Abstracts Political Science

Populism in parties, politicians, and parliamentary speeches

by Julia Leschke

Although research on populism is burgeoning across social science disciplines, there is still a lack of cross-national, cross-sectional and longitudinal data on political elites’ adoption of populism. Throughout the last decade, scholars have increasingly attempted to measure the phenomenon of populism in political texts using a variety of qualitative and quantitative methods. Yet, as populism is a malleable and complex concept, it has hitherto proven immensely challenging to measure it reliably, validly, and independently of other ideological traits in text. This dissertation seeks to understand and empirically clarify the concept structure and measurement of populism. In measuring populism comparatively, it also tries to answer how and why political actors adopt populist positions. The dissertation contributes by developing and empirically testing a novel typology which conceptualises populism as a multidimensional concept opposing the types of elitism and pluralism. It argues and empirically demonstrates that populism can be validly measured if its constitutive components are measured independently in text and joined into a global populism measure using non-compensatory aggregation. The dissertation conceptually challenges existing populism-centric approaches as it suggests understanding populism as a political position on a scale between populism and anti-populism. This (anti-) populism scale is empirically tested using quantitative text analysis and large-scale hand-coding by trained native speakers. The (anti-) populism scale allows to scale actors’ specific positions based on manifestos as well as parliamentary speeches and proves to be of high content and convergent validity when compared to expert data. The dissertation measures and analyses populism in the party systems of the United Kingdom, Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Austria. It creates a unique cross-national, longitudinal and cross-party dataset of more than 165,000 hand-coded sentences from a census sample of 632 party manifestos from 1960 to 2022, and more than 23 million statements from plenary speeches from each national parliament from 1990 to 2018. Testing the most prominent assumptions about populism, the dissertation shows that populist positions are both a stable feature as well as a tactical tool for parties. By helping to explain political actors’ adoption of populist and anti-populist positions across settings and party systems, the dissertation contributes to the fields of political behaviour, comparative politics and political communication, while the novel typology, its measurement in text and the findings on concept structure contribute to the fields of measurement and text analysis.