Description
To better understand the ‘populist wave’ in contemporary European politics, this study empirically differentiates between ideational populism and strategic populism. Traditional research on political parties pays little attention to the strategic focus of populist communication. It usually concentrates on grained types of populisms analyses, dedicating much more attention to ideational varieties of populism over the years. This lack of scholarly attention is surprising, given that voters respond to populist rhetoric and may even adjust voting behaviour when policy is framed in populist terms. This article presents a novel dataset, which contains a new text-based measurement of populist rhetoric in 908 party manifestos across 24 European democracies from 2000 to 2021. These measurements, created through dictionaries and word embeddings, serve as country-specific information for a multilevel modelling analysis with European Values Study (EVS) surveys. Our results have important implications for our understanding of varieties of strategic populisms.
