Populism in Manifestos. Rhetorical and Ideological Populism in Germany, Austria and Switzerland between 1980 and 2021

In 2017 the AfD entered the national parliament in Germany and thereby ended the exceptional status of Germany as a country without a successful right-wing populist party. In neighboring countries Austria and Switzerland, the FPÖ and SVP have been represented in parliament for decades and have even been part of the government. This paper compares the development of populism in manifestos from these three countries in a time span from the early 1980s to the early 2020s. The leading question is how populism occurs with respect to both ideology and language, and how populist right-wing parties influence other parties. Populism is not only seen as a “thin-centered ideology” (Mudde 2004), characterized by people-centrism and anti-elitism (and anti-pluralism, if it has a right-wing orientation), but is also expected to be expressed in a certain political communication style or moral discourse (Jagers & Walgrave 2007). This paper follows a twofold methodological approach: first the ideological positions parties take in their manifestos are measured by categories of the MARPOR coding scheme, which capture anti-elitism and anti-pluralism. Second, to study the language of the manifestos, a dictionary has been created that contains specific populist terms. This thesis shows that references to the people do not appear in election manifestos as often as expected. Moreover, not all challenger parties are more populist than mainstream parties, their level of populism depends on their left- or right-wing orientation. Finally, the results are in line with findings of previous studies, namely that it is mainly the center-right mainstream parties that react to successful right-wing populist parties by becoming more anti-pluralist, whereas anti-elitism is not affected considerably. This paper takes a first step toward bridging the gap between two of the most influential theoretical approaches to populism by combining them and applying a twofold methodological approach to capture populism in a more encompassing way.