The rhetorical contestation of populism in four European parliaments (2010–2020)

Abstract

Studies of the discursive aspect of populism have tended to focus on the rhetorical manifestations of populist discourses, namely how populist politicians ‘talk politics’. However, scant attention has been devoted to how politicians rhetorically characterise the concept of populism itself. This article investigates a corpus (N = 4.835) of parliamentary debates in Germany, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom, to assess the different definitions of populism used by politicians and explain any variations found. Results show that the ways that politicians describe populism vary cross-nationally in terms of topics, adjectives and targets. A more positive attitude towards populism is likely for politicians who express anti-elitism and opposition to multiculturalism and corruption, regardless of the topic under discussion. Moreover, the effect of political ideology on politicians’ attitudes towards populism is more pronounced when economic topics are under discussion. Discussing these findings, this study offers interesting implications for the literature on populism, parliamentary affairs, party politics and text analysis.

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at: https://doi.org/10.1080/01402382.2021.2013655 .

Keywords:

• Parliamentary debates
• party politics
• populism
• rhetorical contestation
• text analysis

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Enrico Borghetto, Luigi Curini, Fred Paxton, Francesca Feo, Marco Giuliani, Rebecca Kittel, Guido Legnante, Luca Manucci, Giovanni Pagano, Francesco Piacentini and Valerio Vignoli for their support and their valuable comments and feedback on our manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 An additional ‘take-away’ of our dataset is the validation of using Google Translator for research (see Supplementary materials).

2 Anti-elite rhetoric and corruption can theoretically pose an issue of endogeneity: a party with a strong anti-elite stance is likely to be populist and may consequently frame populism more positively. However, there is still discussion in the literature about whether populist parties do consistently adopt a positive interpretation of populism (e.g. Casiraghi 2021; Elmgren 2018). Moreover, we statistically check for the potential endogenous effects of both anti-elite rhetoric and corruption and we do not find evidence of endogeneity (Online Appendix).

3 In Online Appendix, we provide various examples of coded paragraphs and a complete codebook.

4 Results remain robust when we employ the dependent variable with three categories.

5 For further details on possible alternative methodologies, see Online Appendix.

6 https://www.chesdata.eu/our-surveys

7 For further discussion see Online Appendix.

8 We selected the most mentioned topics considering all countries. Furthermore, for space reasons, we do not present models testing H1a for the topics, as results are unchanged with respect to the general model (Model 1).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Matteo C. M. Casiraghi

Matteo C. M. Casiraghi is a post-doctoral researcher in political science at University of Milan and Bocconi University. His research interests focus on international norms, parliamentary debates, rhetorical political analysis, visual politics and populism. He has published in British Journal of Politics and International Relations, Parliamentary Affairs and the Journal of Global Security Studies, amongst others. [[email protected]]

Margherita Bordignon

Margherita Bordignon is a doctoral candidate in political studies at University of Milan and University of Pavia. Her research interests include political communication, political elites, populism and social media analysis. [[email protected]]