“The New Populism”: Results and Lessons from a Collaboration with The Guardian

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Session Description

With the rise of populist forces across the globe, scholarship on populism has grown tremendously, with increasing conceptual precision, new techniques of measurement, and improved theorizing and causal analysis. However, much of this research has not reached the public or even policymakers and commentators. In the media, the term “populism” is little more than a pejorative or a synonym for demagoguery; strong claims are often made about how populist certain politicians and leaders are, with little or no data to back these claims; and policymakers and commentators continue to repeat arguments about populism’s causes and consequences that have been refuted by social scientists.

From August 2018 to February 2019, members of Team Populism collaborated with the international news organization The Guardian to produce a series of long-form, digital articles designed to bring populism research to The Guardian’s readers. The project, titled “The New Populism,” had the threefold goal of educating readers on scholarly definitions of populism and the relationship of populism to traditional ideologies; depicting global and European trends in the electoral spread of populism; and sharing the results of research on populism’s causes and its consequences for liberal democracy.

The project was an ideal collaboration. The Guardian’s online global audience (150 million monthly readers), its marketing apparatus, and its skills at data visualization and writing made it possible for a quantity of scholarly research to reach much larger audiences than even the most highly trafficked political science blogs. In recent years The Guardian has worked to provide its readers with more sophisticated analyses of local and global trends (such as populism), but its journalists lack the time and training to produce the original data and analytical tools that this requires. Team Populism is a cross-regional network of over 100 social scientists dedicated to studying populism’s causes and consequences. Formed in 2014, the network has already sponsored publications promoting a theoretical framework and new methodological tools and datasets, but it had not achieved its goals of disseminating this work to a non-academic audience.

As part of this collaboration, The Guardian worked with Team Populism to summarize key ideas from the literature, but also to produce new datasets and conduct interactive research with readers of The Guardian, much of it suitable for subsequent scholarly analysis and publication. This included updating Team Populism’s Populist Discourse Dataset for political chief executives, to where it now covers 250 leaders in over 40 countries from 2000 to the present; performing a new expert survey measuring populism among party leader across Europe; conducting an online experiment with almost 30,000 readers of The Guardian; and engaging more than a half-million people in an online survey of populist attitudes.

In this roundtable we showcase the results of this research and discuss lessons for future collaboration between global online media and political scientists. Scholars will be interested in the combined results of the research, some of which have not been presented in The Guardian; these include the trajectory of populism across much of the globe, results of the online survey and online experiment, and tests of populism’s causes and consequences. We also describe the availability of these datasets for other scholars. Finally, we discuss the advantages and challenges of collaborating with traditional global media outlets, including concerns about scholarly integrity and data transparency.

Sub Unit

• Theme Panel

Chair

• Jennifer McCoy Georgia State University

Presenters

• Kirk A. Hawkins Brigham Young University

• Bruno de Paula Castanho Silva University of Cologne

• David Doyle University of Oxford

• Nina Wiesehomeier FUNDACIÓN IE G81711459

• Ryan Carlin Georgia State University