Article

Populism and the 2016 American Election: Evidence from Official Press Releases and Twitter

November 2018
Political Science and Politics 52(2):1-6

Authors:

In the past year, academics and mass media alike have spoken of populism as a necessary condition for Donald Trump’s success in the 2016 US presidential election. Despite the growing interest in populism for understanding the election, we have yet to provide a systematic analysis of the official campaign discourse and its use of populist rhetoric. To fill this gap, this article proposes an analysis of official campaign statements based on original text data from press releases published from January to June 2016 on campaign websites and tweets published on the official accounts of the three main presidential candidates: Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and Donald Trump. Data show that the Sanders and Trump campaigns relied on populist discourse to promote two opposing electoral agendas on the left and the right of the political spectrum. Clinton made limited use of populist discourse, mostly in response to the other counter-candidates.

Populist Mobilisation and Demobilisation: Germany in Comparative Perspective

Thesis

Jul 2023

J. Philipp Thomeczek

My dissertation consists of four papers in which I analysed different aspects of populist mobilisation and demobilisation. The first research question asked if social media contributes to populist mobilisation. I concluded that populist parties are more active on Facebook than non-populist parties in Paper 1 (Party Politics, https://doi.org/10.1177/13540688231184626). This trend was most visible in Western Europe but also in countries like Sweden, Italy, Finland, Slovakia and Slovenia. Nevertheless, country-specific and contextual factors should be considered, and data quality should be critically reflected. In Paper 2 (Zeitschrift für Parteienwissenschaften, https://doi.org/10.24338/mip-202320-44), I turned to the level of populist communication on social media. I focused on the German election campaign in 2017. Contrary to what was expected, populist communication was not used very frequently by political parties – including populist parties – on Facebook. As anti-elitist rhetoric was more prevalent, there is evidence for the fragmented character of populist communication on social media. In contrast, parties used populist rhetoric more frequently in their press releases. This surprising finding was partially driven by text length. Controlling for text length revealed that anti-elitist rhetoric was more widespread in social media posts than in press releases – thus, the opposite of what the descriptive results suggested. This means that anti-elitism is more prevalent in comparatively long Facebook posts, which parties sound out only rarely. Concerning this research question, I conclude that in many countries, Facebook offers a platform for populists that they actively use. From this perspective, social media can contribute to populist mobilisation. In contrast, when it comes to the actual content that parties produce on social media, at least on Facebook, the prevalence of populist content is low. Although controlling for text length affected the descriptive results, and even reversed them for anti-elitism, this does not change the fact that many posts are short. Facebook communication differs from mass media communication through press releases. Parties have adapted well to the social media logic, which includes relatively short and sometimes even non-political texts. While there has been extensive research which indicates that populist content on social media generates more user attention (Bobba 2019; Bobba and Roncarolo 2018; Bracciale, Andretta, and Martella 2021; Klinger, Koc-Michalska, and Russmann 2022), this study shows that populist communication may be more prevalent on other communication channels. Even strongly populist parties like the AfD do not spread populist communication in every post. Thus, the dominance of populist content, in the sense of parties constantly sending out populist posts, is not necessarily part of the problematic relationship between social media and populism. Instead, the problematic relationship is about how populist content is processed. However, shifting the blame to the level of users ignores the role of polarisation-favouring algorithms (Barrett, Hendrix, and Sims 2021). Overall, the studies contribute to the broader discussion of strategic aspects of populist communication (Dai and Kustov 2022; Franzmann 2016c; Lacatus and Meibauer 2021). Parties make strategic decisions regarding populist rhetoric depending on the communication channel. Future studies would benefit from extending the analysis to more countries, elections and channels. An integrative approach to party communication that systematically compares communication across different channels would be desirable. Currently, even studies that specifically focus on social media communication include one or two channels. However, social media platforms have such distinct audiences that it would be interesting to see how parties and especially populist parties use other social media platforms, such as Instagram or TikTok, for their (populist) communication. Regarding other offline channels, researchers also emphasise the role of internal communication of parties, which can be analysed in membership magazines (Mudde 2007). The interesting finding that populist communication is quite widespread in party press releases poses the question of whether this is a communication channel that is generally used for more radical language. This research question asked whether the populist communication of populist parties can be tamed by including them in government. I collected five years of political Facebook communication by the 16 state chapters of Germany’s left-wing populist Die Linke. The results of Paper 4 (Journal of Political Ideologie, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13569317.2023.2196516 ) pointed in a clear direction. State chapters in power used populist rhetoric less frequently than those in opposition. Furthermore, branches from the East were less populist than those from the West. Results from the Bremen chapter, which was in opposition for half of the period and in government for the other half, further suggested that there is a causal mechanism, since the branch used less populist communication after it came to power. The clarity of the results may be surprising given that I used a multi-word dictionary, which tends to underestimate populist communication (see section 4.3). Therefore, it could be the case that repeating the analysis with manual coding reveals the differences even more drastically. The results provide valuable empirical evidence for the inclusion-moderation thesis and suggest that this can be a strategy for moderating the populist appeal of populist parties. Future studies would greatly benefit from focusing on causality and the point at which moderation starts. As discussed, there are also other cases that do not report evidence for the inclusion-moderation thesis. This is not necessarily a contradiction. It is possible that the moderation processes started much earlier as part of a broader strategy of becoming a trustworthy coalition partner. Yet, even if populist parties become less populist in government, it would be interesting to analyse the starting point of such moderation processes. Populist parties will likely not start to moderate their populist appeal the moment they sign the coalition treaty, but there are probably different paths of moderation that research should analyse more closely. This is also the case why a similar strategy would likely to be unsuccessful for the AfD at the state level: the party shows no signs of making a step towards potential coalitions partners but is rather becoming more radical. Therefore, at least currently, inclusion-moderation would likely not work in the case of the AfD. Regarding Die Linke, the state chapters from Bremen, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Brandenburg and, most recently, Berlin are the most interesting cases, as their government status recently changed. However, other European countries also provide highly interesting cases regarding left-wing populism: the Greek Syriza governed from 2015 to 2019, and the Spanish Podemos has been governing since 2019. In both cases, anecdotal evidence has shown that those parties became less populist in power (Kioupkiolis and Katsambekis 2019; Oleart 2021), but more fine-grained analyses are needed, which probably need to include more text resources such as manifestos and press releases. Finally, in Paper 3, I explored the extent to which referendum campaigns can be exploited for populist mobilisation (Swiss Political Science Review, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/spsr.12435 ) . I again turned to the level of the German states. In Germany, referendums are only practised at the subnational level, but the mobilisation factors contributing to referendum turnout have not been studied systematically yet. The results show that regarding the factors I derived from the classic rational choice approach, costs, benefits and the likelihood of casting the decisive vote affect referendum turnout in Germany. However, those are factors that are mainly influenced by state governments and state parliaments. Although polarised referendum campaigns contribute to mobilisation, which fits well with populism’s polarising nature, the saliency of the average referendum topic has been quite low in the German states so far. Those topics that offer high benefits – namely, voting on (new) constitutions and state restructuring – are exceptions that are currently not up for debate. Moreover, those topics are typically initiated by state parliaments or governments. The same applies to parallel elections that greatly affect mobilisation, where state actors have boycotting potential for referendums they do not support. Therefore, due to the way in which referendums are currently implemented in Germany, they are more likely to lead to populist demobilisation than to mobilisation. The high hurdles for referendums in Germany were implemented due to the negative perception of the ‘Weimar experience’. The main concern was extremism, but there is little doubt that they are also effective against populist mobilisation. However, as this rigidity prevents not simply extremist and populist mobilisation but any kind of referendum mobilisation, the German states are becoming more open. After the reunification, many states lifted restrictions and lowered hurdles (Kersting 2016, 317–19). This process is still ongoing. As Figure 6 shows, this openness is reflected in restrictions being lifted for referendum topics, hurdles for popular initiatives and referendums. Generally, initiatives can now be organised for more salient topics requiring fewer signatures, and quorums have been lowered. However, this opening process, again, affects all kinds of referendums, and therefore populist mobilisation also becomes more likely. It becomes easier for populist actors or populist parties to launch campaigns, and the likelihood of organising an unsuccessful expensive campaign is lowered. One of the most current examples is the Berlin referendum on the nationalisation of housing companies (2021), which was held after Paper 3 was published. Source: Own overview (based on Kampwirth, Rehmet, and Weber 2003; Rehmet, Flothmann, and Weber 2007; Rehmet, Weber, and Gogolin 2010; Rehmet, Weber, and Laroche 2013; Rehmet and Weber 2016; Rehmet and Wiedmann 2021). Figure 6 Development of State Legislation Regarding the Openness of Popular Legislation The campaign was highly politicised, and, in a classic left- wing populist manner, the organisers pitted ‘the good and exploited tenant’ against ‘the evil rent sharks’. The interest group that proposed the initiative turned out to have sent the posts with the highest share of populist language during the campaign, surpassing the AfD’s share (see Figure A3, appendix). There have also been first attempts to employ such a strategy by the AfD in Thuringia, where the party tried to mobilise for an initiative against mandatory Covid vaccination for care jobs (MDR 2022), and in Brandenburg, where it called for an initiative against the public broadcast fee (Tagesspiegel 2018). Much academic work is still needed regarding the potential of referendum campaigns for populist mobilisation, and we are probably just at the beginning of this development. Such analyses always hinge on the available cases; referendums are relatively rare in Europe outside Switzerland. However, focusing on the level of the German states could be promising, as in future campaigns, populism could play a more prominent role. Finally, to analyse those mobilising factors for referendums in Germany in detail, there is a need for more individual data, which is almost non-existent for referendum campaigns.

