In this incisive opening to a multi-part series, ECPS intern Lianne Nota interrogates one of the most taken-for-granted concepts in populism studies: “the people.” Moving beyond conventional definitions that treat the category as self-evident, she foregrounds racialization as a critical—yet often neglected—dimension in its construction. By shifting the analytical lens from race as a fixed attribute to racialization as a dynamic process of boundary-making, the study offers a conceptually rigorous and empirically grounded intervention. Focusing on the Dutch case, Nota situates populist discourse within broader debates on “new racism,” identity, and political representation. The series promises to advance the field by systematically examining how both right- and left-wing populist actors construct “the people” through implicit and explicit forms of differentiation.
By Lianne Nota*
Populism is everywhere in contemporary politics, from Europe to the Americas. At its core lies a simple but powerful idea: ‘the people’ should be at the center of politics (Canovan 1999). But who exactly are ‘the people’ and how are they constructed?
This question is more complicated than it seems. In much of academic literature, populism is understood as a ‘thin ideology’ that divides society into two camps: the ‘pure’ people and the ‘corrupt’ elite (Mudde & Kaltwasser, 2017). While this understanding captures something important, it often takes ‘the people’ for granted, overlooking the essentially contested and flexible nature of that category.
This four-part article series explores a crucial but often overlooked dimension of the construction of ‘the people’: racialization.
Beyond Race: Why Racialization Matters
While much has already been written on the people-centeredness of populism, this article series aims to focus the discussion on the construction of the populist ‘people’ through racialization. Using racialization as a concept instead of race, this series aims to avoid reifying race and emphasizes the inherent social constructedness of race (Small, 1994).
As such, racialization refers above all to a process through which differences between groups are constructed, whether cultural or biological. This understanding of racialization draws on the understanding that, nowadays, ‘new racism’ often uses culture and religion as proxies for race to create orders that resemble racial hierarchies, even in the absence of any explicit biological references (MacMaster, 2001). In addition, racialization often serves to subordinate a specific group (Woodbrige et al., 2025). This article series therefore uses racialization to refer to the discursive process of boundary-making by which (political) subjects are constituted and morally differentiated through the attribution of racial meanings, whether those are explicitly biological or not.
What Has Already Been Said?
Existing research on race and populism reflects the assumption that right-wing populism is inherently exclusionary while left-wing populism is inherently inclusionary (Mudde & Kaltwasser, 2013). As such, the relationship between race and right-wing populism has been addressed by numerous scholars (Krzyżanowski, 2018; Krzyżanowski, 2020; Thorleifsson, 2021; Mondon & Winteri, 2020), while the relationship between race and left-wing populism has been largely overlooked.
Following existing literature, this series does not make any assumptions about the conduciveness of either right- or left-wing populism to racialization. Instead, it asks the open-ended question: how do different populist actors construct ‘the people’ and to what extent does racialization play a role in that process?
Case Study: The Netherlands
To explore this question, we turn to the Netherlands, a country with a long history of both left- and right-wing populism. Interestingly, Dutch political discourse often avoids explicit references to race, favoring terms like ‘ethnicity’ or ‘culture’ (Essed & Trienekens, 2008). This makes the Netherlands a particularly interesting case study for studying how racialization can operate indirectly through seemingly neutral language.
What This Series Will Show
In the upcoming articles, we will work towards answering the puzzle of how Dutch populist actors construct ‘the people’ and, if so, how racialization plays a part in that process. Drawing on a series of Dutch parliamentary debates held in 2015 during the height of the refugee crisis, this series compares how/if Partij voor de Vrijheid (PVV), a right-wing populist party, and Socialistische Partij (SP), a left-wing populist party, constructed ‘the people’ in racialized terms. The findings suggest that, while both parties mobilized a populist divide between ‘the people’ and ‘the elite,’ they differed significantly in how they constructed ‘the people,’ and only one party constructed the ‘people’ in racialized terms.
Let’s dive into existing literature on the role of race in populist politics first.
Where Is Race in Populism Studies?
We have already asked a deceptively simple question: who are ‘the people’ in populist politics? Surprisingly, within mainstream populist research, this question is not often framed in terms of race or racialization. To illustrate, let us take a look at the major handbooks on populism in scholarly literature. For example, the Oxford Handbook of Populism, contains no chapter on race, racism, or racialization, despite dedicating large parts of the book to ‘issue-centred’ discussions surrounding populism (Kaltwasser et al., 2017). Similarly, the Research Handbook on Populism and the Palgrave Handbook of Populism also do not systematically address race as a core issue in populist politics (Oswald, 2022). This relative silence suggests that race, racism, and racialization have not been regarded as central elements of populism within mainstream (theoretical) debates.
