This article explores the cultural dimension in democratic struggle from the vantage point of the public sphere. It proposes that in the public sphere there take place competing and changing interpretations over the `public' through continuous articulation of two analytically distinct representations of public interest - democratic and communal discourses. In an empirical study of the recent credibility crisis in Hong Kong, the author demonstrates first, how the governing coalition sought to maintain its authority through a discourse of `administrative efficiency' (...) embedded in the hegemonic narrative of success, and second, how the challenging discourse of democracy regained momentum through de-mystification of the hegemonic narrative in the event of governing crises. The case study of the recent bird flu crisis offers a specific account of political and cultural challenge to bureaucratic paternalism in the postcolonial context. It is argued that the challenge was powerfully presented as the crisis became a dramatic moment of meaning reconstruction through ironic narrativizing and democratic encoding in the public sphere. (shrink)

It is a commonplace to observe that we have been living through an extraordinary pan-European and trans-Atlantic populist moment. But do the heterogeneous phenomena lumped under the rubric “populist” in fact belong together? Or is “populism” just a journalistic cliché and political epithet? In the first part of the article, I defend the use of “populism” as an analytic category and the characterization of the last few years as a “populist moment,” and I propose an account of populism as a (...) discursive and stylistic repertoire. In the second part, I specify the structural trends and the conjunctural convergence of a series of crises that jointly explain the clustering in space and time that constitutes the populist moment. The question in my title is thus twofold: it is a question about populism as a term or concept and a question about populism as a phenomenon in the world. The article addresses both the conceptual and the explanatory question, limiting the scope of the explanatory argument to the pan-European and trans-Atlantic populist conjuncture of the last few years. (shrink)