Riders on the storm: Future imaginaries of populist leaders and their followers

The project aims to understand how populist leaders and their followers construct long-term visions – Populist Temporal Imaginaries (PTIs) – to shape political discourse and societal expectations. Although populism is often treated as a short-term, opportunistic phenomenon, we argue that its sustained impact on democracy and governance hinges on future-oriented imaginaries that connect historical narratives, present grievances, and future aspirations. To uncover these imaginaries, we propose a Populist Temporal Imaginaries Framework (PTIF) – an analytical tool linking Kosseleck’s and Laclau’s theories with literatures on political imaginaries. We assess the framework via ethnographic observation and interviews with Czech populist leaders and followers to understand how they frame future visions of contested concepts such as family, gender, and climate. The project contributes to the theoretical literature by linking temporality and populism, and empirically by gathering hard-to-obtain data, promising insights into populism’s deeper social resonance and durability.

Project team of FSV UK (4)

prof. PhDr. Ing. Ondřej Císař, Ph.D.

Principal investigator

+420 778 465 054  |  +420 267 224 234

ondrej.cisar@fsv.cuni.cz

Mgr. Linda Coufal, Ph.D.

Team member

linda.coufal@fsv.cuni.cz

Mgr. Eva Hejzlarová, Ph.D.

Team member

+420 267 224 212

eva.hejzlarova@fsv.cuni.cz

Mgr. Eva Soares Moura, Ph.D.

Team member

eva.smoura@fsv.cuni.cz

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