos suggesting that a “political mafia” governs corrupt Portugal or that the West has created ISIS even though nobody talks about it. Additional videos suggest that the reasons behind Brexit, or why Martinho o Pinto left the EU Parliament, are not those narrated by the mass media. Similarly, some videos supposedly “reveal” what is “truly” happening in Syria and state that African Americans support Donald Trump despite what the mass media say. The basic argument is that truth is concealed to manipulate the masses (see chapter “QAnon and Its Conspiracy Milieu: The Italian Case”). Another area of inconvenient truth in this first phase, relates to feminism and abortion: feminism has a prominent voice because it is supported by the NGOs, but feminist positions—including the support to the abortion rights—are supported only by a minority of women, according to the VI page. Videos posted as evidence shows various criticisms of feminists supporting abortion by alternative epistemic authorities: ordinary people, who have first-hand knowledge of the issues, while NGOs do not, and some prominent figures—among the latter, the feminist Camille Paglia and the alt-right influencer and member of the Canadian Libertarian Party Lauren Southern, whose videos feature more prominently during the second phase. Those who tell the truth, in this phase, are mostly politicians whom the hostile media have silenced: in addition to the Portuguese Marinho e

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Pinto, other examples of politicians unfairly treated by the mass media, according to VI, would be Vladimir Putin, Nigel Farage, Bashar Al-Assad, and the small Partido Libertário Português (Portuguese Libertarian Party). Other truthtellers include journalists who, according to VI, have the courage to tell the truth: José Gomes Ferreira and Hernâni Carvalho2 in Portugal, Fox News in the USA. The truthtellers have in common that they are either silenced by the mass media or negatively portrayed—in the videos shared on VI, they are seen “unmasking” the lies of journalists and “leaving them speechless.” Truthtellers are then depicted as those who have the courage to rebel against the mainstream media who hide the truth. Following this logic, the opponents of the truth and truthtellers are, in VI’s view, the mass media such as CNN. Supporters often refer to these outlets as the “means of mass manipulation”—where journalists, the European Union, and, more broadly, the “establishment” (including, e.g., judges and the justice system) are all categorized under this label. Also, some prominent figures are denounced for their supposed wrongdoings, such as Hillary Clinton, who may be a kidnapper of children, and George Soros, who allegedly leads a shadow global government. These “truths” are well-known in the conspiracy milieu and signal the connection of VI to a globally networked community sharing the same ideas (Harambam & Aupers, 2014, see also Murru in this volume), which developed more rapidly during the second phase. The main aspect that can be connected to the issue of epistemology is the repeated demand to think critically. The underlying epistemological assumption is an inductivist approach that rejects (or invites the questioning of) the hypothetico-deductivist approach that posits general causation mechanisms that cannot be empirically demonstrated but only falsified (for a discussion, see Rosenberg & McIntyre, 2020). The content shared consists of videos—always with Portuguese subtitles—including either footage of TV interviews or YouTube videos, many of which are no longer available because the accounts were removed. There is little to no engagement with the posts outside of the administrator, who often “likes” his own posts and sometimes writes a caption to explain the content of the video and state why it is important. The profile image is a figure with the sentence “Viver a verdade para viver de verdade”—which is also the title of a meeting that took place in Brazil in 2013 to discuss the truth in Saint Joseph’s Gospel, organized by the 2

 These individuals ran in the national elections as representatives of the center-right.

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Charismatic Catholic Community Shalom, which advertised the meeting using that same image. The cover photo is a stock image showing a road sign with verdade (truth) and mentira (lie) pointing in opposite directions. Truth-Fighters and Conspiracies (2017–2020) In the second phase (see Table 1), the attention shifts away from Portugal-­ related topics to pay more stable attention to international issues, broadening the focus areas. This shift shows the participation in a global cultural milieu of those who share the same ideas, some of which are pretty far from Portuguese political culture, such as alerts against Islam and immigration. In particular, the inconvenient truth about “the lost war against Muslims” (which is the title of one of the videos) states that Muslim immigrants are pawns meant to replace Europeans and impose Sharia law (referencing “Eurabia” and the so-called Kalergi plan3); Muslim men are portrayed as rapists, and it is argued that the immigration must be stopped because some migrants and refugees are Jihadi terrorists. They seem to Table 1  The three phases Phase 1: 2016–2017 Phase 2: 2017–2020 Phase 3: 2020–2021 Nature of truth (and Manipulation why it is inconvenient) Epistemic authorities Ordinary people; and truthtellers silenced journalists/ politicians Epistemology Critical thinking

Style of communication

Shared videos; no engagement

What people do not want to hear

Covid-19-related

Silenced experts; truth-fighters

Overlapping

Critical thinking; non-mainstream science; folk wisdom User-generated videos

Critical thinking; non-mainstream science; first-hand experience; spirituality Branded content; explosion of engagement

3  The “Kalergi plan” is a far-right, anti-Semitic, white nationalist conspiracy theory that purports that there is a plot to mix white Europeans with other races via immigration, allegedly elaborated and promoted by Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi. “Eurabia” refers to the Arabization and Islamization of Europe allegedly promoted by French and Arab elites.

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“prove” this argument by stating the so-called facts that there are no women or children among the images shown on TV. They further argue that many of these migrants do not come from war zones. Tied to the warnings against Islam are the denunciations of the persecutions of Christians and the criticisms against Pope Francis who is described, according to the videos shared on VI, as too weak against Muslims. Much attention is also paid to the debate over how to regulate hate speech online, with videos sharing concerns over censorship. These inconvenient truths are all united by the argument that the mass media wants to conceal them in the name of political correctness. In the case of Islam, for example, the argument goes as follows: if Neo-Nazis organized terrorist attacks, the mass media would be focusing on the ideological aspect of the attack instead of denying the responsibility of Islam in the development of a terrorist ideology. These depictions echo the typical populist narratives about religion (Giorgi, 2021) and those raised by the “angry white man” (Kimmel, 2017). Other inconvenient truths the VI depicts, I argue, are those that people (and leftists in particular) supposedly do not want to hear, such as the scientific reality of IQ, race, and sex (which cannot be separated by gender), that feminism is, in fact, dangerous for women and will de-virilize men, or that non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are tied to human trafficking. Some content is related to politics—such as criticisms against former US President Barack Obama and the “truth” about the role of the West in the Syrian conflict (in this case, the criticism also references the US government under the Trump administration). The third type of inconvenient truth is related to shadow governments, such as the Bilderberg group, and their machinations: for example, one claims, “we never went to the Moon.” These truths can be grouped in the frame of the well-known conspiracy theory about the New World Order4— the proof includes many episodes of the TV show The Simpsons that seem to predict the future when, in fact, according to supporters, they only revealed secret plans already in place. An example of how the theory works is the comments about the fires in Amazonia that began in August 2019. The theory conveyed by the VI videos is that these fires are small and controlled acts of arson that are meant to conceal some issue related to the secret activities going on in Amazonia (such as human trafficking and dangerous scientific experiments). 4

 A conspiracy theory that hypothesizes a secretly emerging totalitarian world government.

