The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.
ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Polit. Sci.
Sec. Peace and Democracy
Volume 6 - 2024 |
doi: 10.3389/fpos.2024.1435712
"It's not the what but (also) the how": characterizing left-wing populism in political texts
Provisionally accepted- 1 Faro, University for Development, Concepción, Chile
- 2 Faculty of Law, University of Chile, Santiago, Chile
- 3 Facultad de Gobierno, Facultad de Economía y Negocios, University for Development, Concepción, Chile
Despite all the elasticity and even ambiguity surrounding the concept of populism, the existing paradigms converge in the recognition of a populist rhetoric. By using Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools we propose a set of linguistic and discursive markers to identify populist markers in Presidential speeches. The performance of these markers is subsequently tested against the Global Populism Database (GPD). We set-up a multinomial regression model to study the predictive power of these markers on the GPD populist score, focusing on left-wing populist leaders in Spanish-speaking countries in Latin America. We are thus able to characterize (left-wing) populism as a style of communication, as well as to understand what is behind this rhetoric. Our results show that ingroup and emotional content are more present in populist speeches. We also find a positive relation between populism and the use future tense and conditional connectors, which suggest an intention to manipulate the audience. These results have implications both for the current understanding of (left-wing) populist rhetoric and for the conceptualization of populism itself.
Keywords: populism, Natural Language Processing, Linguistics, Speech analysis, Latin America
Received: 20 May 2024; Accepted: 22 Jul 2024.
Copyright: © 2024 Raveau, Fuentes-Bravo, Fernández, Couyoumdjian and Del Solar. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
María P. Raveau, Faro, University for Development, Concepción, Chile
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.