Green Populism in New Social Movements : A Qualitative Text Analysis on Extinction Rebellion's Discourse

Abstract: This thesis aims to explore the new concept of green populism and to explore if Extinction Rebellion can be seen as a new social movement. The concept of green populism is based on Cas Mudde’s ideational approach to populism and Dobson’s approach to green ideology. The theories will form a categorization of green populism to see if any of these elements are visible in Extinction Rebellion’s discourse. The combination of the two theories helps to define the elements or categories of green populism: Ecological Crisis of Cosmic Proportion, Victimizing “the People”, Identifying and/or blame the antagonist, Green Action, Scientific Evidencing, and Intergenerational Justice. The theories on new social movements is based on theories from scholars such as Alberto Melucci, Alain Touraine and Manuel Castells to help us understand what characterizes a new social movement. The four following characteristics of new social movements was highlighted: They focus on non-material issues, they tend to emphasize different protest tactics, they often have a horizontal organization, and they often use symbolic action. To answer the research questions in this thesis, a qualitative text analysis will be conducted. A qualitative text analysis focuses on certain selected aspects of the material which are determined by the aim and research questions. The qualitative text analysis is applied to the captions of eight selected Instagram-posts from Extinction Rebellion’s official account. The analysis leads to the conclusion that Extinction Rebellion can be seen as a new social movement, with a few exceptions regarding their focus on non-material issues. Another conclusion is that we were able to find elements of green populism in Extinction Rebellion’s discourse. The final conclusion is that green populism should be seen as a theoretical and analytical tool for analyzing communication rather than a label of environmental actors.