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ABSTRACT
This article analyses political cartoons that depict contemporary populist politicians in Denmark, Finland, and Sweden between 2005 and 2015, a period which focuses on the electoral successes of these movements. The hypothesis is that by analyzing cartoons we can explore the underlying moral and normative confrontations linked to current political populism in the Nordic liberal democracies, which arose during the insurgent phase of the domestic right-wing parties. In total, 60 political cartoons are analyzed by means of content categorization and visual semiotics. The most popular caricatures in the cartoons depicted the leaders of the populist parties, while the most common signifiers linked the populism in the cartoons explicitly to fascism, Nazism, nativism, and racism. In this, the cartoons differed from news journalism, reflecting the specific role of cartoons in public opinion discourse and indicating special characteristics that derive from particular political contexts and also the cartoonists’ own perspectives.
Acknowledgments
This work was supported by the Academy of Finland under Grant 259393 (Research Council for Culture and Society).
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
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Juha Herkman
Juha Herkman is a Professor of Media and Communication Studies at the University of Helsinki, Finland. For last ten years, Herkman has studied political communication, and his current research focuses on the relationship between populism and the media as well as on mainstreaming of populism in Europe. Herkman has published several academic textbooks in Finnish, and articles in journals such as Media, Culture & Society, Javnost - The Public, Nordicom Review, Convergence, Journalism Studies and Acta Sociologica.