Due to the malleable nature of populism, it has proven notoriously difficult to measure the concept reliably and independently of an actors’ host ideology in text. Hitherto, there is hardly any comparative empirical evidence on the distribution of populism across time, countries, or parties in party systems. Empirical studies usually focus on one party or single party systems at one election, and studies are often biased towards the radical right. Drawing on a new typology, I measure each constituent component of populism individually in text. I create a dataset of 165,700 hand-coded single ‘sentences in context’ from party manifestos and parliamentary speeches at a high reliability without providing coders with any information on the political speaker to avoid bias. I measure populist and several anti-populist positions on a hitherto unprecedented scope for five European party systems, using 633 party manifestos from 1960-2021, as well as 3 million legislative speeches from 1990-2018. I iteratively create one extensive dictionary per concept, language, and country-context, to filter potential candidate sentences to be hand-coded. The findings demonstrate a high face and convergent validity across party systems and data sources. The findings show that that there is a populist-anti-populist divide across party systems, where populism is more prevalent in democratic radical left-wing, radical right-wing and regionalist parties. Long-established mainstream parties are anti-populist, while non-democratic parties demonstrate defected types of populism. The findings contribute to the measurement of political positions and concepts, and to the study of (anti-)populism and the supply side of party competition.