Populist argumentation claims to represent ‘the people’ against ‘the elite’, appealing to emotions and reacting to a sense of crisis. By analysing a public debate in Finland, where populist arguments appropriate a culturally shared, familiar experience – that of singing Suvivirsi, the Summer Hymn – I argue that evoking familiarity is an effective way of ‘doing populism’. Analysing media texts from 2002 to 2014 and a questionnaire to political candidates in 2011 – when the right-wing populist (True) Finns Party broke through – using Laurent Thévenot’s sociology of engagements, I show that appeals to the familiarity of the hymn are particularly compatible with the populist valorization of the experience of the common people. In other words, familiarity is a central tool in the toolkit of populism. Remembering the shared experience of singing the hymn bonds the assumed 'people' together and gives an emotional charge for populist arguments. The article applies pragmatist political sociology, studying politics 'in action' in ordinary citizens' daily lives, to the analysis of populism – largely absent from previous, extensive populism studies.

1. 1/14
Populism and Familiarity:
Political Appropriation of
Suvivirsi, the Summer Hymn
TuukkaYlä-Anttila
(Universities of Helsinki &Tampere)
Nordic Sociological Association
Conference 2016, Helsinki

2. 2/14
Outline
• Suvivirsi
• The debate
• Populism
• Sociology of engagements
• Media materials
• Analysis: Justifications
• Analysis: Familiarity
• A quick party comparison
• Discussion

3. 3/14
Suvivirsi
• “Summer Hymn” (ca. 1700), sung in schools by
pupils in spring ceremonies
• Thanks God for the awakening of nature and the
coming harvest
• Recently, a site of battle over religion/secularism
and multiculturalism
• Should pupils sing religious hymn in schools? What
about non-Christians and non-believers?

4. 4/14
The debate
• School and Church as institutions
• 97% of children attend public schools
(Statistics Finland 2014)
• 95% membership in Lutheran church (1970), 75% (2014)
• Large-scale immigration to Finland since 1990s
• Secularization, individualization
• “Everyone knows the song by heart”
• Who is included?
• “Save Suvivirsi” – moral panic

5. 5/14
Populism
• Is “populism” an ideology, a strategy, a style,
a rhetoric, a discourse, a logic, or something else?
• Aslanidis (2015): a discursive frame
• ‘anti-elite discourse in the name of the sovereign People’
• ‘Doing populism’! (Jansen 2011)
• Emotional argumentation, reaction to crisis
(Berezin 2002, Demertzis 2006)

6. 6/14
If Finns have to look at the religious dress of
muslims and the subordination of women
under the guise of religion, so we can
without worry sing Suvivirsi once a year! IS
THIS QUESTION SOME SORT OF JOKE???
(Finns Party parliamentary candidate 2011)

7. 7/14
Sociology of engagements
What is ’good’?
How do we engage
with the world?
How is this visible in
empirical material?
Regime of
Justification
Conventionalized &
generalized common
goods: justifications,
which can be
appealed to
Justifications can be
tested against them
References to
common value-
systems, such as
cultural heritage
Regime of
Familiarity
Feeling of ease,
comfort and ‘home’
in habituated action
Intimate common-
places make ease
and comfort in
familiarity possible
References to the
experience and
emotions of singing
the hymn
(Adapted fromThévenot, 2001 andThévenot, 2014)
Empirical uses: Blok 2015, Centemeri 2015, Lonkila 2011...

8. 8/14
Media materials
4
18
15
6
10
12 11
17
14
17
19
17
13
40
2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014
Set 1: Articles/opinions mentioning suvivir* in HS
(2002–2003 & 2010–2014: 139 articles)
Set 2: parliamentary candidate responses from Centre,
Conservative, Social Democrat and (True) Finns to
HSVoting Advice Application 2011 (358 responses)

9. 9/14
Analysis: Justifications
“One of the signs of spring is the debate over
whether singing Suvivirsi in school festivities is
religious practice.There is no one right answer to
this question: to one Suvivirsi may be a prayer, to
another a beautiful tradition and yet to another
neither of these.There is no objectively right
answer.”
(Opinion, 6 Apr 2014)

10. 10/14
Analysis: Justifications
• ‘part of our cultural heritage’ (Opinion 29 May 2014)
• ‘part of Finnish culture’ (Opinion 28 Mar 2014)
• ‘part of our national cultural heritage despite its
religious background’ (Opinion 15 April 2014)
• ‘Schools can continue to carry Finnish traditions, but
should also teach about other religious traditions’
(HSVAA: 47, F, Social Democrat)

11. 11/14
Analysis: Familiarity
• ‘singing it arouses feelings of nostalgia’
(Column, 11 May 2014)
• ‘the song is beautiful and tender’
(Opinion, 1 Jun 2011)
• ‘a part of the shared experience of many
generations’ (Opinion, 29 May 2014)
• ‘it contains a powerful emotional charge’ ... ‘it moves
you’ ... ‘it makes you weep’ ... ‘causes shivers’ ...
‘makes your heart pound’ (various, 2011–2015)

12. 12/14
Analysis: Familiarity
• ‘If Finns have to look at the religious dress of
muslims and the subordination of women under the
guise of religion, so we can without worry sing
Suvivirsi once a year! ISTHIS QUESTION SOME
SORT OF JOKE???’ (53, F, Finns Party)
• ‘it feels familiar’ (63, M, Social Democrat)
• ‘hearing the song echoed in Finnish schools fills
hearts with emotion as nature blooms’
(65, M, Finns Party)
• ‘I believe everyone knows it by heart’
(47, M, Social Democrat)

13. 13/14
A quick party comparison
Centre Party
(N=70)
(True) Finns
Party
(N=68)
National
Coalition
(N=65)
Social
Democrats
(N=61)
Arguments
based on
justification
90% 67% 80% 78%
Arguments
based on
familiarity
10% 33% 20% 22%
(100%) (100%) (100%) (100%)
(Helsingin SanomatVoting Advice Application 2011)

14. 14/14
Discussion
• Populism politicizes the felt experiences of “the
common people” (however defined!), demands
acceptance of familiarity as political justification
• Pragmatism: habitual action, escaping the
imperative to justify caused by crisis
• Appropriation of Suvivirsi aims to conflate
community of feeling with national identity, with
exclusionary consequences
• Experience-based politics is in stark contrast to
bureaucratic and technocratic expert politics!

15. 15/14
Some literature
• Aslanidis P (2015) Is Populism an Ideology?A Refutation and a New Perspective. Political
Studies.
• Berezin M (2002) Secure States. Towards a Political Sociology of Emotion. In: Emotions and
Sociology, ed. Barbalet.
• Blok A (2015) Attachments to the Common-Place. Pragmatic Sociology and the Aesthetic
Cosmopolitics of Eco-House Design in Kyoto, Japan. European Journal of Cultural and Political
Sociology.
• Boltanski L &Thévenot L (2006) On Justification.
• Centemeri L (2015) Reframing Problems of Incommensurability in EnvironmentalConflicts
Through Pragmatic Sociology. FromValue Pluralism to the Plurality of Modes of Engagement
with the Environment. EnvironmentalValues.
• Demertzis N (2006) Emotions and Populism. In: Emotion, Politics and Society, eds. Clarke,
Hoggett &Thompson.
• Jansen RS (2011) Populist Mobilization. A NewTheoretical Approach to Populism. Sociological
Theory.
• Lonkila M (2011)Yhteisyyden kieliopit helsinkiläisessä ja pietarilaisessa kaupunkiaktivismissa.
Sosiologia.
• Thévenot L (2014)Voicing Concern and Difference. From Public Spaces to Common-Places.
European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology.