“The Oktoberfest is populist”: The rhetorical weaponization of populism in four European parliaments (2010-2020)

Political Science literature has largely discussed the nature of populism and has often analysed the rhetorical manifestations of populist discourses, namely how supposedly populist politicians “speak politics”. However, scant attention has been devoted to how populist and non-populist politicians characterize populism. In this article, we investigate a large corpus (N = 4.835) of parliamentary debates in Germany, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom, employing both qualitative and quantitative text-analysis techniques, to assess why politicians define populism in different ways and under what conditions they rhetorically weaponize the term to attack their colleagues. Our results show that politicians describe populism in comparable terms, though important differences at the national level influence the topics they discuss, the adjectives they associate with the term, and the targets of their speeches and rhetorical criticisms. In addition, divergences among political parties’ positions on crucial issues, such as left-right ideologies, multiculturalism, neoliberalism, and corruption, also shape the way in which politicians rhetorically describe and employ populism in the parliamentary arena. Discussing these findings, our study offers engaging implications for the literature on populism, parliamentary affairs, party politics, and text-analysis.