Defining 'populism': How can Semiotics contribute to the debate?

Although populism has become a key notion to understand the current political scenario, from a theoretical point of view it is still not clear what this concept means. The goal of this paper is to show some issues in which semiotics could contribute to the task of conceptual clarification. While in the first section I discuss the debate and the various accounts that compete in trying to explain what populism is, in the following two sections I show how this debate can profit from a contribution from semiotics. This paper is to be regarded as an attempt to build a bridge between semiotics and the conceptual debate on populism within political sciences.