Being populist when you need it? On the strategic usage of populist rhetoric in parliamentary debates

Populist parties are increasingly successful in Europe. Despite promoting very different policies and having fundamentally different ideological positions, populist actors share a very distinct form of rhetoric. This rhetorical dimension of populist success has long been overlooked by political scientists even though it matters for democratic deliberation and public discourse – especially, in parliament. Moreover, it might also be important for explaining recent electoral successes of populist parties. To understand under what conditions populist rhetoric gets employed and by whom, I analyse the presence of populist rhetoric in elite discourse through a quantitative analysis of debates in the European Parliament. I combine a supervised classification approach based on a crowdsourced sample of speeches with word embeddings to build a novel measure of populist rhetoric. I argue that legislator- and audience-level characteristics explain legislators' use of populist rhetoric and that parliamentarians engage in populist rhetoric strategically when they want to address an audience that they believe is receptive of populist arguments. The contribution of this paper is twofold: Methodologically, it develops a novel, quantitative measure for populist rhetoric in parliamentary debates. Substantially, it thoroughly investigates the presence of populist rhetoric in parliamentary debates. Taken together, this paper provides relevant substantive and empirical evidence on elites' communication strategies when they engage in populist rhetoric.