As expressions without clear definition but with strong normative charging, empty signifiers play an important role in political discourse. Uniting diverse populations under a common banner and endowing political demands with self-evident legitimacy, they constitute a potent tool for rallying support for political action. Among empty signifiers, one particularly versatile construct are ‘the people’ as bearers of ultimate political legitimacy. In this paper, we investigate how ‘the people’ are constructed in propagandistic conflict narratives during the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, imbuing the concept with different meanings in the pursuit of competing political ends. We show how ‘the people’ are constructed as democratic sovereign, enduring nation, moral humans or dispersed media publics, each time summoning different kinds of legitimacy and using different strategies to construct encompassing consensus and marginalize dissent. We discuss implications for the study of ideological discourse, populism and political communication.

中文翻译：

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那些人是谁'？

由于没有明确的定义但具有很强的规范性的表达，空的指称在政治话语中起着重要的作用。它们将不同群体团结在一个统一的旗帜下，并使政治要求具有不言而喻的合法性，它们是集会支持政治行动的有力工具。在空洞的指称中，一种特别多才多艺的构造是“人民”作为最终政治合法性的承载者。在本文中，我们研究了在俄乌冲突期间如何在宣传性冲突叙事中建构“人民”，并在追求竞争性政治目标时赋予了这一概念不同的含义。我们展示了“人民”如何成为民主的主权，持久的国家，有道德的人或分散的媒体公众，每次都召集不同种类的合法性，并使用不同的策略来构建包容性共识并边缘化异议。我们讨论了对思想话语，民粹主义和政治传播的研究意义。