Are some Communication Channels More Suited for Populism Than Others? A Comparison of Populist Communication in Facebook Posts and Party Press Releases in the German Election Campaign 2017

Article

Full-text available

May 2023

J. Philipp Thomeczek

During the last decade, the vote share of populist parties in Europe has increased drastically. Research suggests that social media is a driving factor of this success, as the social media logic is well compatible with populist ideas. However, few studies have empirically investigated how prevalent populist communication is on social media compared to other communication channels. The article aims to close this research gap. The study analyses the parties’ Facebook posts and press releases by using a novel dataset covering political communication during the German election campaign of 2017 (n=1,216). The findings reveal that populist communication was less prevalent on social media than expected, even in the case of the right-wing populist AfD. The direct comparison of parties’ Facebook posts with their press releases shows that populist communication was, surprisingly, much more prevalent in the latter. This could be due to the fragmented nature of online populist communication and non-political content that is typical for social media communication. However, to some extent, this is also explained by the varying length of the two text types. When controlled for length, posts were more likely to contain anti-elitist rhetoric. The findings suggest that the problem of social media with populism is not necessarily related to the content that parties produce but the users’ reactions towards it, which are driven by polarisation-favouring algorithms. The results also contribute to the broader discussion of strategic aspects of populist communication and call for further research on the role of different communication channels and platforms in political discourse.

Donald Trump’s Pragmalinguistic Strategies in Twitter Before and During the COVID-19 Crisis: A Corpus-driven Approach https://digituma.uma.pt/handle/10400.13/3876

Thesis

Nov 2021

Diogo H. Jasmins

COVID-19 is one of the most remarkable worldwide crises of the latest decade with 33 million cases in the US as of the 1 st of July 2021. In these difficult times citizens seem to have looked up to their leaders for guidance and support (Wood & Owens & Durham, 2005) as largely represented in the media (i.e., print press, online press and social media) whose study is nevertheless beyond the scope of full coverage and analysis in this dissertation. Rather interesting for this case study is the scrutiny of the way Donald Trump, the running President of the USA at the moment COVID-19 hit the country, interacted online and established the virtual rapport with interlocutors (Walther, 1992; Crystal, 2006; Greengard, 2009; Murthy, 2013; Baym, 2015 & Burgess & Baym, 2020) given his reported multiple ways of communicating globally with a focus on the COVID pandemic in the United States. The analysis of online Twitter corpora selected from Trump’s Twitter in two periods (5 months prior and after COVID mentions in Trump’s Twitter) makes it possible to look at the way Twitter messages were encoded, particularly evidenced in indexical expressions (i.e., personal pronoun reference) and the cooperative principle, both objects of scrutiny in this piece of research. More than the linguistic choices, or possible colligations and collocations to be associated with the lexeme COVID (via corpus linguistics and a discourse-based approach, following Baker, 2006; Biber, Conrad and Reppen ,1998; as well as corpus pragmatics, in the line of Romero-Trillo, 2017), this exploratory research study of interdisciplinary kind intends to disclose relevant pragmalinguistic strategies (Sousa & Ivanova, 2012) evidenced in tweet exchanges between a leading politician in the global scenario and internet users (Mirzaeian, 2020). This dissertation brings to the fore and discusses strategies likely to strengthen or deepen the gap among interlocutors.

Populism and President Trump’s approach to foreign policy: An analysis of tweets and rally speeches

Article

Full-text available

Jul 2020

Corina Lacatus

Much like his candidacy, Donald Trump’s presidency has been described as populist par excellence and as fundamentally breaking with the liberal internationalist tradition of American foreign policy. Despite a growing interest in populism and the role it has played in shaping Donald Trump’s appeal to the public at election time in 2016, we lack an understanding of how populist rhetoric after his electoral victory shaped his approach to foreign policy. This article proposes a study of President Trump’s official campaign communication through rally speeches and Twitter during the 2 months prior to the mid-term election in November 2018 as well as tweets published in the official personal account @realDonaldTrump from September to November 2018. The analysis finds that resurgent Jacksonian populism promoted by the Tea Party shapes President Trump’s approach to foreign policy. Fundamentally anti-elitist, Trump’s populism opposes migration, multilateralism, and is deeply sceptical of the United States’ capacity to support a liberal global order that he perceives as detrimental to the economic interest of the American people. In addition, the analysis finds inconsistencies between his campaign discourse of non-intervention in military conflicts abroad and his foreign policy action.

That Is So Mainstream: The Impact of Hyper-Partisan Media Use and Right-, Left-Wing Alternative Media Repertoires on Consumers’ Belief in Political Misperceptions in the United States

Article

Feb 2024

Two studies examined hyper-partisan and alternative media audiences in the United States and their relationship with misperceptions—or false beliefs—despite available evidence to disprove them. Study 1, which used secondary data (ANES), yielded limited findings and suggested that hyper-partisan conservative content was associated with holding misperceptions. Study 2 used an original survey (N = 661) to examine American alternative media repertoires and their relationship with holding false beliefs. The findings of Study 2 suggested that not only is alternative media exposure related to misperceptions but so was exposure to media generally among our respondents

Strategic Political Public Relations in the “Age of Populism”

Chapter

Full-text available

Jan 2024

Scholars tout today as the “age of populism” (Ricci, D.M., Cambridge University Press., 2020) following worldwide electoral success for populist politicians. Populist politicians seem to utilize an atypical formula for managing relationships with media, public, and other relevant stakeholders. Notably, they are more digitally savvy than their non-populist counterparts, maintaining direct communication with niche publics. This political environment has sparked a great deal of research within political science and political communication scholarship. To keep with the times, political public relations research must be reexamined to adjust strategies and tactics accordingly for ensuring electoral success. In this chapter, we argue that the populist politician creates a unique approach by merging political marketing and political public relations tactics. Specifically, this shift emerges in their use of emotional appeals, reactive communication, digital communication, and overall social media presence.

Populism, Competitive Authoritarianism, and Foreign Policy: The Case of Uganda's 2021 Election

Article

Full-text available

Jan 2023

Corina Lacatus

Despite populism being a fast-growing field of inquiry, populist discourse in an African setting is understudied. This paper expands our knowledge of populist communication and foreign policy in a competitive authoritarian context, proposing an analysis of two Ugandan politicians—Bobi Wine and Yoweri Museveni—and their communication on Twitter before the January 2021 election. Counter to expectations, I find that thick ideology has a limited effect on the electoral discourses of both candidates in a competitive autocracy such as Uganda, and this applies also to their communication about foreign policy. When it comes to their position on foreign policy, strategic electoral communication is focused on positioning themselves in relation to the West, signaling a commitment to a strong future linkage with the West and democratization in the event of electoral victory. The content analysis of Twitter-based communication finds that the long-standing incumbent, Museveni, uses tried-and-tested populist tropes to reinforce his regime, emphasizing his government's allegedly strong capacity to maintain a linkage to Western donors and to conduct a successful foreign policy focused on receiving foreign aid and advancing its investment in economic development. In his turn, counter-candidate Wine is a contemporary populist who contests the long-standing regime and promises a truthful commitment to democratization and an authentic and corruption-free linkage with the West if successfully elected. This paper aims to broaden our understanding of how political leaders in competitive autocratic countries of the Global South make strategic use of populist communication about foreign policy to advance their political agendas.

When Do Politicians Use Populist Rhetoric? Populism as a Campaign Gamble

Article

Jan 2022
POLIT COMMUN

Why do some politicians employ populist rhetoric more than others within the same elections, and why do the same politicians employ more of it in some elections? Building on a simple formal theoretical model of two-candidate elections informed by the ideational approach to populist communication, we argue that the initially less popular political actors are more likely to use populist rhetoric in a gamble to have at least some chance of winning. To test the empirical implications of our argument, we construct the most comprehensive corpus of U.S. presidential campaign speeches (1952-2016) and estimate the prevalence of populist rhetoric across these speeches with a novel automated text analysis method utilizing active learning and word embedding. Overall, we show the robustly greater use of populism among the presidential candidates with the lower polling numbers regardless of their partisanship or incumbency status.

Introduction to the special Issue: elections, rhetoric and American foreign policy in the age of Donald Trump

Article

Full-text available

Feb 2020

This introduction presents the special issue’s conceptual and empirical starting points and situates the special issue’s intended contributions. It does so by reviewing extant scholarship on electoral rhetoric and foreign policy and by teasing out several possible linkages between elections, rhetoric and foreign policy. It also discusses how each contribution to the special issue seeks to illuminate causal mechanisms at work in these linkages. Finally, it posits that these linkages are crucial to examining the changes brought about by Trump’s election and his foreign policy rhetoric.

