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

Project name in Czech
Riders on the storm: Future imaginaries of populist leaders and their followers
Annotation in Czech
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.

R&D category
ZV - Basic research
OECD FORD - main branch
50401 - Sociology
OECD FORD - secondary branch
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OECD FORD - another secondary branch
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CEP - equivalent branches <br>(according to the <a href="http://www.vyzkum.cz/storage/att/E6EF7938F0E854BAE520AC119FB22E8D/Prevodnik_oboru_Frascati.pdf">converter</a>)
AO - Sociology, demography

Confidentiality
S - Úplné a pravdivé údaje o projektu nepodléhají ochraně podle zvláštních právních předpisů
Data delivery code
CEP26-GA0-GA-R
Data delivery date
May 19, 2026

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