17:45 - 20:00
Thursday-Panel
Chair/s:
Markus Kollberg
Discussant/s:
Denise Traber
Meeting Room L

Roman Hlatky
EU Influence, Identity Politics, and Ceiling Effects in Nationalist Voting: Evidence from Slovakia
Nationalist Voting: Evidence from Slovakia

Markus Kollberg
Being populist when you need it? On the strategic usage of populist rhetoric in parliamentary debates

Thomas Meyer, Katjana Gattermann
A truly European contest? Transnational media reporting on political parties’ electoral performances across EU member states

Jonathan Slapin, Michele Fenzl, R. Daniel Kelemen, Pit Rieger
Attitudes Regarding Cooperation with Extremist, Anti-democratic Parties in National and European Politics

Ronja Sczepanski
What is the fuss all about? Testing the impact of high-information environments on people's knowledge about the EU
Being populist when you need it? On the strategic usage of populist rhetoric in parliamentary debates
Markus Kollberg
University College London, Department of Political Science

Today, hardly any political debates occur without accusations of someone making a populist argument. However, it is not yet clear whether populist rhetoric is empirically really as common as one might think and, if so, what its effects are on parliamentary debates and legislative behaviour. To answer these questions, I quantitatively analyse more than 300,000 speeches given in the European Parliament between 1999 and 2017 by combining a novel supervised machine-learning approach based on a crowdsourced sample of speeches with word embeddings, dictionaries and unsupervised topic models. In addition, I incorporate longitudinal public opinion data from 28 European countries to show that elites use populist rhetoric strategically and that the presence of populist rhetoric in parliament depends on factors such as issue salience, polarisation and party positions. The contribution of this paper is twofold: Methodologically, it develops a novel, quantitative measure for populist rhetoric in parliamentary debates. Substantially, it thoroughly investigates the effects of populist rhetoric on parliamentary debates as well as voters and thus how populism transforms European Politics.