From Words to Votes: Decoding Sentiment in Brazilian Presidential Candidates' Tweets From Words to Votes: Decoding Sentiment in Brazilian Presidential Candidates' Tweets (NIPE Working Paper 03/2025)

Research

Full-text available

Jan 2025

This study investigates the sentiment analysis of tweets from the four most influential presidential candidates in the 2022 Brazilian elections. Tweets from July 1 to October 30 were gathered using a custom Python script, and the sentiments expressed in these tweets were analyzed with the VADER sentiment analysis library. Two econometric models were estimated to study temporal shifts in sentiment and the effect of opponents' sentiment. Results showed strategic shifts in sentiment during different campaign phases. Lula da Silva, the election winner, showed significant increases in negative tweets during the second-round campaign and seemed to adjust his sentiment based on opponents' sentiments, suggesting the potential effectiveness of adaptable communication strategies. This study contributes to understanding political communication dynamics on social media and their potential impact on electoral outcomes.

Varieties of Populist Attitudes in Brexit Britain: Socio-Political and Psychological Correlates of a New Multi-dimensional Scale

Article

Full-text available

Jan 2025
POLIT STUD-LONDON

Populism is usually understood as a complex multi-dimensional phenomenon that encompasses different manifestations. However, most studies on the demand-side adopt a parsimonious minimal definition approach that hinders the ability to capture different forms of populism and the variable weight of its components. This article tests a new multi-dimensional strategy to measure and compare populist and pluralist attitudes in the context of Brexit Britain. We explore the relationship between populism and Britons' socio-political views-on borders, democracy, governance, identity, and the European Union-and psychological traits-such as conspiracy belief, social alienation, justification of political violence, and meaning in life-. Our new Multi-dimensional Populist Attitudes Scale (MPAS) reveals two varieties of populism, 'aspirational/ subversive' and 'identitarian/protective', and a non-populist 'moderate/pluralist' archetype. The new items introduced in the MPAS can complement (or become an alternative to) extant scales especially in contexts where populist movements do not fully fit narrow conceptualisations of populism.

Who votes for populist presidential candidates? Differential support among US-based Latin American diasporas

Article

Full-text available

Aug 2024
POLIT GEOGR

What explains diaspora support for populist presidential candidates? Existing findings suggest most diaspora voters are less likely to support populist candidates. However, there are notable exceptions among Latin American diasporas. We posit educated diasporas will be less likely to support populist candidates and political socialization in destination countries with successful populists will increase support for populist candidates in origin-country elections. We use origin-country candidate-level election data from 13 Latin American diasporas residing in the United States to test these claims. Our data covers 172 candidates from 45 first-round presidential elections. We connect this voting data to time-variant demographic data from the American Community Survey (ACS) for US respondents born in our thirteen Latin American countries of interest. Our results complicate existing findings as only some diasporas have less support for populist candidates than domestic voters, while others have relatively more support. We find weak origin-country state capacity, manifested by non-reporting of consulate- level election results, explains this variation. Diasporas from weaker states leave earlier in life and are more politically socialized in the destination country, yet likely vote for populists out of a desire to restore order in their country of birth.

Policing the police: Why it is so hard to reform police departments in the United States?

Article

Jul 2024

Why has it been so difficult to reform U.S. policing? We provide a theoretical argument that understanding of the entrenched militarisation and accountability problems of U.S. police departments would benefit from using theory in comparative research on civil–military relations. American police forces undermine local democracy by encroaching upon the decision-making powers of city officials in ways that resemble militaries in fragile democracies. Applying historical and contemporary evidence and existing scholarly research on policing, we explain police militarisation was initiated by civilian leaders of city governments to garner governmental legitimacy, and by-proxy police support, in racialised contexts. Trading off city governments’ institutional strength in order to maintain legitimacy produced opportunities for police insubordination or subversion of city government oversight of police activity. Consequently, cities with low public legitimacy and/or weak municipal institutions, faced with high demands by militarised police departments, may be more likely to experience police subversion of democratic accountability over police activity.

Probing into Populism Variant: A Socio-Historical Narrative of Non-Western Populism

Article

Jun 2024

Patrick Agbedejobi

A case study on the COVID-19 discourse in politicians’ speeches: Investigations into the speeches of former Iranian President Hassan Rouhani

Article

Full-text available

Dec 2023

This paper aims to analyze former Iranian President Hassan Rouhani’s thirty speeches on COVID-19 delivered between February 2, 2020 and April 27, 2020. We apply Laclau and Mouffe’s theory of discourse analysis to investigate and analyze Rouhani’s rhetorical and discursive strategies in making meaning of COVID-19. Findings showed that COVID-19 discourse in Rouhani’s speeches has mainly revolved around three nodal points: “the country”, “the enemy”, and “the state of exception”. Thus, the structural articulation of COVID-19 discourse resembles the hegemonic discourse in Iran. Our results also explain how Rouhani used COVID-19 as an empty signifier to reinforce the hegemonic discourse in Iran while trying to redefine his relations with the state-leaning organizations. Furthermore, we analyzed the rhetorical practices that Rouhani employed to articulate the COVID-19 discourse. This paper contributes to a growing body of literature into discursive aspects and implications of a global pandemic by providing empirical evidence form an understudied context: Iran.

“Everything is Biased”: Populist Supporters’ Folk Theories of Journalism

Article

Sep 2023
INT J PRESS/POLIT

Clara Juarez Miro

Populist supporters have a complex relationship with journalism (e.g., embracing elites’ negative rhetoric, yet consuming news profusely). This study explores this relationship. The notion of folk theories informs an inductive analysis of thirty-three in-depth interviews conducted in 2021 with right-wing and left-wing populist supporters in the United States and Spain to understand how they (RQ1) make sense of their news consumption habits and (RQ2) navigate the current high-choice media environment to stay informed. Findings reveal three interconnected folk theories that populist supporters drew from in explaining their news consumption: (1) “everything is biased,” (2) “it’s a way of seeing what other people think,” and (3) “it’s a pleasurable source of information.” Findings additionally support an important role of emotion underlying these folk theories, which helped participants reconcile their negative views of journalism with the pleasure they derived from meeting ingrained normative democratic ideals.

Evaluation Mechanism of Political Discourse: A Holistic Approach

Article

Full-text available

Jul 2023
J PSYCHOLINGUIST RES

Taking the economic issue of Trump’s First State of the Union Address (SUA) as original data, the present study examined the evaluation features of political speeches by adopting a holistic approach, which includes both macro and micro dimensions. At the macro level, a series of semantic patterns were identified, with Goal-Achievement and General-Example Patterns being the most prevalent. They predetermine the evaluative tone, giving the surrounding statements evaluative meanings, exhibiting the radiating nature of evaluative meaning; at the micro level, a variety of resources have been identified, both explicit and implicit, lexical and syntactical, attitudinal and gradational, which collaborate to reinforce the subjective evaluation, revealing the holistic characteristic in the realization of evaluative meaning. Throughout the analysis, three evaluative mechanisms have been proposed, which are the coupling of meaning, semantic prosody, and tense switching. They collaborate and promote the subjective evaluation to be established and reinforced in a cumulative, gradient or hybrid pattern. In a narrow sense, the present study has partially revealed Trump’s political discourse feature. Broadly speaking, it contributes to the theoretical development of the appraisal framework by refining existing evaluation systems through a holistic research paradigm, which in turn facilitates accurate interpretation of various types of discourse.

Resources or Trust: What matters more in the vaccination strategies of high-income liberal democracies?

Article

Mar 2022

Objectives This paper presents an overview of the vaccination policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic in Denmark, Canada, and the United States until September 1, 2021. The article seeks to understand the reasons for vaccination differences among high-income, liberal democracies. Methods The country cases were selected based on tiers of population-level vaccination uptake within six months after vaccines became broadly available (for high-income countries). We conducted a rapid review of primary data for each country case. Through a graphical and descriptive analysis, we evaluated common patterns as well as significant divergences in the vaccination rollout across countries and its relationship with COVID-19 health outcomes, government policy responses, resource constraints, and socio-political factors. This inductive analysis provides a sense of how resource constraints compare with current political contexts in each country case that may influence the public's response to a national vaccination strategy. Results Resources, socio-economic factors, and health outcomes related to COVID-19 do not ensure vaccination policy success as the case of the United States makes clear. Instead, trust in government and health systems appear to promise a higher vaccination uptake and maintained support for measures during a pandemic. Trust in government can be defined as the confidence citizens have that governmental actions will do what is right and perceived as fair. Conclusion Denmark, the United States, and Canada are high-income liberal democracies with very different vaccine strategies and subsequently different vaccination outcomes across their populations. What appears to be critical to successful vaccination outcomes is high trust in government or health officials, along with the depoliticization of the COVID-19 pandemic amongst the country's political parties.

Populism on the American Left: How Populist is the Sanders Electorate?

Article

Full-text available

Jan 2021

Since the 2016 US presidential elections, political commentators and academics have often attributed the rise of both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump to a general 'populist' wave affecting the country. While the two politicians are often juxtaposed with each other in terms of their alleged 'populism', there are grounds to question this characterisation for Bernie Sanders on the left. While others have articulated their doubts as to the level of populist attitudes in the Sanders movement, in our study, we move in the direction of analysing the political beliefs of Sanders' supporters. With the use of ANES survey data, our regression models demonstrate that while a small cohort of populist voters did support Sanders during the 2016 primary, they were much smaller in size than traditional left-wing groups that exhibited negative correlations with populist attitudes. When compared with other presidential candidates running in the 2016 primaries, the results demonstrate that those with populist attitudes were much more inclined to vote for the Republican candidate Donald Trump than the Bernie Sanders. Finally, when we run regressions on the disaggregated components of our index for populist attitudes, the results only demonstrate positive relationships with certain components of the populist worldview, such as anti-elitism, but not for others. Our results, thus, bring significant contributions to the study of populism in the United States by pointing primarily to a populist revolt from the right and less so on the left.

