Friday, March 14, 2014
Chairman's (Omni Shoreham)
Research on populism has traditionally identified the phenomenon with political parties in particular national settings. It is only recently that scholars have attempted to integrate insights from specific case studies into a common definition of populism, viewed as a form of political claims-making predicated on a fundamental moral opposition between a virtuous populace and corrupt elites. The emergence of this theoretical understanding of populism raises important questions for research in political science and sociology: How does the usage of populist rhetoric by political actors vary in content and prevalence across national contexts? Under what circumstances do populist arguments become dominant in political discourse? What types of political actors are more or less likely to rely on populist rhetoric? What impact does the populist discourse of radical parties have on mainstream actors?
We begin to answer these questions by conducting a computational text analysis of all plenary speeches delivered in the 5th European Parliament between 1999 and 2004. By measuring the presence of multiple varieties of populist rhetoric in the texts, we are able track the fluctuating prevalence of populist rhetoric over time (including reactions to key events, such as terror attacks and economic recessions) and across political groups, issue domains, and countries. This analysis serves as a starting point for subsequent hypotheses concerning the variation in politicians’ reliance on populist claims and the cleavages that shape political discourse in the European Parliament.
