Populism’s Added Value: Comparing Foreign Policy Votes and Speeches in Czech and Slovak Parliaments

The relationship between foreign policy and populism has attracted growing scholarly attention over the past decade. However, the ideational approach to populism - conceptualizing it as a thin ideology attached to a thicker ideological foundation - has been criticized for its limited ability to explain the added value of populism in foreign affairs. Critics argue that this framework oversimplifies populism’s distinctiveness, failing to account for its heterogeneity and the regional differences and complexities that shape populist behavior. This paper empirically tests these critiques by examining (1) whether populist and non-populist parties within similar ideological positions truly exhibit similar policy decision-making, as the ideational approach suggests, and (2) whether populist parties demonstrate a distinct approach by framing and arguing foreign policy issues differently than their ‘like-minded’ non-populist counterparts. This study analyzes parliamentary voting and debate speeches in the Czech Republic and Slovakia—two Eastern European parliamentary democracies that serve as a fitting example of cases with regional complexities, shaping the distinct character of populism in non-Western contexts. These cases are particularly valuable for examining the impact of regional and ideological diversity, as they feature populist parties spanning from social democratic to radical right. Furthermore, both countries constitutionally require parliamentary votes on foreign policy issues, such as treaty ratifications and military deployments, providing a direct lens through which decision-making patterns and the framing of foreign policy issues can be observed. This approach is more suitable for gaining insights into parties’ policy-making behavior than analyzing policy intentions in party manifestos or public communication in the media. To test whether ideologically-similar populist and non-populist parties express comparable policy preference, the paper analyses 6,345 party votes on two types of foreign policy issues - treaty ratifications and military deployments - from 2002 to 2021, sourced from the International Treaty Ratification Votes Database and the Parliamentary Deployment Votes Database, supplemented by original data collection. The dataset is further enhanced with party ideological scores sourced from the Chapel Hill Expert Survey, while the identification of populist parties is guided by the PopuList database. Additionally, the potential distinctiveness of issue framing and argumentation by populist parties is explored through the analysis of hundreds of pre-vote debate speeches, using topic modeling, a text-as-data approach performed with the LLaMA large language model. By expanding empirical applications of the ideational approach to populism, moving beyond Western-centric foreign policy studies, and employing innovative methodologies in textual analysis, this paper contributes to both theoretical and methodological advancements in the study of populism and foreign policy.