Mapping Populist and Nationalist Rhetoric Across Thirty-Six Democracies

• In Event: Populism and Nationalism in Comparative Perspective

Abstract

What happens when state executives use populist rhetoric in their public addresses, framing political issues as a Manichean struggle between the “pure people” and “evil elites”? Does it matter if they also use nationalist rhetoric--framing political issues as atavistic “us-versus-them” struggles between ethnic groups? Following contemporary trends in the literature, we argue that populism and nationalism are most profitably studied as discursive frames, and that these frames do significant ideational work when employed in state leaders’ public addresses. Our starting assumption is that political leaders use these frames both separately and together to reinscribe the shape of the sovereign community to gain popular support for major policy change. We hypothesize that such framing has predictable policy impacts, including a generalized shift toward more protectionist trade policies, immigration restrictions and minority rights reduction (nationalism), and the concentration of political power through clientelism, restrictions of media freedom, and reductions in judicial independence (populism).

This paper distills a preliminary analysis of an original dataset of holistically coded speeches of government leaders across a selection of North American and European countries, from 2000 to present. To gather these data, we trained 66 country experts to code public speeches of chief executives across governments in thirty-six North American and European countries using Hawkins’ (2009) method of holistic grading. After summarizing the data, we conduct a series of tests of hypothesized policy effects of populist and nationalist discourse drawing on expectations from the literature. These data will offer insights into the governmental utility of these discursive devices--used together and separately.

Authors

• Erin K. Jenne, Central European University

• Kirk A. Hawkins, Brigham Young University

• Bruno de Paula Castanho Silva, University of Cologne