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According to this theory, the counter-intuitive media alert around these fires has a twofold aim. The first is to undermine Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s leadership—and, more broadly, to argue that the Global South cannot take care of itself and the Global North should be in charge instead. This position would also be demonstrated by the fact that the UN sustainability goals include climate action, the protection of the environment, and control over the Amazon rainforest to preserve the global green lung. In contrast, the relevance of the Amazon for the planet is hugely downplayed by the videos shared by Verdade Inconveniente. The second, connected, objective, according to this theory, is to raise environmental concerns, which include the call for reducing the consumption of meat, to promote the so-called Vegan Agenda. Occasionally, some millenarist content also appears in the videos—for example, outlining the signs of the end of the world that individuals should recognize. During the second phase, epistemic authorities and the figure of the truthteller also change. Truthtellers are more clearly framed as truth-­ fighters: citizen-journalists, such as the YouTubers Nando Moura, Paul Joseph Watson, and Dennis Prager, to name just a few, who, in a figure of speech, “take the matter into their own hands” and have the ability to discover and share the truth. Also, during this phase, international female alt-right influencers (see Askanius, 2021) and conspiracy celebrities (see Harambam & Aupers, 2014) become relevant figures—for example, the already mentioned Lauren Southern and the Brazilian YouTubers Debora G. Barbosa, Ana Campagnolo, and Danielle Sans.5 Citizen-journalists, influencers, and alternative media such as Um repugnante mundo novo (A repulsive new world), the channel Felipe Pontes, or the Catholic Veritas Perpetua, give voice to alternative epistemic authorities who are characterized as neglected experts. These figures include the global-warming deniers Ricardo Felicio and Louis Carlos Molion and the social psychologist Jordan Peterson, who identifies religious fundamentalism as a basis for terrorism. Expertise is also related to first-hand experience: for example, Jared Kushner, who exposed the New World Order, would be credible because he is part of the global elite, and thus he has access to that world. The same applies to a Muslim woman exposing Islam or persecuted Christians all around the world. Politicians, instead, almost 5  Founder of the channel Monarquista, Antifeminista, Das Artes Visuales (monarchist, antifeminist, of visual arts). Its introductory video is provocatively titled Ben-vindos, conspiradores! (Welcome, conspirators!).

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disappear—there is only some mention of Bolsonaro and French President Emmanuel Macron in relation to the Amazonia fires. Similar to the first phase, in the second phase, the mass media are also the target of criticisms alongside the “establishment”—such as the EU, NASA, and “Big Pharma” (mentioned for the first time in May 2019), and some countries (China and Cuba). In addition to the establishment, targets of criticism are the global left and so-called globalist fascism, which includes progressives, social democrats, Marxists, and feminists. A series of videos criticize the “left” as promoting socialism, which should be instead equated to Nazism, and relocate the “truths” along the left-right dimension, politicizing and polarizing topics such as Islam and science. For example, in a video focusing on science, Lauren Southern exposes what she defines as the “hypocrisy” of the left, which label right-wing supporters as “anti-science” when instead it is leftists who hold anti-scientific positions, refusing GMOs and nuclear power, which are indeed positive scientific developments, and fighting for body positivity while overlooking the fact that weight gain is dangerous to health. Some specific figures are also singled out, such as Greta Thunberg. In terms of epistemology, in addition to critical thinking and the valorization of scientific knowledge produced by independent and non-­ mainstream scholars, there is also the valorization of folk wisdom as “truth,” including “scientific truths,” and “false” is a matter of common sense. If something sounds contrary to common sense, the argument goes, it is probably false. In this sense, the rejection of hypothetico-­ deductivism becomes more explicit than in the previous phase. The page dynamics are not notably different from those in the first phase, as the “likes” are scarce, there is basically no sharing, and the shared content is made up entirely of videos (many are no longer available on YouTube), all with subtitles in Portuguese. The difference is that these are videos produced by content-creators (e.g., citizen-journalists, influencers), and many share similar features, supposedly debunking taken-for-­ granted truths by exposing falsehoods and mobilizing emotions (Eslen-Ziya infra; Harsin, 2018). Going Out and Fighting for Freedom (2020–Present) The third phase (Table 1) marks yet another shift in the VI page. With the advent of Covid-19 and the policy measures adopted to limit the spread of the virus, the truths that the page discusses, the truthtellers, the

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epistemology, and the page dynamics all change. The topic of Covid-19 dominates the discussion, and the most prominent inconvenient truth, according to VI, is that the virus was created in a laboratory. The proof includes the parallelism with the Zika virus, which is considered an “abortive” weapon, the hints contained in a video game dealing with biological weapons, and the fact that millions of people in the world got sick at the same time without contact with one another. The blame for the fabricated virus is cast upon China or, in other versions, the cabal promoting the New World Order. More specifically, Covid-19 is allegedly connected to the advancement of the digital era and the increasing power of artificial intelligence (AI). According to this theory, 5G6 contributed to spreading the virus, and, as a consequence, many governments increased the digitalization of public administration and their digital control of citizens (through tracking and “virtual lagers”). Evidence would be, for example, the Portuguese law for digital transition approved in May 2020 or government support for the tracing app Stayaway Covid. Other supposed evidence concerns the activities of Elon Musk, allegedly advancing “transhumanism,” the diffusion of the neuro-linguistic programming, and the governments’ prohibition of human contacts in the first months of the pandemic. Another inconvenient truth connected to the virus concerns vaccinations, which according to the videos shared by VI, cause cancer. At the same time, other remedies that “Big Pharma” considers dangerous would be curative, such as Hydroxychloroquine—referenced by former US President Trump, or the attempt to reach herd immunity, such as happened in Sweden. More broadly, this type of “inconvenient truth” exposes, according to VI, the inconsistencies of information about the virus and the inefficacy of the measures taken by the governments. Allegedly, the pandemic is an excuse to intensify government control over citizens. For example, VI posts share data regarding Covid-19-related deaths, commenting that they supposedly show that the virus is not as dangerous as the media purport, posting videos of almost empty hospitals as further evidence. Other posts denounce the danger of laser thermometers, which supposedly interfere with the electricity of the brain, and state the uselessness (and actual danger) of wearing masks. Also, posts are shared showing “anomalies” (such as an invasion of birds in a US city) and suggesting their connection with the “Coronavirus situation.” Starting in the 6

 The fifth generation technology standard for broadband cellular networks.

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summer of 2020, in particular, inconvenient truths have also related to the consequences of Covid-19-related restrictions: economic crises and psychological damage for children, on the one side, and dangers to democracy on the other side, denouncing police control and the restrictions on the sale of alcohol. As evidence of the anti-democratic character of the restrictions, the page shares, for example, information about a Belgian court that ruled that the federal government failed to establish a proper legal basis for the policy measures related to Covid-19 restrictions.7 Other inconvenient truths continue to be unrelated to the virus, although their relevance is reduced. Some posts, for example, expose the “true” reasons behind apparently beneficent behaviors, such as a supposed scandal involving the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (false) or the “evil agenda” of organizations such as the UN. Inconvenient truths are also the denunciations of falsehoods, according to VI: for example, the page uploads videos exposing the QAnon theory as false or affirming that the police kneeling in front of the Black Lives Matter protests after the murder of George Floyd are actually actors paid by George Soros. Falsehoods also include the allegations against the truthtellers, whom the mass media label “negationists” and dangerous radical-right activists, although very marginal in the political debate. The truth would be instead that negationists are those who do not recognize the truth (e.g., inversion logic; Krasni, 2020). Also, truthtellers’ voices are not marginal, according to VI, whose posts would instead demonstrate that the protests gather many people all around Europe who would otherwise be marginalized. As for the allegation of extremism, the page administrator references the political spectrum diagram known as the “Nolan chart,” explaining that the page rejects all polarization between left and right. In this phase, the figure of the truthtellers is similar to the previous phase: there are “courageous” journalists in the mainstream media, such as the Spanish Cristina Martín Jiménez, who authored the first book on the Bilderberg club, or some local journalists who “dare” to cover the protests against Covid-19-related restrictions. According to VI, politicians occasionally tell the truth—this would be the case, for example, of the Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko, who warns against the “coronavirus conspiracy.” Mostly, however, truthtellers are said to be the independent media outlets, such as the channels related to micro-celebrities 7  h t t p s : / / w w w. p o l i t i c o . e u / a r t i c l e / b e l g i a n - c o u r t - s l a p s - d o w n - c o v i d 19-measures-reports/

