Temporal world-building in populist politics

This article examines how populist politics organizes collective futures under conditions of social uncertainty and destabilized horizons of expectation. While existing scholarship has predominantly conceptualized populism as a thin ideology, discursive logic, or reactive political strategy, less attention has been paid to how populist actors construct and mobilize competing temporal orders. Drawing on Reinhart Koselleck’s theory of experience and expectation, Ernesto Laclau’s discourse theory, and sociological approaches to political imaginaries and futurity, the article conceptualizes populism as a form of temporal world-building. It argues that contemporary populism operates through distinct regimes of futurity that stabilize uncertainty by organizing collective expectations around narratives of restoration, prefiguration, and catastrophe. Restorative regimes project horizons of renewal and institutional transformation; prefigurative regimes enact alternative social orders through subcultural and counter-public practices; and catastrophic regimes structure political imagination through anticipated decline and existential threat. Integrating insights from discourse theory, framing analysis, and narrative sociology, the article develops an interpretive framework for analyzing how political actors construct and contest collective futures across different social and political contexts.