The Role of National Identity in Electoral Discourse

Illiberal pressures have made national identity a high-stakes resource in electoral politics across Europe. In this context, populist parties have played a central role in redefining political belonging, contesting liberal democratic norms, and advancing competing interpretations of democracy and sovereignty through appeals to ‘the nation’. Such appeals to national identity can perform several interrelated roles: a framing device by defining political issues as legitimate for the ‘national interest’; a moral legitimising function by mobilising history, collective memory, and shared cultural references; a boundary-setting function by constructing distinctions between ‘us’ and ‘them’; and a competitive and adaptive resource. While extensive research has examined democratic backsliding and the rise of populism, we still know comparatively little about how national identity is strategically operationalised by populist actors in electoral competition, and how these identity constructions are embedded in formal party programmes. To answer this question, this paper focuses on a comparative set of European cases in which populism and identity-based contestation are simultaneously salient. The analysis relies on party manifestos as a systematic and comparable record of programmatic campaign commitments. We analyse these documents using machine-learning-based text and topic analysis informed by a purpose-built dictionary of national identity components. This approach allows us to identify recurring identity frames, distinguish them from adjacent policy content, and trace patterns consistent with framing, symbolic legitimising, and boundary-setting functions. The analysis further relates identity-related discourse to party family and government status, examining how national identity is articulated under different competitive and institutional conditions. Thus, this paper contributes to research on populism and national identity by offering a systematic framework for analysing how identity functions within populist electoral discourse. It demonstrates how national identity is framed, mobilised, and adapted in contemporary European party competition, and clarifies the role of populist actors in shaping the boundaries and meanings of political belonging.