Telling it Like it Isn’t: Populism and Truthfulness – Embracing Sincerity, Abandoning Accuracy?

Populism’s relationship to truth is a puzzling one: on the hand, prominent populists often appear to play fast and loose with the facts, leading some to equate populism with post-truth politics. On the other, populists and their supporters purport to be supremely concerned with matters of honesty, presenting themselves as brave truth-tellers who “speak truth to power” and expose the dishonesty of mainstream politics. This paper suggests a novel explanation to this puzzle and empirically tests it, yielding nuanced insights. Drawing on a distinction between components of truthfulness, we argue that populism implies a conception of truth that priorities sincerity over accuracy. This tendency stems from populism’s valorization of “the people’s” “folk” values and rejection of the intellectual class’ “elite” ones. We hypothesize that populist speech contains more appeals to sincerity – efforts to communicate to the audience that the speaker is faithfully expressing that which they truly believe or feel – and less appeals to accuracy – attempts to signal that the speaker has expended an effort verifying that what they say is true – than conventional political rhetoric. We test a corpus of 303 speeches from world leaders, we address the following question: is populist speech characterized by more appeals to sincerity and less appeals to accuracy than other speech? The Global Populism Database is used to measure populist speech, and the ClaimBuster tool is used to measure appeals to accuracy. Using Supervised Machine Learning (RoBERTa-base), we develop a novel tool to measure appeals to sincerity. This tool identifies references to speaker’s personal mental states (beliefs, emotions, and desires) and self-portrayals of earnestness to measure rhetorical appeals to sincerity, enabling its application to large textual corpora. The results suggest that appeals to accuracy and to sincerity are treated by speakers as complementary, as evidenced by a significant negative correlation. In other words, the more leaders use facts and figures (appeal to accuracy), the less they refer to emotions and beliefs (appeal to sincerity), and vice versa. Regarding populist speech, as hypothesized, speeches with more populist messages contained fewer appeals to accuracy. However, contrary to our hypothesis, populist speeches were also found to contain less appeals to sincerity. Thus, while leaders were overall found to use appeals to sincerity and accuracy interchangeably, populist speakers appear to neglect appeals to truthfulness altogether. Additionally, results reveal an intriguing connection between accuracy and sincerity among mainstream party leaders.