Still ‘fire in the (full) belly’? Anti-establishment rhetoric before and after government participation

Abstract

ABSTRACT Scholars argued that anti-establishment parties use a populist rhetoric that appeals to the worst instincts of people. Indeed, populist politicians are often viewed as charismatic leaders that have fire in their belly. While in the past these parties heavily relied on anti-establishment platforms and communication rhetoric, their increasing electoral success along with the growing duties linked with government membership transform them into more established parties, rather than pure outsiders, and cast doubts on the feasibility of keeping a populist rhetoric. This paper compares right-wing and non-right-wing populism, investigating whether populist leaders change their rhetorical strategy once in office, decreasing the level of negativity and adopting a more forward-looking and inclusive style of communication, with a stronger focus on fulfilling the policy proposal made during the electoral campaign rather than blaming political rivals. For this purpose, we collected a new corpus of political speeches extracted from video messages posted on Facebook by four anti-establishment party leaders in three countries (Austria, Italy and Spain), from 2016 to 2018, i.e., immediately before and immediately after their access to power. Overall, 30 h of recorded audio from 215 videos (amounting to around 140 million visualizations) have been analyzed using topic models and well-established semantic psycholinguistic dictionaries. The results highlight slight changes in the rhetoric of populist leaders once in power, mostly for non-right-wing populists, as their language becomes less negative, less assertive and more focused on government duties.