Where's my Niche? Comparing the Rhetoric of Populist and Non-Populist Political Parties across Czechia and Slovakia
Abstract
Populism, a political strategy dividing society into pure people and corrupted elite (De Cleen and Glynos 2021; Weyland 2001), has been quickly adopted as an innovative style used by some parties and their parliamentary representants (Akkerman, Lange, and Rooduijn 2016; Fasone 2020). While the literature has covered the electoral behaviour of parties using populist frames (Curini and Martelli 2015; Gerstlé and Nai 2019), there is a significant gap in the research of subsequent activities.
Scholars have identified their crucial topics addressed to voters (Otjes and Louwerse 2015), but a comprehensive assessment of the following rhetoric primates is still absent. This paper aims to comparatively assess the influence of the crucial topics, focused on parliamentary speeches by mainstream & populist parties' MPs for a purpose to detect 'owned' dominants.
It utilizes ParlSpeech and Slovak Parliamentary TV data to measure the intensity of their appeals in selected issues, e.g. healthcare or security policies. The investigation maximises variability in the status of populists inside the party system by selecting houses in two countries: Czechia and Slovakia.
The analysis contributes to clarifications in 'issue ownerships' & targeting hardly scaled cases, e.g. valence (Zulianello 2020) or technocratic (Bustikova and Guasti 2019) populist parties.