A New Type of Populist Nationalism: Measuring Turkish Imperial-Populist Nationalism Via Mixed-Methods of Text Analysis (2014-2017)

This article provides a new conceptual framework of non-European imperial populist nationalism, which shows different characteristics than its European counterparts, and applies it to the case of Turkey. By differentiating the characteristics of populism and nationalism at domestic and international political level, the glorious imperial past rhetoric is identified as the primary factor that distinguishes the populist nationalist regimes of China, Russia, and Turkey from its European counterparts. Although both types of populism are born as a reaction to the elite/establishment, the European populist nationalism embraces anti-global attitudes and questions the European Union integration in international politics. However, the non-European imperial ones emerge as a reaction against the internalization of Western values and criticize the Western economic and political domination at the international level. The nationalist component of the European populist nationalism raises the issue of immigration and race in domestic politics and shows Eurosceptic attitudes at international level, whereas the non-European imperial discourse concentrates on developing a new type of nationalism, i.e., people’s nationalism by aggrandizing the glorious imperial past. Based on this framework, I analyze the Turkish populist nationalism via mixed-methods text analysis of 295 presidential speeches delivered during the period 2014-2017. The results reveal that President Erdoğan not only engages in an imperial-populist nationalist discourse but also proposes a new type of nationalism with an eclectic nature. Besides developing a conceptual map for examining different types of populist nationalisms at the theoretical level, this article disentangles the components of imperial populist nationalism at the case-specific level.