When research on the relationship between race and populism does exist, it mostly focuses on right-wing populist parties and movements. For example, Krzyżanowski (2018, 2020) argues that racist and xenophobic ideas have become normalized in Poland as a result of anti-refugee and anti-immigration rhetoric introduced by the Polish PiS party, a right-wing populist and nationalist party. This kind of research shows that culture and religion are often used as proxies for race to create orders that resemble racial hierarchies, even in the absence of any explicit biological references. This kind of cultural racism is sometimes called ‘new racism,’ to distinguish it from the biological racism that characterized the pre-1945 era (MacMaster, 2001). While this body of work has been crucial in drawing more attention to the role of race and racialization in populist ideology, it has also contributed to a relative neglect of how similar processes might (or might not) unfold beyond right-wing populist parties.
Two notable exceptions in this regard are worth mentioning. A study by Chazel and Dain (2021) found that left-wing populist movements may also draw on notions like ‘the homeland,’ albeit in more inclusive ways than their right-wing counterparts do. Drawing on narratives about belonging and national identity always engages in some exercise of boundary-making, introducing the possibility for racialization. In their study of Hugo Chávez’s political rhetoric, this leads Barreto and Maldonado (2025) to conclude that left-wing populism can also include racial rhetoric.
Therefore, rather than assuming a priori that left-wing populism is immune to racialization, this article series critically examines the role racialization plays in left-wing populism and whether this role differs from how racialization operates in right-wing populism. The next article turns to how we can study racialization empirically by outlining a discourse-analytical approach to this process.
(*) Lianne Nota is an ECPS intern and Research Master’s student in International Relations at the University of Groningen, with a focus on identity, populism, ontological security, and the ethics of global affairs. These article series is based on her paper “Constructing ‘The People’: The Role of Racialization in Dutch Populist Discourse” that she wrote for her specialization phase at RUG.
References
Barreto, A. A., & Maldonado, D. (2025). Race and populism on the left: Political rhetoric in Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela. Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies, 20(3), 387–402. https://doi.org/10.1080/17442222.2024.2393506
Chazel, L., & Dain, V. (2021). “Left-Wing Populism and Nationalism: A Comparative Analysis of the Patriotic Narratives of Podemos and France insoumise.” Journal for the Study of Radicalism, 15(2), 73–94. https://www-jstor-org.focus.lib.kth.se/stable/48642382
Canovan, M. (1999). Trust the People! Populism and the Two Faces of Democracy. Political Studies, 47(1), 2–16. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9248.00184
Essed, P., & Trienekens, S. (2008). ‘Who wants to feel white?’ Race, Dutch culture and contested identities. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 31(1), 52–72. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870701538885
Kaltwasser, C. R., Taggart, P., Espejo, P. O., & Ostiguy, P. (Eds). (2017). The Oxford Handbook of Populism. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198803560.001.0001
Krzyżanowski, M. (2018). Discursive Shifts in Ethno-Nationalist Politics: On Politicization and Mediatization of the “Refugee Crisis” in Poland. Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies, 16(1–2), 76–96. https://doi.org/10.1080/15562948.2017.1317897
Krzyżanowski, M. (2020). Discursive shifts and the normalisation of racism: Imaginaries of immigration, moral panics and the discourse of contemporary right-wing populism. Social Semiotics, 30(4), 503–527. https://doi.org/10.1080/10350330.2020.1766199
MacMaster, N. (2001). Racism in Europe, 1870-2000. Palgrave. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4039-4033-9
Mondon, A., & Winter, A. (2019). Whiteness, populism and the racialisation of the working class in the United Kingdom and the United States. Identities, 26(5), 510–528. https://doi.org/10.1080/1070289X.2018.1552440
Mudde, C., & Kaltwasser, C. R. (2013). Exclusionary vs. Inclusionary Populism: Comparing Contemporary Europe and Latin America. Government and Opposition, 48(2), 147–174. https://doi.org/10.1017/gov.2012.11
Mudde, C., & Kaltwasser, C. R. (2017). Populism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press. (1378915). https://research.ebsco.com/linkprocessor/plink?id=0a98f106-01e2-39bf-9f0c-7ff265fff45d
Oswald, M. (Ed.). (2022). The Palgrave Handbook of Populism. Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80803-7
Small, S. (1994). Racialised Barriers: The Black Experience in the United States and England in the 1980s. Routledge.
Thorleifsson, C. (2021). In pursuit of purity: Populist nationalism and the racialization of difference. Identities, 28(2), 186–202. https://doi.org/10.1080/1070289X.2019.1635767
Woodbridge, E., Vanhouche, A.-S., & Lechkar, I. (2025). The racialization of radicalization and terrorism: Belgian political language on Muslims and Islam. Ethnicities, 25(5), 701–723. https://doi.org/10.1177/14687968251329926
See other parts of the series
Part 2 — Studying “the People”: A Discourse-Analytical Approach to Populism
Part 3 — (De-)racializing ‘the People’: Who Is the Dutch Populist ‘People’?
Part 4: Rethinking the Nexus of Racialization and Populism: Lessons from the Study
