11:20 - 13:00
P2
Room: South Room 225
Panel Session 2
Lisa Zehnter - There’s no such thing as one people Systematizing group-references in populist political communication
Lanabi la Lova - How Russia Sets Its News Agenda at Home
Julia Leschke - Populist and anti-populist positions in parties. Measuring populism in multi-lingual parliamentary speeches and manifestos.
Bruno Castanho Silva - Populists and the Spread of Covid-19 Conspiracies on Facebook in Seven European Countries
Florian Schaffner - A Machine Learning Approach to Analyze Populist and Governmental Rhetoric during the Coronavirus Pandemic
There’s no such thing as one people Systematizing group-references in populist political communication
P2-01
Presented by: Lisa Zehnter
Lisa Zehnter
Berlin Social Science Center (WZB)
While reference to the people is an important and necessary characteristic of populist political communication, all parties in representative democracies use group-references in their political communication. However, the identity of the populist ingroup remains ambiguous, theoretically only defined by its unity, which is the precondition for the formulation of a common will (volonté general), and by its opposition to other groups, namely elites and, in the case of right-wing populism, “dangerous others”. But which group-references are used by different political actors when talking about the people? Research on the empirical characteristics of the populist ingroup beyond homogeneity and demarcation is scarce. I argue that references to the people (and its antagonists) is context-dependent, differing across party status and ideology, country and time, and that there is no single identity of the ingroup, but rather that the people have many faces. To identify and systematize the identity of the in- and outgroup(s) of populist political communication, this study makes use of a novel method, extending dictionary analysis with word embeddings. These specialized group dictionaries are applied to a corpus of election manifestos, press releases and tweets from political parties in Austria, Germany and Switzerland to study long- as well as short-term trends.