Textual Measures of Populism (TEMPOP) for the Analysis of Party Competition and Political Behaviour

Research question/goal: 

The project "Textual Measures of Populism (TEMPOP) for the Analysis of Party Competition and Political Behaviour" seeks to contribute scientifically to research on populism, party competition, and political behaviour in conceptual, methodological, and analytical terms. A quantification of populism eases the scientific study as well as the societal discussion of populism and its causes or consequences. In the course of the project, the information obtained on the degree of populism of politicians and political parties is used to answer research questions on patterns of political competition between populist and mainstream parties as well as on the impact on individual political behaviour. The project applies statistical models measuring populism from political text (party manifestos, political speeches and (social) media), thereby crossing contextual and language barriers, and contributes to the analysis of causes and consequences of populism.

Current stage: 

In 2024, we drafted a DFG grant proposal in collaboration with internal partners at the MZES (project B1.2111), which will be submitted to the DFG after internal review. Further preparatory steps include migrating the existing Political Documents Archive (polidoc.net) to a sustainably available Shiny App. Hosted at the MZES, this app will allow us to include party manifestos as one of the project’s text data sources. A paper titled “Measuring Populism from Party Manifestos with Multilingual Context-Sensitive BERT” has been accepted for presentation at the Annual Congress of the Swiss Political Science Association in January 2025. The paper focusses on the coding of populist statements using recently developed annotation scheme and the training and evaluation of context- and language-sensitive machine learning models. 

Fact sheet

Funding: 
MZES
Duration: 
2018 to 2025
Status: 
in preparation
Data Sources: 
party manifestos, political speeches, Tweets
Geographic Space: 
16 established European democracies

Publications

Journal Articles

Storz, Anna, and Julian Bernauer (2018): Supply and Demand of Populism: A Quantitative Text Analysis of Cantonal SVP Manifestos. Swiss Political Science Review, 24, issue 4, pp. 525-544. more

Book Chapters

Bernauer, Julian, and Adrian Vatter (2024): Power Concentration and Power Diffusion: A New Typology of Political-Institutional Patterns of Democracy. Pp. 410-428 in: Adrian Vatter, Rahel Freiburghaus (Eds.) Handbook of Comparative Political Institutions. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. more

Conference Presentations

Bernauer, Julian, João Areal and Ruben L. Bach (2025): Measuring Populism From Party Manifestos With Multilingual Context-Sensitive BERT. [Annual Congress of the Swiss Political Science Association (SVPW), Geneva, January 09th to January 10th, 2025] more
Rehbein, Ines, Josef Ruppenhofer and Julian Bernauer (2021): Who is we? Disambiguating the referents of first person plural pronouns in parliamentary debates. [Proceedings of the 17th Conference on Natural Language Processing (KONVENS 2021), Düsseldorf, Germany, September 06th to September 09th, 2021] more
Bernauer, Julian, and Federico Nanni (2019): Cross-Lingual Topical Scaling of Political Text using Word Embeddings. [General Online Research (GOR), Köln, March 06th to March 08th, 2019] more