Establishment Responses to Populist Challenges: Evidence from Legislative Speech

• In Event: Measuring Populism and Its Impacts

Abstract

In recent years, many political systems have witnessed the rise of right-wing populist parties, sometimes challenging foundational norms of the established political system. In the face of such challenges, establishment actors face the important choice of how to respond to the challenger party. A rich literature in comparative party politics examines this question. Though typologies abound, the literature broadly speaking identifies two types of response: either engaging with the challenger on par with other parties, or employ a strategy of disparagement, i.e. seeking to portray the challenger as democratically illegitimate. However, the existing literature conceptualizes this response solely as a party system- or party-level phenomenon.

This paper argues that legislative speech, previously unexamined in the literature, offers a window into individual-level variation in establishment responses to right-wing populist challenges. I revisit an oft-studied case in the literature, responses in the Danish party system to the entry of the right-wing populist Danish People's Party in the mid-1990's. I take a text as data approach, applying machine learning methods to a total of around 130,000 paragraphs of legislative speech in order to characterize responses at the level of individual speeches. I link these speech-level estimates to an original data set on political and demographic characteristics of individual legislators.

Using this novel approach, which allows for a uniquely granular characterization of responses to right-wing populist parties, I uncover systematic individual-level, within-party variation in legislators' choice of an engagement or a disparagement response to the entry of the Danish People's Party. The results suggest that political and demographic characteristics of individual legislators, unexamined in the existing literature, play an important role in explaining establishment responses to populist challenges.

Author

• Frederik Hjorth, University of Copenhagen