The Sound of Populism: Distinct Linguistic Features Across Populist Variants
This research provides insights into political communication by distinguishing linguistic patterns across populist types, which is incremental as it combines existing methods to analyze known phenomena.
This study analyzed U.S. presidential speeches to identify how different populist variants (left-wing, right-wing, anti-elitism, people-centrism) manifest in linguistic features, revealing that populist rhetoric consistently uses a direct, assertive tone to connect with 'the people', with right-wing and people-centrism showing more emotionally charged discourse compared to left-wing and anti-elitist expressions.
This study explores the sound of populism by integrating the classic Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) features, which capture the emotional and stylistic tones of language, with a fine-tuned RoBERTa model, a state-of-the-art context-aware language model trained to detect nuanced expressions of populism. This approach allows us to uncover the auditory dimensions of political rhetoric in U.S. presidential inaugural and State of the Union addresses. We examine how four key populist dimensions (i.e., left-wing, right-wing, anti-elitism, and people-centrism) manifest in the linguistic markers of speech, drawing attention to both commonalities and distinct tonal shifts across these variants. Our findings reveal that populist rhetoric consistently features a direct, assertive ``sound" that forges a connection with ``the people'' and constructs a charismatic leadership persona. However, this sound is not simply informal but strategically calibrated. Notably, right-wing populism and people-centrism exhibit a more emotionally charged discourse, resonating with themes of identity, grievance, and crisis, in contrast to the relatively restrained emotional tones of left-wing and anti-elitist expressions.