Populist Claims-Making in The Fifth European Parliament, 1999-2004

• In Event: 568 - Section on Political Sociology Paper Session. The Politics of Representation

Abstract

This paper examines populist claims-making in legislative discourse. We define populism as a rhetorical strategy that juxtaposes the virtuous populace with a corrupt elite and views the former as the sole legitimate source of political power. Political scientists, who have long been engaged in populism research, tend to treat populism as a stable ideological attribute of political parties. In contrast, we posit that populism should be conceptualized as an attribute of political claims, so that actors can vary in the degree to which they rely on populist language. This makes it possible to empirically track the type and prevalence of populism over time and across parties and countries. We apply this perspective to the Fifth Session of the European Parliament (1999-2004). Using dictionary-based computational text analysis methods, we classify 35,029 speeches delivered by 713 Members of European Parliament (MEPs). Contrary to much Europeanist scholarship on populism, we find that populist rhetoric is not limited to the radical right, but is prevalent among ideologically extreme parties on both sides of the political spectrum. Populism also appears to fluctuate over time, increasing most markedly among right-wing parties after the terror attacks of 9/11. Individual-level attributes of MEPs are also predictive of the use of populism, with higher levels found among male and newly elected MEPs. In contrast, we do not find support for a geographical center-periphery cleavage in populist politics, though tentative evidence points to greater reliance on populism among MEPs from rich countries.

Authors

• Bart Bonikowski, Harvard University

• Noam Gidron, Harvard University