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and influencers, for example, the Portuguese João Tilly and the Brazilian Debora G. Barbosa and Flavio Valle—the latter particularly interested in spirituality. The relevance of spirituality increases during the third phase, in which many posts cover occult symbolism and esotericism. During this phase, hybrid figures also emerge, as influencers and truthtellers come to be regarded as epistemic authorities in good standing— not only translators and intermediators of knowledge produced by experts, but experts themselves. Examples are Daniel Mastral, an expert in occultism and esotericism, and the well-known David Icke.8 As in the previous phase, epistemic authorities include neglected scientists like Nikola Tesla or those who disagree with the mainstream narratives about the pandemic. Particularly relevant in the VI discourse are “dissident” doctors and physicians, especially at the local level, such as Ferdinando Nobre or the group Medicos por la Verdade (doctors for the truth), who “dare” to challenge the corrupt scientific establishment and allegedly expose the “truth” about the danger of masks in relation to Covid-19. Other figures are lawyers and judges criticizing Covid-19-related restrictions, such as the group Juristas pela Verdade (Jurists for the Truth). Ordinary people also are regarded as knowledge producers due to their first-hand experience with the pandemic and its consequences. In a way, the page itself becomes an epistemic authority. Truthtellers and alternative epistemic authorities are rebels, anti-conformists, cool critical thinkers. Restaurateurs who challenge the restrictions are labeled heroes. Opponents to the truthtellers would be members of the mass media who allegedly manipulate citizens’ minds and censor the truthtellers, the elite said to be governing the world (such as Bill Gates), the Jesuits, the left (in particular, Antifa), and, on occasion, the “Satanic Zionists.” Criticisms against the media are no longer only general: a series of posts, for example, contest the news coverage of the protests against the Covid-19-related restrictions taking place in Portugal, explaining that the mainstream Portuguese media downplays the numbers of participants— showing pictures and videos as evidence of the contrary. The mainstream social media outlets become a target, too: for example, commenting on a post on which the new policy of Facebook applied the label “false,” the page administrator protests that the post is not false information. Also, 8  According to a report by the Center for Countering Digital Hate, Icke is the most prolific source of disinformation about Covid-19. See the report at: https://www.counterhate. com/icke

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posts appear that invite users to move to Mewe, which is supposedly better than Facebook in terms of privacy (its claim is “The Social Network Built on Trust, Control and Love”). Also, other platforms are added to the page, such as YouTube and Telegram channels. Like at the beginning of the first phase, in this third phase, the focus returns to Portugal, and opponents of the truthtellers include the authoritarian Portuguese government and the center-left coalition, who enforce Covid-19-related restrictions. However, opponents to the truthtellers are also those who follow the rules and refuse to think critically and “outside the box” (see also Harambam & Aupers, 2014). In terms of epistemology, critical thinking maintains a relevant role in the third phase, as truths are mostly labeled as neglected scientific evidence. Videos invite users to think with their brains, always challenging mainstream narratives instead of thinking through emotions. First-hand experience, non-generalizing inductivism, and I-pistemology are also crucial. The third phase also marks an explosion in the number of posts. The style of communication changes and the YouTube videos produced by a variety of truthtellers are often presented without subtitles. In addition, other content is shared, including articles from mainstream media that apparently acknowledge some of the inconvenient truths, such as a BBC article titled “Microsoft to replace journalists with robots,”9 or a Lancet article questioning the “pandemic” label.10 Many posts are text-only reflections, articulating the position of the administrator of the page rather than only sharing videos. The posts call for critical thinking, rebellion against tyranny, and the defense of democracy and children who are suffering due to social isolation. On occasion, the style is that of posing “inconvenient questions” to the powerful, supposedly exposing contradictions. Also, it includes word games that reveal the true face of things—for example, posts use the label “state of stupidity” instead of “state of emergency.” There is a process of identity-creation: the page is more clearly linked to groups protesting against the policy measures meant to contain the spread of Covid-19—such as masking, staying home, and closures—and 9  https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52860247#:~:text=Microsoft%20is%20 to%20replace%20dozens,is%20currently%20done%20by%20journalists 10  https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)32000-6/ fulltext

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much of the shared content relates to calls for actions, such as petitions, email-writings campaigns, and street protests against the restrictions, followed by videos and pictures of the initiatives (and, more recently, preceded by individuals’ videos calling for participation). Also, the page shares videos and information about similar initiatives in other countries, like Germany and France. The majority of the content becomes self-created, and in addition to pictures and videos of the initiatives, the page also develops a specific style for the images, which are framed by a red line and include the name of the page at the bottom (a similar style is followed for the videos). Many of the images created aim to equate the anti-Covid-19 measures to unlawful restrictions and 1984-like scenarios, for example, the Star of David, images of people in chains, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights portrayed as a roll of toilet paper. Also, the page launches an image and video “series” labeled with the hashtag sim palavras (without words), supposedly showing paradoxical situations related to the virus. The page also produces graphics for flyers as well as t-shirts. The image used depicts a man, in comic style, with a gag preventing him from speaking. During this phase, the page assumes the features of a group, as shown by the changes in the forms of the interactions: the likes skyrocketed to more than 400 per post, people commented and also shared content on the page, mostly memes or inspirational quotations related to mass media manipulation and brainwashing, calling for critical thinking and solidarity among like-minded “rebels.” On occasion, comments become the instrument to discuss group positions, unpacking the different aspects of a variety of issues and clarifying what constitutes the shared taken-for-granted positions. For example, the voices of doctors denouncing the dangers of masks are sometimes challenged by doctors, thus compromising with the powerful. In the process of group-identity creation, street protests are of paramount importance: first, they are an occasion to forge alliances and clarify the profile of the followers of the page (and related groups). In addition to Medicos per la Verdade, alliances are forged with the group Quero Emigrar (I Want to Emigrate). Second, in a manner of speaking, the page ceases to be a “virtual” space sharing mainly international content and assumes the connotation of an interconnected digital space located in Portugal, embodied by people taking the streets.

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Truth and Science The research presented in this chapter was concerned with truth and science in a post-truth society. The analysis clearly shows how Verdade Inconveniente changed from a barely noticeable voice distributing supposed counter-information and counter-knowledge about a wide range of topics to what can be considered a node within an international galaxy of groups and individuals sharing a similar culture. In the process, it grew into a highly populated platform, mostly focusing on Portugal, sharing protests and initiatives, and becoming a proper “community.” The identity of the community is constructed around a shared culture and identity of critical thinkers who are rebelling against the system (see Harambam & Aupers, 2014). A diachronic gaze points out how the attention moves from Portugal to the global milieu (see chapter “QAnon and Its Conspiracy Milieu: The Italian Case”), which seems to provide plausibility and emotional connection through the participation in a shared culture (see chapter “Knowledge, Counter-­ Knowledge, Pseudo-­ Science in Populism”), and then returns to Portugal, embodying, diffusing, and locally adapting this shared culture according to local cultures and specificities (see chapter “The Problematic Relationship Between Science, Politics and Public Opinion in Late Modernity: The Case of the Anti-­Vax Movement in Spain and Italy”). The arguments touch upon politics, broadly defined, and science: between the first and the third phase, truth and science become inextricably connected. Truthtellers are mostly mediators who give voice to alternative epistemic authorities. In time, some truthtellers also become epistemic authorities in good standing, and their authority derives from their identification as critical thinkers who challenge the mainstream narrative and want to develop educated opinions. This I-Pistemology oscillates between praise for scientific epistemology—that people should individually check—and the valorization of other forms of epistemology (such as first-hand experience). Analyzing the nature of truth points out different, intersecting aspects. First of all, truth is concealed by mass media and politics, deadened by a “conspiracy of silence” (Zerubavel, 2006), brainwashing, and manipulation. Second, truth may also be something people do not want to hear because of political correctness. In time, the posting activity on the page reveals the politicization and polarization of truth, and the accusations move to indict leftists as either ingenuous or liars. Hence, the third aspect

