Correlates of populist outbursts in plenary speeches

The polarization of the political discourse and the rise of populist parties and movements are two sides of the same coin. ButHowever, populist rhetoric need not be limited to populist actors, but might be found among politicians and parties of the complete political spectrum. While common measures of populism are based on the categorization categorizing of parties from their manifestos, we apply a new and in this regard agnostic measure of (ideationally defined) populism. Building on a large corpus of human -coded documents, we use supervised machine learning to capture the prevalence of populism in plenary speeches of the German Bundestag on the level of politicians and parties in fine- grained temporal resolution. With this measure at hand, we are able to explore some correlates of populist rhetoric within the parliamentary discourse. First, we ask whether electoral pressure and pressure from public opinion increase the likelihood of populist rhetoric in plenary speeches.? In a second step, we examine, whether populist outbursts have a contagious effect on political adversaries or whether adversaries refrain to adopt from adoptinga populist rhetoric and ratherinstead contrast the shrill tone with a reasoned tone? The analysis contributes to the debate on party competition and democratic backsliding in times of polarization and populist challenges.