Populism as a discursive strategy: an analysis of the communication of selected populist actors in the Czech political arena

This paper analyses the concept of populism as a discursive strategy. Therefore, it uses the view of populist discourse as discussed by Ernesto Laclau and other authors in their works. The author analyses the communication practices of four selected Czech political actors on social networks (Facebook and Twitter) in the period before the elections to the Chamber of Deputies of the Parliament of the Czech Republic in October 2021. For the analysis, the author chose representatives who are commonly labelled as populists, i.e. former Prime Minister Andrej Babiš, far-right populists, i.e. Tomio Okamura, and then two politicians representing mainstream parties - Markéta Pekarová Adamová from TOP 09 and Vít Rakušan from STAN. In the theoretical part, the author describes in depth the phenomenon of populism on the basis of expert literature, and in a comprehensive way points out the relationship between populism, social networks, media and political communication. In the practical part, the author conducted a so-called critical discursive analysis of posts of the politicians on the above-mentioned social media and then compared their dominant communication practices. The author then places the data and results of the research in context of the populist narrative described in the theoretical part of the thesis