When are Populist Parties Populist? A Study of Populist Sentiment in Election Manifestos of Germany’s AfD and Die Linke

Abstract

ABSTRACT In recent years, interest has grown in using election manifestos to measure populism. This, however, is not without its controversies, with critics arguing that party manifestos is an unlikely case for observing populist language. This paper discusses conceptual challenges associated with measuring populism in text-based data, specifically manifestos. Based on previous research, I argue that not all parts of manifestos are equally likely to contain populist language and that variation might be based on the issue being discussed. To test this point, I present a novel dataset containing 32 hand-coded election manifestos of German populist parties AfD and Die Linke. By utilising this data, I analyse the variation in populist sentiment within these manifestos and demonstrate that issues vary in their degree of populism employed and that this is partially related to what issues are salient to populist parties.