American Politics in Two Dimensions: Partisan and Ideological Identities versus Anti-Establishment Orientations

Article

Jul 2021
AM J POLIT SCI

Contemporary political ills at the mass behavior level (e.g., outgroup aggression, conspiracy theories) are often attributed to increasing polarization and partisan tribalism. We theorize that many such problems are less the product of left-right orientations than an orthogonal “anti-establishment” dimension of opinion dominated by conspiracy, populist, and Manichean orientations. Using two national surveys from 2019 and 2020, we find that this dimension of opinion is correlated with several antisocial psychological traits, the acceptance of political violence, and time spent on extremist social media platforms. It is also related to support for populist candidates, such as Trump and Sanders, and beliefs in misinformation and conspiracy theories. While many inherently view politics as a conflict between left and right, others see it as a battle between “the people” and a corrupt establishment. Our findings demonstrate an urgent need to expand the traditional conceptualization of mass opinion beyond familiar left-right identities and affective orientations.

Trump Knows Best: Donald Trump’s Rejection of Expertise and the 2020 Presidential Election

Article

Full-text available

Jan 2021
SOCIETY

Mark D. Brewer

Education level—often referred to as the “diploma divide”—has been implicated as one of the key cleavages in the 2016 presidential election. This piece explores this division over time, along with the most common explanations of the education cleavage in 2016, class and racial resentment. Voters’ views on the value of expertise are added as a possible explanation of the 2016 electoral divide by education level.

When Do Politicians Use Populist Rhetoric? Populism as a Campaign Gamble

Preprint

May 2020

Why do some politicians employ populist rhetoric more within the same elections? We present a model of populism where two competitors allocate their effort between conventional and–much riskier–populist campaigning in an attempt to (de)mobilize the electorate. We show that, despite its risks, the politician with the lower prior support is likelier to use populism to have a chance of winning. To test our model’s empirical implications, we construct the most comprehensive corpus of U.S. presidential campaign speeches (1952-2016) and estimate the prevalence of populist rhetoric across these speeches with a novel automated text analysis method utilizing active learning and word embedding. Overall, we demonstrate the robustly greater use of populism among the presidential candidates with the lower polling numbers.

Congressional rhetoric on Twitter and the crisis of democracy

Article

Mar 2025

Unemployment, Immigration, and Populism

Article

Nov 2024
J LAW ECON

Shuai Chen

“He is the riskiest candidate standing on this stage”: social, verbal, and nonverbal aggression in the 2020 Democratic primary debates

Article

Oct 2024

Daniel Montez

To Dog-Whistle or to Bark? Elite Communication Strategies When Invoking Conspiracy Theories

Article

Full-text available

Oct 2024

When do politicians dog-whistle conspiracy theories (CTs), and when do they explicitly endorse – or ‘bark’ – a CT? Over time, does the use of dog-whistles shape the degree to which politicians bark? Drawing from the models of mass communication literature, we theorize that politicians who leverage CTs to garner political support have incentives to tailor their communication to their audience. When politicians speak to general audiences, they risk being punished for explicitly endorsing CTs. However, for parties that use CTs to rally their base, dog-whistling a CT may allow politicians to covertly signal support for a CT to party faithful. Conversely, amongst audiences primarily composed of party loyalists or CT believers, politicians have strong incentives to explicitly endorse CTs. We test our theory with data from Poland, where a series of CTs emerged following a 2010 plane crash in Smoleńsk, Russia that killed the Polish president and 95 other top officials. We draw on speeches and tweets discussing the crash from 2011 to 2022 by the Law and Justice (PiS) party, which sometimes endorses these CTs. We find descriptive evidence that PiS politicians both dog-whistle and ‘bark’. While they tend to dog-whistle more when the audience is more diverse, they tend to bark when the audience is more uniformly CT-supporting. We find some evidence that politicians bark more and dog-whistle less over time, which suggests that, with sustained use, dog-whistling may become understood by a wider array of audiences.

The Political Twittersphere as a Breeding Ground for Populist Ideas: The Case of Israel

Article

Aug 2024

This study employs a neural network approach to investigate the dissemination and content of populist ideas within the Israeli political Twittersphere. By analyzing a data set of Twitter activity by Israeli lawmakers from 2013 to 2022, the study reveals a consistent increase in the frequency and concentration of populist ideas, particularly among legislators from religious-nationalist parties. The analysis of the topical content of populist ideas spread on Twitter highlights the significant impact of legal proceedings against the Prime Minister on political discussions. It delineates the development of a Manichean discourse among the center-left and a complete populist cosmology among the right, reaching its peak in 2022. The study demonstrates the utility of such approaches in understanding the evolution and dissemination of populist ideas, as well as the challenges faced by the backsliding Israeli democracy.

Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW): Left-Wing Authoritarian-and Populist? An Empirical Analysis

Article

Full-text available

May 2024

J. Philipp Thomeczek

Germany’s relatively stable party system faces a new left-authoritarian challenger: Sahra Wagenknecht’s Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW) party. First polls indicate that for the BSW, election results above 10% are within reach. While Wagenknecht’s positions in economic and cultural terms have already been discussed, this article elaborates on another highly relevant feature of Wagenknecht, namely her populist communication. Exploring Wagenknecht’s and BSW’s populist appeal helps us to understand why the party is said to also have potential among seemingly different voter groups coming from the far right Alternative for Germany (AfD) and far left Die Linke, which share high levels of populist attitudes. To analyse the role that populist communication plays for Wagenknecht and the BSW, this article combines quantitative and qualitative methods. The quantitative analysis covers all speeches (10,000) and press releases (19,000) published by Die Linke members of Parliament (MPs; 2005–2023). The results show that Wagenknecht is the (former) Die Linke MP with the highest share of populist communication. Furthermore, she was also able to convince a group of populist MPs to join the BSW. The article closes with a qualitative analysis of BSW’s manifesto that reveals how populist framing plays a major role in this document, in which the political and economic elites are accused of working against the interest of “the majority”. Based on this analysis, the classification of the BSW as a populist party seems to be appropriate.

Political Alienation and the Trump Vote in the 2016 and 2020 US Presidential Elections

Article

Mar 2024

Maxwell B. Allamong

Following Donald Trump’s surprising victory in the 2016 US presidential election, some popular and scholarly sources suggested that Trump’s candidacy may have been bolstered, in part, by the mobilization of “politically alienated” voters. This argument is puzzling, however, as certain forms of political alienation are often negatively related to political participation, making it unclear whether or how alienation may have been related to turnout and to support for Trump at the ballot box. I shed light on this puzzle using data from the American National Election Studies, which contain measures of two dimensions of political alienation: inefficacy and cynicism. With these data I examine how either dimension relates to turnout and to vote choice in 2016 and in 2020. Cynicism emerges as a positive predictor of both turnout and the Trump vote in 2016, but not in 2020. Inefficacy, however, does not positively predict turnout or the Trump vote in either election. I offer a potential explanation for the diminished relationship between cynicism and mobilization in the 2020 elections by applying a Structural Topic Model to open-ended survey responses about Trump, which reveals a substantial decrease in the salience of Trump’s “political outsider” qualities during his reelection bid.

Media Populism Revisited

Chapter

Dec 2023

Benjamin Krämer

The concept of media populism originally assumes a relationship between the way journalistic media operate and populism, and in a more narrow sense, refers to the idea that media outlets and actors can convey a populist ideology or discourse. This contribution shortly reviews the history of the concept and reviews different understandings. It then discusses various challenges, both methodological and in terms of transferring the concept to social media and new political issues. The article concludes with some remarks on the problem of conceptual overstretching, ambiguity, and contestedness.

How the populist radical right exploits crisis: comparing the role of proximity in the COVID-19 and refugee crises in Germany

Article

Full-text available

Nov 2023
WEST EUR POLIT

This article studies the conditions required by populist radical right actors to convincingly create a sense of crisis. The article draws on the literature on political blame games and policy feedback to argue that it is not only the salience of an event that determines its ‘populist exploitability’, but also its proximity to mass publics – or more simply, how directly and closely it affects citizens. In the study, Moffitt’s stepwise model of populist crisis performance is extended and expectations are formulated regarding how the proximity of an event influences the various steps of crisis performance. The article then tests this theoretical argument with a within-unit analysis of the crisis performance of a populist radical right party, the Alternative for Germany (AfD), during the refugee crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic. The analysis suggests that the pandemic’s proximity to people’s daily lives narrowed and complicated the AfD’s crisis performance in important ways. The article sheds light on the determinants of the success of populist radical right parties and nuances our understanding of the broader relationship between populism and crisis.