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concerns the truth as an instrument of exposing contradictions. Facts are either true or false, and truths are interconnected in a cultural constellation that has to be either wholly adopted or wholly rejected. There is no room for nuance, ambiguities, or selective understandings. From the analysis emerges the affirmation of an individual form of inductivism in the form of the prominence given to individual experience as a test for validating scientific truths, which also becomes unfalsifiable (see Harambam & Aupers, 2014). It is not “epistemic relativism”; on the contrary, in Verdade Inconveniente, the reality and uniqueness of truth are reaffirmed. Moreover, it is strictly connected to what the individuals can experience and immediately understand—in this sense, it is an expression of populist epistemology. The grammar of “truth” is particularly relevant in contemporary politics, and moreover, in populist politics. Since the mid-2000s, scholars have pointed out that a combination of contingent events, such as bribery scandals, and long-term processes, such as the increasing complexity of the governmental structure in Europe (with the parallel increase in the numbers of non-elected organizations playing a crucial role in decision-­making; Kriesi, 2008), have resulted in citizens’ distrust of party politics, increasing demands for transparency, and the changing status of accountability in the political sphere. As Rosanvallon (2008, 228) writes more than ten years ago: “The less responsive governments are, the more citizens want to hold them accountable.” This process has paved the way to what has been called the “judicialization of politics,” which impacted political practice and culture, and in particular, the relevance and nature of political accountability (for a discussion, see Giorgi, 2018; Jacquot & Vitale, 2014). In terms of practice, the expression points out the increasing role of courts and litigation in the political realm (also referred to as tribunalization) and the resort to judicial means instead of political discussions to assess the effect of policies. In terms of culture, judicialization points to the spreading of the logic of judgment in politics, including an imperative of transparency and complete accountability, the relevance of holding people accountable, and the importance of the ritual aspect of judgment as the moment in which social norms are reaffirmed and restored. Also, judgment is a special type of decision, as it marks the final resolution over a matter and implies the rejection of the constitutive ambiguity of political discourse in favor of a commitment to a supposed non-political, non-partisan “truth” (see Rosanvallon, 2008).

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In other words, then, the judicialization of politics means that “truth” has increasing relevance in contemporary political grammar. Nevertheless, truth and politics are odd bedfellows. Truths differ from opinions in their mode of asserting validity, as they are compelling and not disputable: “The modes of thought and communication that deal with truth, if seen from the political perspective, are necessarily domineering; they don’t take into account other people’s opinion, and taking these into account is the hallmark of all strictly political thinking” (Arendt, 2003, 556). The opposite of truth, in fact, is a deliberate falsehood, not an opinion. As such, if a political matter were turned into a factual truth, it would not be disputable, with an effect of depoliticization (Mouffe, 2013). However, Arendt also points out that once the truthteller “enters the political realm and identifies himself with some partial interest and power formation, compromises on the only quality that could have made his truth appear plausible, namely, his personal truthfulness, guaranteed by impartiality, integrity, independence” (2003, 563), as factual truth is not self-evident. The politicization of science is by no means a recent phenomenon: the polarization of political opinions on science-related issues has a long history. However, scholars point out that in contemporary post-truth societies, the politicization of science is combined with the politicization of factual truths—making them disputable. Additionally, the judicialization of politics results in a political culture that demands policy choices that are oriented by non-partisan truths. As many scholars have commented, this demand risks a depoliticization effect: if political decisions over science-­ related matters are turned into inevitable choices because of their connection to indisputable truth, then they are less subject to public scrutiny. The politicization of truth is not exclusive to populist actors: scholars have argued that it can be traced back to the rise of non-partisan political grammar and the politics of “there-is-no-alternative” of the 1980s (Mouffe, 2005).11 The “populist challenge”— to epistemic authorities and scientific epistemology concerning science-related policies, in particular—highlights the complex intersections of politics and truth. In this post-truth climate, in which facts become a matter of opinion, truth is more important than ever.

 Mouffe (2005) speaks of a “post-democratic” consensus.

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Right-Wing Populism and the Trade-Off Between Health and the Economy During the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Comparison Between Western Europe and the United States Oscar Mazzoleni and Gilles Ivaldi

Introduction Since the beginning of 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic has triggered large scale emergency measures by national governments. Mostly, such measures have been based on medical expert advice and they have been The authors are grateful to Hande Eslen-Ziya and Alberta Giorgi for their valuable suggestions and comments on a previous version of this chapter. O. Mazzoleni (*) University of Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland e-mail: [email protected] G. Ivaldi Sciences-Po, Paris, France © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 H. Eslen-Ziya, A. Giorgi (eds.), Populism and Science in Europe, Palgrave Studies in European Political Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97535-7_12

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considered to be primarily ‘science-driven.’ Meanwhile, populist opposition to such responses by governments to the COVID-19 pandemic has gathered force across Europe and the United States, expressing concerns about curtailed civil liberties as well as about the impact of such measures on the national economy. Such criticism has been labeled ‘medical populism’ defined as a spectacularization, simplification and dramatization of the health crisis, which constructs a conflict between ‘liberty and the economy,’ on the one hand, and ‘public health,’ on the other hand (Lasco, 2020; see also Lasco & Curato, 2019). Mede and Schäfer (2020) suggest that this may have fuelled public resentment against science in the form of what the authors define as ‘science-related populism,’ that is a set of ideas suggesting that the virtuous “ordinary people” and their common sense— and not allegedly corrupt academic elites—should determine what is deemed “true knowledge,” how it is produced, and on which topics scientific research should focus (p. 482). Recent research seems to confirm that right-wing populist (RWP) actors are increasingly part of such mobilization against ‘science-driven’ COVID-19 measures, which concerns face masks, vaccines, and vaccination certificates (e.g., Meyer, 2021; Speed & Mannion, 2020). One particular aspect, which has received little attention, however, concerns how arguments about economic freedom and prosperity have been used by right-wing populists opposing governments’ COVID-19 restrictions that have been imposed in the name of science. There is little knowledge of how the trade-off between health and the economy has been framed by RWP parties and leaders during the pandemic crisis, and, most importantly, how their voters may have balanced concerns for general health and the economy. Moreover, we need a better understanding of the variation in COVID-19 pandemic responses across different national contexts, particularly with regard to populist participation in national executives during the pandemic, and when taking other types of populist challengers into account. As government restrictions based on science advice have persisted, and science-related populism has continued to spread across many countries—including Western Europe and the United States—in 2020 and 2021, one might ask how much the opposition between health and the economy may be shaping a new political cleavage between citizens. Looking at the complex relation between science and populism from this particular angle, this contribution seeks to answer two main research questions: (1) are RWP parties’ voters more inclined to prioritize the economy over the government’s health-oriented restrictive measures

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against COVID-19? And if so, do we see different effects across Western countries, in particular when contrasting West European countries with the United States? The chapter is organized as follows. First, we develop our theoretical argument by using existing literature on the relationship between people’s opinions and the pandemic showing that ideological and partisan features matter; second, we will introduce the case selection on which we will perform our comparative analysis. Then, to develop our main hypothesis, we will illustrate how supply-side right-wing populism has framed the trade-­ off between health and the economy during the pandemic. We will do this by offering some examples of statements by leaders and representatives. In the fourth section, we will analyze original survey data gathered in June 2021 among national representative samples of citizens in France, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, and the United States.

Citizens’ Attitudes During the Pandemic As the pandemic crisis is a recent phenomenon, there is a dearth of studies addressing which COVID-19 related issues and grievances influence citizens’ support for RWP parties, how these parties’ voters deal with the issues, and how they may differ from other populist parties’ supporters, especially those with left-wing populist orientations. However, some studies do provide some material to help us build our argument. Regarding the trade-off between economy and health (Singer, 2021), a comparative survey among seven West European countries conducted in June 2020 (Oana et al., 2021) suggests that those who are not afraid of the COVID-19 crisis having a negative impact on their personal health and the health conditions of society in general tend to oppose strict lockdown policies, while people worried about personal and societal economic aspects tend to be in favor of strict lockdowns. By contrast, citizens traditionally more in favor of the state playing a proactive role in supporting its citizens’ well-­being in the name of solidarity and tradition and have had easier access to economic relief during the COVID-19 crisis would be more willing to accept strict health measures than would be the case with right-wing voters. Overall, according to this research, both ideological orientation and personal and social pre-occupation have an impact on the trade-off between health and the economy during the first wave of the pandemic. A complementary stream of research shows a clear negative link between RWPP supporters, on the one hand, and trust in vaccines and

