The Populist Construction of “the People” in the Digital Public Sphere: Continuity and Transformation

The article offers a social- and political-philosophical analysis of the populist construction of “the people” in the digital public sphere. It proceeds from the premise that “the people” invoked by populism is not a pre-given demographic totality but a performatively constituted political subject produced through representation, boundary-making, and claims to moral unity. The study combines conceptual analysis of populism and political representation with a critical synthesis of research on platform society, algorithmic mediation, and social-media populism. It identifies the enduring structures of populist people-construction: articulating heterogeneous demands, establishing an antagonistic frontier (between the virtuous people and a culpable elite), attributing moral unity, concentrating representative authority, and performing a recurrent crisis that demands the restoration of popular sovereignty. It then demonstrates that digitalization transforms this construction along five interrelated dimensions: 1) the locus of production becomes partly distributed among leaders, influencers, and users; 2) mediation becomes hybrid, platform-dependent, and algorithmic; 3) political time becomes continuous and accelerated; 4) popular authorization becomes datafied through engagement metrics; and 5) the boundaries of “the people” become dynamically personalized and modular across overlapping digital publics. The resulting political subject is simultaneously more participatory and more dependent on opaque infrastructures of visibility, shifting from mass-mediated representation toward asymmetrical platform-mediated co-production. Digital platforms do not eliminate mediation between leaders and citizens; they conceal and reorganize it. The article concludes that contemporary populism combines the continuity of an antagonistic political logic with a profound transformation of the communicative conditions through which a unified people is made visible, measurable, and actionable.