Sinn Féin: Populists in Sheep's Clothing?

In the 45 years since enacting the Armalite and Ballot Box strategy, Sinn Féin have gone from an abstentionist outsider party to the largest party in Northern Ireland and the most popular party in the Republic. Yet they have been decried as populist by academics (Mudde 2007; Rooduijn et al 2019), journalists (De Bréadún 2015; Maillot 2022; Ross 2022) politicians (Varadkar 2020), and even themselves (Ó Broin 2020). This paper investigates the degree of populism present within Sinn Féin. Using a dictionary-based computerized content analysis, this paper analyses manifestos, speeches, and select publications of An Phoblacht from 2007-2021 to measure the degree of populist rhetoric present within Sinn Féin texts, how this has changed over time, and the extent to which radical left and nationalism are Sinn Féin’s host ideologies. Then, a qualitative analysis of select texts is conducted to examine how populism manifests in Sinn Féin. This is compared with interviews with information gathered from elite interviews. By measuring texts following the Financial Crash, this research contributes to Kriesi and Pappas’ (2015) study of populism in the age of the Great Recession in Europe. Moreover, despite the label populist being applied to Sinn Féin by all manner of actors, there has not yet been a time-series analysis of Sinn Féin texts to determine the degree of populism present. This research plugs that hole, and provides insight to how populism manifests itself in Ireland. What’s more, this research also contributes to our understanding of Sinn Féin ideology, namely, the age-old question of when push comes to shove, what gets discarded first: their nationalist policies, or their leftist ones? Finally, this research contributes towards the growing field of computerised content analysis, and how this exciting field of research can contribute towards our analysis of populism and political science.