The Populist Master Frame of Democracy: a Legitimation Strategy for the Transnational Far-Right

The populist far-right in Europe has become increasingly successful in both national and European elections (Aktas, 2024). This trend has developed in tandem with the increasing normalization and mainstreaming of populist far-right discourse in the European public sphere (Caiani, 2025). The subsequent transnationalization of the populist far-right raises important questions with regard to key elements of populism: who are the transnational people, who are their antagonistic counterparts, and how are they politically represented by far-right actors on a transnational level? Although a small field studying ‘transnational populism’ has emerged (De Cleen et al., 2020; Kuyper & Moffitt, 2020; Moffitt, 2017), and the field of International Relations has addressed the issue as well (McDonnell & Werner, 2020; Wojczewski, 2023), as of yet, these questions have not been systematically considered from the perspective of political communication (but see Lacatus et al., 2023). What is more, the dominance of the ideological approach to populism within the political sciences, in my view, has led to a misunderstanding of the role populism plays in successful electoral mobilizations by the European far-right (cf. Rydgren, 2017). In my contribution, I develop and operationalize an account of populism as a master frame of the social imaginary of (liberal) democracy (cf. Aslanidis, 2016, 2018; Taylor, 2004). Drawing upon the study of social movements, contentious politics, and representative claim-making, I conceptualize the populist master frame as a discursive strategy constructing the sovereign people against powerful others. Because the discursive content of the master frame draws upon an already shared social imaginary of democracy, it has the potential to resonate widely among audiences. Strategically speaking, its adoption allows far-right actors to legitimize their antidemocratic ideologies. Crucially, the master frame helps them ‘transnationalize’ their (nationalist) ideologies, since an appeal to ‘the people’ is able to transcend national boundaries in a way an appeal to ‘the nation’ cannot. Hence, populism does not feature as a (thin) ideological core of the far-right, but as a legitimation strategy tapping into imaginaries of liberal democracy. I propose this discursive strategy is best researched as a master frame. During the first half of 2026, this account of populism will be operationalized by studying a purposive sample of X posts by several prominent European far-right actors communicating in English to a European (transnational) audience within the time frame of the last three years. Deploying a qualitative, manual content analysis, the study analyzes if and how the people, their antagonistic opposites, and the way they are to be politically represented, are framed on this transnational level of political communication. In doing so, the study contributes 1) to the understanding of the transnationalization of the populist far-right from the perspective of political communication, and 2) to the debate on populism by studying it as a master frame. We expect the findings of the study to be obtained before the start of ECPR.