17:45 - 20:00
Friday-Panel
Chair/s:
Janina Beiser-McGrath
Discussant/s:
Torun Dewan
Meeting Room F

Christine Sylvester, Julia Maynard
The Spurious Relationship between Party Leader Resignations and their Votes

Janina Beiser-McGrath, Anja Osei
Can I stay or must I go? Cabinet replacement in Africa

Despina Alexiadou
Cabinet reshuffles: how bad are they for expertise and policy?

Ebru Ece Özbey
Populist Contagion in the House of Commons: A Comparative Study of PMQs from Blair to May

Maria Thürk, Heike Klüver
The electoral implications of minority cabinets
Populist Contagion in the House of Commons: A Comparative Study of PMQs from Blair to May
Ebru Ece Özbey
University of Cologne, Cologne; Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, Cologne

Several studies to date have argued that politics in Western democracies have become gradually populist since the early 1990s, not only due to the increasing number of populist political actors but also to their mainstream competitors, who have followed suit. The empirical evidence concerning the populist contagion has remained inconclusive, however, and the burgeoning literature has so far focused predominantly on electoral performance as the focus of inquiry, political parties as the unit of analysis, election manifestos as the data source, and a priori identification of cases.This study sets out to revisit the theoretical arguments on populist contagion beyond the party-political sphere while questioning the alleged linear (continuously growing) and one-directional (from populist towards non-populist) pattern of contagion. Instead of portraying the alleged populists as the doer and the non-populists as the done-to and postulating a linear increase of populism, it asserts that the complex processes, which eventually lead to more populism in the parliament, might be reciprocal or even symbiotic.The study takes on the ideational conceptual approach and depicts populism as a thin-centered ideology with two fundamental constitutive components: people-centrism and anti-elitism. Following a case study design and using the textual data from the Prime Minister’s Questions sessions, it measures the level of populist discourse at individual and aggregate levels. Doing so, the study generates a novel data-set that provides insights into the establishment or consolidation of populist sentiments among the members of parliament and reveals the temporal trends in the House of Commons for over a twenty-year period.