A Cure for ‘Populism’? Diagnostic and Prognostic Framing in Anti-Populist Political Punditry

Despite growing scholarly interest in anti-populism, the remedies proposed by anti-populists to counter ‘populism’ remain underexplored. I address this gap by examining how anti-populists prescribe cures for the ‘populist’ malady in a corpus of newspaper opinion pieces, academic books and popular non-fiction from the UK and US contexts (2014–2024). Through a mixed-methods frame analysis, I identify four dominant frames: political, economic, cultural and epistemic. These frames diagnose ‘populism’ as authoritarian, economically reckless, nationalist/xenophobic and irrational, respectively. Correspondingly, their prognoses prescribe the cures of restoring liberal-democratic norms; fiscal prudence accompanied by economic growth and a (limited) degree of redistribution; controls on migration flows paired with a reclamation of patriotism and an emphasis on education alongside plainspoken political communication to immunise voters against ‘populism’. Overall, these cures, cohered by an anti-populist master frame, are elite-centric in their scepticism towards popular political engagement and embolden reactionary politics by reproducing the very (‘populist’) far-right discourses which anti-populists claim to oppose.