How Populist Parties Talk About Deliberation in Europe

Populist parties place the people at the center of polity and politics. Such parties refer to direct democracy as a suitable avenue to involvement people in the decision-making process but much less is known about their approaches towards deliberation. This paper seeks to address this gap in the literature and examines in detail how populist parties talk about deliberation in their election manifestos. It has two goals: to identify what type of deliberation populist parties tend to support and to analyze whether their support for deliberation is generic or policy specific. The rhetoric about deliberation will be compared between populist and non-populist political parties. Our qualitative content analysis draws on the election manifestos used by the political parties in 25 European democracies in the national elections between 2004 and 2022.