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Populist discourse in the opposition and the government. Analysis of political communication using natural language processing.

Author(s): Tomas Dvorak, Linda Coufal

Friday 16  |   11:40-12:00

Room: TP41

Session: Political Change and Conflict [s53]

The aim of this paper is to present a comparative analysis of the discourse of populist parties in Austria (FPÖ), Switzerland (SVP) and the Czech Republic (SPD). We focus on the political communication of these parties from two perspectives. First, we test the so-called 'inclusion-moderation' hypothesis, according to which populists moderate and soften their radical rhetoric when they are included in government. Swiss SVP has been a long-term governing party with some opposition experience, Austrian FPO has had one-time government experience and Czech SPD has not had governing experience yet. The choice of these parties provides varied involvement in government in the respective countries. For the (Austrian and Swiss) parties mentioned above, we look at different time periods to test this hypothesis. Second, we use Natural Language Processing (NLP) analysis to classify thousands of documents. Since this is a method that is still scarcely used in this research context, we also focus on the methodological aspects and pitfalls of using NLP to analyze populist discourse. In particular in coding populism from the perspective of the ideational approach. In this paper, we focus on both these aspects.