Inviting the Populists to the Party: Populist Appeals in Presidential Primaries

• In Event: Populist Politics

Abstract

Both popular and academic discourse have noted the surge of populism in American politics. The empirical study of this phenomenon, however, has lagged behind the comparative literature (Hawkins & Littvay, 2019; Lee, 2019). This extends to studies assessing the use of populism as a political communication tactic (Jagers & Walgrave, 2007). While there has been a great deal of attention paid to the quantity and form of elite populist appeals elsewhere in the world (Armory & Armory, 2005; Decadri & Boussalis, 2020; Hawkins, 2009; Hawkins & Rovira Kaltwasser, 2017; Pauwels, 2011; Roodujin & Pauwels, 2011), equivalent studies of populist rhetoric by American politicians are rarer and typically limited to either presidential rhetoric (Bimes & Mulroy, 2004; Lamont, Park, & Ayala-Hurtado, 2017) or presidential general elections (Bonikowski & Gidron, 2016).

What these studies miss, however, is the role the American two-party system plays in structuring the use and substantive importance of populism as a political communication style. As Lee (2019) notes, populist presidential primary candidates have been common since the McGovern-Fraser reforms but the parties had – until Donald Trump – been largely successful in preventing them from conquering the party. By focusing on only party standard-bearers, either as presidents or presidential general election candidates, we are potentially missing the important ways populist primary candidates affect intraparty debates and alter the trajectory of party coalitions. While a few studies do analyze the populist rhetoric of recent primary candidates (Hawkins & Rovira Kaltwasser, 2018; Lacatus, 2019; Oliver & Rahn, 2016), these have been temporal snapshots of only the most prominent candidates. To truly examine how populist primary candidacies affect the party coalitions, we need theorizing and analysis that is broader in scope.

I argue that understanding the effect of populist rhetoric in American politics requires appreciating that the potential outcomes are not limited to electoral success and defeat. Major parties can assimilate the positions of populist candidates, a phenomenon that is historically common (Kazin, 1995). Given populism’s “thin-centered ideology” (Mudde, 2004), parties can choose to assimilate the ideological positions of populist candidacies with or without the populist means of presentation. I argue that while populism will be generally rare among the most prominent candidates in primaries, assimilation of populist positions will be quite common.

Using the Presidential Primary Communication Corpus (Scott, 2020) which contains more than 3300 speeches by more than 100 discrete campaigns by presidential primary candidates for both major party nominations from 2000-2020, I study the use of populist rhetoric in primaries. The empirical section proceeds in three parts. First, I resolve a source of conceptual controversy in the literature. Consensus on how to measure populist appeals has proven elusive. Some have tried to use automated dictionary methods to measure anti-elitism and/or pro-people messages (Gründl, 2020; Pauwels, 2011; Roodujin & Pauwels, 2011), attributes which are directly related to the conceptual definition of populism. Others have employed broader measurements, including negativity, emotionality, and blame language (Bucy et al., 2020); personalization (Mendoça & Duarte Caetano, 2021; Schneiker, 2020), and simplicity (Decadri & Boussalis, 2020). I measure all of these attributes of each speech plus the use of certain populist topics via a Structural Topic Model (Roberts et al., 2014). I then use an exploratory factor analysis to see if these different attributes are really tapping into a singular, populist dimension.

Having performed this exploratory factor analysis, I then provide some descriptive analysis designed to track the trajectory of populist political communication longitudinally – both within single election cycles and across elections – and to identify populist candidates. Having identified the populists, I move on to the third empirical section: using a combination of topic modeling and the Lexicoder topic dictionaries (Albugh, Sevenans & Soroka, 2013) to identify which issues and ideological position these candidates most prominently advocated. I then examine if the eventual nominees embraced these issues later in the primary and if candidates in subsequent races assimilated the prior populist causes.

This paper has significant implications for how we conceptualize the influence of populist candidates within two-party political systems, provides clarity on the best practices of measuring an important political communication concept, and is the most expansive look at populism in American intraparty contests to date.

Author

• Zachary Scott, Wake Forest University