Introduction: Populism, Political Communication and Performative Leadership in International Politics

Chapter

Full-text available

Nov 2023

Who speaks for ‘the people’? Populists across the globe have mobilised this question to attack liberal institutions, political opponents, and the democratic process itself, communicating a political reality in which globalist elites have allegedly betrayed the sovereign will of the popular community. The recent ‘surge’ (Mudde, 2016) or ‘wave’ (Aslanidis, 2016) of populism around the world has encompassed electorally successful right-wing populist leaders in the Northern Hemisphere such as Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, Marine Le Pen, Jaroslav Kaczynski, Recyp Erdogan, and Victor Orbán, who have advanced nationalist, exclusionary, protectionist and Eurosceptic political agendas. In parallel, left-wing populists in Greece, Spain and Bolivia have attracted voters disillusioned with neoliberal economic policies and existing representational mechanisms of liberal democracy with anti-elitist and anti-globalist platforms. In the Southern Hemisphere, Narendra Modi, Jair Bolsonaro and Yoweri Museveni are oft-cited examples of contemporary populist leaders who have enjoyed continued electoral success with agendas promoting ethnocultural and religious-Nationalist slogans in post-colonial contexts. Prior analyses of these populists’ electoral success and political leadership have usually focused on the ideas, ideologies and strategies populism encompasses, especially in the domestic political arena.

Transatlantic Diplomacy in the Age of Populism: A Story of Resilience?

Chapter

Nov 2023

Emmanuelle Blanc

In an era of insurgent populism, diplomacy—one of the key institutions of international politics—seems to be increasingly challenged. The weakening of the professional diplomatic corps in favour of personalism at home, the preference for bilateral interactions at the detriment of multilateralism, and the provocative communication style geared outwards- are all part of the growing anti-diplomatic repertoire of practices systematically used by populist leaders. Yet despite its saliency, we know very little about the impact that populist communication (i.e. the language, deliberation and discursive performance of populist ideas) has on the conduct of diplomacy, whose main function is to ensure the smooth management of International Relations. To what extent, and how does populist communication affect diplomacy? To answer this question, this book chapter focuses on the diplomatic practice of dialogue in the transatlantic context by scrutinizing its evolution during the presidency of Donald Trump. The analysis shows that while the presidential populist rhetoric has indeed changed the substance of transatlantic diplomatic exchanges, it has also triggered a strong response from new diplomatic actors—demonstrating the resilience of this fundamental institution.

Populist Hyperpartisans?: The Interaction Between Partisan Media Exposure and Populism in the 2020 US Presidential Election

Article

Full-text available

Sep 2023

Social media policy in two dimensions: understanding the role of anti-establishment beliefs and political ideology in Americans’ attribution of responsibility regarding online content

Article

Aug 2023

Inviting the Populists to the Party: Populist Appeals in Presidential Primaries

Article

Jun 2023

Zachary Scott

The aftermath of the 2016 election cycle ignited significant interest in populism among scholars of American politics, yet relatively little engagement has gone toward how American political elites and institutions respond to populist insurgencies. This is problematic as the response a populist insurgency receives likely affects its degree of success, thereby conditioning the substantive importance of rising populism. This paper addresses this shortcoming by articulating an audition and assimilation theory of party response to populist insurgencies. This theory predicts that parties, presented with an electorally viable populist insurgency in a presidential primary contest, can choose to assimilate the message while removing the populist content to diffuse the insurgent nature. In contrast, an electorally unviable populist insurgency is treated as a failed audition, warranting no response. Using a corpus of presidential primary candidate speeches, I show that party nominees assimilate the topics used by populists who demonstrate electoral viability but do not become more populist themselves. This assimilation is also found among party platforms. Furthermore, assimilation is only performed by the Democratic party and exceeds assimilation of topics used by electorally viable, non-populist rivals.

The Conditional Association Between Populism, Ideological Extremity, and Affective Polarization

Article

May 2023
INT J PUBLIC OPIN R

Alberto Stefanelli

In recent years there has been an increasing interest in whether populism is related to opinion extremity. Yet, research on the topic offers little direct evidence on whether and under which conditions populist ideas at the individual level are related to policy extremity and inter-party dislike. This article aims to fill this gap by focusing on the reasons populist individuals hold more or less extreme opinions. Using data from the 2016 American National Electoral Study, I find that populist attitudes are a strong correlate of both ideological extremity and affective polarization, yet this association is conditional on respondent’s party affiliation. Populism is related to higher levels of ideological extremity among Democrats and stronger negative leader evaluations among Republicans. This finding indicates that the relationship between populism and citizens’ political judgements varies depending on the ability of populist leaders to make certain dimensions of the competition salient (i.e., ideological or affective) and exploit pre-existing ideological and partisan rivalries (i.e., party identity).

Patterns of Legislators' Communication on Social Media: The Case of Israel

Article

Jan 2023

The American Anti-Vaccine Movement: An Investigation of Populism, Polarization, and Public Policy

Thesis

Full-text available

May 2020

Grayson Jackson

Populism, animated in part by the distrust of elite authority, can be found across the spectrum of American political ideology. From Donald Trump and his “drain the swamp” rhetoric to Bernie Sanders and his denunciations of corporate greed, this contagious, populist skepticism has invaded contemporary American political culture. Unfortunately, this sentiment has also plagued the medical and scientific communities, with government agencies, pharmaceutical industry giants, and experts encountering growing distrust, especially concerning the safety and efficacy of vaccines. Whereas measles outbreaks occur with increasing frequency across the United States and the rates of non-medical vaccine exemptions are rising to dangerous levels, Americans face a veritable public health crisis. This thesis will trace the roots of populism and political partisanship in order to evaluate their influence on the anti-vaccine movement in the United States, with further attention paid to the specific public health risks of and policy prescriptions for vaccine hesitancy.

‘Saying it like it is’: Right-wing populism, international politics, and the performance of authenticity

Article

Full-text available

May 2022
Br J Polit Int Relat

Populist leaders base their electoral appeal on underlying their agenda with claims to authenticity reflected both in the content and in the style of their political communication. Based on a conceptualisation of authenticity as discursive performance, we conduct a comparative analysis of the authenticity claims of two right-wing populist leaders, Boris Johnson and Donald Trump. We focus on authenticity claims associated with international politics. International issues are central to populist exclusionary narratives, but also difficult for populist incumbents to narrate authentically. We find that despite differences in their public personas, Johnson and Trump show considerable similarities in both content and style of their authenticity performances. In particular, they ‘domesticate’ international politics to reinforce domestic issues assumed closer to ‘ordinary’ voters, all the while employing rhetorical styles suggestive of their authenticity. These findings highlight the centrality of authenticity performances to populist politics and electoral appeal.

How Do Populists Visually Represent ‘The People’? A Systematic Comparative Visual Content Analysis of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders’ Instagram Accounts

Article

May 2022
INT J PRESS/POLIT

Benjamin Moffitt

How do populists visually represent “the people”? While the literature on populism has tended to focus on text- and language-based documents, such as speeches, policies, and party documents to consider how populists characterize “the people,” in this article I undertake a systematic visual content analysis to consider how populist leaders on either side of the ideological spectrum visually represent “the people” in images from their official Instagram accounts ( N = 432). Comparing the cases of Donald Trump on the populist right and Bernie Sanders on the populist left, I code for the majority gender, race, and age of “the people” in each image, and supplement this with a discussion of the depictions of these categories. I find that Trump’s images of “the people” are significantly more homogenous across all categories—specifically more white, more masculine, and with less young people—than Sanders’, and situate these findings in the context of the literature on the differences between left and right populism. This article contributes to the study of populist communication by highlighting the role of images in representing “the people”; analyzing how left and right populists do this differently; and developing a method for measuring the demographic characteristics of “the people” in populists’ images that can be used in future studies. In doing so, it seeks to push the literature forward by highlighting that images are not something “extra” to be studied in populist communication, but rather are a central battleground for the construction of populist identities.

Opportunistic oppression: U.S. migration restrictions and public health policy during the COVID-19 pandemic

Article

Full-text available

Feb 2022

As the COVID-19 pandemic swept the world in Spring 2020, the Trump administration invoked war against the coronavirus to severely restrict admission of migrants and asylum seekers into the United States. At the same time, it declined to enact national measures to control viral community spread and sharply criticised public health policies. We analyse this notable inconsistency as a case of opportunistic oppression whereby policymakers take advantage of a crisis to pursue pre-existing, and often unrelated, policy preferences. We identify how the securitisation of health and the crisis-enabled politics of enmity allowed the Trump administration to cynically erode migrant human rights protections while simultaneously failing to contain the pandemic. Opportunistic oppression represents an attractive strategy for states facing real and imagined emergencies to pursue political agendas that are not necessarily part of a coherent and effective response to the crisis at hand.

Control, alt, delete: Patriarchal populist attacks on international women's rights

Article

Full-text available

Jan 2022

The rise of patriarchal populist leaders over the past decade has fortified a long-standing campaign by conservative governments and advocacy groups to undermine women's international human rights. Their efforts have increasingly focused on revising language as a means to challenge and weaken the international norms and organizations essential to women's and girls' equality and health. Through our textual analysis of UN records, governmental and nongovernmental publications, media coverage of disputes over language , and background interviews with activists, we identify and delineate the significance of this 'norm spoiling' strategy and trace its expansion during the Trump administration. We find that women's rights challengers have pursued three distinct spoiling tactics based in language: controlling what women's rights advocates can say through policies such as the United States' 'global gag rule'; altering the meaning of women's rights by reframing them as an attack on other rights, such as religious freedom; and deleting foundational words, such as 'gender' and 'sexual and reproductive health and rights', from international agreements. The role of language in today's patriarchal populism goes beyond populist leaders' speeches, rallies and tweets. Their governments and allies systematically control, alter or delete words central to women's rights.

