Populism is currently a very contested term. As theoretical debates have continued, populism has spread across the world. Many Western European political parties and movements share right-wing forms of populism, while in Latin America populism spans a broad ideological spectrum, ranging from neoliberalism to state socialism. Consequently, the classic post-war 'left-right' cleavage in the electorate and in party competition over the economy became increasingly overlaid (Norris). Moreover, being ideologically 'thin-centered,' populism (Mud) cannot be pegged to standard left-right ideologies. Populism is becoming more informal, ad hoc, discontinuous, and context-sensitive. It is no longer explained solely by economic insecurity but rather by a cultural backlash against changing values. This suggests that populism is a form of identification that is constructed. That is why the seminar considers populist identification to be contingent on the strength of citizens’ identification. Through a framework of comparative analysis, including case studies from Eastern and Western Europe, the US, Latin America, as well as authoritarian states like Russia and China, we will identify the traits of populist discourse needed for the empirical part of our seminar. The seminar aims to assess the civic quality of citizens’ political identity based on their public activities in the social media sphere. Social media, which provide a wide space for citizen communication and participation, as well as a sphere for consumerist lifestyles and identity formation, offer a very good environment for empirically identifying citizenship identities being challenged through populist identity politics. It is therefore the task of our seminar to reveal how populist sentiments are actually constructed by citizens amidst the technological affordances of social media. Schließen