A Populist Era? an Analysis of Legislative Discourse in the European Parliament, 1999-2014

Much has been made of the rise of the populist right in Europe, leading some scholars to pronounce that contemporary European politics are characterized by a populist zeitgeist. This research defines certain parties as populist and then observes their electoral outcomes over time. In contrast, we posit that in order to understand the dynamics of populist politics, populism should be defined as an attribute of political claims and its prevalence should be systematically measured across the entire political spectrum. Building on our past work that identified populist claims on both the populist left and right, we use automated text analyses to analyze an original data set consisting of all plenary speeches delivered in the 5^th, 6^th, and 7^th sessions of the European Parliament. Our speech-level operationalization of populism allows us to track changes in the prevalence of populist rhetoric across individual Members of Parliament, parties, parliamentary groups, and countries. We demonstrate that populism responds to major structural shocks, such as the economic crisis, terrorist attacks, and institutional changes within the EU. Furthermore, our analysis confirms that populism is present on both the extreme left and right in European politics and that its prevalence has diffused over time to the political center. Our study represents the first attempt to theorize and systematically measure long-term temporal patterns in populist claims-making and thus makes an important contribution to the study of political discourse and party mobilization in Europe.