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scientific authorities, as well as social distancing measures, on the other hand. An aggregate nationwide analysis conducted in 14 West European countries before the COVID-19 pandemic suggests there is a positive association between the level of support for right-wing populist parties and the percentage of citizens who believe that vaccines are either unimportant or ineffective (Kennedy, 2019). A sub-national analysis in Italy (Barbieri & Bonini, 2020) highlights that the residents in provinces which had high support for extreme right-wing parties had lower rates of compliance with social distancing orders during the first COVID-19 lockdown in 2020. A study carried out in the UK in the spring of 2020, when the consensus about restrictions was high, show that people who believed immigration was bad for the British economy and those who thought Britain should protect its independence were less supportive of lockdown measures (Collignon et  al., 2021). A case study by social psychologists based on a three-step survey—one before and two during the pandemic— shows the influence of the left–right axis on scientific trust, with a strong link between right-wing ideology and lower trust in scientists (Kossowska et al., 2021). Similarly, a survey in Poland in April 2021 provides evidence that RWPP voters are more likely to support the anti-vaccine movement (Raciborski et al., 2021). Research conducted in the US underlines that people’s attitudes toward the government’s measures to curb COVID-19 were clearly partisan-oriented even during the first wave in 2020 (Allcott et al., 2020; Gadarian et al., 2021). Drawing on two different datasets, collected at two different stages of COVID-19 infection rates across the United States and specifically in Florida, Shino and Smith (2021) find that health concerns are important predictors of people’s choices in the 2020 presidential election. Individuals who were concerned about contracting COVID-19 and had taken even the most basic preventive action (wearing a mask) to prioritize public health vis-à-vis the economy were more likely to show weaker support for Trump in 2020.

A Comparative Analysis of Western Countries As can be seen, the current literature suggests that right-wing populist responses to COVID-19 measures by national governments show both similarities and differences across national contexts. By using a comparative approach, our empirical analysis aims to show to what extent a health versus economy cleavage has arisen during the pandemic. In this vein, it seems crucial to compare European countries with the United States, as

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trends of right-wing populism and responses to the pandemic may follow different patterns, and to focus on 2021, when the pandemic crisis persists but also continues to play a transformative role. Our data cover four European countries—namely France, Italy, Germany and Switzerland—and the United States. We have selected our five cases according to three main dimensions. The first dimension relates to the presence of one or more relevant right-wing populist parties in the country. Our analysis considers European countries where established right-wing populist parties are currently enjoying substantial levels of electoral support. For our European countries, we use the PopuList as a reference to identify populist parties (Rooduijn et al., 2019). Cases of radical right-wing populist parties include the Rassemblement national (RN) in France, the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in Germany, Lega and Fratelli d’Italia in Italy, and the Schweizerische Volkspartei or Swiss People’s Party (SVP) in Switzerland. In the United States, we follow the recent literature that sees Donald Trump as a main populist case, showing important similarities with RWP parties in Western Europe (Hawkins & Littvay, 2019; Steger, 2019). The second dimension is related to the status of the RWP actors in their respective party systems. In the US, the Trump presidency between 2017 and 2021 marked a major case of populism in power. In Switzerland, the SVP has traditionally been a member of the Swiss federal government, while parties like the RN and AfD continue to be excluded from national power. In Italy, Lega and M5S have recently been in government. A junior member of the conservative coalition with Forza Italia since 2013, Fratelli d’Italia became the main opposition party in Italy. Such differences are relevant as RWP parties with a governmental profile may be inclined to moderate their populism and may also seek to appeal to a broader electorate with more disparate economic preferences and diverging views about health issues. A third and last dimension concerns the competitive opportunities for the supply of populism in our countries. In Switzerland and the US, populism is primarily found on the right of the party system. In Switzerland, the SVP is the only nationwide populist party (Mazzoleni, 2018). In the US, populism is an essentially right-wing phenomenon (Steger, 2019). By contrast, in France, populism is found across both sides of the party system, with Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s France Insoumise (LFI) as a case of leftwing populist party (Ivaldi, 2018). In Germany, Die Linke has used populist ideas and themes, although the party remains more firmly associated with a traditional radical left agenda. In Italy, the main populist forces

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include M5S which has a strong populist appeal while showing more ambivalent positions on the economic and cultural axes of competition (Ivaldi et  al., 2017; Mosca & Tronconi, 2019). The presence of other relevant populist actors may have important implications for the distribution of populist socioeconomic attitudes across the political spectrum. There may also be variation in how such attitudes interact with policy preferences to shape political behavior (Loew & Faas, 2019).

Right-Wing Populist Politics Against Lockdown We begin by looking at the ‘supply-side’ of right-wing populism regarding the trade-off between the economy and health-oriented restrictive measures against COVID-19 across our five countries of interest. While we recognize that the link between ‘demand-side’ and ‘supply-side’ of populist politics is a complex one, it is important that we look at possible differences in populist strategies over economic and health issues across context. While at the beginning of the pandemic, there was strong variation in RWP parties’ strategies regarding health policy measures (e.g., Bobba & Hubé, 2021), we can argue that opposition to lockdown measures has been a common position among many right-wing populist parties and leaders across continents after the first wave of pandemic crisis. Such actors have been champions of anti-lockdown stances, often downplaying the pandemic and rejecting mainstream scientific expertise (Meyer, 2021; Speed & Mannion, 2020). However, the attack against expertise and medical authorities was not the only argument at stake. It is also notable that these parties have propagated their criticism of lockdowns by using economic populist stances—in particular, by showing strong support for small businesses as main drivers of the country’s economy and wealth. In the US, during the 2020 presidential campaign, Donald Trump primary attacked Joe Biden for wanting to ‘lock down’ the economy again and ostensibly turn the US into a ‘prison state.’1 As early as March 2020, in the early days of the pandemic, Trump pushed to reopen the economy, saying that he wanted the country ‘opened up and just raring to go by Easter,’ despite warnings from health experts: ‘Our country, Trump said, wasn’t built to be shut down. This is not a country that was built for this. It was not built to be shut down (…) If it were up to the doctors, they may 1  https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/nov/04/exit-polls-economy-covidlockdown-trump

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say let’s keep it shut down – let’s shut down the entire world! (…) We lose thousands and thousands of people a year to the flu. We don’t turn the country off.’2 Additionally, Trump claimed to support workers and small businesses: ‘My administration is also taking bold action to help American workers (…) We’ve now processed over $200 billion in loans to help small businesses retain their workers (…) It’s really something that has been an incredible success. And they need more money to keep it going to take care of these business and keep them—keep them open.’3 In France, Rassemblement national (RN) has pursued similar anti-­ lockdown rhetoric with a disregard for scientific expertise and a call to support small businesses. According to the party, ‘successive lockdowns have been terrible blows to economic actors (…) affecting the whole chain of supply and economic activity. In 2020, bankruptcies have concerned, above all, the smallest companies, which have been weakened and unjustly sacrificed on scientifically unproven grounds.’4 For Marine Le Pen, ‘the total closure or major time restriction of bars and restaurants risks killing the economy and plunging thousands of business owners and employees into great difficulty. Let’s not add, she said, economic and social distress to the health crisis!’5 Support for small business has also been key to the RN’s message: ‘we need automatic and generalized mechanisms to help small entrepreneurs and self-employed workers (merchants, farmers, professionals…) receive a subsistence allowance.’6 In Switzerland, the SVP has also taken anti-lockdown positions. According to the party, ‘a generalized ban on public gatherings is far too drastic a measure because it completely paralyzes the life of societies. The fact is that we are now paying the price for the laissez-faire policy pursued by the left in municipal authorities, which tolerated illegal parties and demonstrations. This serious negligence endangers not only the health of all the country’s inhabitants but also our national prosperity.’7 2  https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/24/coronavirus-response-trump-wants-to-reopenus-economy-by-easter.html 3  https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/presidential-speeches/april-13-2020coronavirus-task-force-briefing 4  https://rassemblementnational.fr/communiques/anticipons-la-reprise-et-le-necessaireaccompagnement-des-acteurs-economiques/ 5  https://twitter.com/mlp_officiel/status/1309393536954044416 6  https://rassemblementnational.fr/tribunes-libres/coronavirus-aides-de-letat-auxentreprises-ou-bouees-percees/ 7  https://www.udc.ch/actualites/articles/communiques-de-presse/responsabiliteindividuelle-et-non-aux-mesures-coercitives-contre-covid-19/

