https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6686-5969
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ABSTRACT
Scholars argued that anti-establishment parties use a populist rhetoric that appeals to the worst instincts of people. Indeed, populist politicians are often viewed as charismatic leaders that have fire in their belly. While in the past these parties heavily relied on anti-establishment platforms and communication rhetoric, their increasing electoral success along with the growing duties linked with government membership transform them into more established parties, rather than pure outsiders, and cast doubts on the feasibility of keeping a populist rhetoric. This paper compares right-wing and non-right-wing populism, investigating whether populist leaders change their rhetorical strategy once in office, decreasing the level of negativity and adopting a more forward-looking and inclusive style of communication, with a stronger focus on fulfilling the policy proposal made during the electoral campaign rather than blaming political rivals. For this purpose, we collected a new corpus of political speeches extracted from video messages posted on Facebook by four anti-establishment party leaders in three countries (Austria, Italy and Spain), from 2016 to 2018, i.e., immediately before and immediately after their access to power. Overall, 30 h of recorded audio from 215 videos (amounting to around 140 million visualizations) have been analyzed using topic models and well-established semantic psycholinguistic dictionaries. The results highlight slight changes in the rhetoric of populist leaders once in power, mostly for non-right-wing populists, as their language becomes less negative, less assertive and more focused on government duties.
Acknowledgements
The authors wish to thank the anonymous reviewers, the editors as well as the discussant and the participants at the conference ‘Social Movements and Parties in a Fractured MediaLandscape’, Florence, 1-2 July 2019.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Timbro Authoritarian Populism Index, https://populismindex.com/ (last accessed 21st June 2019).
6 See the well-known Manifesto Project dataset: https://manifesto-project.wzb.eu/
8 There are few missing cases concerning some variables when the LIWC software did not detect any word belonging to the categories included in the numerator or denominator of our index. Additionally, the category Personal is not available in the Spanish LIWC dictionary.
9 This option was suggested by the Hausman test (except when analyzing Personal and Social). Using fixed effects (Table A13, Online Appendix) or a fractional logit does not alter our findings. The results hold even when including basic control variables, such as the type of video (interview on news media, advertisement, institutional speech or propaganda speech) or the intensity of the speech (rate of words). The findings are substantively similar to a simple mean comparison t-test.
10 The full models are reported in the Online Appendix (Table A12, A14 and A15).
11 While it is not possible to evaluate language complexity using standard measures based on the length of the sentences (since any punctuation is lost with the audio transcription), we rely on the rate of complex words composed of more than six letters under the idea that the length of the words reflects their complexity.
15 https://www.euronews.com/2019/09/04/podemos-insist-on-formal-coalition-as-price-for-saving-sanchez
16 Strache became leader of the FPö in 2005, after a party split promoted by Jörg Haider, whose new party replaced the FPö as junior partner of the ruling coalition.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Andrea Ceron
Andrea Ceron is Associate Professor in Political Sciences at the University of Milan. His research focuses on party politics and social media analysis [email: [email protected]].
Alessandro Gandini
Alessandro Gandini is Assistant Professor in Sociology of Communication at the University of Milan. His research focuses on digital media and digital methods [email: [email protected]].
Patrizio Lodetti
Patrizio Lodetti is Post-doc Researcher at the University of Milan [email: [email protected]].
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