Populism in the Plenary - Populist Rhetoric and its Effects on Debates, Legislators and Voters

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: What makes political rhetoric populist? And, what are the effects of populist rhetoric on parliamentary debates, legislators and voters? I adopt a quantitative research approach in order to measure the presence of populist rhetoric in parliamentary debates of the European Parliament from 1999 to 2017, to investigate how populist rhetoric affects parliamentary debates as well as the behaviour of legislators, to assess the effects that populist rhetoric has on voters and how these effects can be changed. More precisely, I will measure populist rhetoric by the means of a supervised classifier which is trained through crowdsourcing, investigate the effects of populist rhetoric on elite behaviour by combining a bouquet of different tools of quantitative text analysis such as dictionaries and topic models, and assess its effects on voters in two survey experiments. Despite being a contribution on its own, developing a reliable measure for populist rhetoric in parliamentary debates is important because it is a prerequisite for systematically investigating how populist rhetoric affects parliamentary and democratic discourse as well as voters which in turn is vital for understanding how populism transforms European politics.