Populism amidst Crisis: European Political Discourse during the Great Recession

The rise of populism in European politics has been linked to a variety of contextual factors, from growth in immigration to economic downturns. Some have claimed that recent years have witnessed a secular increase in populism and its diffusion from the political extremes into the center, partly in reaction to the Great Recession. We empirically test these arguments by analyzing over 100,000 plenary speeches delivered in the European Parliament between 1999 and 2012, with a particular focus on the four-year period corresponding to the economic crisis. By treating populism as an attribute of speech acts rather than a stable ideology of political actors, we are able to measure the prevalence of populist claims-making across Members of Parliament, national parties, parliamentary groups, countries, and over time. We observe a moderate rise in populism on both the radical left and right during the thirteen years covered by our data, but this development largely preceded the Great Recession. Following the crisis, left-wing populism increased and right-wing populism declined. We find little support for the diffusion of populism into the political center. Our results also demonstrate a growing polarization of the core and periphery of the EU, with right-wing populism increasingly concentrated in richer countries and left-wing populism gaining prominence in poorer countries. In addition to its substantive contributions, our paper illustrates the analytical utility of a discursive approach that is sensitive to distributional shifts in populist politics.