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ABSTRACT
In recent years, interest has grown in using election manifestos to measure populism. This, however, is not without its controversies, with critics arguing that party manifestos is an unlikely case for observing populist language. This paper discusses conceptual challenges associated with measuring populism in text-based data, specifically manifestos. Based on previous research, I argue that not all parts of manifestos are equally likely to contain populist language and that variation might be based on the issue being discussed. To test this point, I present a novel dataset containing 32 hand-coded election manifestos of German populist parties AfD and Die Linke. By utilising this data, I analyse the variation in populist sentiment within these manifestos and demonstrate that issues vary in their degree of populism employed and that this is partially related to what issues are salient to populist parties.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Supplemental Data
Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/09644008.2024.2355211.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Leon Siefken
Leon Siefken is a scholar pursuing his Master’s in Political Science at the University of Mannheim, having earned a Bachelor of Social Science in 2022. His research interests lie in the areas of supply-side populism, party politics, and comparative government.