Appealing to the ordinary citizen: symbolic repertoires of ordinariness in party communication

Claims to speak as or for ordinary people have become increasingly visible in contemporary politics. Political leaders often draw on an appeal to being ordinary, and citizen mobilisations frequently find common ground in shared understandings of themselves as ordinary citizens. These developments suggest that ordinariness now plays a significant role in political communication. Research on populism shows that many populist radical right parties excel at constructing an identity of ordinariness through style, narrative, and emotional cues, often drawing on the “low” pole of politics, which involves informal language, everyday manners, and cultural markers associated with ordinary people rather than elite norms (Ostiguy 2017). Research on party transformation and electoral realignment offers one possible explanation for the contrasting difficulties faced by many mainstream left parties, since shifts in their social bases and organisational profiles have brought a larger presence of highly educated and professional groups (Piketty 2018; Gethin et al. 2021; Mudge 2018). But even with these insights, there remain open questions about why some parties appear more capable than others of activating this identity of ordinariness, how their attempts to mobilise it differ in practice, and to what extent this identity depends on populist framing or on the ideological profiles of radical right actors. To address these questions, the paper draws on Boussaguet and Faucher’s (2024) framework of symbolic repertoires and sees ordinariness as a set of narratives, images, and categories that express ideas of normality, everyday experience, and belonging. Party communication is treated as a key site where these symbolic resources are selected and combined in order to define constituencies and justify political authority. The aim is not to map the repertoire of ordinariness in full but to explore how parties use this repertoire when they claim to represent ordinary people. The empirical study focuses on two connected dimensions of party communication. The first concerns communication initiated by party elites, including speeches, website texts, and selected public statements. The second concerns how these symbolic claims appear in member accounts, explored through interviews. This two-level design allows an examination of both the production and circulation of symbolic identities within the parties. By comparing the Sweden Democrats, a relatively new populist radical right party, with the Swedish Social Democratic Party, a long-established mass party, the study explores how each draws on and adapts the symbolic repertoire of ordinariness. The aim is to understand how their repertoires differ and how far they go in constructing the ordinary citizen as the core of their representational claims. The comparison highlights how parties situated within the same national context adapt shared symbolic resources in contrasting ways and how these adaptations shape their capacity to construct legitimacy through appeals to ordinariness.