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We find similar populist responses to COVID-19 policies in Italy. With regard to protests against lockdowns, according to Lega leader Matteo Salvini, ‘where the situation is under control, you cannot ask for more weeks or months of closures and sacrifices (…) They are people who are just asking to be able to work; I always listen to them with extreme attention.’8 Meanwhile, Salvini called for evictions to restore private properties: ‘it is necessary and urgent to restore private property and give the 4 million small landlords who have not been getting their rents for a long time and who are also paying taxes on them back their rights.’9 We see similar views by Giorgia Meloni, leader of Fratelli d’Italia: ‘I am against the use of the Green pass to access social life because I find it neither useful nor right (…) I consider it harmful for our already compromised economy and useless for the management of the pandemic.’10 In Germany, the AfD voiced strong support for small business and entrepreneurs, calling for emergency financial support from the state and the exemption of income and corporate taxes and asking that the government ‘immediately put an end to the state-imposed lockdown and give back to the many businesses and their employees that are threatened with extinction and to all people their constitutionally guaranteed rights to freedom.’11 According to Stephan Brandner, deputy federal spokesman, ‘the state aid, which was paid out far too late and is far too bureaucratic, cannot plug the holes created by missing sales. As the AfD, we stand for the fact that there must be a legally regulated right to compensation and no handouts for entrepreneurs. Above all, however, we also stand for openings and a reawakened economy, as many countries in the world are currently successfully showing us!’12 As can be seen, RWP parties’ discourse in some relevant Western countries have prioritized economic freedom by adopting a variety of 8  https://www.adnkronos.com/covid-salvini-spero-riaperture-a-breve-in-gioco-salute-­ mentale_3U0kv1Iu94JTGW7U7GYLCU 9  https://www.ansa.it/sito/notizie/topnews/2021/04/08/covidsalvinisfrattiurgente-­ ripristinare-­proprieta-privata_976f8754-441e-4dac-b21b-25e932e7b30d.html 10  https://www.corriere.it/politica/21_agosto_12/giorgia-meloni-green-passcontrolli-­­i ntervista-f965c398-fad4-11eb-ba5f-da3c10b6af90.shtmlhttps://www.facebook.com/giorgiameloni.paginaufficiale/photos/a.10151958645677645/10159 228481382645/?type=3 11  https://www.afd.de/bundesparteitag-in-dresden-beschliesst-corona-resolution/ 12  h t t p s : / / w w w. a f d . d e / s t e p h a n - b r a n d n e r - e n d e - d e r - a u s s e t z u n g - d e r insolvenzantragspflicht-koennte-wahres-­ausmass-der-wirtschaftskrise-offenbaren/

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arguments—among others, a defense of small business and constitutional (including property) rights and skepticism about the scientific and medical reasons underlying restrictive measures taken in the name of health protection. Thus, considering the available research and ‘supply-side’ evidence, it seems reasonable to hypothesize that (1) people supporting RWP parties are more economics-oriented with lower agreement with science-­ based restrictive measures taking place during the pandemic, and because of the increasing politicization by RWP parties, more than personal and social concerns relating to the pandemic, (2) ideological orientation has an impact on the trade-off between health and the economy.

Data and Methods Our analysis is based on an original comparative survey conducted by YouGov in June 2021. In particular, we look at how citizens view the health versus economy trade-off, as well as their evaluation of the national government’s management of the COVID-19 crisis. Our national representative samples include people aged 18 and over who were recruited via the internet. The survey used quota-sampling based on gender, age, occupation, and size of municipality with regional stratification. Potential ‘speeders’ who completed the questionnaire in less than half the median time were excluded. While we are primarily interested in right-wing populist parties and actors, we also explore socioeconomic attitudes for other populist parties in the countries where such parties are relevant. Finally, it should be noted that our period of investigation concerns the second stage of the pandemic in 2021, at a time when the social and economic impact of government policies to fight the COVID-19 pandemic emerged as a political issue across most Western countries. Our main variable of interest concerns the health versus economy trade-­ off during the pandemic, which was measured using the following item: “to what extent do you agree or disagree with the following statement: the government should always prioritize public health over the economy?”. Other COVID-19 related socioeconomic and political attitudes concerned the evaluation of the national government’s handling of the health crisis, which was taken from the following question: “The government has handled the health crisis in a satisfactory way.” Positive views of the management of the pandemic by the national government may increase the likelihood to support health measures over the economy. Additionally, considering the relation between criticism of health measures by right-­wing

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populist actors and their support to small businesses during the pandemic, we added two specific questions—that is, “The government should put more trust in private companies to deal with the economic consequences of COVID-19” and “The government has not provided enough support to shopkeepers and small business owners”—which allowed to control for the effect of right-wing economic attitudes on the health versus economy tradeoff. All items were measured on a seven-point Likert scale ranging from 1 ‘completely disagree’ to 7 ‘completely agree.’ Next, we looked at the personal and household economic impact of the coronavirus. We may expect people who have been economically affected most by the health crisis to be less supportive of health measures and to be more likely to prioritize the economy, independent from their political orientation. The personal/household impact of COVID-19 was taken from the following question: “Please tell us whether you have experienced one or more of these situations since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Please select all the responses that apply, even if this situation has come to an end: The income from my job has decreased; I was made redundant/lost my job; My household income has fallen; My working hours have decreased; I was forced to take annual eave/holiday; I was forced to take unpaid leave; None of the above”. Finally, we included two important attitudinal controls, namely welfare chauvinism and attitudes toward economic redistribution, which allowed better isolation of the effect of populist party preferences taking into account attitudinal predispositions of voting for those parties. As the literature suggests, welfare chauvinism is a key factor in populist voting, which is traditionally positively associated with right-wing populism and negatively correlated with other instances of populism, in particular those situated on the left of the party spectrum. By contrast, redistribution is a significant driver of left-wing populism, which is often seen as more socially inclusive and universalist (Mudde & Kaltwasser, 2017; Van Hauwaert & Van Kessel, 2018). Welfare chauvinism and economic redistribution were measured with the following items: “People may have different opinions on societal and socioeconomic issues. To what extent do you agree or disagree with each of the following statements? In jobs, priority should be given to American citizens over foreigners; To reduce inequality, one should take from the rich to give to the poor”. Populist preferences were taken from a measure of vote intention. In the four European countries, we used a legislative vote intention featuring all relevant national political parties, as well as abstention: “If a general

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election were held tomorrow, which party would you vote for?” In the US, we used a measure of presidential vote intention that featured the two main candidates in the 2020 election (i.e., Joe Biden and Donald Trump), other Democratic and Republican candidates, and abstention. However, due to the small number of respondents who declared a vote for other Democratic and Republican candidates, we focused on a hypothetical Biden versus Trump horserace. We first examine bivariate correlations between populist preferences and voters’ views of this trade-off. We then turn to a series of multivariate linear regression model to examine the effect of populist voting preferences across each of the five countries. Our dependent variable is the health versus economy trade-off. Together with the populist voting variable, all our models include a set of sociodemographic controls, namely gender, age, and educational attainment, recoded into three categories: high, middle, and low. We add attitudes toward economic issues in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the impact of coronavirus on the personal/household situation (here we focus on loss of income and/or redundancy), and our two attitudinal controls, welfare chauvinism and redistribution. We test different models for established right-wing populist actors across our five cases; where relevant, we also test a model of voting for other populist parties such as LFI in France, Die Linke in Germany, and the M5S in Italy. We use a dichotomous factor to contrast the populist vote against all other parties; nonresponses and non-voters are excluded from calculations.

