Populism, Blame Shifting and the Crisis: Discourse Strategies in Portuguese Political Parties

ABSTRACT

Populist parties have been gaining ground in European political systems. Against this backcloth, Portugal stands out as the only Southern European country in which traditional mainstream parties have not faced a sharp rise in populist challengers. This article relies on content analysis of election manifestos to examine the use of populist claims by the main Portuguese parties before and after the crisis (1995–2015). Our findings reveal that populist rhetoric has been used mainly by left-wing radical parties as a wedge to disrupt a decade-old status quo. Moreover, we did not find a significant increase in the frequency of populist rhetorical elements after the crisis, either in mainstream or challenger parties. Overall, in the Portuguese case, ideology is the most important factor that explains the adoption of a populist discourse.

KEYWORDS:

• Populism
• political parties
• radical left
• economic crisis
• Portugal
• content analysis

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and the Editors of South European Society and Politics for their valuable comments and Vera Ramalhete for her research assistance. This study was supported by the Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT), by a grant within the framework of the project ‘Crisis, Political Representation and Democratic Renewal: The Portuguese case in the Southern European context’ (PTDC/IVC-CPO/3098/2014), and by the Research Grant SFRH/BPD/89968/2012 and FCT Investigator Contract IF/00382/2014.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary material

The supplementary material for this paper is available online at https://doi.org/10.1080/13608746.2018.1558606.

Notes

1. There are still few works on this topic, but see Carreira Da Silva and Salgado (2018) and Jalali (2018).

2. The MPT (Partido da Terra, Earth Party) – a new ‘protest party’ that emerged in the 2014 European elections (Morlino & Raniolo 2017, pp. 56–71) – shows the highest anti-elitist salience (8.0).

3. The revolution of 1974 overthrew the dictatorship which had ruled Portugal since 1926.

4. In particular, the emergence of new left-wing parties such as SYRIZA in Greece (Stavrakakis & Katsambekis 2014) or Podemos in Spain (Kioupkiolis 2016) is an example of the rise of a new type of populism in Europe, which contrasts with that of so-called ‘exclusionary’ populist parties, based on nationalist, xenophobic or reactionary values (Mudde & Rovira Kaltwasser 2013).

5. 2013 was also marked by a corruption case centred on the former PS prime-minister José Sócrates, which had tremendous repercussions in the media.

6. The overall trajectory is very similar to that experienced by other Southern European countries (Greece, Italy and Spain) over the last decade (Muro & Vidal 2017).

7. A study comparing different methodological strategies of content analysis found that the qualitative method generally provides better results than the automated textual analysis (Rooduijn & Pauwels 2011).

8. Extra-parliamentary parties have not been coded for the pre-crisis period because either they were old parties (originating from the democratic transition), or they did not innovate in terms of party competition or communication strategies.

9. To make the coding more reliable, two different coders were asked to analyse the same election manifesto. To test for internal validity, we compared our results to the results obtained by other approaches, namely the holistic approach (Hawkins & Silva 2015) and the Chapel Hill data. Overall, there are no significant discrepancies. We thank Ana Cameira, Soraia André and Tânia Pereira for the coding of election manifestos.

10. As a second step, we applied also the codification of populism suggested by Rooduijn & Pauwels, which is based on the identification of words or sets of words associated to the ‘people’ or to ‘anti-elitism’ (see the original codebook in Rooduijn & Pauwels 2011) in a manifesto paragraph. This alternative codification permits comparison of Portuguese manifestos with manifestos from five other European countries coded by Rooduijn, de Lange and van der Brug (2014). Differently from Manucci and Weber’s operationalisation, to be coded as populist, a paragraph should include references to both people and anti-elitism. The results are presented and discussed in Appendix C in the online appendix. We also applied the same weighting procedure suggested by Rooduijn, de Lange and van der Brug (2014, p. 567) so as to make our data sets comparable with theirs. All datasets are available upon request.

11. We also coded paragraphs containing attacks against ‘national institutions’ (e.g. Constitutional Court, national parliament and government, parliamentary committees etc.) but since the share of such paragraphs is never higher than one per cent we decided to drop it from the analysis. Another important caveat to be made is that the coding of populist anti-elitism and blame-shifting are not equivalent. As emphasised by Manucci and Weber (2017, p. 320), the target of populist critique is an elite in general (the ‘banks’ and not ‘the monetary policy of the European Central Bank’) and it always comes with a more or less explicit opposition to the people.

12. The PNR was founded in 2000 through a convergence of nationalist, conservative and extreme-right forces, and has contested parliamentary elections since 2002. It defends religious values and the fight against immigration and is against the process of European integration. Even though PNR was, on occasion, able to attract considerable visibility in the mass media, it has remained a marginal actor in the party system, never achieving more than 0.5 per cent of the vote in legislative elections (corresponding to 28,000 votes). Another case of a new actor that sought to use a populist rhetoric – associated to a political entrepreneur, António Marinho e Pinto – is the PDR, a new protest party founded in 2014 (see Morlino & Raniolo 2017, pp. 70-71).

13. Fractional logit models are recommended when the dependent variable is a proportion (Papke & Wooldridge 1996).

14. For example, the slogan adopted by BE in the 2009 elections was ‘Those who got us into this crisis must get us out of it’ with an image of Durão Barroso (President of the European Commission and ex-PSD president) and socialist Prime Minister José Sócrates embracing each other.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Marco Lisi

Marco Lisi is an assistant professor at Nova University of Lisbon and a researcher at IPRI-Nova. His research interests focus on political parties, electoral behaviour, democratic theory and political representation. He recently edited Party System Change, the European Crisis and the State of Democracy (Routledge, 2019).

Enrico Borghetto

Enrico Borghetto is FCT researcher (Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia IF/00382/2014) at the Interdisciplinary Centre of Social Science of the FCSH/Nova University of Lisbon. His research has focused on compliance with EU policies, the Europeanisation of national legislation, legislative studies and European decision-making. His work has appeared in various academic journals including Party Politics, European Union Politics and the Journal of European Public Policy.