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Virtuous people and evil elites? The role of moralizing frames and normative distinctions in identifying populist discourse

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  • Hunger, Sophia

Abstract

Populism has been a much-studied concept in Social Science research. A great share of research on the concept has been dedicated to measuring the occurrence of populism in political text. In this article, I propose a novel measure of populism that considers established theoretical assumptions, i.e. presenting the people as morally superior and the elite as evil. This moral framing of the antagonistic groups is necessary to identify populist discourse while keeping it separate from empirically related concepts, e.g. radical right-wing ideology. The novel two-step dictionary detects morally-framed references to both groups. I apply this approach to a text corpus of all speeches given in the European Parliament from 1999 to 2014 and carry out extensive validity checks. Taking the moralizing notion of populism more seriously not only contributes to our theoretical understanding of populist discourse and its impact on the political sphere, but the new measure also improves previous approaches to measuring populism.

Suggested Citation

  • Hunger, Sophia, 2024. "Virtuous people and evil elites? The role of moralizing frames and normative distinctions in identifying populist discourse," EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, vol. 6(1), pages 1-26.
    • Handle: RePEc:zbw:espost:308502
    DOI: 10.1080/2474736X.2024.2370308
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    1. Johanna Kantola & Cherry Miller, 2021. "Party Politics and Radical Right Populism in the European Parliament: Analysing Political Groups as Democratic Actors," Journal of Common Market Studies, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 59(4), pages 782-801, July.
    2. Di Cocco, Jessica & Monechi, Bernardo, 2022. "How Populist are Parties? Measuring Degrees of Populism in Party Manifestos Using Supervised Machine Learning," Political Analysis, Cambridge University Press, vol. 30(3), pages 311-327, July.
    3. Grimmer, Justin & Stewart, Brandon M., 2013. "Text as Data: The Promise and Pitfalls of Automatic Content Analysis Methods for Political Texts," Political Analysis, Cambridge University Press, vol. 21(3), pages 267-297, July.
    4. Timothy J. Ryan, 2017. "No Compromise: Political Consequences of Moralized Attitudes," American Journal of Political Science, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 61(2), pages 409-423, April.
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    Cited by:

    1. Larissa Böckmann & Sarah L. de Lange & Nathalie Brack & Matthijs Rooduijn, 2025. "Far‐Right Illiberalism in the European Parliament," Politics and Governance, Cogitatio Press, vol. 13.

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