A meaningless buzzword or a meaningful label? How do Spanish politicians use populismo and populista on Twitter?

Abstract While there is substantial research on populism and populist discourse, research on discourses about populism is still developing. Scholars highlight the need to understand why populism is so widely used and what the rapid spread of this socio-political keyword tells us about political and media discourse. The main objective of this paper is therefore to understand discourses on populism. To this aim, we examine for what purpose the terms populism and populist – henceforth populis* – are used and what they allow to do in discourse. Based on the analysis of a corpus of tweets produced by political figures in Spain, we show that, contrary to previous analyses, populis* does not have the sole function of being a randomly used buzzword or of proposing an anti-populist discourse. Indeed, our analysis shows that political actors resort to different patterns of use of populis* depending on their political and communicative strategy.