El Partido Republicano chileno frente al “estallido social”: discurso político, identidad y antagonismo

Article

Full-text available

Dec 2021

El articulo describe y analiza el conjunto de intervenciones públicas producidas por el Partido Republicano a través de su principal líder, José Antonio Kast, durante el período más intenso de la crisis socio-política chilena del año 2019. Estas intervenciones fueron abordadas a partir del registro, clasificación y análisis de las frecuencias léxicas, oposiciones binarias, relaciones de identidad y tópicos privilegiados posibles de observar en los mensajes generados durante el período que media entre los meses de octubre de 2019 y marzo de 2020. El artículo concluye que, durante el período estudiado, el Partido Republicano profundizó el carácter antagónico de su discurso político y su ubicación dentro de los márgenes de lo que se conoce como la "derecha radical", al mismo tiempo que debilitó su capacidad de ampliación hacia espacios sociales diversos al núcleo identitario clásico de la derecha chilena.

Crisis, Rhetoric and Right-Wing Populist Incumbency: An Analysis of Donald Trump's Tweets and Press Briefings

Article

Full-text available

Sep 2021

How do right-wing-populist incumbents navigate rhetorical strategic choices when they seek to manage external crises? Relevant literature has paid increasing attention to the role of ‘crisis’ in boosting the electoral success of right-wing populist candidates. We know a lot less about the rhetorical strategies used by right-wing populist incumbents seeking re-election. We draw on literatures on populism, crisis management and political rhetoric to conceptualize the rhetorical strategic choices of right-wing populist incumbents in times of crisis. We propose a framework for the choice of rhetorical strategy available to right-wing populist incumbents and illustrate it with a qualitative content analysis of Trump's tweets and White House press briefings during the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic. We find limited rhetorical adaptation to crisis and high degrees of continuity with previous rhetoric grounded in right-wing populism. This challenges prevalent assumptions regarding the likelihood of incumbent rhetorical flexibility in the face of crisis.

Rhetoric and Reality in the United States of America: Trump, Populism and Health Policy

Chapter

Sep 2021

There is no formal national populist radical right party (PRR) in the United States. Rather, the PRR is led by political actors within existing parties, like Donald Trump and the Republican Party. Trump exhibits predisposition to PRR through his xenophobic, authoritarian and populist policies. Yet, health policy under the Trump administration has delivered few concrete policies, PRR or otherwise. Where Trump has had policy success is with welfare and liberal chauvinistic policies, which seek to rein in the role of government in the welfare state and deny benefits to out-groups, such as minorities and immigrants. These policy successes include changes to the public welfare Medicaid programme and the public charge rule. These policy successes have occurred because of its overlap with the policy preferences of the broader Republican Party. The US failed response to COVID-19 is due in part to Trump’s reliance on PRR policies. While Donald Trump lost his bid for re-election in 2020, his candidacy and administration provide a blueprint for future officials to leverage PRR policy for electoral success while also further establishing PRR policies within the Republican Party.

Social and Institutional Presence of the Presidents of the Americas on social media: An analysis of the Communication on Twitter about COVID-19

Article

Full-text available

Jan 2021

Power to the People? Populism and the Politics of School Choice in the United States

Article

Jan 2021

Jeremy Singer

I use the definition of populism as a discursive frame to consider the extent to which the politics of school choice in the United States have been populist. This analysis offers a novel way to understand how political actors have forged coalitions to support school choice and suggests how they may remake their positions in an evolving political context. Populist approaches in the politics of school choice have been muted over the past three decades, as the contemporary educational reform movement has relied on political rhetoric that would foster and maintain broad-based coalitional support for its agenda. This is revealed by the dominant framing of school choice in the contemporary reform era, and by its contrast with more populist discourses throughout the politics of school choice. While populist sentiments are rising in the United States, political elites largely still rely on the contemporary reform movement’s weakly populist or elitist discourse surrounding school choice. Social and geographic divisions within and between political constituencies remain obstacles to a populist turn in the politics of school choice.

Helmut Kohl - früher Populist oder charismatischer Leader?

Thesis

Jan 2021

Ferdinand Knapp

Was former chancellor Helmut Kohl a populist or a charismatic leader? This bachelor's thesis approaches the question taking account of the theories of Martin Sebaldt and Henrik Gast about charismatic leadership and the role of the chancellor in Germany and the theories about populism by Jan-Werner Müller and others. Included are interviews of Kohl's contemporary witnesses, Dr. Wilfried Steuer, former member of the Landtag of Baden-Württemberg and Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, former Minister of Justice of Germany.

Antitrust Without Romance

Article

Jan 2019

Thibault Schrepel

Helping populism win? Social media use, filter bubbles, and support for populist presidential candidates in the 2016 US election campaign

Article

Full-text available

Jun 2017

Undoubtedly, populist political candidates from the right and the left, including Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, changed the tenor and direction of the 2016 presidential contest in the US. Much like Barack Obama’s electoral successes that were credited at least in part to his savvy social media campaigning in 2008 and 2012, since Trump’s victory, the notion that social media ‘helped him win’ has been revitalized, even by Trump himself [McCormick, R. (2016a). Donald Trump says Facebook and Twitter ‘helped him win’. The Verge. Retrieved from http://www.theverge.com/2016/11/13/13619148/trump-facebook-twitter-helped-win]. This study therefore explores citizen support for populist and establishment candidates across the ideological spectrum in the US to specifically examine if using social media was related to an increased likelihood of supporting populist presidential political candidates, including Trump. Differing forms of active, passive, and uncivil social media were taken into account and the findings suggest active social media use for politics was actually related to less support for Republican populists, such as Trump, but that forms of both passive or uncivil social media use were linked to an increase in the likelihood of support to a level roughly equivalent to that of the traditional television viewing. These patterns are almost the inverse of support for Democratic populists, in this case namely Sanders.

Italy: A Country of many populisms

Chapter

Full-text available

Dec 2007

Marco Tarchi

How to assess populist discourse through three current approaches

Article

Full-text available

May 2015

Mario Poblete

There are several disputes on what populism is, but currently there is probably greater controversy over how to measure it. If we focus on populism as discourse, we can see that there is little ontological consensus. Here, the resolution of epistemological controversies is much less auspicious. In fact, types of methodological approaches and techniques differ substantively. This review article analyses three perspectives on populism, which are representative of three contemporary efforts to assess populism as discourse: first, the poststructuralist approach based on Laclau's theory; second, a mixed approach based on positivism, but employing hermeneutic techniques of textual analysis known as holistic grading; and third, content analysis, which is the most classical of these approaches, and the most quantitative, being based on counting phrases within texts. In spite of these differences, the approaches are in certain agreement: they employ a similar concept of populism, they accept that populism as discourse is triggered by certain structural factors and they identify the presence of a leader to catalyse populist discourse.

Voices of the peoples: Populism in Europe and Latin America compared

Article

Full-text available

Jul 2011

Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser is currently a post-doctoral fellow at the Social Science Research Center Berlin (WZB). He is the recipient of the Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowship for a two-year research project on populism in Europe and Latin America, which he will undertake at the University of Sussex during the 2011–2013 academic years. With research interests that include populism, democracy, and Latin American politics, he has published in Democratization and the Latin American Research Review, among others. He holds a PhD from the Humboldt University of Berlin (2009). the two anonymous reviewers. Of course, all errors are ours alone.

Introduction: The Sceptre and the Spectre

Article

Full-text available

Jan 2008

Ghiţa Ionescu and Ernest Gellner (1969: 1) began their classic edited collection on populism by paraphrasing Marx and Engel’s famous opening line: ‘A Spectre is haunting the world — populism’. However, it was not quite the entire world that was being haunted in the late 1960s. Looking through the case studies in Ionescu and Gellner’s book, we find chapters on North America, Latin America, Russia, Eastern Europe and Africa, but nothing on that part of the world in which most of the contributors lived and worked: Western Europe. By contrast, the present volume focuses exclusively on that area. This reflects the fact that while the likes of Ross Perot in the United States, Preston Manning in Canada and Pauline Hanson in Australia have all attracted sporadic attention as new populist leaders, the main area of sustained populist growth and success over the last fifteen years in established democracies has been Western Europe.

Emotions and Information Diffusion in Social Media — Sentiment of Microblogs and Sharing Behavior

Article

Full-text available

Apr 2013

As a new communication paradigm, social media has promoted information dissemination in social networks. Previous research has identified several content-related features as well as user and network characteristics that may drive information diffusion. However, little research has focused on the relationship between emotions and information diffusion in a social media setting. In this paper, we examine whether sentiment occurring in social media content is associated with a user's information sharing behavior. We carry out our research in the context of political communication on Twitter. Based on two data sets of more than 165,000 tweets in total, we find that emotionally charged Twitter messages tend to be retweeted more often and more quickly compared to neutral ones. As a practical implication, companies should pay more attention to the analysis of sentiment related to their brands and products in social media communication as well as in designing advertising content that triggers emotions.