A Left/Right Populist Divide Preliminary analysis of density curves representing the distribution of the health versus economy trade-off highlights differences across our five countries (see Appendix, Graphs 1–5). Citizens were more prone to prioritize health over the economy in France, Italy, and Germany, less so in the United States and Switzerland were the distribution was less skewed to the left. Bivariate Analysis The bivariate analysis presented in the Figs. 1 and 2 shows means on the item concerning the prioritization of health over the economy across radical right-wing and other populist voters, compared with other voters in each country. As can be seen, compared with other voters, RWPP

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France: Vote for RRPP

0

0

2

2

Mean 4

Mean 4

6

6

Germany: Vote for RRPP

Other

Vote for RRPP

Other

RWP

Bivariate analysis of RRPP vote

Bivariate analysis of RRPP vote

RWP

Switzerland: Vote for RRPP

0

0

2

2

Mean 4

Mean 4

6

6

Italy: Vote for RRPP

Vote for RRPP

Other Bivariate analysis of RRPP vote

Vote for RRPP

RWP

Other

Vote for RRPP

RWP

Bivariate analysis of RRPP vote

0

2

Mean 4

6

United States: Vote for RRPP

Other Bivariate analysis of RRPP vote

Vote for RRPP

RWP

Fig. 1  Means of prioritizing health over the economy for radical right-wing populist and other voters. (Source: EPS Survey June 2021)

  RIGHT-WING POPULISM AND THE TRADE-OFF BETWEEN HEALTH… 

4 2 0

0

2

Mean

Mean

4

6

Germany: Vote Other populist

6

France: Vote Other populist

267

Other

Vote Other populist

LWP

Other

Vote Other populist

LWP

Bivariate analysis of Other Populist vote

Bivariate analysis of Other Populist vote

0

2

Mean 4

6

Italy: Vote Other populist

Other

Vote Other populist

LWP

Bivariate analysis of Other Populist vote

Fig. 2  Means of prioritizing health over the economy for other populist voters. (Source: EPS Survey June 2021)

supporters were generally more likely to prioritize the economy over health during the pandemic, with the exception of the RN in France, where we find no significant difference. The gap is particularly notable in the US, where Trump voters differ substantially from those supporting Biden. Such differences are found across cases of RWP parties in opposition (e.g., Lega, AfD, Trump), as well as in cases where these parties are in power, such as the SVP in Switzerland. Let us note that we still find significant differences in Italy when looking separately at supporters of Lega and Fratelli d’Italia, with both groups being more likely to prioritize the economy over health. In sharp contrast, in the three countries with other populist parties, we find that supporters of Die Linke in Germany, LFI in France, and the M5S in Italy were more likely to prioritize health over the economy. Again, we find a greater propensity to support governmental health measures in populist parties in opposition such as LFI and Die Linke, as well as those in government, as was the case for the M5S in Italy at the time of the survey.

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Multivariate Analysis We further explore the link between populist preferences and views of the health versus economy trade-off by running multivariate analyses that include sociodemographic controls. Populist voters across the political spectrum have different sociological profiles, and we must account for important sociodemographic factors like gender, age, and education. Additionally, we look at the working status of respondents as the priority given to the economy over health may vary across different situations depending on employment. We also add two variables concerning the impact of the pandemic on the personal/household situation (i.e., loss of income and/or redundancy) to check our second hypothesis. Table 1 summarizes significant effects of the populist vote across each country and the type of populist actor, when controlling for sociodemographic variables, and the impact of coronavirus on the personal situation (see Models 1a for RWP parties and 1b for other populist parties in the Appendix). The results show that sociodemographic factors vary across contexts. Gender is only significant in the US, where women were much more likely to prioritize health over the economy during the pandemic. In terms of age, older voters were also more likely to give priority to health, but only in Germany and Italy. We see more consistent findings with regard to education: With the exception of the Swiss case, we find that individuals with higher levels of education tend to prioritize the economy over health, and that such differences are statistically significant in all the other countries of the survey. Finally, there is virtually no effect of the personal situation with regard to loss of income and redundancy, with the exception of Germany, where respondents who had been made redundant because of the coronavirus were significantly less likely to prioritize health measures by the government (Model 1). Turning to the effect of populist preferences, the multivariate analyses confirm that RWP parties’ supporters were consistently less likely to support health over the economy, when controlling for their sociodemographic profile and personal situation during the pandemic (Model 1a), while we find the opposite for other populist voters: Supporters of Die Linke, LFI, and the M5S were significantly less likely to support the economic rather than the health measures by their government at the time of the survey (Model 1b). In Italy, two separate models for Lega, on the one hand, and Fratelli d’Italia, on the other hand, confirm that supporters of those two parties were more likely to support the economy over health,

Model 1a −0.31** −0.80*** Model 2a 0.14*** 0.20*** 0.01 −0.08** 0.05* 0.06* −0.04 0.01 0.24*** 0.25*** −0.02 −0.42** −0.95*** 0.33*** −0.02 0.08** −0.06* 0.21*** −0.47***

−0.89*** 0.27*** 0.02 −0.02 −0.03 0.13*** −0.29**

0.27*** −0.09*** 0.08*** −0.07** 0.29*** −0.86***

−2.41***

US Trump

Model 1b 0.42* 0.79*** Model 2b 0.14*** 0.23*** 0.01 −0.07* 0.05* 0.05* −0.04 0.01 0.24*** 0.24*** 0.08 0.56***

Germany Die Linke

0.28*** 0.02 −0.03 −0.05* 0.14*** 0.31**

0.69***

Italy M5S

*p < 0.05; **p < 0.01; ***p < 0.001

Models 1a and 1b, linear regressions, with gender, age, education, working status, loss of income, and redundancy; in the US, we add race. Models 2a and 2b, sociodemographic and attitudinal controls

Notes:

Model 1 Populist vote Model 2 Gov’t managed health crisis well More trust private companies Not enough support for small entrepreneurs Welfare chauvinism Take from rich Populist vote

Switzerland SVP

France LFI

Italy Lega/FdI

France RN

Germany AfD

Other populist actors

Right-wing populism

Table 1  Health over economy: summary of significant effects of the populist vote across countries

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with statistically significant and negative coefficients in both cases (–.52*** and –.81***, respectively, see Model 1c in Appendix). We validate the effect of populist preferences by including the respondents’ assessment of the management of the health crisis by their national government. The view of the health versus economy trade-off may be associated with the perception of how effectively the national government has handled the pandemic. To control for socioeconomic attitudes, we also include the two items concerning trust in private companies to deal with the economic consequences of COVID-19, on the one hand, and the government’s support to shopkeepers and small business owners, on the other hand. Finally, we add welfare chauvinism and redistribution preferences to control for drivers of the populist vote on both the left and the right. We run the previous multivariate regressions, including all these additional factors, for both RWP and other populist parties’ supporters (see details of Models 2a and 2b in the Appendix). All significant effects are reported at the bottom of Table 1. As anticipated, the effect of perceptions of the government’s management of the crisis is clear. In all five countries, the preference for health over the economy is clearly associated with positive views of how the national government has dealt with the health crisis. Turning to support for small entrepreneurs, it is only significant in Switzerland and the US, which reflects the economically right-leaning profile of SVP and Donald Trump supporters. Welfare chauvinism has no significant effect, except for the US, where more chauvinistic voters—most of whom are Trump supporters—tend to prioritize the economy over health. Interestingly, we find a strong relationship between economic redistribution and the prioritization of health measures, with individuals in favor of redistribution being significantly more likely to give precedence to health over the economy, a relationship that is partly visible in the coefficients for other and primarily left-leaning populist voters. Again, we find the effect of RWP party preference to be statistically significant and substantial across all countries when controlling for views of the national government’s action, as well as all other attitudinal predictors, with the exception of France, where the RN’s vote has a much weaker effect on the health versus economy trade-off, losing statistical significance (see Model 2a). The same applies when running separate models for Lega and Fratelli d’Italia in Italy (Model 2c in Appendix), partly due to the contrasts used in the models (i.e., coding each populist party as ‘other’ in turn). Model 2b also confirms our previous observations with regard to other populist parties’ supporters who are still more likely to prioritize health

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over the economy, independently of their assessment of the government’s handling of the crisis and other attitudes, in Germany and Italy. It is no longer the case, however, in France, where supporters of LFI are not more prone to prioritize health over economy when controlling for attitudinal factors, in particular for their redistribution preferences, bearing in mind that LFI voters have the highest level of pro-redistribution attitudes of the entire French electorate (Ivaldi, 2018).

