(2025):
Quantitative Text Analysis using R. Scraping, Preparing, Visualising and Modelling Data.
London,
SAGE.
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Textual Measures of Populism (TEMPOP) for the Analysis of Party Competition and Political Behaviour
Project Directors
Dr. Julian Bernauer
MZES-funded
2018 – 2026
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:
The original project proposal, developed in collaboration with internal partners at the MZES and submitted to the DFG in April 2025, was rejected in October 2025 despite generally positive reviews. The proposal will therefore be revised and resubmitted. The revision will focus on conceptual refinement and on a smaller number of core use cases and research questions. In particular, the aim is to show that context-dependent variation in populist rhetoric can be captured using specially trained machine learning models. This approach will allow for addressing questions such as whether populist rhetoric can be decomposed into a stable core and a variable, context-dependent component and whether the media and political parties influence each other with regard to populist rhetoric.
Publications
Books
Journal Articles
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(2018): Supply and Demand of Populism: A Quantitative Text Analysis of Cantonal SVP Manifestos. Swiss Political Science Review, 24, 4, 525-544. More
Presentations
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(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, 06/09/2021 - 09/09/2021]. More