Populism in Europe 1970-2015: A Comparative Analysis

This paper aims at establishing whether or not populism became a mainstream political ideology and strategy in the discourse of European politicians and journalists. Moreover, I try to establish whether populism shows a peculiar communicative style. I analyse the evolution of populism in a comparative-longitudinal way, on the basis of a semi-automated content analysis of newspaper articles and party manifestos in eight European countries (Austria, France, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, and UK) from 1970 to 2015. The hypotheses which will be tested concern the role of politicians and media actors in exploiting populist communicative strategies, and the issues to which populism has been linked over time and across countries. The analysis is held in three steps: first, I evaluate the impact of three variables on the quantitative levels of populism (actor-level, medium-level, and country-level); second, I verify the qualitative evolution of populism over time (issues); third, I control whether it is possible to claim that populism shows a peculiar stylistic hallmark when compared with non-populist statements. The first results show that the levels of populism did not increase over time, and that party manifestos contain more populism than newspapers.