Exclusionary vs. Inclusionary Populism: Comparing Contemporary Europe and Latin America

Article

Full-text available

Apr 2013
GOV OPPOS

Although there is a lively academic debate about contemporary populism in Europe and Latin America, almost no cross-regional research exists on this topic. This article aims to fill this gap by showing that a minimal and ideological definition of populism permits us to analyse current expressions of populism in both regions. Moreover, based on a comparison of four prototypical cases (FN/Le Pen and FPÖ/Haider in Europe and PSUV/Chávez and MAS/Morales in Latin America), we show that it is possible to identify two regional subtypes of populism: exclusionary populism in Europe and inclusionary populism in Latin America.

Populism Emergent: A framework for analyzing its contexts, mechanics, and outcomes

Article

Full-text available

Jan 2012

Takis Pappas

This paper, based on cross-regional empirical research, provides an integrated analytical framework for understanding the emergence of populism in seemingly different political contexts in both Europe (including Greece, France and the Netherlands) and Latin America (including Peru and Venezuela). It is found that, given an appropriate context, political leadership is the most important factor for setting in motion a number of interdependent causal mechanisms that may produce populism. Those mechanisms include the politicization of social resentment, the formation of new cleavage lines, and intense polarization. When successfully emergent, populism’s first and foremost outcome is the creation of new parties, or movements, of a distinctly personalist appeal. The causal explanation proposed in this paper is both parsimonious and credible. It also points to specific research themes related to successfully emergent populism.

The Populist Chameleon: The People's Party, Huey Long, George Wallace, and the Populist Argumentative Frame

Article

Full-text available

Nov 2006

Michael J Lee

This essay argues that a sustained form can be located in the complicated history of populist rhetoric. Despite its chameleonic qualities, the advancement of populism is constituted by alterations in the focus and content, not the structure, of populist activism. This structure, or what I term its argumentative frame, positions a virtuous people against a powerful enemy and expresses disdain toward traditional forms of democratic deliberation and republican representation. I trace these themes through the rhetoric of the People's Party, Huey Long, and George Wallace. I conclude by analyzing the link between populism's persistence in U.S. history and the nation's Founding.

Populism as political communication style: An empirical study of political parties' discourse in Belgium

Article

Full-text available

Apr 2007
EUR J POLIT RES

The scientific debate about populism has been revitalised by the recent rise of extreme-right parties in Western Europe. Within the broad discussion about populism and its relationship with extreme-right, this article is confined to three topics: a conceptual, an epistemological and an empirical issue. First, taking a clear position in the ongoing definition struggle, populism is defined primarily as a specific political communication style. Populism is conceived of as a political style essentially displaying proximity of the people, while at the same time taking an anti-establishment stance and stressing the (ideal) homogeneity of the people by excluding specific population segments. Second, it is pointed out that defining populism as a style enables one to turn it into a useful concept that has too often remained vague and blurred. Third, drawing on an operational definition of populism, a comparative discourse analysis of the political party broadcasts of the Belgian parties is carried out. The quantitative analysis leads to a clear conclusion. In terms of the degree and the kinds of populism embraced by the six political parties under scrutiny, the extreme-right party Vlaams Blok behaves very differently from the other Belgian parties. Its messages are a copybook example of populism.

The Resurgence of the Latin American Left

Book

Jan 2011

Steven Levitsky

Populism: A Very Short Introduction

Book

Feb 2017

Cas Mudde

What is populism? What is the relationship between populism and democracy? Populism: A Very Short Introduction presents populism as an ideology that divides society into two antagonistic camps: the “pure people” versus the “corrupt elite,” and that privileges popular sovereignty above all else. It illustrates the practical power of this ideology by describing populist movements of the modern era—European right-wing parties, left-wing presidents in Latin America, and the Tea Party movement in the United States—and charismatic populist leaders such as Juan Domingo Péron, H. Ross Perot, Silvio Berlusconi, and Hugo Chávez. Although populism is ultimately part of democracy, populist forces constitute an increasing challenge to democratic politics.

What Is Populism?

Book

Jan 2016

Jan-Werner Müller

Ethno-nationalist populism and the mobilization of collective resentment

Article

Nov 2017
BRIT J SOCIOL

Bart Bonikowski

Scholarly and journalistic accounts of the recent successes of radical-right politics in Europe and the United States, including the Brexit referendum and the Trump campaign, tend to conflate three phenomena: populism, ethno-nationalism and authoritarianism. While all three are important elements of the radical right, they are neither coterminous nor limited to the right. The resulting lack of analytical clarity has hindered accounts of the causes and consequences of ethno-nationalist populism. To address this problem, I bring together existing research on nationalism, populism and authoritarianism in contemporary democracies to precisely define these concepts and examine temporal patterns in their supply and demand, that is, politicians' discursive strategies and the corresponding public attitudes. Based on the available evidence, I conclude that both the supply and demand sides of radical politics have been relatively stable over time, which suggests that in order to understand public support for radical politics, scholars should instead focus on the increased resonance between pre-existing attitudes and discursive frames. Drawing on recent research in cultural sociology, I argue that resonance is not only a function of the congruence between a frame and the beliefs of its audience, but also of shifting context. In the case of radical-right politics, a variety of social changes have engendered a sense of collective status threat among national ethnocultural majorities. Political and media discourse has channelled such threats into resentments toward elites, immigrants, and ethnic, racial and religious minorities, thereby activating previously latent attitudes and lending legitimacy to radical political campaigns that promise to return power and status to their aggrieved supporters. Not only does this form of politics threaten democratic institutions and inter-group relations, but it also has the potential to alter the contours of mainstream public discourse, thereby creating the conditions of possibility for future successes of populist, nationalist, and authoritarian politics.

Measuring populist discourse in the United States and beyond

Article

Apr 2018
Nat. Hum. Behav.

Many have argued that populism dominated the 2016 US presidential election. Textual analysis of electoral discourse in the United States, Greece and Venezuela suggests that the overall level of populism in the US election was in fact moderate. Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump engaged in populist discourse, but Trump lacked consistency.

Populism and the Mirror of Democracy

Book

Jan 2005

Francisco Panizza

The Role of Twitter in the 2016 US Election

Book

Jan 2018

This book assembles six chapters by respected and emerging scholars in political science and communication to produce a first sustained look at Twitter's role in the 2016 US Presidential Election. While much attention has already been paid to Trump's use of Twitter as a phenomenon—how it helps drive news cycles, distracts attention from other matters, or levies attacks against rivals, the news media, and other critics—there has been little scholarly analysis of the impact Twitter played in the actual election. These chapters apply an impressive diversity of theoretical explanations and methodological approaches to explore how this new technology shaped an American election, and what impact it could have in the future.

Trump's Electoral Speeches and His Appeal to the American White Working Class

Article

Nov 2017

This paper contributes to the study of social change by considering boundary work as a dimension of cultural change. Drawing on the computer-assisted qualitative analysis of 73 formal speeches made by Donald Trump during the 2016 electoral campaign, we argue that his political rhetoric, which led to his presidential victory, addressed the white working classes' concern with their declining position in the national pecking order. He addressed their concern by raising the moral status of this group, that is, by 1) emphatically describing them as hard working Americans who are victims of globalization; 2) voicing their concerns about 'people above' (professionals, the rich, and politicians); 3) drawing strong moral boundaries toward undocumented immigrants, refugees and Muslims; 4) presenting African American and (legal) Hispanic Americans as workers who also deserve jobs; 5) stressing the role of working class men as protectors of women and LGBTQ people. This particular case study of cultural resonance provides a novel, distinctively sociological approach for capturing dynamics of social change.

Rise of the Trumpenvolk: Populism in the 2016 Election

Article

Sep 2016

Despite the wide application of the label “populist” in the 2016 election cycle, there has been little systematic evidence that this election is distinctive in its populist appeal. Looking at historical trends, contemporary rhetoric, and public opinion data, we find that populism is an appropriate descriptor of the 2016 election and that Donald Trump stands out in particular as the populist par excellence. Historical data reveal a large “representation gap” that typically accompanies populist candidates. Content analysis of campaign speeches shows that Trump, more so than any other candidate, employs a rhetoric that is distinctive in its simplicity, anti-elitism, and collectivism. Original survey data show that Trump’s supporters are distinctive in their unique combination of anti-expertise, anti-elitism, and pronationalist sentiments. Together, these findings highlight the distinctiveness of populism as a mechanism of political mobilization and the unusual character of the 2016 race.

The Electoral Landscape of 2016

Article

Sep 2016

As 2015 got underway, most Americans were poised for another Bush vs. Clinton presidential election, but by the middle of the year it was clear something unexpected was unfolding in the race for the White House. In this article, we illuminate the political landscape heading into the 2016 election, paying special attention to the public’s mood, their assessments of government, their attitudes about race and members of the other party, and the health of the nation’s economy. Fundamental predictors of election outcomes did not clearly favor either side, but an increasing ethnic diversity in the electorate, alongside a racially polarized electorate, was favorable to Democrats. Ultimately, an ambivalent electorate divided by party and race set the stage for a presidential primary that played directly on these divisions, and for a general election whose outcome initially appeared far from certain.