Conclusion The COVID-19 pandemic is a ‘hard time’ example of the formation of public opinion (e.g., Bartels, 2014). The crisis has pushed health issues in post-war Western democracies to the top of the national agenda of almost all governments world-wide, and it has fostered de-alignment and re-­ alignment in both the ‘supply-side’ and the ‘demand-side’ of populist politics. Faced with the new opportunities produced by COVID-19, many right-wing populists have shaped their targets and reframed their discourses and strategies, as some analyses have shown, in terms of ‘medical populism,’ opposing science-based health measures. In this chapter, we focused on the impact of RWP parties on the trade-­ off between health and the economy during COVID-19. Across Western countries, governments have implemented restrictive measures limiting business—not only strict lockdowns but also other limitations influencing income and economic freedom of small entrepreneurs and consumer access to retail (including masks and COVID passes). The analysis in the five countries confirms that the health–economy trade-off is driven in large part by populist party preferences. Irrespective of people’s views regarding the national government’s handling of the pandemic, and when simultaneously taking into account sociodemographic factors and relevant socio-political attitudes, we find that RWP parties and their leaders attracted the most skeptical segment of the public during the second phase of the COVID-19 pandemic (i.e., during the vaccination campaigns and COVID-19 certificates). In line with the recent literature on the populist supply of pandemic politics, our analysis of the ‘demand-side’ suggests that right-wing populist voters were more likely to prioritize health over the economy, and that this was very significant among those voting for Trump in the US, Alternative für Deutschland in Germany, Lega and Fratelli d’Italia in Italy, and the SVP in Switzerland.

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How can we interpret these results? A first important aspect relates to the government versus opposition status of populist parties. As our analysis suggests, we should nuance the role of the anti-establishment stance that is inherent in the populist claim. The AfD, Fratelli d’Italia, the RN, the Lega, and Trump (after the 2020 Presidential elections) were in the opposition, but their supporters were no less critical of the government and no less economically oriented than supporters of the SVP were; likely, the latter has a minoritarian position in the Swiss government coalition. In any event, the government versus opposition contrast does not appear to be sufficient to account for how populist voters balanced health and economic issues in COVID-19. The left–right populist divide seems on the other hand more relevant. Our results demonstrate that supporters of left-wing populist parties such as the French France Insoumise and the Die Linke in Germany were more likely to support health-oriented restrictive policymaking in their respective countries. We find similar results for the more ‘centrist’ variant of populism embodied by the M5S in Italy. All this indicates that populist voters across the political board may respond differently to the prioritization of health issues. Our results are consistent with previous research and they also corroborate our overview of the ‘supply-side’ of pandemic politics among right-wing populist parties and leaders. A second important aspect concerns the link between economic prioritization by RWP parties and their predominantly small business-oriented approach observed prior to the pandemic. Our findings suggests that views of the health versus economy trade-off among populist voters may be somewhat disconnected from the socioeconomic positions of those parties, particularly to the right of the political spectrum. While left-wing populism is generally associated with socially inclusive and redistributive preferences (Da Silva, 2021; Otjes & Louwerse, 2015), the literature shows that RWP parties cover a wide range of socioeconomic positions which have also changed over time (De Lange, 2007). The SVP is traditionally seen as a market-oriented right-wing party, while the RN and, more recently, the German AfD and Fratelli d’Italia are, to some extent, closer to the economic left (Fenger, 2018: 197; Otjes et al., 2018: 285). In Italy, Salvini’s Lega is both market liberal and protectionist (Albertazzi et  al., 2018; Caterina, 2021), while in the US, Trump’s socioeconomic policies were a mix of traditional conservative and more distinctively left-­ leaning interventionist and anti-trade positions (Steger, 2019). A more relevant connection may be established on the other hand with the ‘producerist morality’ that dominates the political economy of

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contemporary right-wing populism. As suggested in the literature, rightwing populists in Western countries share a common ‘producerist’ ideology which typifies the ‘people’ as a virtuous community of deserving ‘producers’ (Abts et al., 2021; Berlet & Lyons, 2000; Ivaldi & Mazzoleni, 2019; Kazin, 1998). Producerist principles include the defense of hardworking people, high relevance of small business and private entrepreneurship, the stigmatization of ‘parasites’ at both the top and bottom of society, including immigrants and the establishment, which both stand accused of undermining economic prosperity (see Rinaldi & Bekker, 2021). Such principles are embedded in economic populism and they have been identified as key aspects of the moral economy of populist parties and leaders such as the French RN, the Swiss SVP and Donald Trump in the United States (Ivaldi & Mazzoleni, 2019, 2020). The way in which the trade-off between health and the economy is framed by RWP is not just a by-product of the pandemic crisis, but it is rooted in previous beliefs and discourses. Although the literature traditionally emphasizes the fluidity of political rhetoric in times of crisis, research on the COVID-19 pandemic seems to contradict this argument. A recent in-depth analysis of Trump’s re-election campaign in 2020 shows for instance a great deal of continuity with his previous right-wing populist rhetoric, including ‘anti-elitism and anti-science positions, personalized authority and criticism of media’ (Lacatus & Meibauer, 2021: 15). Similarly, RWP parties and leaders across West European countries, as well as in the US, have opposed restrictive health measures by governments, claiming to protect economic freedom and to defend the interests of small business—topics that are nothing new to RWP parties’ discourse. Though our data do not allow to link the supply and demand-side of populist pandemic politics, our findings suggest that right-wing populist voters in particular generally tend to align with the anti-lockdown positions of their preferred party or candidate, and that they differ in that respect both from other populist and mainstream voters. Of course, the consolidation of the cleavage that has emerged between health and the economy will very much depend on the duration and severity of the COVID-19 pandemic in the next months. As our data suggest, government responses and handling of the crisis are key to preserving public opinion support for often restrictive health measures, as right-wing populists may perpetuate their criticism of the health versus economy trade-off that has dominated and may continue to occupy the political agenda of most Western nations in the near future.

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Appendix

Graphs 1–5  Distribution of the health versus economy trade-off in France, Italy, Germany, Switzerland and the United States

Model 1a  Linear regressions: Health over Economy by sociodemographic controls and Vote for RWP Linear regressions: sociodemographic controls and Vote for RWP Health over Economy France

Germany

Italy

Switzerland

GenderFemale

0.10 (0.09)

0.12 (0.08)

0.09 (0.09)

AgeContinuous

0.001 (0.005)

0.01 (0.004)**

0.01 (0.004)**

EducationRMiddle −0.18 (0.12) EducationRHigh −0.41 (0.11)*** StatusRecStudent 0.11 (0.34)

−0.28 (0.13)* −0.43 (0.13)** 0.13 (0.21)

−0.26 (0.13) −0.29 (0.15)* 0.18 (0.23)

StatusRecInactive

0.12 (0.14)

0.03 (0.14)

StatusRecRetired

0.12 (0.14)

0.31 (0.12)*

LossIncome

0.19 (0.11)

0.13 (0.11)

MadeRedundant

−0.96 (0.22)*** −0.31 −0.80 (0.10)** (0.12)*** 5.30 4.75 (0.28)*** (0.25)*** 1359 1632 0.02 0.08 0.01 0.07 1.64 1.60 (df = 1348) (df = 1621) 2.84** 14.10*** (df = 10; (df = 10; 1348) 1621)

0.35 (0.12)** 0.40 (0.14)** −0.06 (0.09) 0.25 (0.16)

0.21 (0.09)* 0.43 (0.08)*** 0.004 −0.004 (0.004) (0.003) 0.22 (0.14) 0.01 (0.16) −0.45 (0.17)** −0.01 −0.38 (0.11) (0.12)** −0.05 −0.48 (0.10) (0.10)*** 0.17 (0.18) −0.01 (0.23) 0.15 (0.15) 0.06 (0.11)

RaceBlack RaceHispanic RaceOther

VoteRWP Constant Observations R2 Adjusted R2 Residual Std. Error F Statistic

0.14 (0.24)

Notes: p