Switzerland: Favorable Conditions for Growing Populism

Chapter

Jul 2016

A New American populist coalition?: The relationship between the tea party and the far right

Chapter

Jan 2015

G. Michael

The Populist Style in American Politics: Presidential Campaign Discourse, 1952–1996

Article

Jun 2016

This paper examines populist claims-making in US presidential elections. We define populism as a discursive strategy that juxtaposes the virtuous populace with a corrupt elite and views the former as the sole legitimate source of political power. In contrast to past research, we argue that populism is best operationalized as an attribute of political claims rather than a stable ideological property of political actors. This analytical strategy allows us to systematically measure how the use of populism is affected by a variety of contextual factors. Our empirical case consists of 2,406 speeches given by American presidential candidates between 1952 and 1996, which we code using automated text analysis. Populism is shown to be a common feature of presidential politics among both Democrats and Republicans, but its prevalence varies with candidates' relative positions in the political field. In particular, we demonstrate that the probability of a candidate's reliance on populist claims is directly proportional to his distance from the center of power (in this case, the presidency). This suggests that populism is primarily a strategic tool of political challengers, and particularly those who have legitimate claims to outsider status. By examining temporal changes in populist claims-making on the political left and right, its variation across geographic regions and field positions, and the changing content of populist frames, our paper contributes to the debate on populism in modern democracies, while integrating field theory with the study of institutional politics.

The Populist Persuasion: An American History

Article

Nov 1998

How to Perform Crisis: A Model for Understanding the Key Role of Crisis in Contemporary Populism

Article

Apr 2014

Benjamin Moffitt

A focus on crisis is a mainstay of the literature on contemporary populism. However, the links between populism and crisis remain under-theorized and undeveloped. This article puts forward a novel perspective for understanding this relationship, arguing that crisis does not just trigger populism, but that populism also attempts to act as a trigger for crisis. This is because crises are always mediated and ‘performed’. The article presents a six-step model of how populist actors ‘perform’ crisis, drawing on empirical examples from Europe, Latin America, North America and the Asia-Pacific region. It explains how the performance of crisis allows populist actors to pit ‘the people’ against a dangerous other, radically simplify the terrain of political debate and advocate strong leadership. It ultimately suggests that we should move from thinking of crisis as something purely external to populism, towards thinking about the performance of crisis as an internal core feature of populism.

The Nucleus of Populism: In Search of the Lowest Common Denominator

Article

Oct 2013

Matthijs Rooduijn

There are different area-based bodies of literature on populism, which generally define the concept in slightly different ways. As a result, the term ‘populism’ has been attached to a wide variety of political actors, from Perot in the US to Berlusconi in Italy, and from Perón in Argentina to Le Pen in France. Is it an unfortunate coincidence that the same word has been used for completely different parties and politicians, or is it possible to discern the lowest common denominator that these actors share? By means of a comparison of six cases, based on a most-different systems design, I demonstrate that populists in different times and places have four characteristics in common: (1) they emphasize the central position of the people; (2) they criticize the elite; (3) they perceive the people as a homogeneous entity; and (4) they proclaim a serious crisis. These four characteristics constitute the core elements of populism.

Clarifying a Contested Concept: Populism in the Study of Latin American Politics

Article

Oct 2001

Kurt Weyland

Populism has traditionally been defined as a cumulative concept, characterized by the simultaneous presence of political, economic, social, and discursive attributes. Radial concepts of populism offer a looser way of spanning different domains. Criticism of modernization and dependency theory, which assumed tight connections between different domains, and the emergence of new types of personalistic leadership that lack some traditional attributes of populism have made cumulative and radial concepts of populism problematic. Populism can be reconceptualized as a classical concept located in a single domain, politics. Populism can be defined as a political strategy through which a personalistic leader seeks or exercises government power through direct, unmediated, uninstitutionalized support from large numbers of followers.

Rethinking Populism: Politics, Mediatisation and Political Style

Article

Jun 2013
POLIT STUD-LONDON

As a key feature of the contemporary political landscape, populism stands as one of the most contentious concepts in political science. This article presents a critique of dominant conceptions of populism – as ideology, logic, discourse and strategy/organisation – and introduces the category of ‘political style’ as a new compelling way of thinking about the phenomenon. We argue that this new category captures an important dimension of contemporary populism that is missed by rival approaches. In doing so, we put forward an inductive model of populism as a political style and contextualise it within the increasingly stylised and mediatised milieu of contemporary politics by focusing on its performative features. We conclude by considering how this concept allows us to understand how populism appears across the political spectrum, how it translates into the political mainstream and its implications for democratic politics.

Is Chávez Populist?

Article

Jun 2009
COMP POLIT STUD

Kirk A. Hawkins

This article pushes forward our understanding of populism by developing one of the more underappreciated definitions of populism, populism as discourse. It does so by creating a quantitative measure of populist discourse suitable for cross-country and historical analysis. The article starts by laying out the discursive definition of populism in the context of existing definitions. It then operationalizes this definition through a holistic grading of speeches by current chief executives and a few historical figures. The result is a data set of elite-level populist discourse in more than 40 current and past governments from a variety of countries across the world, with special focus on Latin America. This measurement has high reliability comparable to standard human-coded content analysis, compares well to common understandings of actual cases of populism, and is a reasonably efficient technique even in small samples.

Populism, Pluralism, and Liberal Democracy

Article

Jan 2010
J DEMOCR

Marc F. Plattner

In recent years, scholars have begun to focus on the sources of "authoritarian resilience." But democracy has also shown surprising resilience, in part because the disorders to which it is prone tend to counteract each other.

The Thin Ideology of Populism

Article

Feb 2008

Ben Stanley

The concept of populism has in recent years inspired much debate and much confusion. It has been described variously as a pathology, a style, a syndrome and a doctrine. Others have raised doubts as to whether the term has any analytical utility, concluding that it is simply too vague to tell us anything meaningful about politics. Drawing on recent developments in the theoretical literature, it is argued that populism should be regarded as a ‘thin’ ideology which, although of limited analytical use on its own terms, nevertheless conveys a distinct set of ideas about the political which interact with the established ideational traditions of full ideologies.

Measuring Populism: Comparing Two Methods of Content Analysis

Article

Nov 2011

The measurement of populism – particularly over time and space – has received only scarce attention. In this research note two different ways to measure populism are compared: a classical content analysis and a computer-based content analysis. An analysis of political parties in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Germany and Italy demonstrates that both methods can be used to measure populism across countries and over time. Recommendations are presented on how to combine these methods in future comparative research on populism.

Populist Mobilization: A New Theoretical Approach to Populism*

Article

Jun 2011
SOCIOL THEOR

Robert S. Jansen

Sociology has long shied away from the problem of populism. This may be due to suspicion about the concept or uncertainty about how to fit populist cases into broader comparative matrices. Such caution is warranted: the existing interdisciplinary literature has been plagued by conceptual confusion and disagreement. But given the recent resurgence of populist politics in Latin America and elsewhere, sociology can no longer afford to sidestep such analytical challenges. This article moves toward a political sociology of populism by identifying past theoretical deficiencies and proposing a new, practice-based approach that is not beholden to pejorative common sense understandings. This approach conceptualizes populism as a mode of political practice—as populist mobilization. Its utility is demonstrated through an application to mid-twentieth-century Latin American politics. The article concludes by sketching an agenda for future research on populist mobilization in Latin America and beyond.

Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe

Book

Aug 2007

Cas Mudde

As Europe enters a significant phase of re-integration of East and West, it faces an increasing problem with the rise of far-right political parties. Cas Mudde offers the first comprehensive and truly pan-European study of populist radical right parties in Europe. He focuses on the parties themselves, discussing them both as dependent and independent variables. Based upon a wealth of primary and secondary literature, this book offers critical and original insights into three major aspects of European populist radical right parties: concepts and classifications; themes and issues; and explanations for electoral failures and successes. It concludes with a discussion of the impact of radical right parties on European democracies, and vice versa, and offers suggestions for future research.

Trust the People! The Populism and the Two Faces of Democracy

Article

Feb 1999
POLIT STUD-LONDON

Margaret Canovan

Populism, understood as an appeal to ‘the people’ against both the established structure of power and the dominant ideas and values, should not be dismissed as a pathological form of politics of no interest to the political theorist, for its democratic pretensions raise important issues. Adapting Michael Oakeshott's distinction between ‘the politics of faith’ and ‘the politics of scepticism’, the paper offers an analysis of democracy in terms of two opposing faces, one ‘pragmatic’ and the other ‘redemptive’, and argues that it is the inescapable tension between them that makes populism a perennial possibility.

citation_title=The Role of Twitter in the 2016 US Election; citation_author=Galdieri

J Christopher
Jennifer C Tauna

The Populist Persuasion

Jan 1995

Michael Kazin

Kazin, Michael. 1995. The Populist Persuasion. New York: Basic Books.

Populism: Concepts in the Social Sciences

Paul A Taggart

Taggart, Paul A. 2000. Populism: Concepts in the Social Sciences. Philadelphia, PA: Open University Press.

Boiling Mad: Inside Tea Party America

Kate Zernike

Zernike, Kate. 2010. Boiling Mad: Inside Tea Party America. New York: Henry Holt and Company.

Populism and the 2016 American Election: Evidence from Official Press Releases and Twitter

Abstract

No full-text available

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